Octopus On Ecstasy And 2021 Oscar Winner

My Octopus Teacher won the best documentary Oscar this year. 

If you haven't watched it yet, please do so. 

Next, I am not thrilled by this ecstasy experiment on Octopus; some insights from the brilliant Octopus mind: 

They were given a high dose of MDMA first by dissolving it into the water, but they didn’t like it. The study author, Gul Dolen, put it like this:

“They really didn’t like it. They looked like they were freaked out. They were just taking these postures of super hypervigilance. They would sit in the corner of the tank and stare at everything.”

Not a great start for the study or the octopuses. They were grumpy before the drugs and now they were freaked out, too. But things got better.

When they were given lower doses, more the kind of dose that you or I might take if we were to ever do that kind of thing, something else happened. Something both strange, and exactly what you might expect. As Dolen says:

“After MDMA, they were essentially hugging… really just much more relaxed in posture, and using a lot more of their body to interact with the other octopus.”

Just like high humans at a festival, they were hugging. But there’s more. The once-grumpy, antisocial octopuses now “Somersaulted through the water as though they were dancing.” Somehow, as far as surface behaviour goes, MDMA seems to affect octopuses in the same ways as us.

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So What Did We Learn?

Aside from the obvious — octopuses love to hug on ecstasy too — it’s pretty useful for biologists to know. Because the creatures are so old and predate us by so long, it can give an indication of when some brain systems evolved. Basically, we probably picked up the brain system affected by the MDMA from our animal ancestors rather than it developing in humans as we evolved. It was there before us.

It also shows that basic brain chemistry plays a big role in our social psychology, whereas previously it was thought that complex brain systems were responsible.

More specifically, the study concluded a couple of bits for the people here for the science and not the high octopus:

• “Sociality is widespread across the animal kingdom.”
• “Serotonin is an evolutionarily ancient molecule.”
• “Neurotransmitter’s prosocial functions may be conserved across evolution.”

There’s plenty more if you wish to read the full study, here.

But to summarise, octopuses on ecstasy behave exactly as you would expect: they dance and hug each other. 

Project CETI - Using AI To Decipher Whale Language

They live in matriarchal and multicultural societies and share dialects and strong multigenerational family bonds Sperm whales have the largest brains of any species and have higher-level functions such conscious thought and future planning, as well as speech and feelings of compassion, love, suffering and intuition. Their vocalizations, among the loudest animal sounds on the planet, have a Morse code-like structure that shares the hallmarks of a highly-evolved language.

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Project CETI, a nonprofit organization and interdisciplinary initative that aims to apply advanced machine learning and state-of-the art robotics to listen to and translate the communication of whales. Founded and led by a team of scientists, CETI is bringing together leading cryptographers, roboticists, linguists, AI experts, technologists and marine scientists to connect to a fellow mammal with the largest brain: the sperm whale.

Over the next five years, CETI  listen deeply to sperm whale communication, interpret their voices, and then attempt to communicate back. Through an understanding of a non-human species and showing the power of collaborative research, CETI aspires to deepen our relationship with life on earth.

- Project CETI 

These are one of those few rare moments in my life when I salute and bow to my fellow sapiens. 

Thank you!

Pleasures Of Bird Watching On A Beautiful Spring Morning

 Fluffy & Garph!

Why I Don't Read Anything On Consciousness & Inside Of Neurons - An Interesting Idea Of All Sciences

I don't remember exactly when but around a couple of years before Max was diagnosed with cancer; I decided to stop reading anything related to consciousness. I didn't care if it was written by a "wise" philosopher centuries ago or a paper published on nature by a "brilliant" neuroscientist two days ago. 

I understood it was a pointless quest and a complete waste of time.  The only upside - it's the pinnacle of virtue signaling to sound and look smart. I decided to even throw away the books I had on consciousness. Throw away to recycle the paper and not donate the books so that it doesn't corrupt minds. 

But why? 

For starters, we don't know how and where the memory is formed and stored. We don't know if that question is even correct. 

Imagine Sapiens roaming in savanna who are yet to invent the rudimentary wheel and we are debating now their thoughts on driverless cars and lithium-powered automobiles.  Our understanding of the basics and fundamentals of how memories are formed and stored (leave alone consciousness) is worse than that. 

If you don't believe me, please search for "Blue Brain Project" on this blog or save some time and read this insightful interview with neuroscientist Randy Gallistel:

How does the “ferret experiment” work, what were the results, and why are the results significant?

The ferret-experiment shows that the measuring of—and then storage of—a maximally-simple experiential-fact (the duration of the interval between two simple events) occurs within a single huge cell (neuron) in the cerebellum. It also shows that subsequent single-spike input to this cell triggers the reading-out of this memory into a simple behavior: an appropriately-timed blink.

The blink occurs in response to a simple stimulus (a touch on the paw) that warns of a soon-to-occur threat to the eye (a shock to the skin near the eye). The interval-duration between the warning-signal and the shock itself has been stored in the engram inside this huge cell in the cerebellum—as a result, the brain can time the blink so that the eye is closed (hence protected) at the moment when the predicted threat occurs.

