Free Will (excluding taxes and postage)

I just came across this paper on free will and consciousness by Stuart Kauffman. I think it’s nonsense, but I can’t be bothered to raise a counterargument; it would just take too long. There are so many linguistic slippages to contend with in physics and life’s too short. But I’m posting it because I know some of you will be interested and may wish to take the matter up.

Basically Kauffman looks to a handy loophole, which is claimed to lie between classical and quantum physics, that is neither “lawful” nor random, and he thinks he can take advantage of this to permit the free will and conscious self-determination he so desperately wants. If you ask me, this desperation is easily seen in the following quotes (the italics are mine):

 ”If mind does not act on matter, is mind a mere epiphenomenon?”

“The response to this apparent impasse is a retreat to epiphenomenonalism: Mind does nothing, in fact, it does not act on brain, it is an epiphenomena (sic) of brain. It is fair to say that no one likes this view“

Oh, well, it’s the duty of every scientist to find some loopholes that might plausibly help us avoid finding out something we simply don’t like very much. I can see that. It works for Intelligent Design proponents.

Why “mere”? It doesn’t bother me in the slightest if I’m an epiphenomenon. I don’t feel “mere”; I’m proud of what I am. Maybe a hurricane feels it is making a conscious decision to make landfall over southern Florida, too. So what? I cannot possibly know my future and nor can anyone else (classical theory is enough for that; we don’t need to invoke QM), so I look forward to finding out what is actually going to happen to me. It’s a consequence of my biology that I feel like I’m choosing it, and that I’m somehow making things happen, and if that’s how it feels to me then what do I care if it’s an illusion at the level of physics? I happen to live in a moderately successful social organization, which therefore has evolved a system of belief in culpability and justice; if it hadn’t then I wouldn’t be here, because society would have collapsed. As a consequence, I’m an organism that interprets what happens to me and others as something that was within our control. Sometimes I even have to hold people responsible for “their” actions, because that’s how this society thrives (I don’t have to choose to do it, it’s just the way my thoughts turn out). At the level of description in which “I” live, it makes sense to talk about responsibility, choices and morals. So what if that wouldn’t make sense to an atom? I’m not an atom. I really don’t mind being a lawful consequence of my past and my environment. It doesn’t bother me in the slightest. How else can I even justify my so-called choices? “I did it because…” I don’t feel a need to seek out quantum loopholes that could just plausibly allow the way that the world seems to be, actually to be “true.”

But if this sort of thing bothers you and you’re desperate to escape the feeling that you’re trapped by causality, then this is a paper you should read.

Morality and the prefrontal cortex

Phew! I should have had the good sense to write up yesterday’s post as an essay for Machines Like Us, because there it could have stimulated unmoderated debate, whereas on my own blog I’m always the one holding the talking stick. I’ll see if Norm can add this post to yesterday’s, which he already put on his site, and then if you have other comments I’d encourage you to post them there.

As it is, thank you all for the excellent thoughts. I’ve decided to highlight some of them in this separate post, because not everyone reads comments and I’d hate for my own first thoughts to seem like the end of the matter. I don’t know the answers. That’s why I put forward my own working hypothesis, to be debated.

Anyway, here are just a few of the things people have said that I’d like to come back on. If you’re not in a hurry, you should read their comments on yesterday’s post, partly because they’re interesting and partly to be sure I haven’t taken their words out of context.

Vegard: I think that the problem is not that the moral philosophy not tied to religion is non-existent, I think the problem is that most people don’t _know_ that it exists, where to find it, that it is not usually taught in schools, etc

Yes, I suppose it may be true that most moral philosophy over the past three hundred years (and of course much that occurred among the ancient Greeks) was done in a secular context. But it remains true that the biggest objection to atheism that I’ve heard from the Christian man-in-the-street is the implicit or explicit assumption that atheists have no morals, or that our morals are vague and suspect, whereas the morals they’ve been given by their religion are absolute and self-evidently correct. I think more people would be willing to let go of a belief in the supernatural if they weren’t so scared of being thought amoral, or if they had a clearer idea of a morality that isn’t based on ancient teachings and threats of damnation. Non-believers have gained a voice in the past few years but I don’t think we’re yet providing replacements for all of the functions of supernatural religions.

