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It’s now autumn – on Saturday, even though the temperature was still felt August warm, the vernal high tides shouted the new season as they flushed out the late summer seaweed blooms. The boy and the dog and I walked down a few days ago to the boat landing, and the cresting tidal water was lapping happily above the edge of the marshland, eroding it as we watched, and the dog was both happy to easily get into the water and disappointed that there was no beach to roll on to dry off. 

Two days later, we walked along the beach, standing a few feet higher than we were used to, looking down at the tidal bore churning up the lower boundary of the estuary. The same tides which had washed away the red kelp had deposited a massive pile of new sand, forming a prominent ridge that dropped steeply back into the ocean on one side, down into a strange sandy valley in front of the dune bluff filled with tide pools, but that made the two of us feel like we were walking on a mountain ridge, the ocean off to the right and the dry ground above the dunes level to us off to the left on shore on the other side of the vale. The dog was rather excited to find the remains of dead bluefish to roll around in, which had come in with the new sand; this made for an unpleasant car ride home, at least for the boy and me. 

Both at the town landing and on the beach, the boy and I talked about how the water was rising each year – even in his short lifetime so far, he’s noticed it – but we also talked about how beautiful the whole thing was. The dog, had she had the power of speech, I’m sure would have said similarly sublime things about the fish. But it was easier to talk about sea levels rising on the Maine coast than it was to talk about its beauty, or beauties, in any form.

In fact, I think beauty can’t be spoken of; it is the signal quality of beauty, or more broadly, of what is the aesthetic in this world. When we experience something that extends beyond our ability to exchange that experience with someone else in immediate terms (beyond simple words like “beautiful” or “smelly” or “sublime”), it enters the realm of aesthetics, and when it is the result of human artifice, the realm of art. This might seem uninteresting, but we live in a world dominated by information theory, and the concept of something which can not be exchanged without loss of fundamental meaning (as opposed to that which is subject to potential loss of meaning) is an extremal case in information theory. It deserves some consideration.

“Information theory” is both a means of expressing the transmission of “information” from a source to a receptor, over a mechanism which inevitably risks some loss of quality, and a way of looking at the physical world. Both are children of Claude Shannon, a noteworthy polymath who evolved the transmission theory while thinking simultaneously of signal degradation across wire networks and thinking about cryptography. Others then subsequently realized that his concept of information transfer also held when considering the realization of information about quantum particles in motion upon measurement, measurement being directly analogous to the “receiver” function in information transmission. Implicit in both of his expressions of “information”, however, is the idea that there is completeness which is accessible: there is a “true” message being transmitted from Bob to Mary, and there is a fully coherent version of a transmission function that exists instantaneously prior to measurement.

But let’s look at the simple version of his theory: a message (“Hello world”) is being transmitted over a mechanical (or digital, or whatever) bridge, which today we’d call a network, from an originating source to a receptor. The source is by definition a human being (or a device constructed and programmed by a human being, which for these purposes is the same thing) and the receptor is also a human being. The problems Shannon recognized – and which he then quantified – involve signal and message decay. The decay could come from outside of the experiment: cosmic rays bombarding the wire over which the message is transferred. Or, because some nasty person taps into the wire to read the message, it could come from decay due to measurement and rebroadcast. 

Separately, Shannon quantified the concept of encryption in preserving the privacy of transmission, and faced the challenge of trying to transmit information about the message – its encryption key – in a way that the nasty person couldn’t first intercept and use to read the message before the intended receiver got it. Encryption depended, though, on an unambiguous transmission message, a point Shannon assumed to be the case – indeed, he is aware of the fact that reliability of the original message – the idea that it is complete prior to transmission – is a postulate of his approach to information theory as a construct.

