Reality "in here" vs reality "out there"

"Many people think that there must be something more to the fabric of reality than what science can explain," said The Economist in a recent review of a book about the philosopher Henri Bergson, who once said of Einstein's theory of relativity that "it is not science, it is a metaphysics grafted upon science."

Bergson obviously understood nothing about relativity, and The Economist is often surprisingly prone to magical thinking for a paper devoted to the dismal science, but the comment happened to coincide with this interesting post by "A Motley Fool" on Substack and the above video by Grim Jim Desborough, both dealing with the question of the mystical vs the material.

It isn't a contest, and only non-scientists imagine that faith in science puts the two in conflict. (A point that Grim makes in his video.) I am a rationalist. I believe that the universe is simply a set of processes, "mechanical" if you like. But I also believe that we live in a mental model of the universe, and our mental model includes mystical phenomena. Those things are not real outside the world of ideas, as Alan Moore puts it, but in that that world they matter.

In other words, both gravity and love are real and important, but they are not real and important in the same way. To think so, and to try to insist that mystical ideas are also important to the universe -- that they're part of the fabric of reality, as The Economist insists -- is a category error. We're apes, and apes with clever little brains that imagine all sorts of art and feelings, but the universe doesn't give a stuff about that -- unless you can believe in an immanent deity that thinks like an ape. Einstein would have had no need to refute Andrew Marvell's statement of time

But at my back I always hear
Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.

because, unlike Bergson, Marvell wasn't Dunning-Kruger (or even Donneing-Kruger) in thinking he was saying something fundamental about the objective nature of time.

It's the 21st century. We should have got past human exceptionalism by now, and also past the clomping kind of philosophy that still thinks science and intuition are describing the same kind of reality. For us they exist as a superposition, but that only matters on this tiny blip of matter in this tiny sliver of time to this one primate species. When humans are gone, the universe will still have red shift and black holes and gravitational waves but the notions of Bergson will be gone forever in the abyss of time.

Imagine all the people

By the time you read this we've had the US presidential election, the bellwether of the direction the West is taking -- whether towards liberal & humanist values or a retreat into conspiracy theories, insular nationalism, and turkeys voting for Christmas. Not that the losing side turned out to exactly be paragons of incorruptible and dutiful good governance. One day maybe we'll appoint somebody who's fit to hold the office. (Other countries are doing better, but the overall liberty trend is downwards.)

You may have wondered what would happen if all the world's borders were open -- that is, the EU model of freedom of movement applied globally. According to one analysis it would make the planet nearly $80 trillion richer. That's ten thousand dollars a head if distributed evenly, so not to be sneezed at. Read about it in The Economist here (you can register to get free access to the article, or look at the archive.ph snapshot without the graphs here).

An additional benefit is we could stop spending money on war. The total cost of Putin's invasion of Ukraine to date, including reconstruction of Ukraine's damaged infrastructure, is now more than four times the entire amount spent on the Apollo programme after adjusting for inflation -- and before factoring in the spin-off tech benefits of the Moon landings. It's often said we shouldn't waste money on AI, or particle research, or space exploration, or whatever, until we've sorted out problems here on Earth. Well, start with national boundaries and then we can go to Mars and do the other things and still have trillions of dollars left to save the whale.

It happens I think the cultural benefits of full freedom of movement would be even greater than the financial ones. Intolerance thrives when people live in a racial and social bubble. The more you meet people from other walks of life the more you appreciate that our real identity is human, not national or religious or ethnic. And people from different societies bring different ways of looking at a problem. There are so many win-wins from international cooperation.

A criticism is that having open borders would be radically disruptive. So it would. But look at the inequality we have now, the division, the frothing hatred. When things build up to that kind of pressure you get wars and revolutions in which people are killed in the thousands or millions just for who they are. With the growing climate crisis the situation will only get worse. Isn't it worth looking for a soft revolution in how we live that could avoid all the atrocity and that after a decade or two of upheaval would yield a richer world for all?

It won't happen, of course. More likely the 21st century will go along the same lines as the 20th only with even more monstrous tech to fuel it all. There are plenty of dark clouds and few silver linings right at the moment. But don't let future generations say we never even tried. We only get a good future if we strive to bring it about. Here's Konstantin Kisin on that very point:

Onto more frivolous matters (which, the gods know, we're all going to need as a safety valve over the next few years) this is the 40th anniversary of the Dragon Warriors RPG. We didn't get The Cursed King in 2024 nor the English edition of Blood Sword 5e, but there's an online Dragon Warriors convention coming up in just over a week (sign up quick!) and lots of really amazing semi-pro content from Red Ruin Publishing on DriveThruRPG, most of it at pay-what-you-like prices. And there's still a hope of seeing Cursed King and Brymstone in 2025, or anyway before Donald Trump leaves office. If he ever does.

I'll try to make up for the lack of any actual pro publications with some scenarios and reminiscences here on the blog. Following a pre-Christmas chat with business consultant and gamer Tom Burton I keep wondering whether the best thing for DW would be to make the original core rulebooks available under Creative Commons. Here is Book One, which I just discovered is available as a free download. I can't truly sanction this sort of thing, as it's entirely unauthorized by the authors and publishers, but if you've never tried a Dragon Warriors game, now's your chance. Happy New Year!

Silver linings

Eight years ago almost to the day, a referendum in the United Kingdom voted 52/48 to leave the European Union. Regular readers cannot fail to have noticed that I was one of the 48% (nowadays more like 63%). I didn't imagine I could know in advance whether the eventual outcome would be good or bad, but I do know that extreme perturbations to complex systems (like modern societies, for example) can have highly unpredictable results. Unless the current state of such a system is catastrophically bad to the point of imminent failure, it never makes sense to make revolutionary changes rather than gradual ones. There were indeed British communities where people figured their situation literally couldn't get any worse. I couldn't even start to get my head around such thinking until I watched this, given that median wealth in the UK is twenty times the median wealth globally, though I tried to keep my own preferences (some would call them prejudices) out of the way enough to ensure that Can You Brexit was an even-handed look at the pros and cons.