Johansson has also identified the first molecular stage in a sequence of molecular events inside this huge neuron. Somewhere in that sequence is the molecular substance that encodes the duration of that interval. It performs the same function as the memory-registers in a conventional computer.

Biological molecules are tiny interconnected machines. Johansson identified the first in a sequence of these machines. The sequence must lead to the engram. Fredrik Johansson has done for molecular biologists what Ariadne did for Theseus when she handed him the ball-of-thread. Theseus used the ball-of-thread to find his way through the labyrinth to the Minotaur and back out again.

Each neuron contains billions of (almost) incomprehensibly-tiny molecular machines. Molecular biologists have developed an astonishing array of techniques for visualizing/manipulating the actions of these little machines. These techniques will allow molecular biologists to follow the machines inside this huge neuron to the engram—to the tiny machine that encodes the experience-gleaned facts so that these learned/remembered facts can inform later behavior. 

How hard has it been to shine the spotlight on the ferret-experiment?

Very hard.

What explains the difficulty?

The difficulty is due to the mental energy required to climb out of intuitive Aristotelian energy-pits. The current approach to the engram is founded on an intuition that dates back to Aristotle.

The intuition is that memory consists of associations—conductive connections—between primitive sensations (color, texture, shape, smell, etc.). This intuition was the foundation of behaviorist psychology, which dominated theory/experiment in psychology during the first half of the previous century. The associative theory of learning is still widely taught in introductory psychology courses/textbooks. And it’s been given new life by the grossly-misleading hype surrounding deep learning.

Neuroscientists embrace Aristotle’s theory. But the most basic fact about memory is that memory is full of learned facts (time, distance, duration, probability, numerosity) that are unrelated to simple sensory-experience. And Aristotle’s theory makes no attempt to explain this basic fact.

This Aristotelian theory directs neuroscientific experiment/theorizing about learning/memory. It would be a far-reaching transformation to abandon this theory and instead focus on how brains encode maximally-simple abstract facts.

In the history of most sciences (physics, chemistry, physiology), the most important stage was when scientists finally abandoned the intuitive-but-useless conceptions that Aristotle left us with. Aristotle’s highly-intuitive natural science became the foundation of medieval philosophy/science. (There was no distinction between philosophy and “natural science” in the Middle Ages.)

In the early history of almost all sciences, it’s striking how difficult it was for thinkers to abandon these intuitively-appealing concepts in favor of much less-intuitive conceptions. Consider caloric theory.

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But what exactly is so hard to understand?

Mainstream brain-scientists have no idea how brains could store a number, retrieve that number and other relevant numbers, operate on pairs of number arithmetically, and return the results to memory. That whole way of thinking (the computational theory of mind) is not part of their conception regarding how the brain works.

And a memory-code is not part of their conception either. It’s like how biochemists had no conception of a code that was realized in molecular structure until the revelation from Watson, Crick, and Franklin.

We know the first step on the way to the actual storage-site of the number, but how hard will it be to follow the “ball of thread” to the storage-site? 

Molecular biologists have repeatedly accomplished astonishing things. So I think they can do it. I judge that it can be done with the tools molecular biologists already have.

It won’t be easy. It could take 10 years—maybe 20—once molecular biologists really start to work on it.

What do we know about the storage-site itself and about the mechanism that allows the number to be transmitted to—and retrieved from—that storage-site? 

Nothing.

Are both the storage-site and the mechanism equally mysterious? 

Yes.

Is the idea that every neuron in the human brain has a storage-site, or just some of them? 

Every neuron.

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Would mainstream neuroscientists raise their eyebrows at the idea that numbers are somehow stored inside cells and retrieved from inside cells? 

Most of them would think it’s about the craziest, stupidest, and most implausible idea they ever heard suggested.

Despite the fact that they all know that the polynucleotides that are abundant inside every cell can store huge amounts of information at negligible energetic cost. They know that. But they don’t think that it’s relevant to thinking about how the brain works.

Not a few neuroscientists think that the scientific concept of information is irrelevant to neuroscience. This school of thought thinks that the concept of information has no useful role to play in understanding how brains do what they do.

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The public would like to think that scientists look at data and take data seriously. What do brain-scientists say when you show them this data? It’s disturbing to think that they refuse to look at data, since data is supposed to be what science is all about. 

Scientists are human. Like all humans, they’re prisoners of preconceptions. When a preconception takes strong hold, it becomes almost unshakable. Max Planck is often quoted as saying: “Science progresses one funeral at a time.”

 

Case to Cancel & Not Cancel Shakespeare

These Socratic debates are very beneficial and result in something that is the opposite of pyrrhic victory - not only both sides win but also many who aren't even aware of what this debate gain immensely. 

This piece by Allan Stratton created a lot of buzz on the internet last few weeks (obviously by people who read the title and never read the whole piece )

His case is simple, Shakespearean English is hard and we need to make Shakespeare more readable to students so that more students "get" Shakespeare and not make it esoteric. His fault, he chose the word "cancel" in the title. 

So no, I’m not saying Shakespeare should be beached in his entirety. But at the moment, as Cassius says in Julius Caesar, “He doth bestride the narrow world like a Colossus” taking up a quarter to a third of each year’s high school English course. You’d think no other playwright existed; why, barely another author.