When we think about how we actually communicate, however, the idea of an unambiguous transmission quickly becomes absurd. Even the simple message “Hello world” is fraught; now, fifty years or more after it was first used to give birth to a live instance of C as a programming language, the two words should inspire a wealth of computer scientist nostalgia, and the use of the phrase is, within computer science at least, used to signify a foundational or existential concept, something that should spark in the receptor the idea that “big things will follow”. The first time it was used, however, it was meant to imply a birth, something innocent and without guile. The programmers were excited to invent a new language, but they were also aware of the limitations and simplicity of the initial release of C into the world. They were hoping for the outcome which, ultimately, did occur – the C kernel is at the heart of nearly every computing device in existence today. But in 1973, it was just some grad students deking around.

But transmitting “Hello world” doesn’t say anything except the raw words, and the specific flavor of meaning that a transmitting entity means to evoke when she sends those words is impossible to fully quantify – and thus impossible to transmit. The concept that Shannon sets up, indeed, is much more data-free than we normally describe: it only transmits the letters of the words. It depends on the sender and receiver understanding the same language, in which “Hello” is a personal informal greeting and “world” is a word denoting the entirety of instant lived existence – which is a lot of loading in and of itself – but the meaning of “Hello world” at the transmitter cannot and will never be fully received by the receiver.

I’d like to propose the notion that aesthetics is simply that personalization which exists at the point of transmission of a concept, and its comparable but always unequal counterparty, the personalization applied by a receiver to any received message. This 
“information” is not equivalent to the encryption key used and exchanged between a sender and receiver to maintain privacy. Rather, this is the extraneous information which exists at each end of the transmission mechanism, in the office of the transmitter and the console of the receiver. 

Aesthetics, seen through the lens of Shannon’s theory of information, is merely the instantaneous interpretation of the quantified information exchanged during a transmission exercise, happening twice: when the sender collapses their fulsome into transmittable form by stripping out their inarticulate aesthetic interpretations, and then again but differently when the receiver enriches the transmission with their aesthetic interpretations. There is no way to extract the persons of the transmitter and the receiver from the scheme, in the simple way in which Shannon does in his original brief formulation of his theory: even as like-willed individuals may design a mechanism to allow for rich data transfer, those same individuals cannot fully load the data with the entirety of the realm in which the transmitter will create the message, and in which the receiver will read it. Each will apply an independent sense, which is not just an analogy of aesthetics (the aesthetic of the artist in the transmission agent, the aesthetic of the viewer in the receiving agent), but which is a functionally complete definition of aesthetics in the presence of a formalized means of describing transfer.

Recognizing this, it should be trivial to also recognize that “art” – in its myriad forms – is really nothing more than overt loading of messages by transmitting parties; aesthetics, as most philosophy realizes, doesn’t require conscious acts of formation (crafts, engineered mechanical objects, and “naive” art, for example, are recognized as having an aesthetic even if their creators would object to the idea of a conscious creation of a form). But perhaps underrecognized in the Shannon formulation in this sense is the same active role on the part of the receiver. They are never a passive receiver of the transmitter’s signal: they always are interpreting it given the background of information (and accumulated history of past interpretation) that they have. This background cannot be fully expressed quantitatively – pick your source of proof for that: Gödel, Heisenberg, or Shannon are all lining up for duty – and thus ensure that the meaning of any information transfer can never be reverse transmitted – and, indeed, that our nefarious friend who intercepts the message will also never get “the full message”.

Information theory thus becomes something far more fraught than what Shannon intended: what it really reveals is the practical impossibility of reliably transmitting the full meaning of any message, due to the fundamental difference of informational interpretation that any two individuals will always have – and transmission always requires at least two individuals, and more if we introduce the nefarious interceptor. No complete information transfer is ever possible because of the unavoidable interpretation differences of the endpoints of the transfer mechanism. What emerges, however, is a realm of aesthetics – untranslatable and untransmissible alterations due to idiosyncratic understandings – that makes the world actually interesting, something beyond a mere computer program. 

