Catmachine

The world around us largely consists of what we expect to see in it.When presented with something brand new, our brains first have to decode the signal that they get from the eyes. The picture passes through the first level filters where edges, shapes and colours are detected and assigned. After that the filters applied rely on our knowledge, memories and experience. It's only after that processing that an identity is assigned to the object. I am looking at a clock. When we're children a lot of what we see is still new to us so our sensitivity at detecting the unusual and never previously encountered is very high - a child walking into a familiar room where just one thing has been changed will spot that change almost immediately. However, as we get older we take a lot of the world as read. In particular we know our homes extremely well and it's unlikely we actually look at anything in them properly very often. This is where my glasses come into it. I wear glasses or contact...

Do you remember the pointless lies you told yourself as a child? I do. I remember them quite clearly. They were harmless but very powerful and sometimes I almost managed to convince myself that they were true. As far as I can see they served one major purpose: to make life more interesting and more like a story. They were micro-stories. One that clearly stuck in my mind was almost convincing myself that I'd heard a cuckoo. Of course it was really a wood pigeon, but a cuckoo was more exciting. Cuckoos belonged in fairy tales and clocks, and how much more exciting would it have been to live in a fairy tale? Or indeed in a clock. The important thing was not to question it. Of course there was that tiny nagging rational voice at the back of my mind whispering "Pigeon... pigeon... pigeon..." but who was interested in pigeons? Pigeons were commonplace, part of the mundane, the everyday, the here and now. Hearing a pigeon was not anything to get excited about. Hearing ...

Anyone who read this blog in May 2010 might have seen a post entitled Intellectromagnetic Spectrum in which I wondered - having read up on some of the symptoms for reasons which are not going to become readily apparent again at this juncture - whether I might in fact have Asperger Syndrome . From what I could see I considered it likely, but I couldn't quite silence that little nagging voice at the back of my mind. You are probably familiar with That Voice yourself. It's the one that constantly puts you down and emphasises your worthlessness. In this instance it was whispering Of course you don't have Asperger Syndrome! You're just saying that to make yourself seem interesting, you're using it as an excuse for your social failings. You don't have it at all. You're just shit at life and don't you forget it . Hardly the most cogent of arguments, but there's always been something convincing about That Voice. No matter how much you might try and dismis...

Do you ever have dreams in which there are two versions of the same person? The strangest thing is that in the dream you don't really notice. It's really quite odd - there's Jack and of course there's Jack as well. Often one of them is a lesser instantiation - they have less talent or inspire less fear. You say I thought Jack was frightening but they're nothing compared to Jack! Sometimes it's something less negative - Jill will show you something and you think That's interesting - I bet Jill would like that, I'll have to remember to tell her about it! This last one sometimes occurs in real life - when Jill shows you something just for a second you think that Jill would be interested and resolve to tell her before remembering that the notion is ridiculous. It must be caused by an error in brain processing. A person is probably represented in the memory space by a complex object with myriad properties and associations. Perhaps sometimes two ver...

Walking down the street this afternoon I found myself in a part of town that I hadn't really visited that much of late, although it was an area I used to frequent more when I first moved down here some fifteen or so years ago.  Fifteen years!  Quite absurd of course to consider that such time had passed. It only seemed like the other day that I made my way down to the coast from London and... Actually no. I realised that it did seem like a long time ago. The biggest difference was how I felt. Walking down that street again evoked in me a Proustian rush, I recalled just how free and excited I felt back then. I'd made a big change to my life and uprooted myself. The possibilities appeared endless, above me an infinite blue sky that reflected my state of mind. I instantly became depressed. Things were so much more negative and gloomy now, the world a far more depressing place. What was it that had changed so much so as to skew my outlook to such a large degree? Aside from...

Our memories are a very useful manual on how not to live your life. Never mind the rose tinted spectacles, for a lot of us the events that really spring into sharp relief are those viewed through blush-tinged goggles. We torment ourselves over and over again over how much of a fool we made of ourselves in such-and-such situation, despite the fact that ninety-nine per cent of the time the only person that remembers these faux pas is ourselves. There is one exception to this rule. When we get drunk and make a fool of ourselves there is a tendency of some people to never let us forget it. However this behaviour is most often observed in people who often do the same thing themselves and their attempts to get everyone else to remember that time you went swimming in the fountain in the town square at the end of the evening are merely an attempt to divert attention from the fact that they pissed on a policeman's shoes the week before. But most of the time we're the only ones cri...

