Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine

This is an article written by one of Feynman's friend. He talks about the time that he worked with Feynman on the connection machine. Also, he provides a glimpse into the brilliance that is Feynman.

The original article can be found here.

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Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine

by, W. Daniel Hillis
for Physics Today

One day when I was having lunch with Richard Feynman, I mentioned to him that I was planning to start a company to build a parallel computer with a million processors. His reaction was unequivocal, "That is positively the dopiest idea I ever heard." For Richard a crazy idea was an opportunity to either prove it wrong or prove it right. Either way, he was interested. By the end of lunch he had agreed to spend the summer working at the company.

Richard's interest in computing went back to his days at Los Alamos, where he supervised the "computers," that is, the people who operated the mechanical calculators. There he was instrumental in setting up some of the first plug-programmable tabulating machines for physical simulation. His interest in the field was heightened in the late 1970's when his son, Carl, began studying computers at MIT.

I got to know Richard through his son. I was a graduate student at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab and Carl was one of the undergraduates helping me with my thesis project. I was trying to design a computer fast enough to solve common sense reasoning problems. The machine, as we envisioned it, would contain a million tiny computers, all connected by a communications network. We called it a "Connection Machine." Richard, always interested in his son's activities, followed the project closely. He was skeptical about the idea, but whenever we met at a conference or I visited CalTech, we would stay up until the early hours of the morning discussing details of the planned machine. The first time he ever seemed to believe that we were really going to try to build it was the lunchtime meeting.

Richard arrived in Boston the day after the company was incorporated. We had been busy raising the money, finding a place to rent, issuing stock, etc. We set up in an old mansion just outside of the city, and when Richard showed up we were still recovering from the shock of having the first few million dollars in the bank. No one had thought about anything technical for several months. We were arguing about what the name of the company should be when Richard walked in, saluted, and said, "Richard Feynman reporting for duty. OK, boss, what's my assignment?" The assembled group of not-quite-graduated MIT students was astounded.

After a hurried private discussion ("I don't know, you hired him..."), we informed Richard that his assignment would be to advise on the application of parallel processing to scientific problems.

"That sounds like a bunch of baloney," he said. "Give me something real to do."

So we sent him out to buy some office supplies. While he was gone, we decided that the part of the machine that we were most worried about was the router that delivered messages from one processor to another. We were not sure that our design was going to work. When Richard returned from buying pencils, we gave him the assignment of analyzing the router.

The Machine

The router of the Connection Machine was the part of the hardware that allowed the processors to communicate. It was a complicated device; by comparison, the processors themselves were simple. Connecting a separate communication wire between each pair of processors was impractical since a million processors would require $10^{12]$ wires. Instead, we planned to connect the processors in a 20-dimensional hypercube so that each processor would only need to talk to 20 others directly. Because many processors had to communicate simultaneously, many messages would contend for the same wires. The router's job was to find a free path through this 20-dimensional traffic jam or, if it couldn't, to hold onto the message in a buffer until a path became free. Our question to Richard Feynman was whether we had allowed enough buffers for the router to operate efficiently.

During those first few months, Richard began studying the router circuit diagrams as if they were objects of nature. He was willing to listen to explanations of how and why things worked, but fundamentally he preferred to figure out everything himself by simulating the action of each of the circuits with pencil and paper.

In the meantime, the rest of us, happy to have found something to keep Richard occupied, went about the business of ordering the furniture and computers, hiring the first engineers, and arranging for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to pay for the development of the first prototype. Richard did a remarkable job of focusing on his "assignment," stopping only occasionally to help wire the computer room, set up the machine shop, shake hands with the investors, install the telephones, and cheerfully remind us of how crazy we all were. When we finally picked the name of the company, Thinking Machines Corporation, Richard was delighted. "That's good. Now I don't have to explain to people that I work with a bunch of loonies. I can just tell them the name of the company."

The technical side of the project was definitely stretching our capacities. We had decided to simplify things by starting with only 64,000 processors, but even then the amount of work to do was overwhelming. We had to design our own silicon integrated circuits, with processors and a router. We also had to invent packaging and cooling mechanisms, write compilers and assemblers, devise ways of testing processors simultaneously, and so on. Even simple problems like wiring the boards together took on a whole new meaning when working with tens of thousands of processors. In retrospect, if we had had any understanding of how complicated the project was going to be, we never would have started.

'Get These Guys Organized'

I had never managed a large group before and I was clearly in over my head. Richard volunteered to help out. "We've got to get these guys organized," he told me. "Let me tell you how we did it at Los Alamos."

Every great man that I have known has had a certain time and place in their life that they use as a reference point; a time when things worked as they were supposed to and great things were accomplished. For Richard, that time was at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project. Whenever things got "cockeyed," Richard would look back and try to understand how now was different than then. Using this approach, Richard decided we should pick an expert in each area of importance in the machine, such as software or packaging or electronics, to become the "group leader" in this area, analogous to the group leaders at Los Alamos.

Part Two of Feynman's "Let's Get Organized" campaign was that we should begin a regular seminar series of invited speakers who might have interesting things to do with our machine. Richard's idea was that we should concentrate on people with new applications, because they would be less conservative about what kind of computer they would use. For our first seminar he invited John Hopfield, a friend of his from CalTech, to give us a talk on his scheme for building neural networks. In 1983, studying neural networks was about as fashionable as studying ESP, so some people considered John Hopfield a little bit crazy. Richard was certain he would fit right in at Thinking Machines Corporation.

What Hopfield had invented was a way of constructing an [associative memory], a device for remembering patterns. To use an associative memory, one trains it on a series of patterns, such as pictures of the letters of the alphabet. Later, when the memory is shown a new pattern it is able to recall a similar pattern that it has seen in the past. A new picture of the letter "A" will "remind" the memory of another "A" that it has seen previously. Hopfield had figured out how such a memory could be built from devices that were similar to biological neurons.

Not only did Hopfield's method seem to work, but it seemed to work well on the Connection Machine. Feynman figured out the details of how to use one processor to simulate each of Hopfield's neurons, with the strength of the connections represented as numbers in the processors' memory. Because of the parallel nature of Hopfield's algorithm, all of the processors could be used concurrently with 100\% efficiency, so the Connection Machine would be hundreds of times faster than any conventional computer.

An Algorithm For Logarithms

Feynman worked out the program for computing Hopfield's network on the Connection Machine in some detail. The part that he was proudest of was the subroutine for computing logarithms. I mention it here not only because it is a clever algorithm, but also because it is a specific contribution Richard made to the mainstream of computer science. He invented it at Los Alamos.

Consider the problem of finding the logarithm of a fractional number between 1.0 and 2.0 (the algorithm can be generalized without too much difficulty). Feynman observed that any such number can be uniquely represented as a product of numbers of the form $1 + 2^{-k]$, where $k$ is an integer. Testing each of these factors in a binary number representation is simply a matter of a shift and a subtraction. Once the factors are determined, the logarithm can be computed by adding together the precomputed logarithms of the factors. The algorithm fit especially well on the Connection Machine, since the small table of the logarithms of $1 + 2^{-k]$ could be shared by all the processors. The entire computation took less time than division.

Concentrating on the algorithm for a basic arithmetic operation was typical of Richard's approach. He loved the details. In studying the router, he paid attention to the action of each individual gate and in writing a program he insisted on understanding the implementation of every instruction. He distrusted abstractions that could not be directly related to the facts. When several years later I wrote a general interest article on the Connection Machine for [Scientific American], he was disappointed that it left out too many details. He asked, "How is anyone supposed to know that this isn't just a bunch of crap?"

Feynman's insistence on looking at the details helped us discover the potential of the machine for numerical computing and physical simulation. We had convinced ourselves at the time that the Connection Machine would not be efficient at "number-crunching," because the first prototype had no special hardware for vectors or floating point arithmetic. Both of these were "known" to be requirements for number-crunching. Feynman decided to test this assumption on a problem that he was familiar with in detail: quantum chromodynamics.

Quantum chromodynamics is a theory of the internal workings of atomic particles such as protons. Using this theory it is possible, in principle, to compute the values of measurable physical quantities, such as a proton's mass. In practice, such a computation requires so much arithmetic that it could keep the fastest computers in the world busy for years. One way to do this calculation is to use a discrete four-dimensional lattice to model a section of space-time. Finding the solution involves adding up the contributions of all of the possible configurations of certain matrices on the links of the lattice, or at least some large representative sample. (This is essentially a Feynman path integral.) The thing that makes this so difficult is that calculating the contribution of even a single configuration involves multiplying the matrices around every little loop in the lattice, and the number of loops grows as the fourth power of the lattice size. Since all of these multiplications can take place concurrently, there is plenty of opportunity to keep all 64,000 processors busy.

To find out how well this would work in practice, Feynman had to write a computer program for QCD. Since the only computer language Richard was really familiar with was Basic, he made up a parallel version of Basic in which he wrote the program and then simulated it by hand to estimate how fast it would run on the Connection Machine.

He was excited by the results. "Hey Danny, you're not going to believe this, but that machine of yours can actually do something [useful]!" According to Feynman's calculations, the Connection Machine, even without any special hardware for floating point arithmetic, would outperform a machine that CalTech was building for doing QCD calculations. From that point on, Richard pushed us more and more toward looking at numerical applications of the machine.

By the end of that summer of 1983, Richard had completed his analysis of the behavior of the router, and much to our surprise and amusement, he presented his answer in the form of a set of partial differential equations. To a physicist this may seem natural, but to a computer designer, treating a set of boolean circuits as a continuous, differentiable system is a bit strange. Feynman's router equations were in terms of variables representing continuous quantities such as "the average number of 1 bits in a message address." I was much more accustomed to seeing analysis in terms of inductive proof and case analysis than taking the derivative of "the number of 1's" with respect to time. Our discrete analysis said we needed seven buffers per chip; Feynman's equations suggested that we only needed five. We decided to play it safe and ignore Feynman.

The decision to ignore Feynman's analysis was made in September, but by next spring we were up against a wall. The chips that we had designed were slightly too big to manufacture and the only way to solve the problem was to cut the number of buffers per chip back to five. Since Feynman's equations claimed we could do this safely, his unconventional methods of analysis started looking better and better to us. We decided to go ahead and make the chips with the smaller number of buffers.

Fortunately, he was right. When we put together the chips the machine worked. The first program run on the machine in April of 1985 was Conway's game of Life.