David: Reading this blog entry, it was almost like reading an entry of a buddhist!

This is an interesting point, because Buddhism is to some extent a bottom-up, self-organising philosophy/religion that got going long before the Internet. Modern secularism seems to have similar emergent qualities and I’d expect its consequences in terms of morals, ethics and the like to be very much in the Open Source, collective mould. Speaking as one of many who think that supernatural explanations are counterproductive and often the cause of serious distress, I think we need some solid foundations – some good alternatives to the edifices we wish to replace. But at the same time we have to watch out that we don’t replace one top-down dogma with another. It’s a difficult path to tread – I was worried that my own suggestions for a basic moral principle would sound like preaching, which was not my intention. But the Internet, like Buddhism, gives us some good models for how to come to a consensus without leaders; an organisation with no organisers.

Terren: I do have a problem with one aspect of your point of view. You wonder whether the relative guilt of the drunk driver who kills, versus the one who doesn’t isn’t equal. You make a similarly counter-intuitive comparison involving the abused-murderer and the non-turn-signal-using driver. In both of these cases you dismiss the outcome of the act, focusing only on the intention of the act.  … I think that would be okay if we could know what our true intent was in each moment. But most of the time we act and then justify our actions later in terms of a model of ourselves, grounded in some context, and that model may or may not fit with reality. Addicts are good examples where the model doesn’t fit.

This is a tough one because it bears on free will and responsibility for our own actions. My own position on free will is that there is no such thing in an absolute sense, but that we must believe there is and act accordingly, simply on the basis that any society that doesn’t will soon decay and dissolve. Of course I shouldn’t say we “must”, because I’ve just said we don’t have any choice! Either our society will find a happy medium between believing people to be culpable and forgiving them for doing what anyone would inevitably do under the exact same circumstances, or it won’t. If it does, we’ll prosper and if it doesn’t we’ll die out.

I think there are two distinct levels of description: at the physical level there is no such thing as free will – we’re all just atoms bumping into each other according to immutable laws. But at the level of description in which we consider ourselves, personally, as free agents in charge of our destinies, the concept of free choice does make sense and as a consequence we have to accept blame and correction when we “do wrong”. Unfortunately we use the same language for both these semantic levels and often confuse them. Plus we simply don’t HAVE any language for describing non-teleological things. It’s tricky and more than I can make sense of in a few paragraphs.

I’ve been tangling with some of the often quite distressing issues you raise for some time now – when should you hold someone responsible for their actions? I don’t have good answers and I’m not sure there are any. I think in the end it comes down to drawing a personal line (but as you say, recognising that it’s a very fuzzy one). If someone hurts you because they’re suffering from a temporary stress-induced psychosis, should you blame them? What if it’s due to lifelong schizophrenia and they have no clue they’re behaving oddly? What if it’s a serious personality disorder and therefore not at all the way they would wish to be, yet unfortunately is a part of their whole makeup? What if it’s nothing that a doctor would consider pathological at all, it’s just that they grew up as an unpleasant person? What if it’s because they’re under the long-term influence of drugs that they took to deal with some undeserved pain in their lives? What if it’s just the beer talking? At the level of physics we can say that ALL of these people are just acting as they inevitably would – as you yourself would if you’d been born with their genes, had their upbringing and found yourself in their circumstances. But at the level of description where we use the term “free will” we have to come to a decision. I really don’t know the answer, and believe me I’ve had to agonise over it! All I know is that societies which find the right balance will prosper when those that don’t won’t. I hope we’re in one of those that do. Debate is one way to encourage the emergence of the right balance, I think; dogma is less likely to succeed.