There are broader implications as well, though. For example, Nick Bostrom has introduced what is to many a compelling notion that the world should be (statistically speaking) a computer simulation performed by a much more advanced civilization that we cannot comprehend. If we did live in a Bostrom simulation, though, it would be possible for my son and I to have an identical experience of the beauty of the tidal bore at Ferry Beach in Scarborough, because I could transmit to him a complete statement of my experience of the tides at a given moment. That is, computationally, our experience would be expressible in a complete form of code within the simulation; the simulation may be programmed to prevent the exchange of that specific kind of code between two elements within the game, but nevertheless, the full expression would be susceptible to complete expression. But we if interpret the world through a communications lens, it becomes readily apparent that, even if a complete transmission of my experience of a state of the world were possible, it would not be able to anticipate the way in which my son experiences the world, even at the same moment. In other words, it is impossible for a simulation to be programmed in which I could construct a complete transmission of state to my son, for anything. Every exchange involves artifice, interpretation, and judgment: in other words, the aesthetic frame. 

Beauty, in this sense, is not in the eye (or ear) of the beholder: the aesthetic sense (be it beauty or ugliness, in vision or in music or in form or in movement) is merely the unavoidable background out of which we try to send messages to our fellow travelers – and the unavoidable background into which we accept those transmissions. It is not noise – we’re not talking about the leakage of data in the mechanical system because of cosmic rays or faulty switches or wiretapping; it is endemic to any system of communications between individuals have the ability to apply non-standardized approaches to creating messages for transmission and for reacting to messages received.

I think Shannon had an inkling of this in his original statement of his theory back in 1945, but what he wrote was a practical piece, focused on building better code systems and understanding the decay function of mechanical systems in which the complete meaning of a transmission could be limited, for point of analysis, to the letter-order form of a simple sentence. But our world has stretched Shannon’s theorem to its limits in creating the internet, its underlying backbone of cryptography which ensures “message packets” are purely transmitted, and indeed in using information technology for the simulacrum of artificial intelligence, and in trying to create “aesthetic objects” out of information technology itself.

Taking Shannon’s theorem and assuming you have two Unix boxes as the sender and receiver, and maybe a third Unix box in Shanghai trying to intercept, and you have a workable theorem. But that’s not the world we live in (not even, really, in a cryptographic sense), and applying Shannon naively to a world in which we have discernable and incompatible individuals at each node quickly reveals the problem: we have ignored the constant creation of artifice, and incorporation of that artifice into both creation and interpretation and retransmission, in the operation of the system. We need to incorporate art and aesthetics into our quantized understanding of information – the price being a far higher level of uncertainty in interpretation (much as quantum mechanics has forced a recognition of probability into our understanding of physics) but the value being systems which recognize the fallibility of the transmission function even in normal operations (not just in regimes which assume bad actors intercept and interfere with transmission).

My son will never see the beach through my eyes, and I’ll never understand what he sees when he looks out over the estuary. Understanding that – and accepting that reality – is essential to me being the best parent I can be, but also, it’s essential for the boy to become the adult he needs to be in a world of complexity. The dog, on the other hand, will continue to try to find patches of dead fish to roll in. We’ll never understand that, either – even if the humans in the equation agree it’s pretty gross.

It is a truth near universally acknowledged, that a single nation lacking possession of a good fortune, must be in want of EU membership. 

At the recent UK election, both the two major parties agreed that the rate of economic growth was too low and that improving this is a prerequisite for much needed increased spending on important public services – hospitals, schools, and green energy projects for Labour; pensions, defence, and immigration centres in Rwanda for the Conservatives.  Yet, during the campaign the principal cause of low growth was not discussed, because neither of the main parties is willing to be honest in public about the folly that is Brexit.   A recent article, The Economist estimates the cost of Brexit to be in the range of 3%-5% of GDP, which makes it, one of the rich world’s worst economic blunders.  The early impacts were to depress business investment, now they are reducing trade, and in due course, they are expected to lower productivity rates.  It might seem obvious that to stimulate stronger growth, this blunder should be reversed as soon as practicable.  Unfortunately for the UK, what is practical is not possible soon.

