Distributed!

Old ideas refuse to die hard. 

One human being's knowledge is limited; hence bureaucratic systems fail - soviet style. But yet, Aristotle is celebrated even though numerous ideas of his turned out to be false and some outright dangerous. One thing we can learn from his failures is not to try to be super intelligent and work on everything under the sun. It is impossible for one human to do that. I think he did this to prove Plato wrong (he wasn't selected to lead Plato's academy after Plato). 

Of course, there is this other dangerous guy in recent times namely Rene Descartes!

Brain in a vat theory is wrong. Brain is not omnipotent. Evolution is frugal. It doesn't do central planning and creates redundancies. 

For starters, there are 9 times more connections from gut to brain than the other way around. The ratio of microbiome to human cell is mind boggling. Each organ inside our body has a two way connection to the brain (and other parts). And our environment affects our thinking and health. Living with non-human animals has a wonderful impact and same with plants inside the house and trees all around.  

In short, we are a complex system and the brain is just a part of it. 

I respect people who fight bad ideas of centuries.  

I refuse to read anything consciousness, intelligence et al., if they focus only on "brain" and it's "elegance"; which is 99.9% of the books and researchers. 

Brilliant interview with Botanist Stefano Mancuso; author of new book Tree Stories: How trees plant our world and connect our lives (it's released in UK but not in US yet)

You refer to your field as plant neurobiology. Is this a provocation?

At the beginning, it was not at all. I started to think that almost all the claims I was hearing about the brain were valid also in plants. The neuron is not a miracle cell, it’s a normal cell that is able to produce an electrical signal. In plants, almost every cell is able to do that. The main difference between animals and plants, in my opinion, is that animals concentrate specific functions inside organs. In the case of plants, they diffuse everything through the whole body, including intelligence. So it was not a provocation at the beginning, but there was a big resistance among my colleagues to use this kind of terminology, and so after it became a provocation.

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The idea that plants are intelligent is controversial enough, but you’ve gone one step further by claiming that plants are to some degree conscious…

It’s incredibly difficult to talk about consciousness, first because we actually don’t know what consciousness is, even in our case. But there is an approach to talking about it as a real biological feature: consciousness is something that we all have, except when we are sleeping very deeply or when we are under anaesthesia. My approach to studying consciousness in plants was similar. I started by seeing if they were sensitive to anaesthetics and found that you can anaesthetise all plants by using the same anaesthetics that work in humans. This is extremely fascinating. We were thinking that consciousness was something related to the brain, but I think that both consciousness and intelligence are more embodied, relating to the entire body.

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You argue passionately in favour of filling cities with trees. Why is this so important?

We are producing 75% of our CO₂ in cities, and the best way to remove that CO₂ is by using trees. The closer the tree is to the source of carbon emissions, the better they are at absorbing it. According to our studies, we could put around 200bn trees in our urban areas. To do that, we really need to imagine a new kind of city, completely covered by plants, without any border between nature and city.

You have a fascinating chapter about a tree stump being kept alive for decades by its neighbouring trees. What can humans learn from tree communities?

Plants are so incredibly cooperative with one another because cooperation is the most efficient way to grant the survival of species. Not understanding the strength of the community is one of [humanity’s] main errors. There was a very clever evolutionary biologist at the beginning of the last century, Peter Kropotkin, who said that when there are fewer resources, and the environment is changing, then cooperation is vastly more efficient [than competition]. This is an important teaching for us today, because we are entering a period of reduction of resources and the environment is changing because of global warming.

Max would have loved being in his Walden! 

Neo doesn't know the wild wild world except Max's Walden. 

Behavioural Effects of Toxoplasma Gondii In Wild Animals

It's been decades or so since Toxo broke the myth of free will and "elegance" of the human brain. Our body and mind are a complex system living and dying in an entangled web of multitude of creatures we neither understand nor comprehend. Hence, this blog even has a Microbes and Us label. 

Another paper on Toxo - how it affects Wolves to become pack leaders. 