This has serious consequences for what ought to be the primary function of high school study: developing a love of reading that will last a lifetime. This is next to impossible when your major contact with literature is a guy from the 1500s who wrote with a quill in what might as well be a second language. And when your teachers aren’t theatre people who can bring the works from page to stage, for which they were intended and where they shine.

Only one insightful signal from a myriad of refuting noises came from Sky Gilbert who refuted Allan Stratton's case very nicely. 

Allan thinks that Shakespeare’s language is difficult and old fashioned, and that students today find analyzing the complexities of his old-fashioned rhetoric boring and irrelevant. Yes, Shakespeare essentially writes in another language (early modern English). And reading or even viewing his work can be a tough slog. Not only did he invent at least 1,700 words (some of which are now forgotten today), he favoured a befuddling periodic syntax in which the subject does not appear until the end of a sentence. 

But a study of Shakespeare’s rhetoric is important in 2021. There is one — and only one — exceedingly relevant idea that can be lifted from Shakespeare’s congested imagery, his complex, sometimes confusing metaphors — one jewel that can be dragged out of his ubiquitous references to OVID and Greek myth (references which were obviously effortless for him, but for most of us, only confound). And this idea is very relevant today. Especially in the era of “alternate facts” and “fake news.”

This idea is the only one Shakespeare undoubtedly believed. I say this because he returns to it over and over. Trevor McNeely articulated this notion clearly and succinctly when he said that Shakespeare was constantly warning us the human mind “can build a perfectly satisfactory reality on thin air, and never think to question it.” Shakespeare is always speaking — in one way or another — about his suspicion that the bewitching power of rhetoric — indeed the very beauty of poetry itself — is both enchanting and dangerous. 

I agree with both. Personally, I wouldn't have found my friend Montaigne if not for Sarah Blackwell's distilled book on Montaigne. Nor would I have understood Stoics and Buddha if not for simplified versions of their wisdom. 

Students who are capable of original works should have a choice to read them but at the same time since a  majority of students aren't capable of doing so then we should use "simplified" versions of classic literary works as a catalyst to instill not only the love of literature but wisdom as well. 

Secrets Of Whales - A Documentary

Secrets of the Whales is a new documentary by  James Cameron. 

Few good humans are doing a moral and wonderful job by educating Sapiens who have almost no capacity to change their minds. Eventually, their own demise does that for them. But yet, these efforts have a tremendous impact on few humans who understand their own insignificance and are open-minded.  

They Love. They Play. They Mourn. Just Like Us. 

For the first time, I am reading the word "wisdom" while referring to a non-human animal. Yes, the following sentence is coming from me - This is progress. 

When photographer Brian Skerry first mentioned his interest in exploring the culture of these remarkable animals, one group leaped to mind. I live four miles from Puget Sound, where three pods of southern-resident killer whales spend a portion of their year zipping about in tight formations like squadrons of Air Force Thunderbirds. When their dorsal fins break the surface near shore, crowds gather with cameras, hoping to catch a memorable hop or acrobatic lunge. What secrets might these whales carry? Could knowing them help us live better together?

Photographer Brian Skerry traveled from the Arctic to the South Pacific to capture spectacular and intimate images...Read More

Scientists have long understood that many whale actions must be picked up from peers or elders. It’s learned behavior and hardly shocking. Even Aristotle knew animals learned from one another. Songbirds raised away from their own families “utter a different voice from their parents,” he wrote. Charles Darwin noted that animal traps eventually must be moved because wild creatures “imitate each other’s caution.”

While genes determine the shape and function of a creature’s body, encoding instructions for essential traits and behaviors, social learning is received wisdom, the development of neural connections that let animals learn from the knowledge of those around them. Scientists generally agree that culture requires that behaviors be socially learned and shared widely, and that they persist. As groups of animals transmit multiple learned behaviors, they can develop sets of habits wholly distinct from others of their species. For example, the ability to throw is genetic. But throwing a curveball requires social learning, and playing baseball instead of cricket is culture.

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Among some whales, intelligence may even be an evolutionary response to culture, as social animals spread learned wisdom far and wide. For culture to exist, individuals must come up with new ways of doing things that get shared among peers. And whales can be shrewd innovators. A few hungry sperm whales off Alaska in the late 1990s found new ways to snack: They stripped black cod off commercial fishing boat longlines. Using underwater cameras, scientists recorded a whale delicately grabbing a line with its massive jaw, creating tension, and then sliding its mouth up the strand until the vibrations popped off a fish. The practice, previously rare, quickly spread. In the Gulf of Maine, in 1980, one humpback was seen hunting in a new way. Before blowing bubbles around schools of sand lances to disorient them, the whale smacked the surface with its fluke. Humpbacks regularly use the bubble technique, but the fluke slap was new. It’s not clear how it helps, but by 2013, scientists counted at least 278 whales that hunted this way.

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When I ask about resilience during one of our many talks, Ford shares a story. Killer whales travel in matrilineal family pods for life and learn how and what to eat by watching their kin. In 1970, when wild orcas in the region were still being caught for marine parks, wranglers drove five killer whales into a British Columbia cove. Two were taken to a marine park. The remaining three refused to eat the salmon offered by caretakers. One eventually died. Only after 79 days did the survivors start eating fish.