Continue reading “Re-entry”

Many years ago, I read an article describing a medical research study, the results of which suggested a connection between regular consumption of coffee and the development of lung cancer.  I was immediately concerned by this report, because I used to drink several cups of strong coffee each day.  I was also immediately puzzled, because I could not see any plausible causal connection between the consumption of coffee and the health of the lungs.  I could more easily have understood that coffee might have harmful effects on the mouth or the throat or the stomach, but I had always considered it a wonderful feature of the human anatomy that while both air and liquids come into the body through the same entrance, somehow we were able to direct the former to the lungs to be processed in the aerobic system and the later to the stomach to be processed in the digestive system.  I have no expertise in medicine or anatomy, but the article’s result seemed suspect to me.

I was right.  A short time later, I read an article that rebutted the conclusions of the first research paper, pointing out that the reason why there was a connection between coffee drinking and lung cancer was simply because many people who smoked numerous cigarettes also liked to drink plenty of coffee.   Nicotine not caffeine was the cause of the lung cancer, but smoking was highly correlated to coffee drinking, and thus coffee drinking is indirectly related to the prevalence of lung cancer, but in a non-causal way.  It is not hard to imagine other examples of this sort of relationship.  Eating fish – high in protein but low in fat – is generally regarded as a healthier choice to eating meat, especially processed meat.  However, if my habitual piscine meal is English style “fish ‘n’ chips”, which I eat most days of the week, then any health benefits from the fish are likely to be overwhelmed by the excess calories and saturated fats that I absorb via my consumption of chips. 

Continue reading “Uncorrelated”

Not long after I had left college and moved to London, I went to visit a friend who lived in a big house Muswell Hill, divided up, as many were in those days, into several small flats.  We were drinking and talking when one of the neighbours knocked on the door and came in to join our company. In conversation, we discovered that he played in a band, and not just any band but The Blockheads, who were famous for supporting Ian Dury, one of London’s best new-wave singers of the late 70s and early 80s.  The musical neighbour told us some good stories about life on the road, and of good and bad gigs, but there was plenty of drinking and smoking that evening and I no longer remember in any detail what he said.

I do still remember some of Ian Dury’s songs, and in particular Reasons to be Cheerful, Part III, which comprises a list of some of the many things that he took pleasure in.  It is, I suppose, a post-punk version of My Favourite Things, from the film The Sound of Music, although Ian Dury ranks higher on my list of favourite things than Julie Andrews.  There is much on Dury’s list that I am indifferent about, but there is also plenty which, for me as for him, supplies good reason to be cheerful: the Bolshoi Ballet, equal votes, porridge oats, a little drop of claret, curing smallpox, Bantu Steve Biko, Harpo Groucho Chico, and – perhaps best of all – John Coltrane’s soprano: all good things, for me. 

There are other modern songwriters who have used the list as a device to structure a song.  Dylan’s Rainy Day Women #12 & 35 , which is the opening track on the album Blonde on Blonde (1966) is one example, although to my mind it is the weakest song on what is otherwise an album replete with masterpieces.  Later, on Slow Train Coming (1979), the first and best of his “Gospel” albums, Dylan repeated the trick, opening with Gotta Serve Somebody, which I consider an exemplar of how to make use of the repetitive process inherent in reading through a long list to increase the dramatic effect and power of the song.  I love this outtake version, with Mark Knopfler on lead guitar.

Using lists to make a moral point is nothing new.  In the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna there is a wonderful painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder called Children’s Games (1560).  This genre of artwork is known as Wimmelbilder, (“busy pictures”), characterised by the viewer’s elevated perspective over the wide pictorial space, in which are spread a large number of figures with no obvious clue or sign within the painting as to their relative importance.  Children’s Games isa list with encyclopaedic ambition.  The painting contains 230 figures, most or all of whom are children, itself an innovation without precedent in Western art, who are engaged in playing around 90 games, some of which would be familiar to children today, and others which seem obscure. 