Wolves infected with a common parasite are more likely than uninfected animals to lead a pack, according to an analysis of more than 200 North American wolves1. Infected animals are also more likely to leave their home packs and strike out on their own.

I bet there is so much research on Toxo over the past two decades because of availability bias and riding fast on past research. I might be wrong. 

But the question is how many other protozoa, bacteria and parasites are affecting humans and how? What about even Toxo's research on human behavior changes et al.,?

Did Fluffy or Garph affect me with Toxo? 

How I Live - 1

Yes, I started this blog to capture how Max and I live since I understood not to trust human (my) memory. 

At this point and time in my life 14 years after this blog started and as I am approaching my 50; It is very clear Max changed my life. I became a better living being because of him. 

At the same time, I want to capture that change at a micro level how I am living with that change without being Max by side. How much of what I know and do now in life will I laugh at say when I am 70? 

So this is going to be an ongoing series on How I live.  It is not about How to live. I have no clue on that topic but I do know How I live. 

This is my everyday life filled with splendor sprouting from the ordinary.  

I miss Max every second of my day. But yet, I see that I am gifted to have experienced that life, feeling of what I felt, what he felt, the joy, the sadness and so much more. Not too many humans can say that. 

I kiss his ashes and photos a hundred times a day. The moment I wake up, before I eat, before bed, and a lot of times in between. 

Some have asked me is it because I miss him? Yes, but much more. 

As far as I know and the limits of human knowledge, this is the only life I have. I don’t have Max by my side. All I have is his ashes, pictures and my time left on earth. 

Once I die, I might not even get a chance to kiss his ashes. So I do what I do when I still have time left on earth to kiss his ashes. 

There isn’t a moment that goes by that I forget how grateful I am for this. Even during difficult  times at work, at home or my health , the moment this gratitude thought comes up, my difficulties do subside. 

So some ancients were so wise when they spoke and wrote about gratitude-filled life. 

They were and are right. Gratitude is rewarding, fulfilling and enriching. 

Every moments in my life is filled with gratitude for my time with Max, to able to live and understand the precious human animal bond and love, to able to smell, to able to see, to able to hear, to feel a touch, to feel a kiss, to make love, to taste, for people who helped me reach where I am today, for people who I never met but their words changed me, for being born in this time and age, for sheer luck of my genes, for sheer luck born in oldest civilization and to able to speak the oldest language, for living in the greatest civilization of current times, for the freedom I have, much more plus my ability to change my mind in front of reality. 

Beware Of Agreeable Humans

Sometimes there comes a research paper which vindicates one's lifetime of learning that had  become a heuristic without a way to quantify it. 

This is one of those papers. 

At this point in life; I get irritated by people who agree with him even though I know they didn't "believe" what I said (maybe even worse they didn't hear a word I said). 

All this happens because of their inability to change their mind but yet want to "preserve" their image of a nice person by shedding disagreement.  

Someone who argues has some sort of skin in the game and has some iota of possibility of changing their mind. 

One needs to be viscerally involved to change their minds. Mind and Body are one and the same. 

But you have no chance with readily agreeable folks. Beware of them. 

Love is overrated; changing minds is a prerequisite for love. 

World would be a better place if changing minds is celebrated as much as humans celebrate love. 

Dispositioned to resist? The Big Five and resistance to dissonant political views

Next, we find that extraverted individuals resist opposing political views by bolstering their prior political views. A closer look at the index of empowering strategies reveals that this effect is driven by social validation (i.e., reminding oneself that significant others share the same opinion). Because extraverts are social in nature, they might seek reassurance from their social environment when their opinions are challenged. This idea seems to align with earlier research that suggests that extraverts are significantly affected by the opinions of their peers (Alkiş & Taşkaya Temizel, 2015).