Cellular Automata

The game of Life is an example of a class of computations that interested Feynman called [cellular automata]. Like many physicists who had spent their lives going to successively lower and lower levels of atomic detail, Feynman often wondered what was at the bottom. One possible answer was a cellular automaton. The notion is that the "continuum" might, at its lowest levels, be discrete in both space and time, and that the laws of physics might simply be a macro-consequence of the average behavior of tiny cells. Each cell could be a simple automaton that obeys a small set of rules and communicates only with its nearest neighbors, like the lattice calculation for QCD. If the universe in fact worked this way, then it presumably would have testable consequences, such as an upper limit on the density of information per cubic meter of space.

The notion of cellular automata goes back to von Neumann and Ulam, whom Feynman had known at Los Alamos. Richard's recent interest in the subject was motivated by his friends Ed Fredkin and Stephen Wolfram, both of whom were fascinated by cellular automata models of physics. Feynman was always quick to point out to them that he considered their specific models "kooky," but like the Connection Machine, he considered the subject sufficiently crazy to put some energy into.

There are many potential problems with cellular automata as a model of physical space and time; for example, finding a set of rules that obeys special relativity. One of the simplest problems is just making the physics so that things look the same in every direction. The most obvious pattern of cellular automata, such as a fixed three-dimensional grid, have preferred directions along the axes of the grid. Is it possible to implement even Newtonian physics on a fixed lattice of automata?

Feynman had a proposed solution to the anisotropy problem which he attempted (without success) to work out in detail. His notion was that the underlying automata, rather than being connected in a regular lattice like a grid or a pattern of hexagons, might be randomly connected. Waves propagating through this medium would, on the average, propagate at the same rate in every direction.

Cellular automata started getting attention at Thinking Machines when Stephen Wolfram, who was also spending time at the company, suggested that we should use such automata not as a model of physics, but as a practical method of simulating physical systems. Specifically, we could use one processor to simulate each cell and rules that were chosen to model something useful, like fluid dynamics. For two-dimensional problems there was a neat solution to the anisotropy problem since [Frisch, Hasslacher, Pomeau] had shown that a hexagonal lattice with a simple set of rules produced isotropic behavior at the macro scale. Wolfram used this method on the Connection Machine to produce a beautiful movie of a turbulent fluid flow in two dimensions. Watching the movie got all of us, especially Feynman, excited about physical simulation. We all started planning additions to the hardware, such as support of floating point arithmetic that would make it possible for us to perform and display a variety of simulations in real time.

Feynman the Explainer

In the meantime, we were having a lot of trouble explaining to people what we were doing with cellular automata. Eyes tended to glaze over when we started talking about state transition diagrams and finite state machines. Finally Feynman told us to explain it like this,

"We have noticed in nature that the behavior of a fluid depends very little on the nature of the individual particles in that fluid. For example, the flow of sand is very similar to the flow of water or the flow of a pile of ball bearings. We have therefore taken advantage of this fact to invent a type of imaginary particle that is especially simple for us to simulate. This particle is a perfect ball bearing that can move at a single speed in one of six directions. The flow of these particles on a large enough scale is very similar to the flow of natural fluids."

This was a typical Richard Feynman explanation. On the one hand, it infuriated the experts who had worked on the problem because it neglected to even mention all of the clever problems that they had solved. On the other hand, it delighted the listeners since they could walk away from it with a real understanding of the phenomenon and how it was connected to physical reality.

We tried to take advantage of Richard's talent for clarity by getting him to critique the technical presentations that we made in our product introductions. Before the commercial announcement of the Connection Machine CM-1 and all of our future products, Richard would give a sentence-by-sentence critique of the planned presentation. "Don't say `reflected acoustic wave.' Say [echo]." Or, "Forget all that `local minima' stuff. Just say there's a bubble caught in the crystal and you have to shake it out." Nothing made him angrier than making something simple sound complicated.

Getting Richard to give advice like that was sometimes tricky. He pretended not to like working on any problem that was outside his claimed area of expertise. Often, at Thinking Machines when he was asked for advice he would gruffly refuse with "That's not my department." I could never figure out just what his department was, but it did not matter anyway, since he spent most of his time working on those "not-my-department" problems. Sometimes he really would give up, but more often than not he would come back a few days after his refusal and remark, "I've been thinking about what you asked the other day and it seems to me..." This worked best if you were careful not to expect it.

I do not mean to imply that Richard was hesitant to do the "dirty work." In fact, he was always volunteering for it. Many a visitor at Thinking Machines was shocked to see that we had a Nobel Laureate soldering circuit boards or painting walls. But what Richard hated, or at least pretended to hate, was being asked to give advice. So why were people always asking him for it? Because even when Richard didn't understand, he always seemed to understand better than the rest of us. And whatever he understood, he could make others understand as well. Richard made people feel like a child does, when a grown-up first treats him as an adult. He was never afraid of telling the truth, and however foolish your question was, he never made you feel like a fool.

The charming side of Richard helped people forgive him for his uncharming characteristics. For example, in many ways Richard was a sexist. Whenever it came time for his daily bowl of soup he would look around for the nearest "girl" and ask if she would fetch it to him. It did not matter if she was the cook, an engineer, or the president of the company. I once asked a female engineer who had just been a victim of this if it bothered her. "Yes, it really annoys me," she said. "On the other hand, he is the only one who ever explained quantum mechanics to me as if I could understand it." That was the essence of Richard's charm.

A Kind Of Game

Richard worked at the company on and off for the next five years. Floating point hardware was eventually added to the machine, and as the machine and its successors went into commercial production, they were being used more and more for the kind of numerical simulation problems that Richard had pioneered with his QCD program. Richard's interest shifted from the construction of the machine to its applications. As it turned out, building a big computer is a good excuse to talk to people who are working on some of the most exciting problems in science. We started working with physicists, astronomers, geologists, biologists, chemists --- everyone of them trying to solve some problem that it had never been possible to solve before. Figuring out how to do these calculations on a parallel machine requires understanding of the details of the application, which was exactly the kind of thing that Richard loved to do.

For Richard, figuring out these problems was a kind of a game. He always started by asking very basic questions like, "What is the simplest example?" or "How can you tell if the answer is right?" He asked questions until he reduced the problem to some essential puzzle that he thought he would be able to solve. Then he would set to work, scribbling on a pad of paper and staring at the results. While he was in the middle of this kind of puzzle solving he was impossible to interrupt. "Don't bug me. I'm busy," he would say without even looking up. Eventually he would either decide the problem was too hard (in which case he lost interest), or he would find a solution (in which case he spent the next day or two explaining it to anyone who listened). In this way he worked on problems in database searches, geophysical modeling, protein folding, analyzing images, and reading insurance forms.

The last project that I worked on with Richard was in simulated evolution. I had written a program that simulated the evolution of populations of sexually reproducing creatures over hundreds of thousands of generations. The results were surprising in that the fitness of the population made progress in sudden leaps rather than by the expected steady improvement. The fossil record shows some evidence that real biological evolution might also exhibit such "punctuated equilibrium," so Richard and I decided to look more closely at why it happened. He was feeling ill by that time, so I went out and spent the week with him in Pasadena, and we worked out a model of evolution of finite populations based on the Fokker Planck equations. When I got back to Boston I went to the library and discovered a book by Kimura on the subject, and much to my disappointment, all of our "discoveries" were covered in the first few pages. When I called back and told Richard what I had found, he was elated. "Hey, we got it right!" he said. "Not bad for amateurs."

In retrospect I realize that in almost everything that we worked on together, we were both amateurs. In digital physics, neural networks, even parallel computing, we never really knew what we were doing. But the things that we studied were so new that no one else knew exactly what they were doing either. It was amateurs who made the progress.

Telling The Good Stuff You Know

Actually, I doubt that it was "progress" that most interested Richard. He was always searching for patterns, for connections, for a new way of looking at something, but I suspect his motivation was not so much to understand the world as it was to find new ideas to explain. The act of discovery was not complete for him until he had taught it to someone else.

I remember a conversation we had a year or so before his death, walking in the hills above Pasadena. We were exploring an unfamiliar trail and Richard, recovering from a major operation for the cancer, was walking more slowly than usual. He was telling a long and funny story about how he had been reading up on his disease and surprising his doctors by predicting their diagnosis and his chances of survival. I was hearing for the first time how far his cancer had progressed, so the jokes did not seem so funny. He must have noticed my mood, because he suddenly stopped the story and asked, "Hey, what's the matter?"

I hesitated. "I'm sad because you're going to die."

"Yeah," he sighed, "that bugs me sometimes too. But not so much as you think." And after a few more steps, "When you get as old as I am, you start to realize that you've told most of the good stuff you know to other people anyway."

We walked along in silence for a few minutes. Then we came to a place where another trail crossed and Richard stopped to look around at the surroundings. Suddenly a grin lit up his face. "Hey," he said, all trace of sadness forgotten, "I bet I can show you a better way home."

And so he did.

Real Life Simpsons Intro

Continuing the buildup to the opening of The Simpsons Movie....

But what about the other guy???

这篇文章在早报刊登，原是在马来西亚的报章刊登的，赞扬的是李鸿毅事件。然而，本人对于此赞扬有所保留。以下是本人的几个疑问：

（1）请问对方是谁？为什么能够在服役时擅自离开岗位？
（2）为何要李鸿毅屡次检举，最后要将此事件公诛于世，军方才理会呢？
（3）这其中有没有特权的嫌疑？（例如说，白马。）
（4）为什么只公开李鸿毅的姓名？这让人感觉有炒作新闻的嫌疑。
（5）透明度还不够。


=====================================================================================
李显龙的儿子

● 刘益万

　　如果你是新加坡总理李显龙的儿子，祖父又是内阁资政李光耀，你特殊的身份肯定让你身价百倍，若果又对政治有兴趣，那你必然是一颗万人追棒的未来政治明星。

　　李鸿毅是一个很普通的名字，但就因为他的父亲是李显龙，在许多国家这种身份就是“太子爷”，谁会动他一根寒毛？也许年轻的李鸿毅就有这种心态，结果犯了“兵家大忌”。

　　身为国民服役军官的李鸿毅，就因为将写给上级的投诉信广发给军中同僚，结果是“王子犯法，与民同罪”而遭惩戒。当然没有人责怪李显龙“养不教、父之过”，强调法纪的新加坡武装部队也没有因为“总理的儿子”而网开一面。

　　李鸿毅因把他对一名军官缺勤，可是上级主管接获其举报后却未进行处分的投诉信广发给同僚而触犯国防部守则，但至少他有胆识举报不公之事，只不过是做得“过火”而不容于军纪。

　　如果李鸿毅“洁身自爱”，他大可少管闲事，既然上司都不严管下属，他没有理由越俎代庖；何况军队中讲的是纪律，必须依照正常的管道行事，不允许你行差踏错半步。

　　20岁的李鸿毅有一般年轻人具备好打不平的本色，而在许多时候，这种挺身而出及仗义执言的行为，更是强调正义与公正社会所不能或缺，否则整个社会将成了事不关己、己不操心的泠漠境界，最后自是让邪恶肆虐。

　　如果社会变得缺情少义又无爱，凡事一只眼开一只眼闭，社会问题肯定衍生；有话直说自然也会惹人不快，甚至就如李鸿毅那样踩正地雷。当然在民主社会里，我们不愿看到有钱有权就可肆无忌惮，但如果没有人揭发不公，不满之声又没法抒发，那么社会鸿沟岂非越来越大，最后遭殃的又是谁呢？

　　李鸿毅被军方惩戒，因为新加坡不允许他有“特权”，否则他的父亲怎样面对新加坡人？缺勤的军官被控上军事法庭，两名上级主管也受到书面警告，这也反映了狮城法纪的严谨，弹丸之地的新加坡能立足全球，自有它一定的道理！

　　之前狮城电视艺人李名顺因喝酒驾车被判入狱，数十年前更因有部长被指贪污而自杀，这就是新加坡“本色”，李鸿毅被惩戒，那是新加坡人之福啊！

·原载7月14日马来西亚《星洲日报》

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Hand Holding Lotus

Peace to the world......