The whales were “caught in this behavioral rut,” Ford tells me. The caretakers didn’t know killer whales in the Northwest represent three different diets: southern- and northern-resident salmon-eaters; offshore shark-eaters; and Bigg’s killer whales, which hunt only marine mammals. Unlike some other cetaceans whose culture offers them flexibility, these killer whales are unwilling or unable to switch food even when options dwindle, much as Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen beat Robert Falcon Scott, a Brit, to the South Pole by eating his sled dogs, which Scott refused to do. “It’s just an example of how ingrained these cultures are,” Ford says.

That’s partly why, in 2019, more than two dozen scientists, including Ford, Garland, Whiten, and Whitehead, called for a sea change in global conservation. In the journal Science they urged the world to incorporate culture into wildlife management decisions. The Convention on Migratory Species already is developing a plan for South American countries to protect sperm whales in the eastern Pacific by focusing on what individual clans require. Such approaches are “essential to maintaining the natural diversity and integrity of Earth’s rich ecosystems,” the authors argue.

Why We Need Gardens - Oliver Sacks

In forty years of medical practice, I have found only two types of non-pharmaceutical ‘therapy’ to be vitally important for patients with chronic neurological diseases: music and gardens.

As a writer, I find gardens essential to the creative process; as a physician, I take my patients to gardens whenever possible. All of us have had the experience of wandering through a lush garden or a timeless desert, walking by a river or an ocean, or climbing a mountain and finding ourselves simultaneously calmed and reinvigorated, engaged in mind, refreshed in body and spirit. The importance of these physiological states on individual and community health is fundamental and wide-ranging. In forty years of medical practice, I have found only two types of non-pharmaceutical “therapy” to be vitally important for patients with chronic neurological diseases: music and gardens.

I cannot say exactly how nature exerts its calming and organizing effects on our brains, but I have seen in my patients the restorative and healing powers of nature and gardens, even for those who are deeply disabled neurologically. In many cases, gardens and nature are more powerful than any medication.

Clearly, nature calls to something very deep in us. Biophilia, the love of nature and living things, is an essential part of the human condition. Hortophilia, the desire to interact with, manage, and tend nature, is also deeply instilled in us. The role that nature plays in health and healing becomes even more critical for people working long days in windowless offices, for those living in city neighborhoods without access to green spaces, for children in city schools, or for those in institutional settings such as nursing homes. The effects of nature’s qualities on health are not only spiritual and emotional but physical and neurological. I have no doubt that they reflect deep changes in the brain’s physiology, and perhaps even its structure.

- That's the full-short but powerful and insightful essay from Oliver Sacks. 

It goes without saying, Oliver Sacks missed non-human animals from his shortlist. My life is however irrelevant and short is a non-outlier example. 

But I agree with Oliver Sacks on we don't know why this works and that is the story of complex systems. I am a small part of that complex system and my small part is a complex system in itself. 

Four Buddhist's Matras For My Last Months With Max

There are quite a few people I don't have in my life since Max passed away. The reason being, Max's relationship with me and my relationship with him had no visible impact on their busy lives. Max and I welcomed them into our lives (with no expectations) for years but if this was a game - society won to influence them better than we did. 

Last Friday, Tim Ferris in his 5-bullet Friday newsletter recommended this insightful piece from Maria Popava. In hindsight, this is what any relationship should offer, and during Max's last months, I was expecting this as a default behavior. So much for no expectations, talk about human desires...

The four mantras from Fear: Essential Wisdom for Getting Through the Storm by Thich Nhat Hanh: 

First Mantra

When you love someone, the best thing you can offer that person is your presence. How can you love if you are not there? Come back to yourself, look into [their] eyes, and say, “Darling, you know something? I’m here for you.” You’re offering [them] your presence. You’re not preoccupied with the past or the future; you are there for your beloved. You must say this with your body and with your mind at the same time, and then you will see the transformation.

Second Mantra

“Darling, I know you are there, and I am so happy.” To be there is the first step, and recognizing the presence of the other person is the second step. Because you are fully there, you recognize that the presence of your beloved is something very precious. You embrace your beloved with mindfulness, and he or she will bloom like a flower. To be loved means first of all to be recognized as existing.

Third Mantra

Even before you do anything to help, your wholehearted presence already brings some relief, because when we suffer, we have great need for presence of the person we love. If we are suffering and the person we love ignores us, we suffer more. So what you can do — right away — is to manifest your true presence to your beloved and say the mantra with all your mindfulness: “Dear one, I know you are suffering. That is why I am here for you.” And already your loved one will feel better.

Your presence is a miracle, your understanding of his or her pain is a miracle, and you are able to offer this aspect of your love immediately. Really try to be there, for yourself, for life, for the people you love. Recognize the presence of those who live in the same place as you, and try to be there when one of them is suffering, because your presence is so precious for this person.