It has been of mild annoyance to me recently that I seem to have been having quite interesting dreams and yet before I can get to a keyboard to record them, they evaporate leaving only a sense of their ambience - if I'm lucky a pleasant and exciting one. I have already discussed on this blog why dreams might have to evaporate , but of course that isn't to say that they always do. Sometimes they stick . And sometimes the ones that stick are the nightmares. This is probably advantageous. Vividly remembering frightening things means we avoid repeating them and consequently may live to pass on the genes for vividly remembering frightening things.  The problem comes when dreams are so frightening that they pass this threshold - there's nothing you can do to avoid them and if you're unlucky they will recur  again and again and again... I have already covered the recurring dreams I used to have about the creatures called Dobods . But one foe appeared ...

As I have so often remarked I don’t cycle into work nearly as often as I should. After all the reasons for doing so are many and varied. It’s greener for a start and saves me money that would otherwise end up in the pockets of Brighton and Hove Buses. And most importantly, it is at least a nod towards making me fitter. I know that in an ideal world should go down the gym of course, but never seem to have the time. However seeing as I have to spend at least 90 minutes a day travelling, I might as well make the most of those minutes getting exercise. Unfortunately the arguments for not cycling are far more persuasive. It’s dark. Often it’s cold and wet. I’m tired. I’m lazy. And perhaps, most importantly, I usually end up as a seething chamber of suppressed rage by the time I reach the end of my journey. This is not because I have an exaggerated sense of self importance and sense of entitlement when it comes to my position on the road. This is because so many other cyclists, pedestria...

These days the name of Alan Turing is associated as much with computers as the name Isaac Newton is with gravity. Quite rightly so. Whilst his work on cryptanalysis at Bletchley Park during World War Two might cause some to consider him a shadowy figure in the world of twentieth century espionage, I would like to think that in the long historical view it will be a thought experiment of his that will be remembered most of all - the Turing Test . In its simplest form the test states that if an interrogator having a conversation over a keyboard (online chat, basically) with a second party cannot distinguish between a real person and a computer program, then the computer (program) could be said to be thinking. Even though this once thought experiment has now been carried out in reality, (most notably at the Loebner Prize which has been carried out annually since 1991) no-one yet wants to stick their neck out and claim that a machine has definitely passed and ipso facto can think. ...

Sometimes it seems that we will stop at nothing to find external reasons for avoiding doing what we really didn't want to do anyway. We know that we didn't want to do it but we tell ourselves that we would have done it nonetheless, if only it hadn't been for the thing with the stuff or the fact that the situation was thus. Case in point. I ended up Not Cycling into work yesterday morning. The official reason (that is to say the reason I went snuffling after so I could hold it up in front of me like a Get Out Of Jail Free card or an FBI warrant) is that my current bike is a write off. Well, according to the Bike Doctor at work anyway when I took it to him for a checkup. Never mind the fact that I managed perfectly well to cycle home after this grim news or the fact that despite this I originally planned to cycle in yesterday as "one last journey" on the ailing bike. The real reason was that I wanted to carry on reading Neal Stephenson 's Anathem , large c...

This week I started cycling into work again for the first time in ages. The weather had improved, it was no longer even remotely cold and I basically couldn't come up with any further ways of putting it off. Leaving early it wasn't nearly as bad as I feared it might be, but on the other hand it did remind me of something about the way my brain works. During the cycle journey I am fully physically occupied. My brain is also very busy; calculating a trajectory here, making sure I obey the traffic lights there and ensuring I don't end up under a juggernaut due to a miscalculation whilst shooting round Vogue Gyratory. However these activities don't entirely occupy the brain. Whilst they're not unconscious autonomic responses they are below the threshold of language, which means that throughout the journey my thought processes are racing and my internal madman is monologuing at a million miles an hour coming up with reams of subvocal garbage and the odd gem. At on...