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275

In metres... that is the height of the highest building in Japan (@ Yokohama)

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This is an article from Scientific American. The original article could be found here.


======================================
Take 66 beer bottles. Fill them with water and connect so that it flows slowly from bottle to bottle. Place apparatus on roof (or better yet, build it in place) and voila, you have the ultimate in DIY solar thermal hot water systems. Not only do you get the pleasure of consuming 66 bottles of beer on the way, you also get the joy of providing hot water for your mother to shower in comfort.

That's Ma Yanjun, a farmer in Qiqiao village, Shaanxi province--the heartland of China. He built the contraption for his mother, according to Weird Asia News, making him both a devoted son and one of the numerous backyard enthusiasts who have discovered a simple way to harness the power of the sun. From the cold of Vermont to the baking heat of South Africa, such solar water collectors--whether made from beer bottles, soda cans, or anything else--are a cheap and simple way to heat water for your home--a different type of recycling if you will. You do need to remember, however, that the sun doesn't always shine and plan accordingly.

Of course, you don't have to build your own. In fact, Ma may already have made a business out of it: 10 families in the village have followed his lead. There are plenty of companies worldwide only too happy to sell you a solar water heater these days. Check out the U.S. Department of Energy's guide here, including diagrams of the various systems (none as fun as Ma's) as well as guidelines for judging whether such a system is right for you. One fact is clear: they work well--providing enough hot water for the kind of lengthy, water-intensive showers so prevalent in my house (and yours?) But you're probably not going to impress your mother as much.

Then again, I know my mother would be singularly unimpressed if I explained a bout of binge drinking as part of my environmental lifestyle. But the several hundred dollars in yearly energy savings I calculated using the DOE's website could buy a lot more beer (or anything else for you teetotallers out there). 66 bottles of beer on the wall, 66 bottles of beer, take one down and pass it around, 65 bottles of beer on the wall...

Now what are some other DIY home improvements that also make environmental (and economic) sense?

虚假的塑胶女孩

(Published years ago... 收录于小说集 《超级铁链男的故事》)

1997年2月29日，我在这个城市的某座大厦的屋顶上的塑胶花园遇见了虚假的塑胶女孩。

我起初还以为自己在做梦，因为虚假的塑胶女孩手中拿着一个浅绿色的塑胶浇水罐替茂盛的虚假塑胶植物浇水，就如Radiohead在“Fake Plastic Trees”这首歌里所描绘的情景一模一样。这不禁让我怀疑自己是否因为观看过多的MTV才陷入这种梦景般的后现代景象。

我捏一下自己的手背。能够感觉到痛楚，证明自己不是在做梦。

“嗨，你在浇花吗？”虽然这个问题显得多余而又让自己的智商显得低能，不过我相信这种直接又明显的问法能够比较容易打开话匣子。

“对啊，难道不是很明显吗？”不出我所料，虚假的塑胶女孩采取了一种防备却又不完全封闭的态度回答了我的问题。

“对啊，是很明显啊，只是我觉得有些奇怪罢了。”

“有什么怪呢？”

“基本上，我认为替塑胶植物浇水是多余的，因为它们不是生物，不需要浇水也可以茂盛地生存下去。”

虚假的塑胶女孩放下手中的浅绿塑胶浇水罐，以一种轻蔑的眼神看着我。那种眼神好像照入眼球的手电筒光线一样刺眼，我顿时感到不自在。我想讲一些话来转移话题，不过脑袋却好像干涸的海绵一样空荡，无法在这个尴尬的时刻想出任何话语来缓和气氛。因此我只有勉强地微笑，希望能够如此混过去。

过了一会儿，虚假的塑胶女孩的眼神缓和了下来，变得没有那么刺眼。她再度拿起浅绿色的塑胶浇水罐替虚假的塑胶植物浇水，然后以一种既不热情却又不冷漠的语气对我解释。

“谁说塑胶植物比需要水分呢？这就是多数人所拥有的错误观念哦。难道说只有有生命的东西才需要水分吗？”

“可是无可否认的是塑胶植物不是吸取水分的啊，因为它们的根都是塑胶或者铁丝构成的，这是最基本的科学常识嘛。”

“谁说这些水是让塑胶植物吸取的呢？这些水是用来洗去它们表层的灰尘，以确保这些虚假的塑胶植物能够保持它们的光泽，给人一种充满生命力的感觉。”

“原来如此。”

我在那一瞬间深深的爱上了虚假的塑胶女孩。

我也不清楚自己为何会如此突然地坠入爱河里，难道是因为虚假的塑胶女孩毫无瑕疵的塑胶脸孔和她几乎完美的丰腴的身段吗？或者我是被她充满自信的态度所吸引了？我也无法解释清楚。也许这就是那些通俗的爱情小说和电视连续剧里所谓的缘分吧。

我想向虚假的塑胶女孩表态，却又因近情情怯而不敢开口。看着她完美的塑胶脸孔，再与自己带有些许赘肉的身躯相比较，简直是癞蛤蟆想吃天鹅肉。于是，我就站在原地动也不动，傻傻地望着还在浇水的虚假的塑胶女孩。我就这样整半个小时看着她反复地重复浇水的动作。从虚假的塑胶花园的第一棵塑胶植物到最后一棵塑胶植物，从左到右又从右到左，以同样的姿势替每一棵塑胶植物浇了大约同样分量的水。她浇水时所散发出的气质打动了我心灵的某处，让我对她的爱念是越来越深。终于，我再也无法按捺自己的情绪。

“你这样反复地浇水，不会觉得累吗？”

“有什么办法，这是我的工作啊。”

“可是你不想改变一下这种生活方式吗？改换工作，去当售货员或者老师还是什么的。”

“不行啊，我只能够在这个虚假的塑胶花园里生活，到外面的世界就很难生存了。”

“怎么难生存法呢？”

“因为我必须有一张塑胶卡才能够在外头的世界生存。”

“塑胶卡？”

“信用卡啊。那种购物是交给售货员刷一刷就可以购得货品的卡啊。”

“原来如此。那如果我有一张信用卡的话，你会嫁给我，然后跟我一起到外面的世界生活吗？”

“你有信用卡吗？”

“现在暂时没有。不过如果我有的话，你会嫁给我，和我一起生活吗？”

“应该会吧。”

我们之间的谈话结束后，虚假的塑胶女孩又继续替虚假的塑胶植物浇水。我转过身子走向电梯，准备离开这座大厦的屋顶。我在那个时候有了一个决定，我必须努力赚钱，去申请一张信用卡，这样才能娶到完美无瑕的虚假的塑胶女孩。

于是，我对工作的态度变得异常积极。我是在一家女性杂志出版社上班，专门报道那些明星的花边新闻。这是一份相当简单的工作，其中的诀窍就是要知道如何编织一些虚假却又不损人名誉或者是伤人自尊的故事，然后把它们当作新闻报道。每个明星都希望他们会有很多新闻，因为这可以增加并巩固他们的知名度，所以他们多数都不在乎报道并非完全属实。更何况，如果我的报道不正确，这些明星们就能够出面澄清真相而借机制造更多新闻。这个时候，我便有更多新闻写，而忠实的歌迷影迷们也会有更多关于他们偶像的资料读，明星们能增加知名度，大家都皆大欢喜。这其中的道理就有点儿像老子的“万物本是空”的学说一样。明星们本来没有新闻可写，就好像一张白纸一样，而我就好像墨水一样，在白纸上涂一涂，涂出一个有形有态的太极，涂出许多精彩的花边新闻。我一向来都以这个方式来经营我所写的稿，从来都没有什么问题，也没有任何明星向杂志社采取法律行动。只要能够捉到平衡点，知道适可而止，就不会有什么麻烦，好像太极一样，要阴阳协调嘛。

问题是，自从我决定努力赚钱之后，我便开始失去这个平衡点。这大概是因为工作操劳过度而导致神智不清的后果吧？起初还没什么问题，明星们面对我胡乱编写的故事还能够沉得住气，只是以沉默的方式抗议或者是开记者会来辟谣。不过，上得山多终遇虎，我写了一篇完全不负责任和没有根据的报道，指责某个明星与另一个明星搞同性恋。结果杂志社被人告上法庭，而我也因此被炒鱿鱼。

没有了工作，没有了收入，拿什么屁来申请信用卡？

没有了信用卡，我又怎么能够赢得虚假的塑胶女孩的欢心呢？

我当时的情绪非常低落，简直是陷入了谷底。我甚至萌起了轻生的念头，因为我认为无法得到虚假的塑胶女孩的欢心，整个世界都变得暗淡无色了，而我的生命本身也失去了任何意义。就当我要对生命放弃希望，沦为一个颓废无能的人渣时，我无意间得知某个电视台要聘请编剧。于是我写了一篇虚假的爱情故事的剧本寄去了电视台，并在信里注明我有意应征那份编剧的工作。一个星期后，电视台回信给我，通知我他们非常喜欢我所写的剧本，而因此决定录取我。就这样，我便当上了电视台的编剧。由于我的想象力丰富，再加上原本就擅长编造故事，因此我所编写的剧本很快就成为收视率最高的电视连续剧。就这样，我竟然成为全国最有名气和最抢手的编剧，而每个月的收入是我以前写娱乐新闻的十倍以上。若我知道会这样，我老早就转行了，反正工作性质都是一样，都是在写一些虚假的故事。

