Catmachine

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: " ...

Readers of my recent blog entry about how reality is in all probability a computer simulation are quite right to feel sceptical. It's clearly a ridiculous notion, a clever bit of philosophical reasoning designed to invoke a paradox. Instinctively we know this. The Simulation Hypothesis goes against what we feel is the truth and as William of Occam himself carved with his famous Razor, the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. The original words of Occam's Razor are in fact particularly astute in this case; pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate or in plain English, plurality should not be posited without necessity . Why hypothesize a multitude of simulations when one simple reality will do? It's just common sense. However, common sense isn't always right. The ancients believed that the Earth was flat - and you can see why. It feels like common sense. Down is down - it's where things fall to. The ground is clearly flat and the sky "u...

" Burn up The Sun and all magazines / Pull down the abattoirs and all that's obscene... " I'd never bought The Sun and was uncomfortable about doing so now. It held all sorts of negative connotations for me. Recently I'd been supportive of the successful campaign to get its sale banned from the campus newsagent but it ran deeper than that. In my head The Sun would always be associated with The Fuckers at school, the bullies. They'd bought it regularly, imagining this made them adult and daring. They'd subsequently sellotaped an endless parade of monochrome newsprint breasts inside their desks and - on one memorable occasion - to the blackboard during an RE lesson. So I was in a quandary. Tom had sold his story to The Sun and I was curious to read it. You'll have to take my word for this - and some of you may be cynical - but it wasn't in a lascivious " I'm going to get to read all Toyah's secrets " way. I just wanted to k...

Nothing is real. No, that's not strictly true. To put it another way, everything is real. If it wasn't real it wouldn't be . The point I'm trying to make is that this world may very well not be the real one. Whatever that means. I'll start again. There is a theory that states that if it ever became possible to simulate reality in a computer, such a simulation would be indistinguishable from the real thing and any inhabitants of the simulation would be completely unaware that they were all simply part of a gigantic computer program. There is another theory that states that this has already happened. It's known as the Simulation Hypothesis and has been put forward by Nick Bostrom who is either a philosopher at the University of Oxford or (if his hypothesis is to be believed) a simulation of a philosopher at a simulation of the University of Oxford. The premise is very simple. If, hypothesises Bostrom, it ever becomes possible to simulate reality i...

I didn't like what I was hearing. I was speaking to fellow Angel and Demon Bob on a payphone in a corridor at The Portland pub in Portland Road, Hove in spring 1985. He'd just played me Toyah's new single down the phone. I didn't like it. It was the chorus that did it. It sounded too poppy , too commercial. Too major key. The verses were OK. But the chorus... It was the kind of chorus I could have imagined Cyndi Lauper having in one of her songs and that didn't sit well with me. Bob and I spoke in hushed tones, it felt like the end of the world.  Listening to us, anyone would have thought that somebody had just died. Whilst a lot of this extreme reaction was due to the glossy production and "chart hit" nature of the song, I'm sure part of it was down to a change in my own taste as well. I was now coming up for two years at university, two years out on my own, and had been exposed to a vast range of diverse influences.  In those days Sussex Uni...

A couple of months ago there was a brief discussion on Twitter as to why some people seemed to get more right wing as they got older. Was this, some asked, a natural result of the aging process and if so how did that explain Tony Benn? I can only speak for myself of course, but I don't really think my political views have changed since adolescence. Like most rational people who grew up under the yoke of Thatcherism I am still what you would call leftish, although in politics, as in other spheres of life, I am loathe to label myself. I just know what I dislike, and it is by exploring what you dislike that you find out what political stripe you really are. What makes your blood boil? One thing that really makes me furious is when people expect to be treated better than others because they consider themselves more important. It's the Don't you know who I am? syndrome. This has always wound me up and still does to this day. Years ago when I worked in London I recall one...

Ironically 1984 would see less Toyah than I'd ever had for a very long time. I was hoping that her release from the five year contract with erstwhile record label Safari  and signing to Portrait Records would result in more music quite soon - after all she'd been releasing albums at a rate of one or two a year since 1979, surely any record label worth its salt would be keen to take their new signing for a spin around the charts? If nothing else I felt it was high time that the music journalists gave her another chance; by the close of play in 1983 virtually everyone in the music press had their knives out for her, even Smash Hits . This was a problem. As self-styled arbiters of coolness, the music papers often dictated what people "should" like, meaning that in an attempt to appear with-it people would stop liking whatever it was that the NME , Melody Maker and Sounds had decided was on the way out at the moment, whatever its merits. If enough people stopped l...

Today marks an anniversary of sorts. Whilst I first set up this blog in 2006, it was exactly one year ago today that I resolved to start blogging on a regular basis. It's true that I haven't blogged every single day since then, but I am happy to report that when the posting frequency did fall, it was always a conscious decision. I wrote something every single day from 17 August 2009 until 15 September 2009. I then did so every other day from 17 September 2009 to 14 February 2010. Ever since then I've been writing on an approximately weekly basis. Sometimes entries will appear more frequently than that, but never less. So what have I learned from this Experiment with the Air Pump ? Well for a start I seem to have discovered that in general people are more interested in my reminiscences about Doctor Who and Toyah than they are in my musings on the nature of time, space, death and reality. However, I've also learned that said musings can be very useful brain train...

"There was a group of kids who started to call themselves the Angels and Demons who'd wait outside the stage door every night from me arriving at about five to me leaving at about eleven. Every night for five months. They'd wait at the door, getting pissed as newts. They'd nick tables from local restaurants and have street parties. No end of phone calls from the police complaining about them. They now have reunions every two weeks at the pub across the road. I got very inspired by them. Most of 'Love is the Law' was provoked by them." Toyah interview by Mick Mercer in Zig Zag, February 1984 As has been documented elsewhere , I went off to university. It was quite odd really. There I was having just made a load of new friends in the Angels and Demons (we'd already started having our reunions at various central London pubs every weekend after Tanzi had finished) and all of a sudden I had to leave all that behind and begin a new life as a student in Br...