Fourth Mantra

This mantra is for when you are suffering and you believe that your beloved has caused you suffering. If someone else had done the same wrong to you, you would have suffered less. But this is the person you love the most, so you suffer deeply, and the last thing you feel like doing is to ask that person for help… So now it is your pride that is the obstacle to reconciliation and healing. According to the teaching of the Buddha, in true love there is no place for pride.

When you are suffering like this, you must go to the person you love and ask for his or her help. That is true love. Do not let pride keep you apart. You must overcome your pride. You must always go to him or her. That is what this mantra is for. Practice for yourself first, to bring about oneness of your body and mind before going to the other person to say the fourth mantra: “Dear one, I am suffering; please help.” This is very simple but very hard to do.

Without even knowing these mantras, I did follow the first three mantras with Max. And I heard the fourth mantra from Max through his playful and powerful eyes. My fault with others, I didn't articulate the fourth mantra and expected it to be heard by default. I failed to learn that lesson from Max. I have learned it now. 

John Gray’s Philosophy Helped Me Unhook From Utopia & Find Peace

All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

- Blaise Pascal

I was so lucky to have read John Gray early in life. He helped me become a realist and kept my idealistic younger self in check. It's a shame that no many people read him and if they read, don't understand him. We sapiens are constantly attracted to subjective bullshit, magic, confirmation bias, and no wonder he is not well-read as other philosophers. His writings will shake up most of the preconceived notions that influence most if not everything in our lives. 

Andy Owen writes about his experiences of reading John Gray. He discovered John Gray almost two decades ago while he was in Afghanistan as a soldier. 

Speaking at the Sydney Writers’ Festival in 2008, Gray highlighted an important caveat to the phrase ‘You can’t have an omelette without breaking eggs,’ which is sometimes used, callously, to justify extreme means to high-value ends. Gray’s caveat was: ‘You can break millions of eggs and still not have a single omelette.’ In my two previous tours of Iraq, I had seen first-hand – as sectarian hatred, insurgency, war fighting, targeted killings and the euphemistically named collateral damage tore apart buildings, bodies, communities and the shallow fabric of the state – just how many eggs had been broken and yet still how far away from the omelette we were.

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Gray showed that they are all various forms (however incompatible) of utopian thinking that have at their heart the teleological notion of progress from unenlightened times to a future utopia, and a belief that violence is justified to achieve it (indeed, from the Jacobins onwards, violence has had a pedagogical function in this process). At first, I baulked at the suggested equivalence with the foot soldiers of the other ideologies. There were clearly profound differences! But through Gray’s examples, I went on to reflect on how much violence had been inflicted throughout history by those thinking that they were doing the right thing and doing it for the greater good.

Killing and dying for nonsensical ideas is how many human beings have made sense of their lives.

A message repeated throughout Gray’s work is that, despite the irrefutable material gains, this notion is misguided: scientific knowledge and the technologies at our disposal increase over time, but there’s no reason to think that morality or culture will also progress, nor – if it does progress for a period – that this progress is irreversible. To think otherwise is to misunderstand the flawed nature of our equally creative and destructive species and the cyclical nature of history. 

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Believing the stories we tell ourselves leads us to suppose that we’re far superior to our fellow creatures, but Gray likens our fate to that of the straw dogs of ancient Chinese rituals that were used as offerings to the gods. During such a ritual, these dogs were treated with the utmost reverence. But when it was over, and they were no longer needed, they were tossed aside. Gray quotes Lao Tzu, the 6th-century BCE Chinese philosopher and founder of the Chinese philosophical tradition of Taoism: ‘Heaven and earth are ruthless and treat the myriad creatures as straw dogs.’ To many, this vision is too bleak. One review of Straw Dogs described Gray as possessing ‘extravagant pessimism’ and the book as so ‘remorselessly, monotonously negative that even nihilism implies too much hope’. A further criticism is that Gray preaches a politics of inaction. He has been asked more than once: if he believes what he claims, how can he get out of bed in the morning? Gray has never bought into the idea that his work outlines a philosophy of pessimism and despair. He has proposed antidotes to the ills he identifies at both the political level and at the level of the individual.

At the political level, in the face of our history of violence, Gray counsels that we have to abandon the belief in utopias and instead adopt a form of political realism that accepts that there are moral and political dilemmas for which there are simply no solutions. Building on the work of one of his key influences, the Latvian-born British philosopher Isaiah Berlin, Gray proposes that we should aspire to an approach of modus vivendi. This recognises that there is a plurality of human values that determines many ways of living, and these values – and those that hold them – will inevitably clash. Modus vivendi is the search for a way of living together despite this, embracing the multiple forms of human life as a good thing in itself. While that’s the aim, we must accept that, as many pre-Enlightenment societies did and many non-Western societies still do, the current reality is that war is followed by periods of peace, which are followed by war again. Conflict will always play a part in maintaining the uneasy equilibrium in which our competing societies and ideologies find themselves. History makes more sense as a cycle than as a straight line of progress, and there is no right or wrong side of history to be on. This is something that the Afghans I met in Helmand intuitively grasped better than we, the forgetful invaders, did. They saw our arrival as another phase in the ebb and flow of our presence in the region, picking up from the Third Anglo-Afghan War of 1919. The shifting alliances of tribal and political leaders to meet their own changing needs frustrated our diplomats and military leaders who couldn’t work out whose ‘side’ they were on.