What was Bruegel trying to show his viewers, aside from his mastery of composition and figure?  Some art historians think the painting is a celebration of folklore and the life of the common people; others think it is akin to a morality tale, perhaps an illustration of the humanist idea of the world as a stage on which we all features as performers; yet others interpret it as a critique of the adult world, in which we remain childlike despite our self-image of maturity.  Whatever Bruegel’s intention, what impresses me about this work, in addition to its clear technical merits, is the aspiration of the artist to catalogue exhaustively an important feature of human life.  This is not a picture showing a handful of children playing a game, it is a picture showing a city full of children playing every known game at that time. 

One hundred years after Bruegel made this picture, a fellow Netherlander, Jacobus Hondius, published a book in Amsterdam entitled Swart register van duysent sonden (‘The Black Register of One Thousand Sins’).  My limited research into this obscure volume from 1679, reveals that Hondius used his book to denounce the directors of both the Dutch West India Company and Dutch East India Company for their participation in the slave trade, for which we should commend him.  Given his role as a Predikant (minister) in the Dutch Calvinist church, I rather doubt that I would agree with his views on many of the other 999 sins in his book, but once again, what fascinates here is the vast amount of labour he devoted to listing one thousand ways in which we might fail: an encyclopaedia of fallenness.

One of the shared features of the song lyrics of Dury and Dylan and the painting by Bruegel, is that they list without ranking.  Their aim is to catalogue, to document, to explore the breadth or the range, but not to impose an order.  Yet, it is one of the features of lists that they make rankings possible.  Just as the list of cardinal numbers (one, two, three, and so on) makes possible the list of ordinal numbers (first, second, third, and so on), so the list of things which makes me cheerful invites the question, which of these makes me most cheerful, and the list of children’s games invites the thought, which is the most enjoyable game.  The organization of the world into lists facilitates the ordering of the world into values.

In the years after Hondius had published his Register, the fashion for compiling long lists of objects and classifying them into groups, and in some cases ranking those groups into some form of order, became a central feature of  Enlightenment science in Europe.  Perhaps most famous of all the classifiers was Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778), who spend his early years travelling around Sweden, the country of his birth, collecting information on its natural resources and documenting the flora and fauna.  In later life, as a Professor at Uppsala University he sent his students on collecting missions all around the world, to bring him examples of plants and animals unknown in Europe.  In total, he named over 12,000 species, and they were all fitted into his system of ordering the natural world, his great taxonomical project through which all objects, living or not, were assigned their proper place. 

A century later, Charles Darwin wrote a book called The Origin of Species (1859) which does not say much about origins, and the main conclusion of which is that there are no stable species, simply groups of living organisms transforming gradually from one sort of thing to another sort of thing, better to fit within their local habitat.  If we accept the truth of evolutionary theory, then taxonomies of plants and animals are mere snapshots, provisional lists awaiting revision.  Had Ian Dury lived to be an old man perhaps he would have written a song called Reasons to be Cheerful Part IV, including some nice rhymes for ‘slippers’ and ‘afternoon naps’, demonstrating that our taste in pleasure likewise evolves over time.  Imagine Bruegel painting a picture today: 230 children playing different games, but all on their mobile phones.

We might think that the inanimate world would be more stable, resistant to changes in taste or modifications of genetic expression.  Except that, while the objects in the universe might be stable in character, our systems of classification are not.  When I was a child, long before my night out in Muswell Hill, I learned the names of the nine planets in our solar system: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto.  Alas, in 2006, the International Astronomical Union decided to redesignate Pluto as a “dwarf planet” (along with Ceres, Haumea, Makemake, and Eris).  According to the IAU, a planet must (a) orbit its host star, (b) be mostly round, and (c) be sufficiently big that its gravitational field has cleared away other objects of similar size near to its orbital route.  Pluto fails on point (c).  It is thought that there may be many dwarf planets – perhaps one hundred – in our solar system, most yet to be discovered.  In 2016, some astronomers posited the existence of a new ninth planet, around ten times the mass of Earth, based on inferences drawn from the behaviour of objects in the Kuiper Belt, a region of icy rocks that orbit the Sun way beyond Neptune.  How many planets are there in our solar system: maybe nine, maybe eight, maybe nine.   How many dwarf planets are there: maybe five, maybe one hundred and five.

