Nick James at the Trajectory

I started out on this essay writing thing in January ‘24 thinking I could write forever about new stuff. Interesting stuff (to me only as it turned out … obviously.) And for a time, it seemed that I was doing just that. Then sixteen essays later, and, as irony would have it just after I had said ‘ I’m now more than a quarter of the way through the year and finding no shortage of subjects to write...

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A few weeks back I mentioned Randy Nesse in the context of his aside about ageing. Long story short, I was so impressed by this guy’s discussion that I bought his book Good Reasons for Bad Feelings . His angle is to look at how evolution accounts for the most complex aspects of human biology. I’m loving it. His focus is looking for evolutionary reasons for psychological conditions. You might think...

I enjoyed listening to Bob Fischer the other day discussing animal welfare. I specifically liked his focus on how one should distribute a budget for charity between human welfare and animal welfare. Before he gets into the different philosophical or logical ways that people might approach the problem, he looks at a model for how we can assess animal suffering on the same scale as human suffering....

I first realised I was destined to be the next Frank Lloyd Wright very early. That was clear because I liked his work. I could draw and I understood physics which would be useful for the structure of those cantilevers. It followed that my stuff would be like his stuff, and my most beautiful works would surely be better looking than his worst ones, and so one day coffee-table books would have to be...

Roger Daltrey is 80 this year and significantly, he’s still alive. Significantly because it’s almost sixty years since he sang ‘I hope I die before I get old’ and only two years since he said ‘I still do.’ In case you are too young to remember the Who, do yourself a favour and discover them soon. When I put together the equality and diversity statement for my own website I thought long and hard ab...

Quite a simple subject today, but like all this stuff, it’s a bit more interesting when you zoom in a bit. How do we see? Well, as everyone knows, eyes are like cameras. There is a lens at the front that focuses an upside down image on your retina, just like the film or CCD at the back of a camera. Obvious right? God or evolution designed it, humans copied it. Problem solved. That’s how we see.  B...

I found a little book entitled Sand and Foam in our house when I was maybe 16 and as I leafed through its pages of verse, one of the lines jumped out at me because I realised immediately that the Beatles had misquoted, or maybe I should say ‘been inspired by’ it in John Lennon’s song addressed to his late mother Julia on the White Album . Khalil Gibran’s 1926 original reads “Half of what I say is...

Gotta love it that kids are so fast these days. Yes, I know we are supposed to grumble that they have the minds of goldfish, stir-fried in their x-boxes and microwaved by their smartphones. But let’s face it, kids are programmed to be inquisitive and to learn and to be creative and to laugh. In a nutshell that means they are naturally sharper, and can be smarter than the rest of us. And on top of...

I was listening last night to Alex O’Connor interviewing Jason Brennan about the problems with democracy. It struck me that most of what he was talking about was not about democracy at all, but tribalism. We worship the idea of democracy and tend to discuss it from a circular idealised argument rather than trying to examine whether or not it actually delivers better results in an imperfect world. ...

There’s a feeling I get when I look to the west and my spirit is crying for leaving. Stairway to Heaven was released when I was fifteen and I remember agreeing with a school friend that that lyric had a magic that touched our adolescent souls in some intangible way. I guess we had just discovered romance.  Just as babies are programmed to learn what all those lights and noises represent, and young...

I felt lucky then and I feel lucky about the same thing now. That first time, it was because the maths teacher stood in front of the class and said ‘You are lucky.’ I was the kind of kid who didn’t question the wisdom of teachers; if he was saying it, it must be true. Apparently, ours was the first year in my school to be taught New Maths by enthusiastic teachers using the SMP books.  I took to Ne...

Artificial intelligence is one thing, but artificial self-awareness? That’s quite another and probably quite a scary concept, even more so for the computer model who has it than for us. I reckon that consciousness is a much richer seam to explore than intelligence.  There are lots of books about at the moment springing from stories like the one about slime mould alleging that it has intelligence b...