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At the individual level, Gray has frequently taken inspiration from our animal cousins, as well as from Taoism, and encouraged us to try to de-attach ourselves from the pressures of feeding our personal narratives and attaining to unreachable overarching purposes. We must renounce the delusion that one’s life is a narrative, that is – an episode in some universal story of progress. Instead, he advocates a more contemplative life, one lived moment to moment, that appreciates the immediate joys of existence in the skin we are in. The last line of Straw Dogs asks: ‘Can we not think of the aim of life as being simply to see?’ In his later book The Silence of Animals (2013), Gray promises temporary respite from our all-too-human world if, freed of the perpetual need for meaning and transcendence, we become more like other animals. In Black Mass, Gray writes: ‘Taoists taught that freedom lies in freeing oneself from personal narratives by identifying with cosmic processes of death and renewal.’ The contemplation he advocates isn’t a turning away from the world like those of some Eastern philosophies but one that allows us to turn back to it and embrace its folly.

In his latest book Feline Philosophy (2020), Gray goes further than any of his previous work in offering practical advice on how to embrace this folly. As he ponders the essential nature, or soul, of the cat through an examination of the lives of both fictional and historical cats, he compares them to humans and identifies some key lessons we can learn from them. Gray notes that cats live for the sensation of life, not for something they might achieve or not achieve. They have the innocence that Gray believes we would have had before the Fall. They have no concept of striving to become the perfect specimen of their type or attain the good life by approaching the perfection of a divine being (or even a concept of what a divine being would be). 

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It is the sensation of life that Gray observes in his feline companions that we lose when we focus on some overarching purpose or commit to ideologies and religions. Gray believes that an acceptance of human limits shouldn’t be seen as a defeat, but rather as a source of wonder and enrichment. He concludes that: ‘The meaning of life is a touch, a scent, which comes by chance and is gone before you know it.’ 

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The 19th-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche claimed that ‘He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.’ Gray’s challenge is to bear the how without the why. He concedes that, for many, this task is too much to bear. Gray is sympathetic to those who can’t bear it, and cites the French Renaissance philosopher Michel de Montaigne and his recognition that in grief he needed a distraction. The last of Gray’s 10 feline hints states: ‘If you cannot learn to live a little more like a cat, return without regret to the human world of diversion.’ But diversion in the consolations of the ‘mystics, poets and pleasure-lovers’ rather than the utopian thinkers who, as I saw in Iraq and Afghanistan, break lives in the name of unobtainable goals.

 

Why Bumblebees Love Cats & Other Beautiful Relationships

Darwin writes: what animals could you imagine to be more distant from one another than a cat and a bumblebee? Yet the ties that bind these two animals, though at first glance nonexistent, are on the contrary so strict that were they to be modified, the consequences would be so numerous and profound as to be unimaginable. Mice, argues Darwin, are among the principal enemies of bumblebees. They eat their larvae and destroy their nests. On the other hand, as everyone knows, mice are the favorite prey of cats. One consequence of this is that, in proximity to those villages with the most cats, one finds fewer mice and more bumblebees. So far so clear? Good, let’s go on.

Bumblebees are the primary pollinators of many vegetable species, and it is common knowledge that the greater the amount and the quality of pollination the greater the number of seeds produced by the plants. The number and the quality of seeds determines the greater or lesser presence of insects, which, as is well known, are the principal nutriment of numerous bird populations. We could go on like this, adding one group of living species to another, for hours on end: bacteria, fungi, cereals, reptiles, orchids, would succeed one another without pause, one by one, until we ran out of breath, like in those nursery rhymes that connect one event to another without interruption. The ecological relationships that Darwin brings to our attention tell us of a world of bonds much more complex and ungraspable than had ever previously been supposed. Relationships so complex as to connect everything to everything in a single network of the living.

There is a famous story along these lines told for the first time by the German biologists Ernst Haeckel and Carl Vogt. As the story goes, the fortunes of England would seem to depend on cats. By nourishing themselves on mice, cats increase the chances of survival of bumblebees, which, in turn, pollinate shamrocks, which then nourish the beef cows that provide the meat to nourish British sailors, thus permitting the British navy—which, as we all know, is the mainstay of the empire—to develop all of its power. T. H. Huxley, expanding on the joke, added that the true force of the empire was not cats but the perseverant love of English spinsters for cats, which kept the cat population so high. In any event, underlying the joke is the simple truth that all living species are connected to one another in some way or other by relationships, visible or hidden, and that acting directly on one species, or simply altering its environment, can have totally unexpected consequences. Darwin tells us that trying to imagine the final consequences of any alteration in these relationships would be as “hopeless” as throwing up a handful of sawdust on a windy day and trying to predict where each particle would land. History is full of such attempts, almost always gone wrong, to modify the presence or the activities of single species. 