当然，有了这种天文数字的收入，要申请一张信用卡比做５０次伏地挺身更容易了。

我拿到了信用卡后，便立刻到那座大厦的屋顶去寻找虚假的塑胶女孩。当我抵达屋顶时，虚假的塑胶女孩跟我上回遇见她时一样在替虚假的塑胶植物浇水。浇水罐的颜色当然也还是浅绿色的。

“嘿，你还记得我吗？”

虚假的塑胶女孩放下手中的浅绿塑胶浇水罐，转过头直视着我。她塑胶的脸毫无表情，一点也不背叛她的内心世界。

“当然还记得，我的记忆可是很好的啊，不像人的记忆一样，会随着时间淡化或者消失。塑胶产品不会这么容易被解构和循环的哦，难道你不知道吗？”

“那你还记得我们上次的谈话吗？”

“还记得啊。你问我如果你有一张信用卡的话，我是否会嫁给你。”

“对啊，我是这样问过。那你还记得你当时是如何回答我吗？”

“记得啊，我说我应该会嫁给你啊。”

我听到虚假的塑胶女孩的回答后，再也按捺不住自己了。我从口袋拿出了我从几间不同信用卡公司和银行申请到的信用卡，然后好像做买卖的商人摆出商品一样把放在透明的卡夹里的信用卡摆出来给虚假的塑胶女孩看。

“我现在不只是有一张信用卡，而是有很多张的信用卡哦。你可以当我的妻子吗？”

“好啊。”

于是，我和虚假的塑胶女孩结婚了。我们的婚礼并不怎么隆重，只是请了几位亲戚和好友罢了，而且都是我的亲戚朋友，因为虚假的塑胶女孩并没有亲戚或朋友。我的父母对我的妻子的印象很好，因为她不仅长得很漂亮，而且还有过目不忘的本事，把我父母所说的话都记得一清二楚，不会忘掉他们所吩咐的话，因此深得老人家的心意。

我们结婚后，虚假的塑胶女孩便搬进我刚买的独立式洋房住。她除了自己的衣服，几棵虚假的塑胶植物和那个浅绿色的塑胶浇水罐以外，就没有其他的私人物品了。于是，我替她申请了一张信用卡，让她去买自己需要或者喜欢的东西。虚假的塑胶女孩也没有什么特别想要的东西，什么电器、家具或者是华丽的衣服都不感兴趣。不过，她却非常喜欢化妆品，每次出外购物都会买不同的化妆品回家。对不同颜色和牌子的唇膏、眼影、睫毛膏、指彩等不同的化妆品，她都会买来收集。虽然如此，由于她除了化妆品以外几乎什么东西也不买，因此每个月的开销都不是很大，我并不反对或者阻止她继续买化妆品。

我们每天的生活都很简单。早上起床后，虚假的塑胶女孩便会花大约半个小时化妆，然后她就到庭院替她从大厦屋顶上的虚假花园移植过来的虚假塑胶植物浇水，一直到午餐时分。我在她浇水的这段时间便会独自在书房里写稿，写完后便陪虚假的塑胶女孩一起吃午餐。午餐通常都是在家里弄一些微波炉食物或者是到附近的小贩中心。午餐后她便继续浇花，而我便继续写稿，一直到傍晚，我才驾车到市区里的高级餐厅享用丰富和昂贵的晚餐，然后我们便回家睡觉。这种简单的生活持续了大概有一年左右吧，而在这期间，我的银行户头里的钱越存越多。因为除了化妆品、微波炉食物、高级餐厅的费用和一些琐碎的开销之外，我们便没有其他的开销了。我们所过的生活几乎是完美的，简直就好像人间乌托邦一样。

然而，不幸的事情发生了。

在我们结婚一年后的圣诞节那晚，我和虚假的塑胶女孩一起到电视台参加周年庆功晚宴。由于那晚我的心情特别好，因此喝了很多杯威士忌。晚宴结束后，我们原本想把车停放在电视台的停车场，然后搭德士回家；不过，我们在街上苦候了很久，却一直等不到德士，就连拨电服务也无法帮我们召到德士。我们实在不想在寒风彻骨的夜晚里像傻瓜由于在大街上等德士，因此我决定不理会血液里的酒精和有点儿模糊的视线，自己开车回家。

当我在医院的床上醒来时，头部感到一阵阵的剧痛，而身体也插了很多莫名其妙的管子。医生告诉我车子撞上了一棵大树，毁坏不堪，而我大难不死，竟然只受了一些皮外伤和轻微的脑震荡，虽然说昏迷了三天三夜实在有一点儿让他们担心。我在病床上搞清楚事态后，立刻问医生关于虚假的塑胶女孩的状况。医生听到我的问题后，显得有点犹豫，似乎不想告诉我。不过，在我再三的追问下，医生终于透露虚假的塑胶女孩已经断成七八截的消息。我听了这个噩耗后，整个人当场崩溃，脑袋一片空白，足足有一个星期没有进食和跟任何人说话。

我出院后向电视台申请了半年的无薪假期，所给的理由是我暂时无法集中精神写剧本。反正我的银行户头还有一大笔钱，因此我并不害怕生活开销无法应付。申请无薪假期后，我便整天呆在家里无所事事，成天望着天花板过日子。我的生命中失去了虚假的塑胶女孩后，仿佛失去了某种驱使自己前进的动力，就好像当初失去工作的情况一样，只不过这次所失去的东西更彻底、更重要、更无法挽回。因此，我这时所承受的绝望感也相应的更深，生活被一种无可名状的绝望感笼罩住。

这种绝望的颓废的生活大概持续了有三个月之久吧。直到有一天，我心血来潮，学这虚假的塑胶女孩生前一样，到庭院里替虚假的塑胶植物浇水时，发现庭院其中一棵虚假的塑胶植物竟然长成人形，而且是与虚假的塑胶女孩一样的形状。我发现了这棵不寻常的虚假的塑胶植物后，心中觉得十分纳罕。难道是虚假的塑胶女孩的灵魂附在这棵塑胶植物上吗？或者是因为老天看我这样孤单寂寞，所以便让虚假的塑胶女孩死后复生？我不太清楚。不过，我的直觉告诉我，我必须照顾这棵特别的虚假塑胶植物。因此，我再度拾起对生活的渴望，每天都按时替这棵虚假的塑胶植物浇水。

虚假的塑胶女孩复活时，我并不在家里。那时我刚好到附近的超级市场去买一些日常用品，回家后便发现虚假的塑胶女孩在庭院里用浅绿色的塑胶浇水罐替虚假的塑胶植物浇水，就如我第一次遇见她时的情景一样。

“嘿，你好吗？你知道我是谁吗？”

我听得出自己的声音是既充满期待却又同时有些不知所措。虽然庭院的虚假的塑胶女孩长得很像我的妻子，不过我却无法确认。

“当然知道啊，你不就是我的丈夫嘛。”

“那么，你……”

“我跟你说哦，塑胶是不会老去和死去的，不像人的生命那么脆弱。我们是长生不老的，最多是有时候形状会被改变而已，不过却不会被解构的哦。我们甚至比人类的灵魂更坚强，因为所谓灵魂这种东西也会随着时间而消失得无影无踪，而我们却不会，因为我们不是真实的，我们只是虚假的塑胶生命，所以能够抵挡时光的冲击。你了解吗？”

“了解啊。”

于是，我们又回到了过去的生活，她替她的虚假塑胶植物浇水，我写我的虚假爱情故事的剧本，一切都回到了过去安祥的日子。

这就是我和虚假的塑胶女孩之间的爱情故事。你们如果不相信我，认为我其实是在编造另一篇虚假的爱情故事来骗取稿费的话，大可以到本人的家来瞧一瞧，看看是否属实。我的家就是那间种满虚假的塑胶植物的独立式洋房，欢迎你们随时光临，来我这座虚假的塑胶世界参观。

如何做一个有爱心的公民

(Wrote this a few years back, and the trigger for writing this is that I could not stand the relentless charitiy shows on TV... This was the pre-NKF incident and hence you can say my satire was sort of right on.... As I read this article now, it seems that it will not be out of place if it were published the next day...... We haven't learnt anything as a society, have we???)

严格来说，我不能算是个有爱心的人，从来没有当过义工，牺牲周末的时间到老人院那儿照顾老人，或者像我一位学弟一样每个星期六风雨不改地义务教导智障儿童。我平时也没有捐款的习惯，大概是因为自己疑心病太重，总是怀疑向我募捐的人其实来自诈骗集团。

尽管自己不以身作则，我还是决定写一篇教导别人如何做一个有爱心的公民的短文，算是为自己积点德吧。

身为热爱公益的新加坡人，一定要每个周末或者星期三按时到投注站排队买大彩。为什么呢？如果大家有稍微留意的话，就会发现新加坡多数的慈善机构都有受到新加坡博彩公司的恩惠。不仅如此，许许多多的艺术机构所举办的节目，也由该公司资助。新加坡博彩公司的官方网站都如此写到了：“迈向公众的目的和利益 (Towards community purpose and benefits)。” ，并且申明该公司的宗旨是把从非法赌博集团那儿所强来的生意的利润转换成有利于这个国家发展的资本。由此可见，如果我们踊跃投注，该公司所赚的钱就会增加，这也间接会增加慈善和艺术机构所能得到的捐款。也就是说，我们在投注的同时就等于在行善，而且还有机会中奖！帮人利己，何乐不为呢？

当然，如果你嫌在收音机旁等待开彩号码的行为非常沉闷，无法你的生活增添姿色，不如考虑投注足球赛。跟买大彩同样的逻辑，而且还可以在电视荧光屏前观赏足球赛时增加刺激感。如果没有下注的话，对许多人而言，所谓足球运动或许只是一群疯子在追球的行为。不过有了因为金钱因素后，整场足球赛就变成更有意义了。关于赛马大概也是同样的道理吧。听说新加坡赛马协会似乎也热衷公益哦。虽然赛马和足球赛有时会比较危险，会出现坠马或者球员受伤的状况，不过若是这些活动可以让更多人下注，因此间接增加供应给慈善机构的款项的话，我想马儿和球员大概不会介意有危险的成分存在吧。

然而，我总觉得在投注时需要排队真的是件非常麻烦的事。或许有关当局应该考虑以更有效率的方法接受赌客的投注，例如开放1900热线，让大众直接利用电话下注，而投注的金额就直接记在电话账单上。这么一来，大众就可以一边看电视，一边下注，一边做善事，一边成为有爱心的公民了。

哈哈，写了这么多废话，我当然是在开玩笑的。如果大家真的要成为一个有爱心的公民，应该多多支持那些常常在电视上播出的大型慈善表演活动，多多响应主持人和艺人的呼吁乐心捐款，这样子才是身为一个有爱心的公民应有的行为。

嗯，别读了这篇文章后骂我没爱心，我在文章一开始就承认了。

Bird on Buddha Head

Did it shit? If it did, then that would be a statement against religion, no?