But I still think the focus should be on intention (and awareness). Focusing on the outcome seems to me to be arbitrary. All of us do minor “bad” things all the time, as you point out, and mostly we get away with it. But some percentage of us will be unlucky. I can’t see any logic that justifies punishing the unlucky ones and not the ones who got away with it. Clearly it would be stupid to punish everyone who fails to indicate before changing lanes with a stiff prison sentence as if they’d killed someone. But the person who did kill someone did nothing that was more wrong – he just failed to indicate too. So it seems to me that the mistake lies in the harsh punishment, not the soft one. I offer it as a warning for us not to judge others too harshly. When it comes down to it, none of us can really help what we do, we just have to believe it sometimes in order to function.

Overall, the best I can come up with (and I’m not happy with it because it implies some vestige of “real” free will) is that we should judge people on the basis of how EASILY they could have avoided calamity. By the time a government declares war, they almost always find that they had little choice. But a wise and diligent government would have seen it coming and tried not to go down that road. That’s their job and we should blame them for not acting at that early point (even whilst recognising that they had no choice even then!) I think it makes some kind of tortured sense to hold people to account for how easily (whatever that means) they could have altered the course of history. That’s why I blame the person who failed to indicate (an easy thing to correct, with an easily foreseeable possibility of severe consequences) more than the murderer (who we presume could have done little to stop the cancerous progress of this relationship earlier, and eventually found herself in a position where she felt she had little choice but to do something terrible). But it’s a pragmatic solution and I welcome new insights.

Vegard: Charles Fried argued that it is wrong to kill and lie because we suppress another person’s ability to make their own choices and live their own lives. He also writes that “our first moral duty is to do right and avoid wrong”

I haven’t looked it up yet, but isn’t that begging the question? Of course we have a moral duty to do right – it’s the definition of “moral duty”. But what does “right” mean? That which is moral? It seems a bit circular. I’m suggesting that the right thing to do is the thing that makes people happy or avoids causing them distress. It’s then our moral duty to do that. But I’m sure Fried has a better argument than it seems and I should look. As for it being wrong to “suppress another person’s ability…”, yes, that’s the argument for freedom. I always assumed that happiness implies freedom – denying someone’s right to make choices makes them unhappy. So maybe optimising happiness is enough of a guideline. But maybe freedom needs a specific emphasis? I was just trying to get to a minimalist statement of best intent, and I’d hate to have to start adding additional clauses. It was the fact that we don’t KNOW how to make people happy that I liked about my suggestion: it forces us to think about each case on an individual basis, instead of blindly following rules. However, your next point (below) is a biggie!

Vegard: The theoretical problem with utilitarianism is that it allows for doing bad things because they have the best outcome overall — the McClosky example [1], simplified: A sheriff has the possibility of framing an innocent man which the public believes to be guilty, in order to prevent a brewing mass riot (which would lead to many more victims than just the one innocent man).

I have to admit that this was the thought going through my head that made me write the post in the first place. I won’t go into details but I’ve had painful personal experience of facing such a quandary. I tried so hard to do what was right – what would make people happiest and minimise the distress, but it was a zero-sum problem and I had to choose,  deliberately and knowingly, to hurt someone whichever option I took. And on reflection, three years on, I’m not at all sure that I did do the right thing. I may have caused people I love more distress than I would if I’d made the other choice. But what can we do but look as far into the future as possible and try our best?

Anyway, back to your specific example: It seems like framing the innocent man is self-evidently wrong, because that’s what the example is set up to suggest. But is it? Perhaps it is the right thing to do? I just don’t know. I think in practice the sheriff wouldn’t know either – he wouldn’t be able to judge in advance whether doing a bad thing to this person would actually result in the best outcome. There are too many unknowns. And so on that basis it sounds like a risky (and hence morally shaky) idea to tell lies and ruin one man in the HOPE of saving many.