Similar to extraverts, agreeable individuals value the ideas of their social circle (Alkiş & Taşkaya Temizel, 2015). In line with this, our data shows that agreeable individuals remind themselves that others in their environment share their views. However, if they can, they will avoid confrontation with alternative political information. Out of the Big Five, agreeable individuals also seem the most resistant. Although surprising, this finding somewhat aligns with previous studies that emphasized the importance of conflict-orientation in understanding people's reactions to political disagreement (e.g., Testa et al., 2014).

Although neurotic individuals react to opposing views with negative affect, they do not seem to avoid such confrontation. Instead of withdrawing from the confrontation – which we hypothesized – we have indications that they engage with the opposing views through contesting and empowering strategies, even if only marginally. Thus, the expected mechanism might be reversed: neurotic individuals become activated precisely because they find counter-attitudinal views emotionally upsetting. This logic aligns with previous findings that show that the strongest motive for neurotic individuals to comment on news stories is when the story affects them emotionally (Barnes et al., 2018).

The Forgotten History Of Cats In The Navy

Early sailors believed that cats could control the weather with their tails. When feline tails twitched in a certain manner, people once reasoned, it meant the cats were angry and preparing to unleash a violent storm that would soon fall over the ship. Later sailors realized that cats twitched their tales when they were agitated by a sudden drop in air pressure, indicating that the ship was heading into unfavorable weather. Crews began to monitor all the mannerism of their ship’s cats and viewed any unusual behavior as a storm warning. The felines were, in a sense, little furry barometers.

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Though cats are known for their aversion to water, they acclimated quite well to life on the sea. Unlike the “limeys” of the Royal Navy, who famously had to drink citrus juice to prevent scurvy, cats make their own vitamin C and can survive on a diet consisting of fish and mammals without needing to eat fruits and vegetables. And when rodents were in short supply, cats had different methods for catching fish for themselves. The easiest prey were the ones that simply washed up on the deck. Some cats overcame their dislike of water to become skilled divers that could snatch fish from the ocean. The cats that never got comfortable with swimming still managed to hunt by deftly knocking down fish leaping over the ship’s bow. Because cats got most of the moisture they needed from eating the fish, they did not require a lot of potable water like human sailors. In addition, cats have an excellent internal filtration system that allows them to drink a bit of sea water if necessary.

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Feline companions were also important for boosting morale among homesick sailors on long voyages, providing the crew with much-needed affection and a bit of softness in the spartan environment of ship. Since cats were considered mascots to be shared by all the sailors, they also helped to create bonds among the crew.

The animals are notoriously difficult to train to do tricks, but some sailors claimed they learned to “speak cat” and were able to get their mascots to perform feats such as standing at attention, saluting, walking tight ropes, and ringing bells. This especially contributed to the U.S. Navy’s goodwill efforts in foreign ports when locals were invited for ship tours that included a brief show featuring performing cats.

- More Here

Better Than Mona Lisa

 

- Source

Please don't kill animals for your gastro intestinal pleasures

How Animals’ Personalities Can Shape Ecosystems

I am so glad there is a lot of research going on to look at individuality of each animal instead of bucketing them as a species or worse just as animals. 

There are zero similarities in character between Max and Neo although both are chocolate lab; the similarities get even worse between Fluffy and Garph. 

I do see occasional flickers of similarities between Fluffy (cat) and Max. I think it's because she grew up around Max and mimicked him. I see heaven on earth when I see Max in her :-) 

Another study here: 

In reality, each individual animal consumes and disperses a different proportion of seeds, making some individuals more mutualistic than others. One implication of this is that some individuals may be more important than others when it comes to seed dispersal (from a conservation standpoint). In this paper, researchers explore how personality factors influence the dispersal behavior of deer mice, seeking to understand the relationship between an individual’s personality traits and their place on the antagonistic-mutualistic continuum.