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In 1958, Mao was rightly convinced that some of the scourges that had plagued the Chinese for centuries had to be eradicated immediately and in a radical fashion. Keep in mind that when the Communists took power in the autumn of 1949, they found themselves governing a nation gravely distressed by a soaring incidence of infectious diseases: plague, cholera, measles, tuberculosis, polio, and malaria were endemic in most of the country. Cholera epidemics were very frequent, and the infant mortality rate ran as high as 30 percent.10

The creation of a national health service and a massive vaccination campaign against plague and measles were the first, meritorious, actions undertaken to improve the situation. Water purification and sewage treatment infrastructure was installed throughout the country, and imitating what had been done previously in the Soviet Union, health care personnel were trained and sent into rural areas to serve as proper health care administrators, educating the population in basic health and hygiene practices and treating diseases with all available resources. But, obviously this wasn’t enough; the diffusion of carriers that spread disease had to be curtailed: mosquitoes, responsible for malaria; rats, spreaders of plague; and, finally, flies had to be exterminated. These three scourges from which China had to be liberated were soon joined by a fourth: sparrows, which by eating fruit and rice cultivated laboriously in the fields were one of the most terrible enemies of the people. Chinese scientists had calculated that each sparrow ate ten pounds of grain per year. So for every million sparrows killed, food for 60,000 people would be saved.

This information was the basis for the “Four Pests Campaign,” and sparrows were public enemy number one. Today, any proposal for ecosystem modification as radical as this call to eliminate four species from a territory as vast as China would, obviously, be considered ill-considered. But in 1958, lots of people thought it seemed like a good idea. So the party’s campaign to recruit the citizenry to combat these four pests was begun. Millions of posters were printed up illustrating the necessary eradication and the means to implement it.

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Although Klochko’s account makes it seem that all this activity was not very effective, the actual results were, unfortunately, devastatingly successful. The government acclaimed the schools, working groups, and governmental agencies that achieved the best results in terms of number of pests killed. The estimates provided by the Chinese government, totally unreliable for their enormity, indicated a billion and a half rats and a billion sparrows killed. Even though they are enormously exaggerated, these figures nevertheless tell us of a massacre whose dramatic consequences would soon be evident. Sparrows, in fact, do not feed exclusively on hulled grains. On the contrary, their main food supply are insects.

In 1959, Mao, realizing his mistake, replaced the sparrows as a target pest with beetles, but the damage had already been done. The almost total lack in China not only of sparrows (which had to be reintroduced from the USSR) but of practically all other birds led to an immeasurable increase in the insect population. The number of locusts began to increase exponentially, and immense swarms of insects making their way through the fields of China destroyed most of the crops. From 1959 to 1961, a series of ill-starred events partially related to natural disasters and partly caused by the mistaken reforms of the Great Leap Forward (the idea to exterminate the sparrows being one of the worst), led to three years of famine so harsh that it caused the deaths of an estimated 20 to 40 million people.

Playing with something whose working mechanisms are not well known is clearly dangerous. The consequences can be completely unpredictable. The strength of ecological communities is one of the engines of life on Earth. At every level, from the microscopic to the macroscopic, it is these communities, understood as relationships among the living, that allow life to persist.

- Excerpts from the book, The Nation of Plants by Stefano Mancuso.

What I've Been Reading

Then, like a man who during a long illness suddenly appears to recover for a moment and glow with renewed hope, Zweig carried Montaigne up from the cellar, and without delay set out to tell the world why this incomparable man of letters, four centuries dead, mattered now in moral terms and how in an intolerable period of history. Montaigne showed better than anyone else that one could remain free.  

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Crucially, it was Montaigne who "assisted" Zweig's suicide, particularly through the essay "A Custom of the Isle of Cea", whose principal theme is the question of willed death, the idea that it is more noble for a man of ideals to depart voluntarily when life becomes unbearable than to remain alive at all costs. 

The most just death is that which is most willed. Our lives depend on the will of others, but death on ourselves alone. There is nothing to which we should apply ourselves more than this. Reputation has no place here and it is folly to think of it. Life is servitude if we lack the freedom to die. 

Montaigne by Stephan Zweig. 

I am writing this in 2021 - There is no human I admire more than this five hundred century-old Montaigne.  Not only admire him but I consider him as my closest friend. My teacher. A guide. An inspiration. 

I have written a lot on this blog on the importance of changing one's mind. No human did that better than Montaigne:

Like a river, all flows over him, leaving nothing behind: no deep conviction, no solid opinion, nothing fixed, nothing stable. 

This weakness, which Montaigne endlessly bemoans, is in fact his strength. An inability to remain fixed at a certain point allows him always to go further. With him, nothing is ever set in stone. He never stops at the boundary of past experiences; he does not rest on his empiricism; he amasses no capital; before properly consuming them his spirit must acquire experiences over and again. So his life becomes an operation of perpetual renewal: "Unremittingly we begin our lives anew." The truth that he finds may in the coming months or even the coming years be truths no more. He must be forever searching. Thus is born a multitude of contradictions. Now he appears an Epicurean, now a Stoic, now a skeptic. He is at one and the same time all and nothing, always different and yet ever the same, the Montaigne of 1550, 1560, 1570, 1580, the Montaigne of yesterday. 

Stephan Zweig went through so much in life and finally, he discovered Montaigne towards the end of his life. Before he committed suicide, he wrote this book. 