Red Hot Chilli Peppers???

On The Streets of Shinjuku, Tokyo

Nice Bug....

Nature is beautiful...

The toy robot

Squashed bug under the child's shoe
As he ran away from the murder scene
On the other side of the block
His grandfather searches
With the child's toy robot

Finally the child returns
With cuts and bruises on his knees
And ask his grandfather if his toy robot had a brain

No, the grandfather says as he hands the child his toy
It's only made of plastic, he says
"But I can talk!!"

The robot protested through the child
"Look, I can move, I can walk, I can fly around like superman!!
My hands are made of titanium steel, my legs are turbo boosters!!
I can dance around like a ballerina, and my eyes sparkle like the stars!!"

Ok, ok, so you have a brain, so you can think
But let's go home for dinner now
And apply some lotion on those knees
So the pain will go away
Grandfather pacifies grandchild, grandchild consoles toy robot

In the middle of the night
The toy robot walks up to the squashed bug and
looks in envy at it, slowly weeping silicon tears

In the corner of the room, the computer shivers uncomfortably

冰箱之死

(收录于诗集 《潘多拉的任意门》)

我们假设了永久冷藏如此
坚固不疑。没有察觉它的死亡
尽管打开门时还有微微的光线
冷却器已经不再排热，如同老旧
电影封印的风韵犹存证明昔日
影星都已阵亡，以及古老配乐的
疲惫不堪。拒绝降温的啤酒暗示
这个结局的必要。或者一种无法
从心头抹去的不安

你提醒我食物疏散的必要。有关
肉类腐烂的轻易，必须立刻料理
用热油的宰杀掩饰无法挽回的死亡
无法烹饪的多余只好任由温度吞噬
或者隐藏在陌生人的肚子里，以逃避
苍蝇的徘徊。我质问鸡蛋的命运
保持现状吗？等待破裂以揭发它是否
变臭，或者新鲜如同早餐的回忆。还是
重新给它们机会？让拥抱的热能
尝试把它们孵化。你的沉默
映衬了问题的飞身坠落。答案
随着不久未来的炒饭沮丧。蔬菜
暂时就置之不理，尽管蛆虫预见
枯黄后无法挽救的腐蚀

我以为冰块的溶化已经干涸了过去
然而，冰箱内侧溢出的调味料哭泣了
以往的无意撒落。让多次无意间开启
被掏空冰箱的门的我进行了一场
五味杂陈的悼念仪式。死亡吊诡
让我闻到了生命的证据，滋味曾经
不以为然的庸俗幸福和我们的忽略

生活继续的必然和市侩的电器店
商量了新冰箱的来临。搬运工人
把死去的冰箱抬走时，我看见
一种灵魂的转换。在保证书上
有效日期的怂恿下，一个装满真空
还未打开的罐头取代另一个
装满真空再度封上的罐头

Quote By Richard Feynman

This is a quote by Richard Feynman in one of his interview when asked about his view on all things mysterious (including religion)..... You can find out more about Richard Feynman here.

============================================================================
You see, one thing is, I can live…without [sic] an uncertainty, and not knowing. I think it’s much more interesting to live, not knowing, than to have answers that might be wrong. I have approximate answers, and possible beliefs, and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I’m not absolutely sure of anything, and there’s many things I don’t know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask, why we’re here, and what the question might mean. I might think about it a little, but if I can’t figure it out, then I go to something else. But I don’t have to know an answer, I don’t have … I don’t feel frightened by not knowing. By being lost in the mysterious universe without having any purpose, which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell, possibly. But it doesn’t frighten me.

Beheaded Male and Female Sign

Found Outside the Washroom of Takashimaya, Singapore

Is there an Artificial God?

Douglas Adams is one of my favorite writers... When eminent scientists like Richard Dawkins say that Douglas Adams is one of the funniest science fiction writer around, you have got to at least pay attention to what he writes and says.... This is a transcript of his speech in 1998 from this website....

==================================================================

In honour of Douglas' memory, Biota.org presents the transcript of his speech at Digital Biota 2, held at Magdelene College Cambridge, in September 1998. I would like to thank Steve Grand for providing this to us. Douglas presented this ''off the cuff'' which only magnifies his true genius in our eyes. -- Bruce Damer

This was originally billed as a debate only because I was a bit anxious coming here. I didn't think I was going to have time to prepare anything and also, in a room full of such luminaries, I thought 'what could I, as an amateur, possibly have to say'? So I thought I would settle for a debate. But after having been here for a couple of days, I realised you're just a bunch of guys! It's been rife with ideas and I've had so many myself through talking with and listening to people that I'd thought what I'd do was stand up and have an argument and debate with myself. I'll talk for a while and hope sufficiently to provoke and inflame opinion that there'll be an outburst of chair- throwing at the end.

Before I embark on what I want to try and tackle, may I warn you that things may get a little bit lost from time to time, because there's a lot of stuff that's just come in from what we've been hearing today, so if I occasionally sort of go… I was telling somebody earlier today that I have a four-year-old daughter and was very, very interested watching her face when she was in her first 2 or 3 weeks of life and suddenly realising what nobody would have realised in previous ages - she was rebooting!

I just want to mention one thing, which is completely meaningless, but I am terribly proud of - I was born in Cambridge in 1952 and my initials are D N A!

The topic I want to introduce to you this evening, the subject of the debate that we are about to sort of not have, is a slightly facetious one (you'll be surprised to hear, but we'll see where we go with it) - ''Is there an Artificial God?'' I'm sure most of the people in this room will share the same view, but even as an out-and-out atheist one can't help noticing that the role of a god has had an enormously profound impact on human history over many, many centuries. It's very interesting to figure out where this came from and what, in the modern scientific world we sometimes hope against hope that we live in, it actually means.

I was thinking about this earlier today when Larry Yaeger was talking about 'what is life?' and mentioned at the end something I didn't know, about a special field of handwriting recognition. The following strange thought went through my mind: that trying to figure out what is life and what isn't and where the boundary is has an interesting relationship with how you recognise handwriting. We all know, when presented with any particular entity, whether it's a bit of mould from the fridge or whatever; we instinctively know when something is an example of life and when it isn't. But it turns out to be tremendously hard exactly to define it. I remember once, a long time ago, needing a definition of life for a speech I was giving. Assuming there was a simple one and looking around the Internet, I was astonished at how diverse the definitions were and how very, very detailed each one had to be in order to include 'this' but not include 'that'. If you think about it, a collection that includes a fruit fly and Richard Dawkins and the Great Barrier Reef is an awkward set of objects to try and compare. When we try and figure out what the rules are that we are looking for, trying to find a rule that's self-evidently true, that turns out to be very, very hard.

Compare this with the business of recognising whether something is an A or a B or a C. It's a similar kind of process, but it's also a very, very different process, because you may say of something that you're 'not quite certain whether it counts as life or not life, it's kind of there on the edge isn't it, it's probably a very low example of what you might call life, it's maybe just about alive or maybe it isn't'. Or maybe you might say about something that's an example of Digital life, 'does that count as being alive?' Is it something, to coin someone's earlier phrase, that'll go squish if you step on it? Think about the controversial Gaia hypothesis; people say 'is the planet alive?', 'is the ecosphere alive or not?' In the end it depends on how you define such things.

Compare that with handwriting recognition. In the end you are trying to say “is this an A or is it a B?” People write As and Bs in many different ways; floridly, sloppily or whatever. It's no good saying 'well, it's sort of A-ish but there's a bit of B in there', because you can't write the word 'apple' with such a thing. It is either an A or a B. How do you judge? If you're doing handwriting recognition, what you are trying to do is not to assess the relative degrees of A-ness or B-ness of the letter, but trying to define the intention of the person who wrote it. It's very clear in the end - is it an A or a B? - ah! it's an A, because the person writing it was writing the word apple and that's clearly what it means. So, in the end, in the absence of an intentional creator, you cannot say what life is, because it simply depends on what set of definitions you include in your overall definition. Without a god, life is only a matter of opinion.

I want to pick up on a few other things that came around today. I was fascinated by Larry (again), talking about tautology, because there's an argument that I remember being stumped by once, to which I couldn't come up with a reply, because I was so puzzled by the challenge and couldn't quite figure it out. A guy said to me, 'yes, but the whole theory of evolution is based on a tautology: that which survives, survives' This is tautological, therefore it doesn't mean anything. I thought about that for a while and it finally occurred to me that a tautology is something that if it means nothing, not only that no information has gone into it but that no consequence has come out of it. So, we may have accidentally stumbled upon the ultimate answer; it's the only thing, the only force, arguably the most powerful of which we are aware, which requires no other input, no other support from any other place, is self evident, hence tautological, but nevertheless astonishingly powerful in its effects. It's hard to find anything that corresponds to that and I therefore put it at the beginning of one of my books. I reduced it to what I thought were the bare essentials, which are very similar to the ones you came up with earlier, which were “anything that happens happens, anything that in happening causes something else to happen causes something else to happen and anything that in happening causes itself to happen again, happens again”. In fact you don't even need the second two because they flow from the first one, which is self-evident and there's nothing else you need to say; everything else flows from that. So, I think we have in our grasp here a fundamental, ultimate truth, against which there is no gain-saying. It was spotted by the guy who said this is a tautology. Yes, it is, but it's a unique tautology in that it requires no information to go in but an infinite amount of information comes out of it. So I think that it is arguably therefore the prime cause of everything in the Universe. Big claim, but I feel I'm talking to a sympathetic audience.

