Ed Lake

Money is the name for the counters in a game that we all have to play. The game is very serious, because it is how we organise the production and consumption of goods, some of which we need in order to live. The rules of the game have a vaguely inevitable appearance, but this owes largely to their familiarity.

It’s fun to imagine new rules that might change the quality of play. What if the counters were designed to disappear over time, so that it was impossible to stockpile them? What if you introduced different kinds of counters for different kinds of goods? From time to time people do try to introduce alternative forms of money with these and other interesting properties. It’s am...

For all the talk of “endless forms most beautiful”, life on Earth seems to reuse a lot of its ideas. There are only so many ways to make a wing or to detect gases or photons or whatever. The essential vital processes are the same across the evolutionary map (survive, get energy, reproduce) and though each of those can be accomplished in a variety of ways depending on your starting point, most of the basic options could be adequately presented in a series of multiple-choice menus:

Are you under the sea? Y/N

If Y, are you sessile or mobile?

If mobile, are you able to control where you go? Y/N

If Y, you will probably need something to flap and wriggle. Have you co...

It seems indisputable that democracies would make better decisions if the electorate was “better” in some global sense (better informed? Better calibrated?). One is reminded of Edward O Wilson’s joke about communism: “Nice theory; wrong species.” Of course a democracy of cognitive superbeings would outperform a democracy of mere humans. But this is not the interesting thing about democracy: its great advantage is not that it reliably identifies the best solutions to the problems it faces, but that it tends to avoid calamities – famines and revolutions and the like. So rather than lamenting the fallibility of electorates, one might ask how much weaker they could become without eroding the ...

Are we counting meditation as prayer? I do that, or try to, and my motives are pretty purely instrumental: I want to calm down a bit and get a grip on myself. I can imagine that my “practice”, if I might so dignify it, would be more effective if it wasn’t pursued in such a mercenary spirit: I wouldn’t be so distracted by questions about whether it was working. But even so, it does seem to do more or less what was advertised. On days when I meditate, I think I grind my teeth less.

As a habitual abuser of weaselly qualifiers of the sort that Professor Millgram recommends, I am disposed to find the view laid out here quite sympathetic. But it’s also interesting (to me) how dependent we find as great a depictor of human thought as the later Henry James to be on a wide range of havering qualifications. Here’s the first paragraph of The Ambassadors, with moments of what I think can properly be called “doublethink” in bold:

Strether’s first question, when he reached the hotel, was about his friend; yet on his learning that Waymarsh was apparently not to arrive till evening he was not wholly disconcerted. A tel...

Whenever I want to confront the inadequacy of narrative to capture the multifariousness of even my own limited understanding of life, I try to write a diary entry. I don’t know how any honest person can do it. It’s like using a coat hanger as a sieve. But I do think stories can be quite a good medium for simple causal generalisations. They’re like stylised instruction manuals for situations, aren’t they? Pull Tab A. Flip ignition switch. Stand back. To the extent that the generalisation is reliable and the story presents it clearly, it might indeed facilitate understanding of (or at least successful engagement with) the world. In the main, though, I think story is probably more like Pinke...

Presented with a question like this, it’s easy to yield to the seduction of Whig history and predict that the world will have got closer to the *correct* way of understanding sex and gender – ie, what I already think. The related but opposite temptation, affecting those with a tragic picture of sexual relations, is to say that all the fundamental problems will remain. I feel each of those temptations at different times, but today I shall do my best to give into both at once. The heart of the matter is, of course, the nature/nurture debate. Male and female humans differ from one another in certain systematic ways (I fear that the wordcount will prevent me from discussing people who are nei...

Interesting question! At the legal level, in the West, a child usually doesn’t have any particular obligations to a parent, although the parental care that the child receives may be implicitly contingent on some basic level of respect or obedience. And it is of course possible to inherit certain financial debts, which might be viewed as an obligation to one’s parents. But for the most part the law is silent - which means we are in the mistier realm of ethics. The silence of the law perhaps implies the difficulty of the question. The parent-child relationship certainly feels rather freighted with obligation, on both sides. What more momentous responsibility can there be than the care of a ...

Humanity doesn’t come in degrees. Membership of the human species is sufficient to qualify for 100-percent humanity. And within that large family, there are lots of different ways to be, by nature or nurture, choice or circumstance. We don’t all share the same opportunities or tastes. We don’t even share the same emotional capacities. Different 100-percent humans will experience romantic love (or its absence) in different ways. It’s true that lots of people regard romatic love as being among the most important things in life, but this is frankly a matter of taste. Of course, many more things are questions of taste than we commonly acknowledge.

There remains, however, the problem of...