Only he whose soul is in turmoil, forced to live in an epoch where war, violence, and ideological tyranny threaten the life of every individual, and the most precious substance in that life, the freedom of the soul, can know how much courage, sincerity and resolve are required to remain faithful to his inner self in these times of the herd's rampancy. Only he knows that no task on earth is more burdensome and difficult than to maintain one's intellectual and moral independence and preserve it unsullied through a mass cataclysm. Only once he has endured the necessary doubt and despair within himself can the individual play an exemplary role in standing form amidst the world's pandemonium. 

Only a seasoned man who has tested himself can appreciate the true worth of Montaigne, and I count myself one of them. 

I rest my case. If you haven't reached out to Montaigne yet (via his writings),  please do so. Life as you know will change for good. 

In his thirty-eighth year, Montaigne enters retirement. He no longer wishes to serve anyone but himself. He is weary of politics, of public life and business affairs. It is a moment of disillusionment. In his social prestige, in his position in life, he is inferior to his father. He has been a worse civil servant, worse husband a worse custodian. What exactly is he then? He has the sense that up to this moment in his life has been a sham; he yearns to live properly, to reflect deeply, and ruminate. And it is among his books he hopes to find the solution to the eternal problem of "life and death". 

For him this farewell must be more than just a farewell to duties. It is a rejection of the exterior world. Until now he has lived for others - now he wants to live for himself alone. Until now he has done what is occupation, the court, his father demanded of him, now he wants to do only what is pleasurable to the self. When he wanted to help, he achieved nothing; when he aspired to something, they barred his way; when he sought to counsel, they ignored his advice. He has amassed experience, now he wants to establish their meaning and harvest their flowering. Michel de Montaigne has lived thirty-eight years on earth; now Michel de Montaigne wants to know: "Who exactly is this Michel de Montaigne?"

Max came into my life when I was 31. Within few months, I discovered that my life until that point was pointless. Thirty-One years filled with vanity. Years filled with dancing to the tune of society. In John Gray's words, I was a Marionette. Max helped me see that before I know Montaigne. Later, when I found Montaigne - I found a friend. 

Max gave me life and taught me how to live. Montaigne, my friend from five hundred years ago who lived through unbearable barbarism taught me not to kill myself. Through this friend, I saw my life, and the times we live now are a million times better than what it used to be. If Montaigne, my friend could live through brutality and barbarism and not kill himself. Then, I can do so too. And I decided to live after Max. I decided to keep this blog alive too. For that future kid, who might be suffocating with brutality humans unleash and decide to commit suicide. I was lucky to have  Max and Montaigne; they rescued me. This blog, a little world of Max will be there after I am gone for someone if they are looking for the courage to live. 

Like Shakespeare later, he had seen with an all too clear eye the fragility of everything: "the wantonness of administrative bodies, the debasement of grace and favour, the absurdity of politics, the monotonous tedium of the courts", and above all his own ineffectualness in the world. He had tried to help, but they were indifferent to his approach, yet always with the pride and bearing of a man who knows his own worth he struggled on to counsel the great men, to pacify fanatics, though they were indifferent to him. 

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He says to himself what we all say to ourselves in comparable periods of mass insanity: Never mind the world! You cannot change it, or improve anything. Focus on yourself, save in yourself what can be saved. Build as others destroy, strive to remain sane in the deluge of madness. Close yourself off. Construct your own world. 

Today while walking in the park, I saw this big tree. Max used to pee on this tree every time we walked. Part of Max is probably still alive in that tree. That tree will still be here when I am gone. That tree is a symbol of thriving under adversity, pandemonium, and all the brutality humans unleash. In few weeks, that tree will have leaves and flowers. It will help birds, insects, and zillion other microbes to thrive. And there will be Neo who will go pee there. There is beauty in that tree. There will be millions of humans who might kill it and burn it for the sheer pleasure of drinking under fire or worse, just because it reminds them of some god damn tradition. But yet, there was this dog named Max and a man who adored that tree. The tree doesn't care about them. It lives for the sheer pleasure of life and helping birds, insects, microbes, a dog named Max, and a man.  

I learnt to see the world like this through Montaigne. I wish Stephan Zweig saw what I saw in Montaigne and used Montaigne as an inspiration to live. After almost a century, I am reading Stephan Zweig and love what he wrote. I wish he lived longer, not committed suicide and wrote more books. 

Thank you Stephan Zweig for writing this book. You have touched my life. Your life wasn't lived in vain. You did have an impact on my life. Thank you.

"He who thinks freely for himself, honours all freedom on earth."

Chickens Are Intelligent

Like some other birds and chimps among other animals, chickens can do simple arithmetic. Dr. Marino writes, “Chickens possess some understanding of numerosity and share some very basic arithmetic capacities with other animals.”

A study published in 2009 even found arithmetic abilities in newborn chicks, concluding that “in the absence of any specific training, chicks spontaneously discriminated between two and three, in both cases preferring the larger stimulus set.”

- More here

For once, open up your eyes and mind. Stop giving excuses. Quit killing chickens and giving them a miserable life just for your gastrointestinal pleasures. Grow up and be kind.