Taken on a longer timescale, lying and perverting justice like that are almost unquestionably bad things. If everyone did it then society would quickly become lawless, anarchic and the total sum of happiness would decline hugely. The sheriff would be setting a bad precedent and taking a serious risk in assuming that his action stands alone. He should consider the longer-term consequences and perhaps decide that honesty is still the best policy, even though it will result in more distress over the medium term.

I don’t have answers, but that’s kind of my point. Choosing to do something bad for the greater good is not in itself abhorrent – we all tell white lies sometimes, with the best intentions and often the best outcomes. The default, of course, is to do what you’re expected to do – stick to the job description, base it on loyalty, or palm the problem off on a superior. But these are just cop-outs, ONCE you realise that the choice is there. To pretend you hadn’t thought of it is mere cowardice. Once the idea is in your head you’re responsible for coming to a decision.  And I think it is better if you think hard about that decision and stand up to be counted, instead of relying on dogmatic formulae to do your thinking for you. And what better basis than trying to make everyone happier? Isn’t that ”doing what’s right”?

What would a religious person do? They’d pray. They’d wait for a little voice in their head to tell them what to do. I would suggest that this little voice is their subconscious, and I have a great deal of respect for the subconscious – it is so much better at juggling large numbers of uncertain variables than formal logic in the prefrontal lobes can handle. So maybe the little voice would have the best solution. But the problem is that they believe that voice belongs to God. They therefore absolve themselves of responsibility and trust “God’s word” implicitly. They don’t question it to make sure that they aren’t just acting emotionally or irrationally, because it’s “wrong” to question God’s will. Even if the solution doesn’t seem quite right, they’ll account for it by saying that “God moves in myserious ways”; “It’s all part of his plan”. Now, as much as I have respect for the power of subconscious thought, I think it still needs to be checked against reason. And I think we need to recognise our own responsibility. When it comes down to it, the decision is ours, and there are no “right answers” that work for all circumstances so we have to adopt a compromise; weigh everything up; make a call and hope we get it right. If we got it wrong we should learn from that and try to avoid making the same mistake in future. I think that minimising the number of formal “commandments” encourages that, and certainly it pays not to leave unquestioned a voice that can say anything it wants to.

Tim: As [our 2yr-old daughter] has become able to understand more of what we’re saying to her, the key to it all seems to be empathy – if we can get her to empathise with the child whose toy she just took then our job is done. … Of course what we’re really doing is harnessing the work of evolution, since it hard-wired us for empathy when we became social animals. Who are we to argue with the conclusions of evolution?

That’s a nice thought, which I think I’ll finish on, because empathy is the crux of the “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” philosophy credited to Moses and then Jesus, which in turn is consistent with the idea I highlighted, of trying your best to make people happy. All of these in turn are expressions of the rather more Hippie concept, ”All you need is love”. And that ties several quite distinct aspects of our brains together – the ability to empathise and place yourself in someone else’s shoes, the ability to reason and see possible long-term implications of your actions, and our emotions, from which we get compassion, sorrow, guilt and all the personal rewards of making someone else happy.

So I think we all know what we have to do (whether religious or atheist); we just need to stand up and say it – not in the sense of “thou shalt”, but as in “I will”. We need to formulate it in a somewhat less “amygdaloid” and ineffectual way than the Hippies, but not nearly so “prefrontally” codified as Bentham’s attempt at an ethical calculus. We need to devote ALL our brains to trying to make each other happy, and we shouldn’t need a god to tell us to do it.

To Be Happy

A few weeks ago I said that those of us who don’t believe in the supernatural really need to get our act together and discuss our own moral philosophy, given that we don’t have one handed down to us on tablets of stone. We are often charged by “believers” as being immoral or amoral, as if the only alternative to Christian or any other religious doctrine is bestial anarchy. So today I thought I’d air my own moral philosophy for your examination. It’s very simple to state and very hard to implement, and it goes like this:

Each of us should strive to create the most happiness, for the most ‘people’, for the longest time.