Closer to earth, the formal classification and naming of clouds started in earnest in the early nineteenth century when Luke Howard (1772-1864), then resident in Tottenham, read a paper at the Askesian Society in December 1802, which was published the following year as On the Modification of Clouds.  Howard divided clouds into three main groups – Stratus, Cumulus, and Cirrus – based on their height above the ground.  This schema has been extended over time and today the World Meteorological Organization recognizes ten basic groups, which are the low-level clouds, below 2,000m (Stratus, Nimbostratus, Cumulonimbus, Cumulus, and Stratocumulus), the mid-level clouds, between 2,000m and 6,000m (Altostratus and Altocumulus), and the high level clouds, above 6,000m (Cirrostratus, Cirrocumulus, and Cirrus).  Giving clouds names from Latin adjectives has become something of a tradition, just as the planets were named after Roman gods.  In the International Cloud Atlas there are also listed some special clouds, such as the Cirrus Homogenitus, meaning a human generated cloud, such as the condensation trails created by aircraft.

Clouds created by humans brings to mind other ways in which our taxonomies of natural phenomena are likely to change in coming years.  Just as animals and plants evolve in response to changes in their environment, so too humans make significant changes to the environment which they inhabit, rendering any system of classification inherently unstable.  Modifications to the weather caused by global warming is one example, damage to the seabed caused by pollution is another.  In addition to the ice rocks of the Kuiper Belt, our solar system has another belt of objects, this one much closer to home, circling the Earth, comprised of satellite and rocket debris.  The European Space Agency reports that there are over 28,000 pieces of debris in orbit, with a total estimated mass of more than 9,300 tonnes.  As a consequence, expectations are rising of the risk of collisions, causing significant damage to satellites.

Space debris is a product of earthly hubris.  We like to assert our power over the natural world, but often fail to consider the consequences.  Classification is the prelude to control, but control might turn out to be illusory.  In Lotte in Weimar (1939), a novel set in 1816, Thomas Mann imagines Goethe describing the weather, making oblique reference to Luke Howard: Used to be no proper interest in these variables in the upper regions; now a man has written a whole book about them, with an entire new terminology … So now we can nail down these changeable humours and tell them to their faces what species and class they belong to.  That is man’s prerogative on earth: to call things by their name and put them in a system.  They cast down their eyes before him, so to speak, when he calls them by name, for to name is to command.

Were I to write my own version of Ian Dury’s famous song, both Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Thomas Mann would surely feature. 

The artist invites the spectator to take a journey within the realm of the canvas. 

So wrote Mark Rothko, in a manuscript that he worked on in the early 1940s, while he took a break from painting.  At that time his pictures were figurative, later he experimented for a few years with a form of surrealism, before developing the large abstract colour paintings for which he became famous.  He is an artist whose work we tend to discover in reverse chronological order: the late works are the most familiar, and the transitional experiments in surrealism and abstraction are somewhat better known that his figurative work. Despite these radical changes in form and scale, his work pursues a consistent theme, namely his determination to draw our attention to the sorrow and suffering that is central to our experience of life.  Rothko’s abandonment of figuration midway through his career, was not an abandonment of interest in the human, rather it was his attempt to depict the full range of human experience, and especially our experiences of unhappiness, more convincingly.

Rothko’s manuscript, The Artist’s Reality, was published in 2004, more than thirty years after his death by suicide.  Like Paul Gaugin’s Recontars de Rapin, written in 1903 but not published until 1951, Rothko’s attack on contemporary art criticism is heartfelt and persuasive, but his ability to explain in words the meaning and importance of his art is less convincing.  Gauguin and Rothko were both great painters, but neither were great writers.  Nonetheless, their texts do tell us something about the questions that concerned them, the problems that they tried to address, the ideas that motivated them.  Knowing this helps us better to understand their most compelling paintings. 

Continue reading “Simply colour”