lucky combo

Our neighbour's pyracantha, withour red leaved vine scrambling through it, makes a glorious combination in the morning sunlight.

Glasgow headgear

Headgear in Glasgow spotted this evening:

looking very formal

not looking quite so happy

view from a Scottish train window

On my way up to Glasgow for a project meeting this afternoon, I had a lovely view of a Scottish sunset from the train window.

small veg

Our vegetable "harvest": 3 miniature carrots, a couple of small onions, and a handful of green beans.  I blame the summer drought/heat.

a bit pathetic

sequestering carbon, several books at a time CLIX

The latest (small!) batch:

Open questions about time and self-reference in living systems

While I was in Canada, our latest paper, by a bunch of different people with ideas on time, life, and self reference, was published.  This work is an output from the workshop we had in Newfoundland three years ago. (Yes, that's how long it took to herd cats, plan the paper, write the paper, revise the paper, submit the paper, revise the paper, see the paper in "print".)

Samson Abramsky, Wolfgang Banzhaf, Leo S. D. Caves, Michael Levin, Penousal Machado, Charles Ofria, Susan Stepney, Roger White.  Open Questions about Time and Self-reference in Living Systems.  Royal Society Open Science 13(8):261059, 2026. doi:10.1098/rsos.261059

Living systems exhibit a range of fundamental characteristics: they are active, self-referential, self-modifying systems. This paper explores how these characteristics create challenges for conventional scientific approaches and why they require new theoretical and formal frameworks. We introduce a distinction between ‘natural time’, the continuing present of physical processes, and ’representational time’, with its framework of past, present and future that emerges with life itself. Representational time enables memory, learning and prediction, functions of living systems essential for their survival. Through examples from evolution, embryogenesis and metamorphosis, we show how living systems navigate the apparent contradictions arising from self-reference as natural time unwinds self-referential loops into developmental spirals. Conventional mathematical and computational formalisms struggle to model self-referential and self-modifying systems without running into paradox. We identify promising new directions for modelling self-referential systems, including domain theory, coalgebra, genetic programming (GP) and self-modifying algorithms. There are broad implications for biology, cognitive science and social sciences, because self-reference and self-modification are not problems to be avoided but core features of living systems that must be modelled to understand life's open-ended creativity.

I say an output.  That's because an editor from a scientific book publisher saw the preprint on arXiv, and contacted one of us, asking if we wanted to prepare a book on the topic.  We discussed it, and decided that sounded fine.  So we now have a book contract (signed before the paper was even accepted!), and are herding cats again, to get individual chapters from the original authors (and wider).  My own chapter is half written.

One of the topics we mention in the paper is on systems of rules that can change their own rules.  Peter Suber invented the game Nomic, where you start from a set of rules on how to vote and change rules; a move in the game is to propose and vote on a change to the rules through a process that conforms to the rules, at least initially.  This is a model of a legal system where rules can be changed by members of the system, potentially ending up in a situation that undermines the original democratic intent: democratically overthrowing democracy.  One application might be to think about consequences for AI alignment: if the AI is explicitly allowed to change its rules, or discovers loopholes that allow it (think of Asimov's robot stories!), then any intial alignment, no matter how carefully defined, may end up being subverted.  The unintended consequences of self-modification!

view from a Sherbrooke hotel window

What is it with the covert bus stops for long distance buses in Canada?  This time, I needed to find the bus to Sherbrooke.  The ticket told me the address of the bus stop: 800, de la Gauchetière Ouest.  800 is the number of the building, which takes up an entire block.  I wandered back and forth a bit, then eventually saw a guy wearing a jacket with the bus logo.  He pointed me to where the bus would arrive.

It arrived, a mass of people piled on, and I settled myself down for the two and a half hour trip.  We stopped a coule of times to pick people up, basically in the middle of nowhere.  How did they find their stops?  

Eventually we arrived in Sherbrooke.  Google told me it was a 12 minute walk to the hotel, "mostly flat".  It should know better. Here's its own street view.

Google streetview: flat, maybe; level, less so

I should have looked in more detail...

Anyway, I hauled my wheely suitcase up the hill, pausing only once for a short rest, and got to the hotel.  

view from my hotel window. of a military museum undergoing refurbishment

The hotel has rather peculiar decor.

A seat in the reception area: note the black floor and ceiling.  The light slowly changes colour...

As well as a dark reception, the lift interior is black, with such dim lighting that I couldn't read the instructions to scan my room card.  The room is also decorated in black: ceiling, walls, carpet.  And two of the lights aren't working...

It was still afternoon so I decided to go for a walk, to get some light.  I found a lovely path along a lake and river.

I walked along it for a while, then walked back.  The path had lots of walkers, joggers and cyclists, as well as a group of black leather-clad elderly gentemen zooming along on mobility scooters.

On the way back I found a great artisnal food hall. I bought a third of a fresh baguette, some wonderful soft cheese, and a maple syrup tart, for a picnic supper back in my goth-themed hotel room.

Off to meet meet my collegue at the University tomorrow!