The Magpie's Nest #1
In which we encounter burglar birds, metal detectors, avant-rock, predictive (de)coding, and Sufi saints
According to European folklore, the magpie is a thief with a penchant for shiny objects like gold coins. I thought a reference to magpies would be a perfect name for a miscellany (specifically this one, dear reader), but fastidious fact-checker that I am, I first investigated the allegations. Studies were indeed conducted. Data were collected. As it turns out there is no clear evidence that magpies prefer shiny objects to any other sort of object.
A believer in the magpie larceny story might find fault with the evidence. Perhaps magpies get bad vibes from nosy scientists? My preferred possibility is that magpie’s are drawn to things that humans seem to value. In other words, it is the human interest in an object that catches the magpie’s eye, rather than its lustre per se. Which, if you think about it, is how humans often decide what is valuable.
Anyway, I will stick with the name ‘Magpie’s Nest’ for these collections. Each section is independent, so feel free to skim or jump around.
TV gold
That leads me to my first (or is it second?) shiny object: the TV show Detectorists, which I finished watching earlier this month. It’s the charming tale of a pair of bumbling treasure-seekers in rural England. They scour the countryside with metal detectors looking for Saxon gold and suchlike. Mostly they find buttons and bits of soda cans.
The final series of Detectorists features a magpie subplot, which is why the bird was in my head in the first place.
What I found particularly appealing about the show was its gentleness: events tickle the boundaries of cringe comedy, but always return to warmth and optimism. The show’s characters really do love hunting for elusive gold, but they also value history, venerable old trees, and last night’s episode of Q.I. The show may have led to a boom in metal detecting as a hobby; its earnest portrayal of male friendship seems to have struck a chord. The pristine cinematography — lingering shots of meadows, burbling brooks, and insects browsing in flowers — is part of the show’s charm, as is the folky soundtrack supplied by Johnny Flynn1. The theme song is lovely.
Music: It’s Black Country Out There!
This week saw the release of For the First Time, the debut album by Black Country, New Road — a band that jumped into my list of favorites. Like those hapless detectorists, they’re from England — but an England that might as well be a parallel dimension. Their sound is harrowing, abrasive, and cathartic. They’ve been compared to the dour post-rock sludge of Slint, but the glint of brass puts me in mind of jazz, prog, and avant-garde classical music — think King Crimson and Third Ear Band, but with lyrics about Gen Z existential dread.
I love this city, despite the burden of preferences
What a time to be alive, oh
I know where I'm going, it's black country out there
This ‘city’ from ‘Science Fair’ could well be the internet.
Their cover of MGMT’s ‘Time to Pretend’ gives a reasonable sense of what they are up to right now — I imagine their sound will have evolved in six months though.
BC,NR has made me return with new ears to old music I didn’t much care for (specifically Slint). This phenomenon — the ability of the new to recontextualize the old — is one of the unsung miracles of human intelligence. Our memories are not at all like static files in computer folders — anything we do in the present can transform the traces of what we did before, creating new patterns. Most of the time these changes accrue imperceptibly, like subterranean rhizomes spreading. So when the shock of the new makes us uproot old experiences and consciously replant them, we know we have encountered something radical. Everything revolutionary is a prism.
Philosophy of mind: Is predictive coding old wine in a shiny new bottle?
Twitter led me to a recent and very readable philosophy paper (no small achievement) that casts a critical eye on predictive coding models of the brain. If you are an observer of neuroscientific fashions, you may have come across the predictive coding word-cloud, which includes “active inference”, “Bayesian brains” and the “Free Energy Principle”.
In ‘New Labels for Old Ideas: Predictive Processing and the Interpretation of Neural Signals’, the Berkeley philosopher Rosa Cao argues that talk of ‘predictions’ in predictive coding models can always be replaced by less mental-sounding terms (like “top-down modulation”), without any change in the underlying function of the model, or its ability to explain neural data. In other words, predictive coding just attaches mentalistic labels to already-known physical processes, adding no new insight into how those physical process cause mind to emerge2. It’s like trying to explain the brain with lego blocks by giving the lego blocks suggestive names like “the visual perception block” or “the cognition block”. Anthropomorphizing our modeling blocks is a temptation that is hard to resist (and one I like to both criticize and play with), but it is particularly useless when trying to understand the anthropos in the first place.