To carry out their study, the researchers trapped deer mice in an experimental forest in Maine. They marked each mouse and tested them for personality traits including boldness, anxiety, docility, and activity level. From there, mice were given access to seed stations with a mix of white pine seeds, red oak acorns, and beech seeds. The seed stations were dusted with fluorescent powder so researchers could track seed dispersal routes, and the seeds were painted with fluorescent paint and marked for later identification. Researchers later cross-checked the dispersal routes and seeds with video footage of the seed stations to learn which seeds were taken by which mice. They assessed whether each individual seed interaction was mutualistic (meaning the seed was dispersed alive and intact) or antagonistic (meaning the mouse consumed the seed or stored it below ground where germination was unlikely to happen). 

The results were as follows:

• Out of 934 observed seed interactions by tagged deer mice, the researchers were able to determine the outcome of 532 seeds. 349 of these observations involved white pine seeds, 135 involved beech seeds, and 48 involved red oak acorns. 
• On average, mice were more antagonistic than mutualistic toward all three seeds.
• For red oak seed interactions, an individual’s timidness predicted the individual’s antagonism. Specifically, bolder individuals were more mutualistic toward red oak seeds, meaning they were more likely to remove and disperse them either on or below the surface. 

For white pine and beech seed interactions, bolder individuals were more antagonistic, though mutualism was more strongly predicted by body condition (calculated using body mass and the scaled-mass index) and forest type. Specifically, individuals with higher body condition tended to be more antagonistic.

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Understanding the impact of individual animals’ personality types on their mutualistic behavior is important for a number of reasons. As human activities alter natural environments, it is vital to understand the potential impact a certain environmental change can have, and certain environmental changes may favor particular personality types in animals. For example, bolder mice are more likely to venture into open areas in search of food, which means that tree clearing may disproportionately affect them. This presents another factor humans must consider before encroaching on the environment. 

What’s more, conservation decisions are usually made at the species level. However, if only a minority of individuals are doing the majority of mutualistic behaviors (for example, if only the boldest mice are spreading most of the seeds of a given tree species), these mice might be considered “keystone individuals” for conservation projects. For example, previous research has demonstrated that bolder, more active individuals tend to be removed from environments at higher rates from hunting and fishing; understanding how these individuals impact the environment can increase our understanding of the consequences of such activities. While more research is needed on this topic, the study offers another reason why it’s important to value animals for their individual traits rather than their species membership alone.

 

Splendid Uselessness

Thanks to Max; my everyday life is filled with splendid uselessness and rich in reality. 

There is no way on earth, I would have seen the world as I do now without him.

Joseph M. Keegin's beautiful essay:

John Alec Baker was not an ornithologist by profession. He had a regular English schoolboy’s grammar-school education, then won his bread at odd jobs and minor clerical positions in the Essex county town where he was born and raised (and where he would, at the age of 61, die). Despite having worked for some time at the Automobile Association, he never learned to drive a car, so when he travelled the quiet roads into the English countryside around Chelmsford to watch the birds, he walked or – despite his poor eyesight and increasingly debilitating rheumatoid arthritis – rode his bicycle.

In his free time, Baker watched and documented the habits of birds, with particular attention to one raptor that had, by the middle of the 20th century, become seriously endangered: the peregrine falcon. Afternoons in the woods, and evenings recording his observations in a diary – a decade of such labour bore Baker his small, luminous masterpiece The Peregrine (1967), now recognised as some of the greatest nature writing ever set to paper:

For 10 years, I spent all my winters searching for that restless brilliance, for the sudden passion and violence that peregrines flush from the sky. For 10 years I have been looking upward for that cloud-biting anchor shape, that crossbow flinging through the air.

Not money, nor fame, nor even the improvement in man’s estate that motivates the knowledge-gathering activity of the modern scientist: Baker’s effort was for the sake of something else entirely. He sought something splendid and beautiful, to be sure, but – in worldly terms – completely and utterly useless.

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Baker’s story is relayed in beautiful detail in the philosopher Zena Hitz’s book Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life (2020); the story of the Minutemen comes from Michael Azerrad’s book Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991 (2001). 

Both are indispensable documents, in very different ways, of how the pursuit of creative and intellectual activities for their own sake results in an abundance of unpredictable, often unexpected rewards. Great art and thought have always been motivated by something other than mere moneymaking, even if moneymaking happened somewhere along the way. But our culture of instrumentality has settled like a thick fog over the idea that some activities are worth pursuing simply because they share in the beautiful, the good, or the true. 