Where does the idea of God come from? Well, I think we have a very skewed point of view on an awful lot of things, but let's try and see where our point of view comes from. Imagine early man. Early man is, like everything else, an evolved creature and he finds himself in a world that he's begun to take a little charge of; he's begun to be a tool-maker, a changer of his environment with the tools that he's made and he makes tools, when he does, in order to make changes in his environment. To give an example of the way man operates compared to other animals, consider speciation, which, as we know, tends to occur when a small group of animals gets separated from the rest of the herd by some geological upheaval, population pressure, food shortage or whatever and finds itself in a new environment with maybe something different going on. Take a very simple example; maybe a bunch of animals suddenly finds itself in a place where the weather is rather colder. We know that in a few generations those genes which favour a thicker coat will have come to the fore and we'll come and we'll find that the animals have now got thicker coats. Early man, who's a tool maker, doesn't have to do this: he can inhabit an extraordinarily wide range of habitats on earth, from tundra to the Gobi Desert - he even manages to live in New York for heaven's sake - and the reason is that when he arrives in a new environment he doesn't have to wait for several generations; if he arrives in a colder environment and sees an animal that has those genes which favour a thicker coat, he says “I'll have it off him”. Tools have enabled us to think intentionally, to make things and to do things to create a world that fits us better. Now imagine an early man surveying his surroundings at the end of a happy day's tool making. He looks around and he sees a world which pleases him mightily: behind him are mountains with caves in - mountains are great because you can go and hide in the caves and you are out of the rain and the bears can't get you; in front of him there's the forest - it's got nuts and berries and delicious food; there's a stream going by, which is full of water - water's delicious to drink, you can float your boats in it and do all sorts of stuff with it; here's cousin Ug and he's caught a mammoth - mammoth's are great, you can eat them, you can wear their coats, you can use their bones to create weapons to catch other mammoths. I mean this is a great world, it's fantastic. But our early man has a moment to reflect and he thinks to himself, 'well, this is an interesting world that I find myself in' and then he asks himself a very treacherous question, a question which is totally meaningless and fallacious, but only comes about because of the nature of the sort of person he is, the sort of person he has evolved into and the sort of person who has thrived because he thinks this particular way. Man the maker looks at his world and says 'So who made this then?' Who made this? - you can see why it's a treacherous question. Early man thinks, 'Well, because there's only one sort of being I know about who makes things, whoever made all this must therefore be a much bigger, much more powerful and necessarily invisible, one of me and because I tend to be the strong one who does all the stuff, he's probably male'. And so we have the idea of a god. Then, because when we make things we do it with the intention of doing something with them, early man asks himself , 'If he made it, what did he make it for?' Now the real trap springs, because early man is thinking, 'This world fits me very well. Here are all these things that support me and feed me and look after me; yes, this world fits me nicely' and he reaches the inescapable conclusion that whoever made it, made it for him.

This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in - an interesting hole I find myself in - fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it's still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for. We all know that at some point in the future the Universe will come to an end and at some other point, considerably in advance from that but still not immediately pressing, the sun will explode. We feel there's plenty of time to worry about that, but on the other hand that's a very dangerous thing to say. Look at what's supposed to be going to happen on the 1st of January 2000 - let's not pretend that we didn't have a warning that the century was going to end! I think that we need to take a larger perspective on who we are and what we are doing here if we are going to survive in the long term.

There are some oddities in the perspective with which we see the world. The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be, but we have done various things over intellectual history to slowly correct some of our misapprehensions. Curiously enough, quite a lot of these have come from sand, so let's talk about the four ages of sand.

From sand we make glass, from glass we make lenses and from lenses we make telescopes. When the great early astronomers, Copernicus, Gallileo and others turned their telescopes on the heavens and discovered that the Universe was an astonishingly different place than we expected and that, far from the world being most of the Universe, with just a few little bright lights going around it, it turned out - and this took a long, long, long time to sink in - that it is just one tiny little speck going round a little nuclear fireball, which is one of millions and millions and millions that make up this particular galaxy and our galaxy is one of millions or billions that make up the Universe and that then we are also faced with the possibility that there may be billions of universes, that applied a little bit of a corrective to the perspective that the Universe was ours.

I rather love that notion and, as I was discussing with someone earlier today, there's a book I thoroughly enjoyed recently by David Deutsch, who is an advocate of the multiple universe view of the Universe, called 'The Fabric of Reality', in which he explores the notion of a quantum multiple universe view of the Universe. This came from the famous wave particle dichotomy about the behaviour of light - that you couldn't measure it as a wave when it behaves as a wave, or as a particle when it behaves as a particle. How does this come to be? David Deutsch points out that if you imagine that our Universe is simply one layer and that there is an infinite multiplicity of universes spreading out on either side, not only does it solve the problem, but the problem simply goes away. This is exactly how you expect light to behave under those circumstances. Quantum mechanics has claims to be predicated on the notion that the Universe behaves as if there was a multiplicity of universes, but it rather strains our credulity to think that there actually would be.

This goes straight back to Gallileo and the Vatican. In fact, what the Vatican said to Gallileo was, “We don't dispute your readings, we just dispute the explanation you put on them. It's all very well for you to say that the planets sort of do that as they go round and it is as if we were a planet and those planets were all going round the sun; it's alright to say it's as if that were happening, but you're not allowed to say that's what is happening, because we have a total lockhold on universal truth and also it simply strains our personal credulity”. Just so, I think that the idea that there are multiple universes currently strains our credulity but it may well be that it's simply one more strain that we have to learn to live with, just as we've had to learn to live with a whole bunch of them in the past.

The other thing that comes out of that vision of the Universe is that it turns out to be composed almost entirely and rather worryingly, of nothing. Wherever you look there is nothing, with occasional tiny, tiny little specks of rock or light. But nevertheless, by watching the way these tiny little specks behave in the vast nothingness, we begin to divine certain principles, certain laws, like gravity and so forth. So that was, if you like, the macroscopic view of the universe, which came from the first age of sand.

The next age of sand is the microscopic one. We put glass lenses into microscopes and started to look down at the microscopic view of the Universe. Then we began to understand that when we get down to the sub-atomic level, the solid world we live in also consists, again rather worryingly, of almost nothing and that wherever we do find something it turns out not to be actually something, but only the probability that there may be something there.

One way or another, this is a deeply misleading Universe. Wherever we look it's beginning to be extremely alarming and extremely upsetting to our sense of who we are - great, strapping, physical people living in a Universe that exists almost entirely for us - that it just isn't the case. At this point we are still divining from this all sorts of fundamental principles, recognising the way that gravity works, the way that strong and weak nuclear forces work, recognising the nature of matter, the nature of particles and so on, but having got those fundamentals, we're still not very good at figuring out how it works, because the maths is really rather tricky. So, we tend to come up with almost a clockwork view of the way it all works, because that's the best our maths can manage. I don't mean in any way to disparage Newton, because I guess he was the first person who saw that there were principles at work that were different from anything we actually saw around us. His first law of motion - that something will remain in its position of either rest or motion until some other force works on it - is something that none of us, living in a gravity well, in a gas envelope, had ever seen, because everything we move comes to a halt. It was only through very, very careful watching and observing and measuring and divining the principles underlying what we could all see happening that he came up with the principles that we all know and recognise as being the laws of motion, but nevertheless it is by modern terms, still a somewhat clockwork view of the Universe. As I say, I don't mean that to sound disparaging in any way at all, because his achievements, as we all know, were absolutely monumental, but it still kind of doesn't make sense to us.

Now there are all sorts of entities we are also aware of, as well as particles, forces, tables, chairs, rocks and so on, that are almost invisible to science; almost invisible, because science has almost nothing to say about them whatsoever. I'm talking about dogs and cats and cows and each other. We living things are, so far, beyond the purview of anything science can actually say, almost beyond even recognising ourselves as things that science might be expected to have something to say about.

I can imagine Newton sitting down and working out his laws of motion and figuring out the way the Universe works and with him, a cat wandering around. The reason we had no idea how cats worked was because, since Newton, we had proceeded by the very simple principle that essentially, to see how things work, we took them apart. If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have in your hands is a non-working cat. Life is a level of complexity that almost lies outside our vision; is so far beyond anything we have any means of understanding that we just think of it as a different class of object, a different class of matter; 'life', something that had a mysterious essence about it, was god given - and that's the only explanation we had. The bombshell comes in 1859 when Darwin publishes 'On the Origin of Species'. It takes a long time before we really get to grips with this and begin to understand it, because not only does it seem incredible and thoroughly demeaning to us, but it's yet another shock to our system to discover that not only are we not the centre of the Universe and we're not made of anything, but we started out as some kind of slime and got to where we are via being a monkey. It just doesn't read well. But also, we have no opportunity to see this stuff at work. In a sense Darwin was like Newton, in that he was the first person to see underlying principles, that really were not at all obvious, from the everyday world in which he lived. We had to think very hard to understand the nature of what was happening around us and we had no clear, obvious everyday examples of evolution to point to. Even today that persists as a slightly tricky problem if you're trying to persuade somebody who doesn't believe in all this evolution stuff and wants you to show him an example - they are hard to find in terms of everyday observation.

So we come to the third age of sand. In the third age of sand we discover something else we can make out of sand - silicon. We make the silicon chip - and suddenly, what opens up to us is a Universe not of fundamental particles and fundamental forces, but of the things that were missing in that picture that told us how they work; what the silicon chip revealed to us was the process. The silicon chip enables us to do mathematics tremendously fast, to model the, as it turns out, very very simple processes that are analogous to life in terms of their simplicity; iteration, looping, branching, the feedback loop which lies at the heart of everything you do on a computer and at the heart of everything that happens in evolution - that is, the output stage of one generation becomes the input stage of the next. Suddenly we have a working model, not for a while because early machines are terribly slow and clunky, but gradually we accumulate a working model of this thing that previously we could only guess at or deduce - and you had to be a pretty sharp and a pretty clear thinker even to divine it happening when it was far from obvious and indeed counter-intuitive, particularly to as proud a species as we.

The computer forms a third age of perspective, because suddenly it enables us to see how life works. Now that is an extraordinarily important point because it becomes self-evident that life, that all forms of complexity, do not flow downwards, they flow upwards and there's a whole grammar that anybody who is used to using computers is now familiar with, which means that evolution is no longer a particular thing, because anybody who's ever looked at the way a computer program works, knows that very, very simple iterative pieces of code, each line of which is tremendously straightforward, give rise to enormously complex phenomena in a computer - and by enormously complex phenomena, I mean a word processing program just as much as I mean Tierra or Creatures.

