How many people is David Mitchell?

I like David Mitchell. I’m impressed by his output. Acting, writing opinion pieces for the Observer, doing staged rants on TV panel shows and even more staged rants on his Soapbox (and one or two in Peep Show as well!): he seems to have it all. But he’s not quite got it all, because contrary to what I assume to be a common confusion, he isn’t the author of Cloud Atlas and those other books whose names nobody like me remembers. That’s a different person with the same name. I’d be surprised if the actor doesn’t have publishers queueing around the block to give him book deals, but he hasn’t published any novels to my knowledge, and if he has they’re not as praised as Cloud Atlas and those others. And if he had and they were, that’d be impressive. I’m told they’re pretty good. If that’s all it’d take to catapult him into the Stephen Fryosphere of national admiration then he should definitely give it a go. Though he wouldn’t want to risk turning into Will Self.

Now the French seem to think that even though they haven’t produced a playwright as good as Shakespeare that’s fine because they have Racine for the tragedies and Moliere for the comedies, and if that’s not enough for you they’ve got Corneille too. But isn’t that cheating? Part of what’s so impressive about Shakespeare is that he did it all by himself. When we find out he occasionally called in Marlowe or Middleton when a deadline loomed, it’s less impressive. It doesn’t make the plays less enjoyable, and indeed I was actually pleased to be told that the silly first scene of Macbeth wasn’t from the pen of our greatest writer. But it does (in other cases) make it slightly less impressive. I suppose what we’re looking for is heroes, and we want our heroes to work alone. When you find out Hercules did one labour with the help of a couple of rivers (which were presumably gods in disguise) and one with the help of Iolaus (blatant cheating) you send him off to do another two to make up. So while the French dramatic canon may be as good as ours, when it comes to literary heroes you can’t cobble together a Shakespeare out of a Moliere here and a Corneille there. All of this is rather a shame for me. One of my favourite heroes is Jason and that’s because he really knew how to put a team together in a way that makes Danny Ocean look like Rafa Benitez. Perhaps I should stop rewatching Peep Show and read Cloud Atlas.

Lost poem

I mentioned in the first post that I occasionally write poetry, and it's true. I do. But rather than inflict a poem on my readers, I'm going to talk about one. I wrote a poem called Chocolate Cake, which was about Michael Rosen's poem Chocolate Cake. Rosen's poem is a classic of the genre. Written in his unmistakeable style, it tells of a hilarious incident from his childhood resulting from his slightly excessive liking for chocolate cake. It begins:

"I love chocolate cake
And when I was a boy
I loved it even more."

Well my poem was about Rosen's poem, and it began:

"I love Chocolate Cake
But when I was a boy
I didn't like it much at all."

My poem went on in a style emulous of Rosen's, talking about how I couldn't appreciate the poem when I was young but now I do. I wondered why that might be, reflecting on nostalgia, false nostalgia and my changing tastes in cake and poetry. I was quite proud of it. It probably ranked among the top five poems I'd written, and it was certainly longer than any better poem I'd written.

Sadly the poem is lost, in the same way that most of the plays of Sophocles are lost. There's no extant copy, and it is not retrievable from my memory or those of the two or three other people I read it to. I lost it when I changed computers; I must have forgotten to copy the file over, or thought that it was on a memory stick or something like that. It wasn't, and now it's gone. Philosophers think a lot more about whether works of art are created or discovered than they do about whether they are destroyed or lost. I tend to agree with Amie Thomasson that they are created and can be destroyed.

I suppose I could write another poem in the style of Rosen's called Chocolate Cake, about Chocolate Cake. Maybe next time I go through a poetic phase I'll do that. I'd like to, but I'd hate to fail to do it justice, its absence having made me grow fonder of it. What most puts me off is that I'd have to stray at least as far as this post has into the unsatisfactory quagmire of unitalicisation=double italicisation, and that this might put me off making the poem self-referential, as that would ramp up the formating into treble and perhaps even quadruple italics. I think I'd want it to be self-referential too, or else I might be tempted to destroy it in order to solve a case of writer's block. I know I'd regret that.

Round squares 2

I’ve been reading a lot of papers by Josh Parsons lately. He’s fun. I go through phases like this where I’ll find a philosopher I find easy and enjoyable to read and plough through anything of theirs I can get my hands on. Outside of philosophy I’ve had the same experience with the Best Page in the Universe, a couple of webcomics and David Mitchell’s Soapbox, but with philosophers it has the bonus that it’s work but doesn’t feel like work. That’s a big improvement on staring at a blank screen all afternoon, which is the opposite. It’s also good for people like me who fuel their research more on enthusiasm than on discipline.