No amount of birdwatching will win a person the presidency or a Beverly Hills mansion; making music with friends will not cure cancer or establish a colony on Mars. But the real project of humanity – of understanding ourselves as human beings, making a good world to live in, and striving together toward mutual flourishing – depends paradoxically upon the continued pursuit of what Hitz calls ‘splendid uselessness’.

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Of course, not all useless activity is actually good. Binge-watching television, being hooked on drugs, or spending one’s day doing nothing but eating are useless activities, to be sure. But truly splendid uselessness nourishes and elevates us spiritually, rather than simply providing a rush of mental or bodily pleasure. The output is always more than the input: the contemplation of nature, the joy of music-making, and even the study of mathematics can be rich and ennobling activities that, while also being pleasurable, reward the intellect and the soul. And the more we engage in these kinds of activities, the more we hone our sensibility and capacity for receptivity – and these qualities allow us to pay attention to, learn from and, ultimately, act in the world.

But this kind of useless activity is not solipsistic. While rewarding each of us internally, splendid uselessness enriches the world beyond us. Like the fertile soil of a well-kept garden, a life of splendid uselessness provides abundance far beyond one’s immediate aims.  

One thing I don't agree with this essay is - we understand neither animal vocal nor non-vocal communication leave alone our capacity to understand non-human animal versions of "splendid uselessness". 

People compare humans to non-human animals just to pride how humans have the capacity to do this and that but yet they have zero understanding of the animal world. This needs to stop. It's boring and annoying.

I know with high confidence that Max had a more splendid uselessness than I will ever do. His life was far richer than mine.

Centring Individual Animals To Improve Research & Citation Practices

Thank you for this paper.  

This should be very obvious for people who shared their lives with non-human animals. 

The core of the paper is - each individual animal (say mice) has their own personalities, traits etc., like how you and I are different. I know, I know duh! 

Hence, lab experiments should take this into account. 

I think it will be impossible so my question is why are they still testing on non-human animals? These are psychological experiments done on these poor animals. 

Abstract

Modern behavioural scientists have come to acknowledge that individual animals may respond differently to the same stimuli and that the quality of welfare and lived experience can affect behavioural responses. 

However, much of the foundational research in behavioural science lacked awareness of the effect of both welfare and individuality on data, bringing their results into question. This oversight is rarely addressed when citing seminal works as their findings are considered crucial to our understanding of animal behaviour. Furthermore, more recent research may reflect this lack of awareness by replication of earlier methods – exacerbating the problem. 

The purpose of this review is threefold. First, we critique seminal papers in animal behaviour as a model for re-examining past experiments, attending to gaps in knowledge or concern about how welfare may have affected results. Second, we propose a means to cite past and future research in a way that is transparent and conscious of the above mentioned problems. Third, we propose a method of transparent reporting for future behaviour research that 

(i) improves replicability, 

(ii) accounts for individuality of non-human participants, and 

(iii) considers the impact of the animals' welfare on the validity of the science. With this combined approach, we aim both to advance the conversation surrounding behaviour scholarship while also serving to drive open engagement in future science.

- Full paper here

A Day In The Life Of An Oak Tree

Max's Walden is surrounded by hundreds of Oak trees instilling more serenity into this body which was  already filled with 13 plus years of tranquil life with Max. 

It's a beautiful sight to look at them any time and any day of the year. 

This beauty comes from a symbiosis between the Oak tree and the thousands of other living beings around it. 

It's been a privilege and gift to live and breath here. 

I cannot ask for more. 

 John Lewis-Stempel observes this beauty over the course of an entire day: 

7.01am

The slanting rays of morning sun first catch the 1,000 leaf buds in the canopy, then the high untidy drey of the grey squirrel, before illuminating the ground beneath our 300-year-old oak. There, as Robert Bridges versed it: ‘Thick on the woodland floor Gay company shall be,/Primrose and Hyacinth And frail Anemone.’ Hyacinth here is the bluebell, lying in a mauve pool.