Cao builds her case methodically, ending with a clear message: words like “prediction” and “inference” are shiny ornaments rather than theoretical contribution.
It’s true that the world seems richer when we describe it in more colorful language – just look at our readiness to anthropomorphize the simplest of systems. But the color should be theoretically justified, and it should carry some empirical weight; in this case, it’s not clear that it does.
The following point she raises is subtle:
The casual use of the terms active, passive, error, contents, contributes to the uneasiness – these terms do not have clear empirical import, and it seems very easy to slide between personal-level versions of terms like “prediction” or “expectation” to the subpersonal ones employed in theorizing.
When a model is presented to us using words that resonate with intuition and naive introspection — particularly our common-sense notions of interpersonal interaction — we may in fact experience a mere mirage of comprehension. The satisfaction such models offer to their fans may arise from recognition rather than understanding. They draw the eye with reflected light, rather than illumination.
There is a lot in the paper that careful neuro-enthusiasts will find interesting. And in a way it might also help neuroscientists see that their mode of answering questions — always provisional, tentative, instrumental — is ill-suited to certain age-old questions about mind, self and consciousness, and therefore may never satisfy philosophers. Or members of the general public, for that matter, who sometimes share with philosophers a desire to know what the mind is, rather than what it seems to be like3.
Mysticism: Rise above the Administrative System
Out of the blue this week the brilliance of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan resurfaced in my mind. While listening to ‘Dam Mast Qalandar’ I began digging into the song’s history. Apparently Nusrat’s song is inspired by an older tune called ‘Dama Dam Mast Qalandar’ — a qawwali that may have been written in the 1300s by Amir Khusrow, and later modified by Bulleh Shah. Here is a rousing version of ‘Dama Dam’ by the Nooran sisters.
After a lifetime of being an Urdu-deficient South Indian, I finally sought out what the word ‘qalandar’ means. The Wikipedia definition is quite something.
A Qalandar is a person who has excelled in seeing things and advances stage by stage into the Being. He even rises above the Administrative System and witnesses the core of Oneness in detail and after enjoying the Unity of the Being returns without losing his grades and then reaches back into his humanly status, so much so that his rise and fall becomes one and the same thing for him.
Somehow it makes me happy that the analytic philosophers’ precision-tooled approach to mind and being (they seek a rather administrative system of ideas, don’t they?), exists in the same world as that of Jhulelal and the transcendent Qalandars.
Bits and bobs
This year is shaping up to be a bumper year for quality memes. Already we’ve seen sea shanties on tiktok, the Nooran sisters having quite the effect, the Handforth parish council, and of course Bernie’s mittens everywhere.
In India a dog got trapped in a bathroom with a leopard for several hours. And survived, unharmed. I used to love reading these kinds of quirky wildlife stories in The Hindu.
The Public Domain Review shared some gorgeous drawings of the nervous system by Ramon y Cajal and Golgi.
Interestingly enough, I saw Johnny Flynn in 2008, opening for Laura Marling at a tiny show at a church hall in Allston. The other opening act was as obscure as Flynn: a certain Mumford and Sons. A couple of years later they became huge, playing the exact same barnstorming songs. I guess there is a lesson about perseverance in there.
This assumes, of course, that mind does in fact ‘emerge’ from the brain, which is something I am not entirely sure is a scientifically coherent concept.
I suspect that it may be impossible to say what the mind is: science only tells us what things are like, and not what they are. A thing is understood by comparing it with other things that we already have a grip on. And in the case of mind, the comparison is done by mind(s) in the first place, so things get a bit loopy. This suggests to me that there are real limits to what science can meaningfully say. More on this in this essay I wrote: The Finger Pointing at the Map.
Love the name !
1. "Our memories are not at all like static files in computer folders — anything we do in the present can transform the traces of what we did before, creating new patterns." reminds me of that TS Eliot quote from Z's video ("What happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it.")
2. Qalandar - how did I never know that meaning ? @_@
3. I'm reclaiming credit for circulating that Rosa Cao essay but I forgive you for terming it a "twitter discovery" since I never got around to do a real reading of it (just pulling your leg / not serious if thats not obvious :p)