That’s it. No detailed list of commandments; no Heaven or Hell as incentives; no advice as to how to go about it, even. But there are several things I need to explain:

First, it’s a variant on something that the philosopher Jeremy Bentham once said, and hence is a form of Utilitarianism. Someone very close to me once described this as “a bleak philosophy”, and maybe she’s right, although at the time she was the innocent victim of my best attempt to stick to it, so it’s not easy to tell. However, just because Bentham and I had a similar idea this doesn’t mean I believe everything Bentham believed. For one thing I don’t think that you can quantify happiness (or pleasure), as he attempted to do, and create definitive rules about it; for another I have absolutely no plans to have myself embalmed and stuck in a glass case.

Perhaps the most important difference from Bentham is that I’ve added “for the longest time” to the end, because without this it is an incitement to Hedonism. He did include this in his “Felicific Calculus” but I think it needs emphasising. In Bentham’s time, global warming, the loss of natural resources to human-induced entropy, and the threat to humanity caused by weapons whose force exceeds our competence, were not recognised issues. But now we can see that we have often given ourselves happiness at the expense of those yet to be born. This is not a good thing. Obviously we can’t account for the consequences of our actions millions of years into the future. Also, our own happiness today is a vital part of future generations’ happiness – if we don’t thrive and prosper then they may not even come to exist, or they may not get a good and enlightened head start in life. Nevertheless, “party, party, party!” is not a good basis for a moral philosophy. In general, there are always more people yet to be born than are existing today, and so future generations must count very highly in our choices.

Notice also that I’ve put “people” in quotes. This is because I don’t know who counts as a person. It’s clearly nonsense to presume that personhood extends evenly thoughout the human species but nowhere beyond. For one thing we don’t even know how to define the human species as it stands today (let alone in the past and future). It seems equally nonsensical to me to go to the other extreme and include all living systems in the category of personhood, for much the same reasons. A bacterium can “experience pain and pleasure”, in the sense that some things that happen to it provide a threat or advantage to its survival, and hence alter its behaviour. But I think few of us would suggest that a bacterium can be happy or unhappy in the sense we mean it for ourselves. To be happy, it seems to me you need to be conscious. Not all living things are conscious. But we don’t know what consciousness is, or which creatures have it. This is why neuroscience, psychology, comparative anatomy, artificial intelligence and artificial life are such important subjects. We need to work this out.

Happiness is also different from pleasure, and pleasure is not always the same as survivability. So why happiness? It seems such a nebulous and selfish beast. But it’s what you want, isn’t it? You want to be happy. You don’t want to be unhappy. I’m the same. I can’t imagine anyone who wants anything different. Some people may say that they want to be unhappy, but in that case the opportunity and right to be miserable is what makes them happy, almost by definition. And happiness is relative. There are millions of poor people, living life on the edge, who nevertheless are happy. There are many rich people, who have all that money can buy, who are desperately unhappy. We should feel as sorry for them as anyone else who is unhappy. We should feel as pleased for the happy poor as we do for the happy rich. Happpiness is what we all want. Wealth, security, comfort and peace are more likely to make us happy, but those aren’t the ultimate goal. Happiness is a strange and ill-defined concept, but it’s overwhelmingly important for the conscious mind. If we aren’t happy then we are suffering, and it seems to me that suffering is self-evidently bad.

But the most important thing about this “most happiness” philosophy is that we simply don’t know how to adhere to it, and almost certainly never will. Even if I knew for sure which organisms can experience happiness, there’s no way I can be confident about which actions will maximise that happiness. You can’t (as Bentham attempted to) measure happiness, and you can’t be certain how any action you take will pan out. Sometimes we do our utmost to make everyone happy and end up making them miserable, because things pan out in a different way than we could have foreseen. But the point is, we should TRY to foresee. It should guide our actions and intentions. And we should be judged according to our intentions and efforts – there’s a big difference between misery caused by malice and misery caused by an honest mistake.