The leaves of autumn, brought down by the screaming Halloween wind, still lie around the tree in a thick sodden copper mat; the mould is soft on the pads of the returning vixen as she slinks down into her den among the tree’s roots, a rabbit clamped in her jaws from her night prowl. A present for her cubs.

In the brightening of the day, the birds and animals that have roosted in the tree emerge from their lairs; the pipistrelle bats from a hollow branch, the wren from under the ivy crawling up the immense trunk. Early morning is the great feeding time of diurnal birds and to the oak fly a great spotted woodpecker, nuthatch and a treecreeper. The latter climbs our venerable Quercus robur in a spiral, inspecting the multitudinous cracks in the bark of trunk and limbs for insects; she is immediately lucky and a Clubiona brevipes spider, which has overwintered under the tree’s rough, hard skin, falls victim to her tweezer-precise bill. The fissures of the oak are, quite literally, crawling with creepy-crawlies; in total, 1,178 invertebrate species use it and 257 of them rely solely on this tree. 

 

We Are Lichens On A Grand Scale

Once we learn about something, suddenly we see it everywhere. 

This is what happened to me when I learned about Lichens. I see Lichens everywhere; agreed it's a selection bias on my side by choosing most of my time in nature.

Maria Popova as usual captures beautifully the essence of Haskell's book The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature 

The quietude and outer simplicity of the lichens hides the complexity of their inner lives. Lichens are amalgams of two creatures: a fungus and either an alga or a bacterium. The fungus spreads the strands of its body over the ground and provides a welcoming bed. The alga or bacterium nestles inside these strands and uses the sun’s energy to assemble sugar and other nutritious molecules. As in any marriage, both partners are changed by their union. The fungus body spreads out, turning itself into a structure similar to a tree leaf: a protective upper crust, a layer for the light-capturing algae, and tiny pores for breathing. The algal partner loses its cell wall, surrenders protection to the fungus, and gives up sexual activities in favor of faster but less genetically exciting self-cloning. Lichenous fungi can be grown in the lab without their partners, but these widows are malformed and sickly. Similarly, algae and bacteria from lichens can generally survive without their fungal partners, but only in a restricted range of habitats. By stripping off the bonds of individuality the lichens have produced a world-conquering union. They cover nearly ten percent of the land’s surface, especially in the treeless far north, where winter reigns for most of the year.

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We are Russian dolls, our lives made possible by other lives within us. But whereas dolls can be taken apart, our cellular and genetic helpers cannot be separated from us, nor we from them. We are lichens on a grand scale.

The beauty of living in a complex system is that everything and every act is interconnected. 

Understand - It's easier not to do bad acts than go out of your way to do good. 

Stressed Plants Cry & Some Animals Can Probably Hear Them

Plants do not suffer in silence. Instead, when thirsty or stressed, plants make “airborne sounds,” according to a study published today in Cell1.

Plants that need water or have recently had their stems cut produce up to roughly 35 sounds per hour, the authors found. But well-hydrated and uncut plants are much quieter, making only about one sound per hour.

The reason you have probably never heard a thirsty plant make noise is that the sounds are ultrasonic — about 20–100 kilohertz. That means they are so high-pitched that very few humans could hear them. Some animals, however, probably can. Bats, mice and moths could potentially live in a world filled with the sounds of plants, and previous work by the same team has found that plants respond to sounds made by animals, too.

- More Here

Very Good Definition Of Current-Day China

Sometimes commentators will launch a tendentious debate on whether China is capitalist or socialist, state-driven or market-driven. It is never one or the other, of course. Contradictory slogans like “socialist market economy with Chinese characteristics” allow the party wide scope for ideological maneuver. Beijing’s habit is to announce several mutually-incompatible policies to simultaneously pursue, tweaking priorities as it goes along. In my view, contesting China’s system in binary terms will always be vain. But we can describe its tendencies. And on balance I believe we should think of the Chinese state today as an autocratic regime that is occasionally capable of economic pragmatism rather than a technocratic regime that slips occasionally into Marxist faults.