I get the feeling that I have already mentioned the whole issue of waking up just before the alarm clock goes off in this blog. It's exactly the kind of thing that it would have occurred to me to write about in the early days when I was doing it regularly. Back in that heady time I used to get up at 6.30am, tap away at the keyboard and then hit PUBLISH POST without a second thought. Given that I'd so recently dragged myself up out of sleep it isn't at all surprising that I'd end up writing about alarm clocks. Nowadays I plan things more and write a blog entry over a couple of days so alarm clocks aren't so fresh in my mind. It's odd when it happens though, this preemptive waking. Depending upon how deeply you've been asleep you snap or drift into wakefulness and wonder what it is that has roused you. Sometimes it almost seems as if you heard an alarm clock going off in the next room or at least dreamed that you heard one. And then it actually goes off...

The introduction of the keyboard into my life - that is at first the typewriter and then the computer rather than the Yamaha Home Organ - I found to be The Great Enabler. Before that I was always hamstrung when it came to expressing myself on paper and I suspect the messiness of my writing and how slow I was were a contributory factor to the "disappointment" teachers expressed in my efforts. For some reason they equated writing neatly with trying hard and intelligence, despite no evidence to support this whatsoever. " Could try harder " OH FUCK OFF. At first I used to blame this on the fact that I'd effectively missed being taught joined up writing at school. I left Galliard Road Junior School in Edmonton the year before we learnt it, only to arrive at Tetherdown Junior School in Muswell Hill and discover that they'd learned it the year before. I ended up teaching myself and whenever possible would lapse back to printing.  Handwriting was just too ...

I watched a fascinating documentary on BBC4 last week, part of the series The Brain: A Secret History . It was all about emotions, where they come from, how they work and what they're for.  All interesting stuff, but I was surprised that at no point was the evolutionary root of emotions discussed - it was all behavioural. And yet I've found that simply looking at things from an evolutionary perspective can provide astonishing insight into what makes us human and just why it is that we do all of the things that we do. Evolution says that anything that makes it far more likely for organisms to pass on their genes to future generations will be exaggerated over time, and for sentient beings lusts, urges and instincts are what make us do things we have to (if we didn't "enjoy" food we'd forget to eat and starve to death). The stronger the lust and protective instincts felt towards a chosen partner will result in more sex and therefore more children; the stronge...

Do you ever get the feeling you're being watched? It's a very real sensation, far from mere paranoia (although it may be a contributory factor to that misunderstood delusion). Picture the scenario. It's 5am, it's Sunday morning, it's summer and you're walking back home through deserted streets after a club night. It's already daylight and you've got the beginnings of monstrous hangover. Nevertheless, there's something to be said for the silence and solitude. Then you stop. You've got the feeling . Someone's watching. You look around. No sign of anyone. In the distance you can hear the engine of a lone vehicle, but that's all. Even the birds are silent. Some thing is watching. You can feel it. Outwardly nothing has changed; the streets are just as deserted as they were two minutes ago but viewed through the filter of potential observation, everything is suddenly sharper and more sinister. Then you see it. Five floors up and loo...

Have you ever wondered what it's like to die? I'm not talking about the famous tunnel of light reported by near death experience patients ; by definition that isn't what it's like to die otherwise those describing it wouldn't have been able to pass on their report. If this is the case, then it could very well be impossible to know; however, I'd like to make an informed guess. Ever since I've been writing this blog on a regular basis I've touched on topics like the nature of consciousness, time, space and reality. It shouldn't be that difficult to cobble together a basic description of the dying of the light. I'm not really that concerned with the actual cause of death, provided it's not being run over by a steamroller or evaporated by a nuclear explosion. I'm more interested in deaths of the slipping away variety. I'm going to start talking about noses here for a paragraph or so. It's not as much of a non sequitur as it m...

There are no emotional qualia . As I have discussed before , it's all very well saying you're happy, but how can we possibly tell that your happy is the same as my happy? Describing it is no good, because any qualitative words we use would by definition only refer to our own emotional experiences and our personal definitions. The only way to be sure would be to become each other and then... well we'd actually be each other so we still wouldn't be able to compare and contrast. Given that this is the case, it is odd that some emotions are treated the same in different people. Treated being the operative word. I am talking about depression. Unfortunately it's an emotion that is never really taken seriously and often misunderstood.  On the one hand the unsympathetic tell you to " snap out of it ", " pull yourself together " or " cheer up (it may never happen) " whilst on the other the condition is used to describe trivia: " ...