This is where my form of utilitarianism is radically different from, say, the Ten Commandments (it’s far more similar to the “Do as you would be done by” Christian moral principle that I wrote about a few weeks ago). Moral codes like those in the Old Testament and Koran tell people exactly what they should do under specific circumstances. They are definitive. Jews even know for sure when it is “wrong” to turn on a light switch. Sometimes it takes some deep and meaningful discussion to figure out the details but they can rely on clerics to debate stuff like that (and anyway they can usually find a Gentile to switch it on for them). Moral CODES like this are very comforting: you know what you’re supposed to do and you don’t have to think too hard about it. But such codes are also ludicrous. They are absurd. They are often very counterproductive. What we need is not codes but moral PRINCIPLES.

Everyone should know by now how stupid it is to follow the letter of the law and flout its spirit. But detailed laws actually encourage people to act that way. It was a good compromise in the days before education, but now many of us have no such excuse. No codified law can possibly account for every circumstance, and often the letter of the law has the opposite effect to its spirit. The European Union is stuffed full of attempts to codify detailed exceptions to laws that clearly don’t always make sense. And the more exceptions the lawmakers include, the more loopholes and absurdities they actually create.

Sometimes this has only silly consequences. If people really want to adhere to anachronistic rules about eating pork, even after the advent of refrigeration and food hygeine standards, then that’s up to them. But sometimes it’s very, very dangerous. Many young men are killing themselves and innocent bystanders every day because they believe they’re adhering to religious law. Whole wars have been fought because one society’s little rituals don’t agree with someone else’s. Strict adherence to laws, regardless of logic or compassion is what puts the “dog” in “dogma”. It is what gives people excuses to do harm while claiming to do good. It is a dirty, shameful COP-OUT on the part of ordinary people.

The advantage of my approach is that I don’t have a clue how to implement it. I can’t look down a list to find my answers. I don’t have the comfort of pointing at a rule to excuse myself for making a mistake and causing unwarranted grief. I have to think very hard all the time, to work out to the best of my ability what I should do to make the most people happiest, because sometimes that involves deliberately making myself or other people unhappy. It makes it clear to me that every decision I take has consequences, and so, for that matter, do the times when I fail to take a decision. It puts the onus on me to think, instead of acting like an automaton.

But it’s a guide. It’s a goal. It’s something to measure my progress by. And the sheer lack of definitive rules means that I have to be constantly aware that sometimes what seems on first glance to be the right thing to do can actually be the worst thing. It keeps me on my toes and reminds me that the responsibility is all mine and I can’t pass it off onto someone else. I think that’s a good thing. I think that makes me MORE moral than someone who just does what he’s told.

And finally it really screws up some of our cosy little assumptions, and that’s a good thing too. Many jurisdictions, for instance, punish a drunk driver who kills someone by a long prison sentence, but a drunk driver who doesn’t kill someone just gets a fine. How is the latter any less guilty than the former? He just got away with it, that’s all. One caused more unhappiness than the other, but both had the same intentions; the same disregard of other people’s feelings. Surely the punishment should be identical in either case? But what? It’s issues like these that require us all to think a great deal harder about culpability and morality than we currently do, because we’re so used to being able to palm the problem off onto someone else.

Who is more guilty in this example: Person A has been abused by her husband for years, sees him hit their child and later that night stabs him to death as he sleeps. Person B fails to indicate when changing lanes on a freeway, causing an accident that may or may not kill someone. I’d suggest that the second person is more guilty than the first, because the cost to oneself, in terms of happiness, of habitually lifting one finger to indicate is ridiculously trivial compared to the potential cost to others of not doing so, whereas the first person had to go through moral torture to make that decision and carry it out. So how should we punish them? It’s not obvious, is it? Introduce the death penalty for failure to use your indicators?

The more we have to think for ourselves instead of relying on someone else (especially someone living in a completely different kind of society, thousands of years ago), the more we are likely to end up making ourselves and everyone else happy. Even if we’re not so clever as the expert moral philosopher. The important thing is our intention – the intention to make people happy is called kindness and kindness is something we can all understand and recognise. Sometimes we’ll get it horribly wrong despite our best efforts - to my shame I know that I have – but the important thing is to try. Morality is about being responsible, not hiding behind religious dogma.