- Dan Wang 2022 Letter

I would go one step further and state that except death, most of the things in life cannot be binarized. 

The root of most problems when people start thinking issues, policies, and everything under the sun in binary terms. 

I am large, I contain multitudes.

- Walt Whitman

Bard - Google's Version Of Chat GPT & My Thoughts On LLMs, AI et al.

I guess since I work in the field, Google last week invited me to experiment with Bard.

My thoughts: 

• Bard is extremely faster than Chat GPT3. It's obvious since Google has faster servers and more dollars than Open AI. 
• Bard is probably trained on much richer data than Open AI since Google has decades of "our" data. But yet, Brad is more cautious in its answers than Chat GPT. 
• Training data is everything in the current state of AI. And also, training data is almost everything for both humans and non-human animals. The sooner we understand this, the better the chances of us solving the problems we face. 
• I am naturally drawn toward people and models who use the phrase "I don't know". In those terms Chat GPT and Brad are more humble than most humans since these two models have more knowledge than any one human ever.
• They don't have wisdom; wisdom is knowing when to follow and when to break rules (and much  more). To be clear, one should never use the word wisdom with AI (leave alone LLMs)
• Both models are highly creative. Creativity has been seen in all non-human animals and now these models are exposing our empty pride. I feel humble and understand I am an organic matter better with these models.
• I don't ask questions to make myself look smart since I have a sense of what they are good and bad at. 
• I asked both models about my favorite human, Montaigne. 

Brad's answer: 

Montaigne had a very close relationship with his cat. He wrote about her in his essays, and she was often a source of comfort and companionship for him. Montaigne believed that animals were capable of feeling emotions, and he saw his cat as a friend and a fellow creature. He wrote about how she would follow him around the house, and how she would sleep on his bed at night. He also wrote about how she would play with him, and how she would sometimes get into trouble. Montaigne's relationship with his cat is an example of the deep bond that can exist between humans and animals.

Here is an excerpt from one of Montaigne's essays about his cat:

"I have a cat, who does not much care to be seen, and whom I seldom see myself. She comes and goes as she pleases, and I never trouble her. She lies at my feet when I am at work, and purrs so loudly that she sometimes interrupts my thoughts. But I am not angry with her for that, for I know that it is her way of showing her affection. She is a very clean cat, and takes great care of her fur. She washes herself several times a day, and always seems to be well pleased with herself. She is also a very playful cat, and loves to chase after her tail. She is a very good hunter, and often brings me mice and birds. I am very fond of my cat, and she is very fond of me. We are good friends, and I hope that we will always be together."

Chat GPT's answer: 

What was Montaigne relationship with his cat like?

Michel de Montaigne, the 16th-century French philosopher and essayist, had a very close relationship with his pet cat. In his famous essay "An Apology for Raymond Sebond," Montaigne wrote extensively about his observations of his feline companion and used his observations as a springboard for philosophical inquiry.

Montaigne was known to be a lover of animals, and his cat was a constant presence in his life. He observed the cat closely and was fascinated by its behavior, agility, and independent nature. He saw the cat as a fellow creature with its own unique perspective on the world, and he valued its company and companionship.

Montaigne's relationship with his cat was one of mutual respect and admiration. He marveled at the cat's ability to live in the present moment and to be content with its surroundings. He also recognized the cat's independence and self-sufficiency, which he saw as admirable qualities to emulate.

Overall, Montaigne's relationship with his cat was one of affection, admiration, and intellectual curiosity. His observations of his feline companion led him to reflect deeply on the nature of animal consciousness and the limits of human understanding.

Both answers are good and unique in their own way plus both answers are true. 

For a long time, AI had been monopolized by a handful of big companies. We should give Open AI credit for breaking that trend. 