I can remember the first time I ever read a programming manual, many many years ago. I'd first started to encounter computers about 1983 and I wanted to know a little bit more about them, so I decided to learn something about programming. I bought a C manual and I read through the first two or three chapters, which took me about a week. At the end it said 'Congratulations, you have now written the letter A on the screen!' I thought, 'Well, I must have misunderstood something here, because it was a huge, huge amount of work to do that, so what if I now want to write a B?' The process of programming, the speed and the means by which enormous simplicity gives rise to enormously complex results, was not part of my mental grammar at that point. It is now - and it is increasingly part of all our mental grammars, because we are used to the way computers work.

So, suddenly, evolution ceases to be such a real problem to get hold of. It's rather like this: imagine, if you will, the following scenario. One Tuesday, a person is spotted in a street in London, doing something criminal. Two detectives are investigating, trying to work out what happened. One of them is a 20th Century detective and the other, by the marvels of science fiction, is a 19th Century detective. The problem is this: the person who was clearly seen and identified on the street in London on Tuesday was seen by someone else, an equally reliable witness, on the street in Santa Fe on the same Tuesday - how could that possibly be? The 19th Century detective could only think it was by some sort of magical intervention. Now the 20th Century detective may not be able to say, “He took BA flight this and then United flight that” - he may not be able to figure out exactly which way he did it, or by which route he travelled, but it's not a problem. It doesn't bother him; he just says, 'He got there by plane. I don't know which plane and it may be a little tricky to find out, but there's no essential mystery.' We're used to the idea of jet travel. We don't know whether the criminal flew BA 178, or UA270, or whatever, but we know roughly how it was done. I suspect that as we become more and more conversant with the role a computer plays and the way in which the computer models the process of enormously simple elements giving rise to enormously complex results, then the idea of life being an emergent phenomenon will become easier and easier to swallow. We may never know precisely what steps life took in the very early stages of this planet, but it's not a mystery.

So what we have arrived at here - and although the first shock wave of this arrival was in 1859, it's really the arrival of the computer that demonstrates it unarguably to us - is 'Is there really a Universe that is not designed from the top downwards but from the bottom upwards? Can complexity emerge from lower levels of simplicity?' It has always struck me as being bizarre that the idea of God as a creator was considered sufficient explanation for the complexity we see around us, because it simply doesn't explain where he came from. If we imagine a designer, that implies a design and that therefore each thing he designs or causes to be designed is a level simpler than him or her, then you have to ask 'What is the level above the designer?' There is one peculiar model of the Universe that has turtles all the way down, but here we have gods all the way up. It really isn't a very good answer, but a bottom-up solution, on the other hand, which rests on the incredibly powerful tautology of anything that happens, happens, clearly gives you a very simple and powerful answer that needs no other explanation whatsoever.

But here's the interesting thing. I said I wanted to ask 'Is there an artificial god?' and this is where I want to address the question of why the idea of a god is so persuasive. I've already explained where I feel this kind of illusion comes from in the first place; it comes from a falseness in our perspective, because we are not taking into account that we are evolved beings, beings who have evolved into a particular landscape, into a particular environment with a particular set of skills and views of the world that have enabled us to survive and thrive rather successfully. But there seems to be an even more powerful idea than that, and this is the idea I want to propose, which is that the spot at the top of the pyramid that we previously said was whence everything flowed, may not actually be vacant just because we say the flow doesn't go that way.

Let me explain what I mean by this. We have created in the world in which we live all kinds of things; we have changed our world in all kinds of ways. That's very very clear. We have built the room we're in and we've built all sorts of complex stuff, like computers and so on, but we've also constructed all kinds of fictitious entities that are enormously powerful. So do we say, 'That's a bad idea; it's stupid - we should simply get rid of it?' Well, here's another fictitious entity - money. Money is a completely fictitious entity, but it's very powerful in our world; we each have wallets, which have got notes in them, but what can those notes do? You can't breed them, you can't stir fry them, you can't live in them, there's absolutely nothing you can do with them that's any use, other than exchange them with each other - and as soon as we exchange them with each other all sots of powerful things happen, because it's a fiction that we've all subscribed to. We don't think this is wrong or right, good or bad; but the thing is that if money vanished the entire co-operative structure that we have would implode, but if we were all to vanish, money would simply vanish too. Money has no meaning outside ourselves, it is something that we have created that has a powerful shaping effect on the world, because its something we all subscribe to.

I would like somebody to write an evolutionary history of religion, because the way in which it has developed seems to me to show all kinds of evolutionary strategies. Think of the arms races that go on between one or two animals living the same environment. For example the race between the Amazonian manatee and a particular type of reed that it eats. The more of the reed the manatee eats, the more the reed develops silica in its cells to attack the teeth of the manatee and the more silica in the reed, the more manatee's teeth get bigger and stronger. One side does one thing and the other counters it. As we know, throughout evolution and history arms races are something that drive evolution in the most powerful ways and in the world of ideas you can see similar kinds of things happening.

Now, the invention of the scientific method and science is, I'm sure we'll all agree, the most powerful intellectual idea, the most powerful framework for thinking and investigating and understanding and challenging the world around us that there is, and that it rests on the premise that any idea is there to be attacked and if it withstands the attack then it lives to fight another day and if it doesn't withstand the attack then down it goes. Religion doesn't seem to work like that; it has certain ideas at the heart of it which we call sacred or holy or whatever. That's an idea we're so familiar with, whether we subscribe to it or not, that it's kind of odd to think what it actually means, because really what it means is 'Here is an idea or a notion that you're not allowed to say anything bad about; you're just not. Why not? - because you're not!' If somebody votes for a party that you don't agree with, you're free to argue about it as much as you like; everybody will have an argument but nobody feels aggrieved by it. If somebody thinks taxes should go up or down you are free to have an argument about it, but on the other hand if somebody says 'I mustn't move a light switch on a Saturday', you say, 'Fine, I respect that'. The odd thing is, even as I am saying that I am thinking 'Is there an Orthodox Jew here who is going to be offended by the fact that I just said that?' but I wouldn't have thought 'Maybe there's somebody from the left wing or somebody from the right wing or somebody who subscribes to this view or the other in economics' when I was making the other points. I just think 'Fine, we have different opinions'. But, the moment I say something that has something to do with somebody's (I'm going to stick my neck out here and say irrational) beliefs, then we all become terribly protective and terribly defensive and say 'No, we don't attack that; that's an irrational belief but no, we respect it'.

It's rather like, if you think back in terms of animal evolution, an animal that's grown an incredible carapace around it, such as a tortoise - that's a great survival strategy because nothing can get through it; or maybe like a poisonous fish that nothing will come close to, which therefore thrives by keeping away any challenges to what it is it is. In the case of an idea, if we think 'Here is an idea that is protected by holiness or sanctity', what does it mean? Why should it be that it's perfectly legitimate to support the Labour party or the Conservative party, Republicans or Democrats, this model of economics versus that, Macintosh instead of Windows, but to have an opinion about how the Universe began, about who created the Universe, no, that's holy? What does that mean? Why do we ring-fence that for any other reason other than that we've just got used to doing so? There's no other reason at all, it's just one of those things that crept into being and once that loop gets going it's very, very powerful. So, we are used to not challenging religious ideas but it's very interesting how much of a furore Richard creates when he does it! Everybody gets absolutely frantic about it because you're not allowed to say these things. Yet when you look at it rationally there is no reason why those ideas shouldn't be as open to debate as any other, except that we have agreed somehow between us that they shouldn't be.

There's a very interesting book - I don't know if anybody here's read it - called 'Man on Earth' by an anthropologist who use to be at Cambridge, called John Reader, in which he describes the way that… I'm going to back up a little bit and tell you about the whole book. It's a series of studies of different cultures in the world that have developed within somewhat isolated circumstances, either on islands or in a mountain valley or wherever, so it's possible to treat them to a certain extent as a test-tube case. You see therefore exactly the degree to which their environment and their immediate circumstances has affected the way in which their culture has arisen. It's a fascinating series of studies. The one I have in mind at the moment is one that describes the culture and economy of Bali, which is a small, very crowded island that subsists on rice. Now, rice is an incredibly efficient food and you can grow an awful lot in a relatively small space, but it's hugely labour intensive and requires a lot of very, very precise co-operation amongst the people there, particularly when you have a large population on a small island needing to bring its harvest in. People now looking at the way in which rice agriculture works in Bali are rather puzzled by it because it is intensely religious. The society of Bali is such that religion permeates every single aspect of it and everybody in that culture is very, very carefully defined in terms of who they are, what their status is and what their role in life is. It's all defined by the church; they have very peculiar calendars and a very peculiar set of customs and rituals, which are precisely defined and, oddly enough, they are fantastically good at being very, very productive with their rice harvest. In the 70s, people came in and noticed that the rice harvest was determined by the temple calendar. It seemed to be totally nonsensical, so they said, 'Get rid of all this, we can help you make your rice harvest much, much more productive than even you're, very successfully, doing at the moment. Use these pesticides, use this calendar, do this, that and the other'. So they started and for two or three years the rice production went up enormously, but the whole predator/prey/pest balance went completely out of kilter. Very shortly, the rice harvest plummeted again and the Balinese said, 'Screw it, we're going back to the temple calendar!' and they reinstated what was there before and it all worked again absolutely perfectly. It's all very well to say that basing the rice harvest on something as irrational and meaningless as a religion is stupid - they should be able to work it out more logically than that, but they might just as well say to us, 'Your culture and society works on the basis of money and that's a fiction, so why don't you get rid of it and just co-operate with each other' - we know it's not going to work!

So, there is a sense in which we build meta-systems above ourselves to fill in the space that we previously populated with an entity that was supposed to be the intentional designer, the creator (even though there isn't one) and because we - I don't necessarily mean we in this room, but we as a species - design and create one and then allow ourselves to behave as if there was one, all sorts of things begin to happen that otherwise wouldn't happen.