Between a rock and a hard place

Today I went out, ostensibly to think about my game. I went to Slide Rock in Sedona, where a canyon creek produces a delightful water slide, and bottle-green water cascades through brilliant red rocks as if designed for a film set. Unfortunately I was in a bit of a delicate mood and there were also a lot of women in bikinis, so not much thinking got done and therefore I have nothing to blog about.

I sat opposite a spot where people could jump about 15 feet into the water below, which they did with gay abandon until a pretty, preppy girl of about 18 called Jessica came along. She walked up to the edge, hesitated for a moment and was lost. She chickened out and withdrew in a flurry of nervous giggles. But she had a couple of friends on my bank, who hollered at her for being such a wimp and generally tried to encourage her, thus making it ever harder for her to get up the nerve. She tried again, and chickened out big time. People started to notice, but she bravely kept on trying, and kept on chickening out again. After about ten minutes it had become a major life ordeal for her, and had drawn a crowd of about a hundred of us who were helpfully counting to three and chanting “Jump! Jump!” at the poor girl. Can you imagine? By now it was completely impossible for her and she walked away, with shame and bitter disappointment seething inside her. I really felt for her.

Anyway, up above all this, taking no notice whatsoever, was a small hoodoo, on which sat a precariously balanced cap rock, whose only mistake had been to have a crack in one side, a thousand years ago, which had widened and isolated the rock from its neighboring strata. Once water had seeped into the crack and found its way to the soft sandstone below all was lost for it, too, and it gradually became marooned on a pinnacle of sand, maybe three inches across, from where, unlike Jessica, it will soon plunge into the foaming depths below.

Those foaming depths are formed into a series of potholes, because once such a rock falls into a hollow it can’t float out again, and hence acts as a millstone, grinding and digging itself an ever deeper and more inescapable hole.

The potholes in turn alternated with beaches, because of the way that, once a river starts to churn and bend, the outside of the bend gets the brunt of the water and debris, and so gets carved deeply, while the inside ends up with a slower current and consequent deposition. Once the process has started it can’t stop, until eventually the curve becomes horseshoe-shaped and a flood breaks through the ever thinning wall to produce an oxbow.

And the pebbles on these beaches were graded very neatly, with all the big stones at the top and all the finer ones at the bottom, not because God had carefully arranged them for best effect but because small stones can fall through the gaps between big stones, but big stones can never fall through the gaps between small ones.

And the people who sat on these beaches laughing at Jessica were arranged in clumps that drifted, rose and fell rhythmically during the afternoon, because everyone finds themselves in a tension between the desire to be with other people and the desire not to be seen to stand too close to strangers. As the gaps between them fill they find themselves in a crowd and wander off to find some space, thus becoming a nucleus for further aggregation.

And the level of noise rose and fell too, as each person had to speak louder to be heard over the others, who in turn had to speak even louder, until the crescendo reached the point where someone paused in their conversation to wonder why everyone else was shouting, then others wondered why that person had suddenly stopped talking and stopped too, and then finally those who were a bit slow on the uptake realised that they were the only ones left speaking too loud.

I have absolutely no reason to tell you any of this other than to remark on how amazing it is when positive feedback meets negative feedback and each has a time delay. The result is self-organisation. The result is also very beautiful, and anyone who thinks all this order needs a designer is sadly mistaken: you only have to look at things which have been designed to see that they can’t compare. Only randomness ratcheted by selection and driven by feedback can produce such elegance. Self-organisation blows my mind even more than women in bikinis.

And meanwhile, whilst everybody was kicking the pebbles and wondering about the noise and remarking at the tops of their voices to their neighbours about whether that hoodoo was safe to walk under, Jessica realised that no-one was looking any more, stepped up to the edge and jumped, bless her. I think it probably made her week.

Luckily the rest of us noticed in time to cheer.