We are going to immensely benefit when two companies (and more will be joining) competing to train better models. Capitalism has its flaws but this competition is a gift from Capitalism to us. 

Having said that, there will be a huge amount of positive externalities coming out of these models, and conversely, there will be some negative externalities. We cannot predict either one of those. 

The only risk the current version of AI can do will be because of bad people using it for malicious goals.

For centuries people have been using even mundane tools maliciously to back their religious, political and other ideologies. 

So understand - AI cannot be compared to giving a nuclear weapon to a sociopath. 

We have so many lessons learned from industrialization, wars, economics etc., which we can use to define some common sense rules and boundaries for AI. I will write more about this soon.

Both models write better English phrases than I do. But yet, this blog is a place for Max and I. I will never use these models to write a blog post. It will be in my own words until my last breath. 

On Honesty As An Attitude - Orwell, Camus and truth

These two men went through so much struggle to show reality to "uninterested" humans. 

I am not going to use the word "hero"; Camus and Orwell are few men who helped me to keep my fire alive and keep breathing. I owe them this much. 

Think of it this way - without them, there is a very good possibility Max and I couldn't have ever met. And if they hadn't fought the ideological battle during their times, I cannot even think about helping animals since there would have been so much human suffering including mine. 

The fire they light is making us help animals and god knows what else that we are not even aware of yet?

Camus and Orwell never met in person nor communicated but yet they were best friends.  

My admiration for both of these eminent writers developed in isolation of one another — but I have always unconsciously identified them as the same sort of writer, and indeed, the same sort of person. There are various superficial similarities: the TB diagnosis that prevented both of them from joining the armed forces, the foreign birth, the rampant womanising, the shared hatred of fascism and suspicion of communism. Much more importantly, they seemed to share the same outlook. Both of these writers took the view that truthfulness was more important than ideological allegiance and metaphysics, that the facts should be derived from the real world, rather than the world of ideas. They were similar stylistically too: both wrote candidly, clearly and prolifically. 

Camus seemed to have shared my view. He said as much in a letter to his mistress, Maria Casarès, on the day of Orwell’s death in 1950.

Some bad news: George Orwell is dead. You don’t know him. A very talented English writer, with exactly the same experience as me (although ten years older) and exactly the same ideas. He fought tuberculosis for years. He was one of the very few men with whom I shared something.

For Camus to say that another writer had “exactly the same ideas”, and was “one of the very few men with whom I shared something” was no small thing. 

No correspondence between the two authors seems to exist. In fact, when I searched for personal links between them there was little to go on. But although my hunt for biographical evidence of a relationship was fruitless, the time I have since spent reading and comparing their work yields some rather more intriguing connections. 

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Both Camus and Orwell are rightly credited with being “antitotalitarian” writers. And yet their reasons for being so are not wholly political. They were antitotalitarian not just because they opposed totalitarian regimes, but because they both understood that the totalitarian mindset requires you accept that truth comes from ideology. If the ideas say something is true, it becomes true, and is true. For Fascists and Communists, ideology is not merely a set of values or beliefs, but a cohesive explanation of the past, present and future of mankind. This is what Camus referred to in The Rebel as the desire “to make the earth a kingdom where man is God”. Orwell and Camus both understood the dangers of such thinking, and sought to repudiate it in their work.

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Orwell – ever the protestant humanist – placed a great deal of faith in the idea of the sceptical conscience. In the world of the novel, “staying sane” meant remaining critical, even if only in secret. It isn’t Winston’s ability to say two and two make four that allows him to rebel: it’s because despite the universally believed falsehoods purveyed by the state, Winston continues to think diligently and honestly. 

For both of these writers, the truth was less a metaphysical question than an attitude. Their novels revolve around the quotidian, everyday experience of the world, in things rather than in ideas. They were both much more concerned with the facts that could be taken from experience than those that could be thought up through ideology. This was the attitude that sustained them throughout their intellectual lives, and united them as figures. And it’s for this reason that I like to think of them as friends, although their paths never crossed.