Anyway, after reading what he had to say about location I think I’ve changed my mind about round squares. It’s not that they wouldn’t be possible if the kind of multiple location the example uses was coherent, but I’m not sure it is. The way Parsons sees it, and simplifying, something can be at a location by having different parts in the different parts of the location, or by being wholly at each of the parts of the location, or mixture of the two, but that’s it. The alleged round square in the other post used a mixture of these methods to occupy a disconnected location made of a square and a circle. That doesn’t make it a round square. Now Hud Hudson apparently thinks there are two other ways of being located, but Parsons argues that they don’t make a lot of sense and I think I agree with him. The way you need for the round square is one of those other ways, so maybe round squares aren’t possible after all. Common sense triumphs again.

Gareth Bale

I’m a Spurs fan so naturally I’m pleased that Bale’s having such a good run of form. I’m also bemused. Bale’s always been a promising young player but I’ve always seen him more in the category of players disappointingly but conspicuously failing to consistently live up to their potential, along with Ashley Young, Theo Walcott and the mindboggling Jermaine Jenas. He’s never struck me as the kind of player like Giggs or Rooney who are clearly the real deal and can be expected to play fabulously unless they pull a Tiger Woods and become suddenly incompetent for reasons firmly external to the game.

Given this, it’s hard for me to view Bale’s purple patch the way others seem to, namely as his apotheosis from Paul Konchesky into Ronaldinho, a transformation destined to happen the moment Harry relieved him of his defensive duties. That seems to me about as sensible as hailing Nani as the new Cristiano Ronaldo every time he does a stepover. If six months from now Bale is the same towering mediocrity who didn’t win any of his first 24 league games for Spurs then nobody should be surprised.

That’s why I’m not pleased about Bale’s apparent committal of his future to the club. We’re not short of wingers and if we sold him in January we’d get a huge fee which we could spend on some decent defenders who weren’t always crocked. That’d be much more use than what I expect him to turn back into, and I think we can all agree he’s quite likely never to have a pricetag higher than the one he’s got at the moment. Then again, if he keeps playing the way he's playing now then he might singlehandedly win us the Champions' League. I'd like that.

Round squares

Most people think that roundness and squareness are incompatible. Circles have curved sides and no corners, while squares have straight sides and four corners. Meinong is sometimes interpreted as having thought there was a round square, but he thought it was a non-existent object, and may even have thought that its having incompatible properties explained its non-existence. But I’ve recently started wondering whether round squares could have existed after all.

If I understood rightly, I was told on Friday that if space was curved in an odd enough way then things in it could be round and square. It sounds like the sort of thing that might be true. That’s not what I’ve been wondering about though; I’m suspecting that round squares might even fit into both Euclidean space and ordinary space.

The problem comes from multiple location. If things can be wholly in two places at once, then I don’t see how round squares could be impossible. The simplest way multiple location could allow round squares is if absolutely anything could be absolutely anywhere and in any number of places. Then an object could be in a round region and a square region, thereby being a round square, since things are the same shapes as their locations.

Prima facie, one can plausibly deny that the possibilities for multiple location are this permissive. However, if multiple location is possible at all I’d have definitely thought that a point-sized object could be at two points at once. (Maybe there really is only one of each kind of point particle and each is in a lot of places. Feynman talked about something like this in his Nobel lecture.) Now take continuum-many point-sized objects, and let them each have two locations. The first locations could be arranged into a square and the second locations could be arranged into a circle. The square region and circular region wouldn’t even have to be the same size, although they could be. The object made out of these point particles would thereby have a circular location and a square location, so it would be a round square.

If this argument works, I suppose it could be used to argue that shape wasn’t an intrinsic property of objects, but rather a property they had in virtue of where they were. That’s weird of course, but multiple location is weird. I’m actually quite attracted to the view that how things are and where they are have a fairly loose relationship, but now I’m starting to worry that if it’s true then analogous arguments to the one about shape will show that almost no properties of located things are intrinsic, and that way lies madness. Or supersubstantivalism.

Computers are amazing

Not philosophy this time I'm afraid. Many people are surprised that computers aren't more reliable. Well I'm surprised they aren't less reliable. Much less.

Say what you like about computers, but they're complicated. Babbage's difference engine certainly looks complicated, Turing machines don't look complicated but they usually are, and now that modern computers are connected by the internet what we're really dealing with is a massive uber-computer of biological complexity. (I think Pascal's proto-calculator was pretty simple, but I'd have been surprised if that wasn't reliable.)

Complicated things break. Murphy's law always struck me as a bit silly, but I'd have thought we could safely say that if enough things can go wrong, something will. Well, with computers there are so many things going on that it amazes me that something doesn't always go wrong. But it doesn't! Usually when you type in a web address you get to the site you want, when you save a file it's still there a year later, emails get through and so on.

Of course the reason people get so annoyed with computers is that they rely on them too much. People don't save their work often enough, they put themselves in situations where they'll miss a deadline if the printer's playing up and they put too much trust in the sanitary status of files from dubious sources. I'm as bad as the next person in this regard, but I don't get annoyed with the computer when something goes wrong. I get annoyed with myself, because it's my fault. Same with train delays, but that's another post.