Let me try and illustrate what I mean by something else. This is very speculative; I'm really going out on a limb here, because it's something I know nothing about whatsoever, so think of this more as a thought experiment than a real explanation of something. I want to talk about Feng Shui, which is something I know very little about, but there's been a lot of talk about it recently in terms of figuring out how a building should be designed, built, situated, decorated and so on. Apparently, we need to think about the building being inhabited by dragons and look at it in terms of how a dragon would move around it. So, if a dragon wouldn't be happy in the house, you have to put a red fish bowl here or a window there. This sounds like complete and utter nonsense, because anything involving dragons must be nonsense - there aren't any dragons, so any theory based on how dragons behave is nonsense. What are these silly people doing, imagining that dragons can tell you how to build your house? Nevertheless, it occurs to me if you disregard for a moment the explanation that's actually offered for it, it may be there is something interesting going on that goes like this: we all know from buildings that we've lived in, worked in, been in or stayed in, that some are more comfortable, more pleasant and more agreeable to live in than others. We haven't had a real way of quantifying this, but in this century we've had an awful lot of architects who think they know how to do it, so we've had the horrible idea of the house as a machine for living in, we've had Mies van der Roe and others putting up glass stumps and strangely shaped things that are supposed to form some theory or other. It's all carefully engineered, but nonetheless, their buildings are not actually very nice to live in. An awful lot of theory has been poured into this, but if you sit and work with an architect (and I've been through that stressful time, as I'm sure a lot of people have) then when you are trying to figure out how a room should work you're trying to integrate all kinds of things about lighting, about angles, about how people move and how people live - and an awful lot of other things you don't know about that get left out. You don't know what importance to attach to one thing or another; you're trying to, very consciously, figure out something when you haven't really got much of a clue, but there's this theory and that theory, this bit of engineering practice and that bit of architectural practice; you don't really know what to make of them. Compare that to somebody who tosses a cricket ball at you. You can sit and watch it and say, 'It's going at 17 degrees'; start to work it out on paper, do some calculus, etc. and about a week after the ball's whizzed past you, you may have figured out where it's going to be and how to catch it. On the other hand, you can simply put your hand out and let the ball drop into it, because we have all kinds of faculties built into us, just below the conscious level, able to do all kinds of complex integrations of all kinds of complex phenomena which therefore enables us to say, 'Oh look, there's a ball coming; catch it!'

What I'm suggesting is that Feng Shui and an awful lot of other things are precisely of that kind of problem. There are all sorts of things we know how to do, but don't necessarily know what we do, we just do them. Go back to the issue of how you figure out how a room or a house should be designed and instead of going through all the business of trying to work out the angles and trying to digest which genuine architectural principles you may want to take out of what may be a passing architectural fad, just ask yourself, 'how would a dragon live here?' We are used to thinking in terms of organic creatures; an organic creature may consist of an enormous complexity of all sorts of different variables that are beyond our ability to resolve but we know how organic creatures live. We've never seen a dragon but we've all got an idea of what a dragon is like, so we can say, 'Well if a dragon went through here, he'd get stuck just here and a little bit cross over there because he couldn't see that and he'd wave his tail and knock that vase over'. You figure out how the dragon's going to be happy here and lo and behold! you've suddenly got a place that makes sense for other organic creatures, such as ourselves, to live in.

So, my argument is that as we become more and more scientifically literate, it's worth remembering that the fictions with which we previously populated our world may have some function that it's worth trying to understand and preserve the essential components of, rather than throwing out the baby with the bath water; because even though we may not accept the reasons given for them being here in the first place, it may well be that there are good practical reasons for them, or something like them, to be there. I suspect that as we move further and further into the field of digital or artificial life we will find more and more unexpected properties begin to emerge out of what we see happening and that this is a precise parallel to the entities we create around ourselves to inform and shape our lives and enable us to work and live together. Therefore, I would argue that though there isn't an actual god there is an artificial god and we should probably bear that in mind. That is my debating point and you are now free to start hurling the chairs around!

Q – What is the fourth age of sand?

Let me back up for a minute and talk about the way we communicate. Traditionally, we have a bunch of different ways in which we communicate with each other. One way is one-to-one; we talk to each other, have a conversation. Another is one-to-many, which I'm doing at the moment, or someone could stand up and sing a song, or announce we've got to go to war. Then we have many-to-one communication; we have a pretty patchy, clunky, not-really-working version we call democracy, but in a more primitive state I would stand up and say, 'OK, we're going to go to war' and some may shout back 'No we're not!' - and then we have many-to-many communication in the argument that breaks out afterwards!

In this century (and the previous century) we modelled one-to-one communications in the telephone, which I assume we are all familiar with. We have one-to-many communication - boy do we have an awful lot of that; broadcasting, publishing, journalism, etc. - we get information poured at us from all over the place and it's completely indiscriminate as to where it might land. It's curious, but we don't have to go very far back in our history until we find that all the information that reached us was relevant to us and therefore anything that happened, any news, whether it was about something that's actually happened to us, in the next house, or in the next village, within the boundary or within our horizon, it happened in our world and if we reacted to it the world reacted back. It was all relevant to us, so for example, if somebody had a terrible accident we could crowd round and really help. Nowadays, because of the plethora of one-to-many communication we have, if a plane crashes in India we may get terribly anxious about it but our anxiety doesn't have any impact. We're not very well able to distinguish between a terrible emergency that's happened to somebody a world away and something that's happened to someone round the corner. We can't really distinguish between them any more, which is why we get terribly upset by something that has happened to somebody in a soap opera that comes out of Hollywood and maybe less concerned when it's happened to our sister. We've all become twisted and disconnected and it's not surprising that we feel very stressed and alienated in the world because the world impacts on us but we don't impact the world. Then there's many-to-one; we have that, but not very well yet and there's not much of it about. Essentially, our democratic systems are a model of that and though they're not very good, they will improve dramatically.

But the fourth, the many-to-many, we didn't have at all before the coming of the Internet, which, of course, runs on fibre-optics. It's communication between us that forms the fourth age of sand. Take what I said earlier about the world not reacting to us when we react to it; I remember the first moment, a few years ago, at which I began to take the Internet seriously. It was a very, very silly thing. There was a guy, a computer research student at Carnegie Mellon, who liked to drink Dr Pepper Light. There was a drinks machine a couple of storeys away from him, where he used to regularly go and get his Dr Pepper, but the machine was often out of stock, so he had quite a few wasted journeys. Eventually he figured out, 'Hang on, there's a chip in there and I'm on a computer and there's a network running around the building, so why don't I just put the drinks machine on the network, then I can poll it from my terminal whenever I want and tell if I'm going to have a wasted journey or not?' So he connected the machine to the local network, but the local net was part of the Internet - so suddenly anyone in the world could see what was happening with this drinks machine. Now that may not be vital information but it turned out to be curiously fascinating; everyone started to know what was happening with the drinks machine. It began to develop, because in the chip in the machine didn't just say, 'The slot which has Dr Pepper Light is empty' but had all sorts of information; it said, 'There are 7 Cokes and 3 Diet Cokes, the temperature they are stored at is this and the last time they were loaded was that'. There was a lot of information in there, and there was one really fabulous piece of information: it turned out that if someone had put their 50 cents in and not pressed the button, i.e. if the machine was pregnant, then you could, from your computer terminal wherever you were in the world, log on to the drinks machine and drop that can! Somebody could be walking down the corridor when suddenly, 'bang!' - there was a Coca-Cola can! What caused that? - well obviously somebody 5,000 miles away! Now that was a very, very silly, but fascinating, story and what it said to me was that this was the first time that we could reach back into the world. It may not be terribly important that from 5,000 miles away you can reach into a University corridor and drop a Coca-Cola can but it's the first shot in the war of bringing to us a whole new way of communicating. So that, I think, is the fourth age of sand.

人面兽身

(刊登于联合早报2007年7月1日)

在与朋友进行的许多有关基因工程和类似课题的讨论中，我发现多数人对于此课题的态度都相当极端。支持的人大多认为这是重要的科学突破，无论从经济、科技或者医学的角度衡量，在本地发展基因工程的工业是利多于弊。然而，反对的人却认为基因工程就等同人类扮演上帝，迟早会造成无法收拾的灾祸，例如没有灵魂的复制人、人面兽身的怪物或者会对人体造成极大伤害的农作物。

然而，在进一步询问之下，我也发现多数反对的朋友对于基因学和相关课题有着深刻的误解。每当我耐心地向这些朋友解释何谓基因学和本人所理解的基因工程时，尽管多数人对于此课题的态度不会马上有一百八十度的改变，不过他们反对的立场却稍微缓和，而也会勉强地承认基因工程在某种程度上是有好处的。

其实，如果对任何课题不了解的话，通常都会产生许多不必要的误解。所谓知识就是力量的说法，大概就是指可以掌握不同课题的重点，以致做出明智和正确的决定。如果不了解某个问题却想主导该问题的讨论，此做法不仅不高明，而且还有种盲人骑瞎马的感觉。

因此，本人对于本地某份报纸在几个星期前所刊登的 “人兽怪” 的头版新闻非常不以为然。该报道是有关本地生物道德咨询委员会考虑在年底向各方征询在本地进行人兽嵌合体研究的意见。据本人所了解，所谓的人兽嵌合体研究，指的是将人类的干细胞注入动物的胚胎腹膜中，让人类干细胞透过新陈代谢系统进入动物器官的循环系统。当该动物 (例如绵羊) 诞生和健全成长后，其器官就可供移植到人类身上。由于这些器官拥有人类的细胞，因此在移植后产生排斥的几率将会降低。

所谓嵌合体的动物指的是搀杂人类细胞的动物，而在整个的构造和生理功能上跟普通动物没有什么两样。然而， 该报纸在报道此新闻时却大肆使用了许多人面兽身的图画，仿佛该研究的目的是为了制造半兽半人的怪物。 况且，从生物学的角度来了解，所谓半兽半人的生物会诞生的可能性微乎其微。任何生物都是经过漫长的进化过程，而在胚胎发育时有一定的限制，并非任何生物都能完成发育。如果出现混合体的胚胎， 该胚胎将无法正常发育而胎死腹中。

或许该报纸利用人面兽身图画的目的是为了吸引读者的注意，不过这种轰动性的报道却在某种程度上误导了读者，导致读者在讨论此课题时没办法针对重点。在该报道中，许多在受访时表示反对的公众人士都表示害怕半兽半人的怪物会对世界和自然界造成灾害。然而，这些顾虑却是多余的。

反之，有关人兽嵌合体研究的其他应该关注的合理问题却被忽略了。例如，从嵌合体动物移植到人类的器官是否会将动物的疾病传染给人类？或者，此做法是否会抵触任何接受移植者的宗教信仰和伦理价值观？这些问题都值得让大众商讨，很可惜的是它们或许会因为该报纸的轰动性报道而被大众忽略。

尽管半兽半人的怪物被制造的可能性是几乎不存在，不过因为知识的不足和轰动性的以讹传讹，我相信还有许多人对基因工程和人兽嵌合体的印象仍然停留在人面兽身的图画上。讽刺的是，人面兽身其实并不存在于实验室里，而只存在于大众媒体具有严重误导性的报道中。