I strive for an open mind on all issues, so it's only right to admit now that it's not all been bad news since the referendum. Admittedly the UK is considerably poorer as a result of leaving the EU's single market -- unnecessarily so, too, as the Norway model was an oft-touted Brexit plan among the more moderate of the Leave campaigners. But there are upsides. Immigration into the UK has increased since the Brexit vote and, contrary to the beliefs of the ship-'em-to-Rwanda mob, those immigrants are integrating well into British life and bring valuable skills, energy and culture. New citizens are also now coming from a wider diversity of backgrounds rather than just Europe. So that is good news, albeit the opposite of what most of the people voting Leave actually wanted.

By the 2010s the UK had long been in need of a way to break the old political mold. The main parties stood for fossilized versions of the socioeconomic classes of a century ago, not today's class structure, but Britain's first-past-the-post voting system prevented any reconfiguration of the parties to fit modern UK society. The Brexit vote had the effect of radically shaking up what the main parties stand for. The electorate would have done better to switch to an instant-runoff voting system when they had the chance in 2011, but that became another of history's missed opportunities. (See also the US Presidential election of 2000.)

Also, Britain seems to be escaping the trend towards nationalist populism (indeed, let's just call it fascism) that's surging across Europe. The British Isles have always been stony ground for fascists, and the Britain First party (whose leader has publicly supported lynch mobs) are faring no better among voters than Oswald Mosley's lot used to. Meanwhile, although the slightly less toxic Reform Party has been climbing a bit in the polls, that rise is largely matched by the decline in the Conservative Party's fortunes. Between them, Britain First and Reform are effectively Britain's far-right Tea Party/MAGA movement, liable to get noisily vexed about any measure that's even halfway sensible, informed, decent or rational. The greatest shame about their electoral alliance is that it's sullying the good Whig name of Reform, but eventually their supporters will get absorbed back into the Tories where their reactionary stridency will be dulled to a general grumble of dissatisfied resentment at the modern world. The example of Poland shows what harm can be done to the mechanism of state once you let people like the PiS stick their finger on the scales, but that threat seems far greater in many EU countries (and across the Atlantic, sadly) than in the UK.

Europe needs to worry about defence, of course, and while I preferred the days when Churchill could sell the concept of the Declaration of Union, post-Brexit Britain at least didn't vacillate in supporting Ukraine against Putin's invasion. It might make more sense to have a truly united European front, especially if Ukraine falls and Putin starts hoovering up the former Soviet states, and given that the next US President (and maybe the next French government) might be more pro-Putin than pro-NATO, but there's little sign that the EU as a whole is more alert to that threat than Britain is.

In another eight years, will I say that the Leave vote was a good idea? Steady on there. I'd still prefer my Enlightenment dream, but that might be one to put alongside the Mars colonies and controlled fusion for everybody and the von Neumann probes equipped with strong AI. At this point I'll settle for a world with fewer despots and more equality, and if getting that means distracting populists with some shiny trinkets like Brexit then so it goes.

Buy Can You Brexit on Amazon

Play the free version

Cambridge Econometrics analysis of the effects of Brexit (PDF)

Post Factum analysis of the pros and cons of Brexit as of summer 2024

In the thick of battle

If you're interested in the statistics of medieval warfare but don't want to go so far as to actually join the SCA, here's an in-depth CSI-style analysis of the Battle of Towton in 1461.

Some highlights:

"[He] suffered eight wounds to his head that day. The precise order can be worked out from the direction of fractures on his skull: when bone breaks, the cracks veer towards existing areas of weakness. The first five blows were delivered by a bladed weapon to the left-hand side of his head, presumably by a right-handed opponent standing in front of him. None is likely to have been lethal."

"In a letter sent nine days after the battle George Neville, the then chancellor of England, wrote that 28,000 men died that day, a figure in accord with a letter sent by Edward IV to his mother. England’s total population at the time is thought not to have exceeded 3 million people. George Goodwin, who has written a book on Towton to coincide with the battle’s 550th anniversary in 2011, reckons as many as 75,000 men, perhaps 10% of the country’s fighting-age population, took the field that day."

"The men whose skeletons were unearthed at Towton were a diverse lot. Their ages at time of death ranged widely. [...] The youngest occupants of the mass grave were around 17 years old; the oldest was around 50. Their stature varies greatly, too. The men’s height ranges from 1.5-1.8 metres (just under five feet to just under six feet), with the older men, almost certainly experienced soldiers, being the tallest. As a group the Towton men are a reminder that images of the medieval male as a homunculus with rotten teeth are well wide of the mark. The average medieval man stood 1.71 metres tall—just four centimetres shorter than a modern Englishman. It is only in the Victorian era that people started to get very stunted. [The Towton soldiers'] health was generally good. Dietary isotopes from their knee-bones show that they ate healthily. Sugar was not widely available at that time, so their teeth were strong, too."

"Arrows were not the only things flying through the air that day. Some of the first bullets were, too. The Towton battlefield has yielded up the earliest lead-composite shot found in England. [Archaeologists] think [they] may have found a fragment of a handgun, which was small enough to be carried around and probably set down on a trestle table or small carriage to be fired."

"The stress of [close quarters] fighting was immense: a few of the Towton skeletons had been clenching their teeth together so tightly that bits of them splintered off."