Thinking About Romans

Speaker A: 00:00:00

ually got its origins in late: 2022

Speaker B: 00:02:50

Jordan? I'm a not very often guy. Not very often? Not very often. Once a month at the very most. Once a month you think about the Roman Empire? And it will be sort of prompted by, oh, there's a bit of Roman wall there. There's an ancient church, that kind of thing. Yeah.

Speaker A: 00:03:04

to me, Green Lanes, might be: 2000

Speaker C: 00:06:21

Yeah, well, I think the first thing to say is Rome was around for a very long time. I think about a thousand years. So there's lots of stuff to say about it and think about it.

Speaker A: 00:06:30

Well,: 2000

Speaker C: 00:06:34

There you go. So there's lots of things you could think about. But I think one of the things that we tend to think about when we think of the Roman Empire is military history, you know, armies, generals, that kind of thing. And I think that there is a stereotype and, you know, stereotypes. There's often a kernel of truth that military history tends to fascinate men more than women. Especially certain kinds of men. Yeah. I mean, you have a dad or a manly man.

Speaker A: 00:07:08

Yeah. Inspired by the Roman Empire, the great generals of Rome.

Speaker C: 00:07:12

Well, you know, yeah. People really into World War Two or Napoleon or Julius Caesar or what have you. So I think but I think because Roman history tends to be a lot about battles and armies and stuff, things that men are more instinctively drawn to. Just say Napoleon himself thought a lot about the Romans, actually. And he really did. Go on. I think that could be one reason. I think another is that the the the pop culture around Rome. When I think of Roman pop culture, I instantly think of the Ridley Scott's Gladiator film. That to me is like the big Rome film. I think that mainly appeals to men as a film. I mean, probably there are women like it, too. But I think that the the the uniforms and the the violence and, you know, like the things that I think generally tend to appeal more to men. I actually came across an interesting study that that that said that it looked at all the books that were published about the Roman Empire in the last 50 years, I think. And apparently there was a massive increase in the 90s of books published about the Roman Empire that's starting to level out now. But that that this this article was saying that it could be a reason why men who are kind of in like in their 40s or 50s or whatever love thinking about Rome is because they were surrounded at a very formative time in their life. They were surrounded by lots of Rome media.

Speaker A: 00:08:46

Yeah, maybe maybe it's the case that if you'd have asked people in the 50s, you know, how they thought about Rome, they might have said much less frequently. But Egypt might have been exactly because they'd have been young during the 20s when that was.

Speaker C: 00:09:00

So, yeah, I think it's probably multifaceted. But yeah, I think also, you know, there are there also there are clearly women that are interested in ancient history as well. In the UK, you have Mary Beard and Bettany Hughes, these presenters on television. They do stuff about Rome as well. So, yeah, but I think there are lots of reasons why it's a it's a main mainly a man thing. I think you're definitely on to something with that.

Speaker A: 00:09:27

e is a very famous paper from: 2008

Speaker C: 00:13:01

I think we do have to speak about because the main like it is men thinking about Rome. So I think it's it is kind of relevant to try and drill into why it's men that think about Rome more than women.

Speaker A: 00:13:12

You know, I think I agree. It's relevant. I think we've done it. Yeah, but just yeah, the whole point of this meme, it's not like it's controversial. I don't think I think everyone is looking at this and going, yeah, isn't it weird that men are thinking about Rome more than women? I don't think people are saying that's not true or it's selective or it's, you know, sexist. And it was just a sort of observation that nobody has noticed before. Okay, so for my feeling, I'm happy with what we've discussed there and what we've covered. But I want to move on to something else, which is, I think maybe what's even more interesting is this thought side of it. Because what does that mean to think about something every day?

Speaker B: 00:13:50

Yeah, Peter. So I'm going to start with a little question. Yeah. So when your your list of incidents of your thinking about Rome, were they, was it, would you class them as a passing idle thought that kind of took you on a little on a little breadcrumb trail towards Rome? And then you got there and you stopped, or did you ruminate a bit on the fact it was Rome?

Speaker A: 00:14:12

Right, it's very fleeting. It's like of a number of things you think of when you're putting a tomato in a stew. One of them, in the course of probably 10 seconds, one of many things you sort of think about is, oh, yeah, Romans didn't have tomatoes. Before you're on to, why did I get these at Aldi and not yet? These are the only thoughts I have, by the way, which are the fleeting kind, the superficial ones.

Speaker B: 00:14:37

I'm going to come on to that. So, so I, I'm often thinking about thinking. And by and large, it's in a fairly unstructured, slightly messy and frustratingly woolly way. I'm not, I kind of wish I could go back to university and study philosophy and just practice thinking and be taught how to think in a, in a structured way. But, but, but I like, so a couple of insights from me, I often, I often think about different kinds of thinking. And I try to adapt my behavior towards some versus others. So I say, are there two broad, there are two, I'll say three broad types of thinking I have. So productive thinking is when I'm solving a problem or I'm thinking productively about something and making progress on it. So I'm actually sort of solving a little problem in my head or developing my understanding or developing my belief about something. Unproductive thinking, I'd say is like worrying and rumination where you're not making any progress. You keep coming over the same, retreading the same ground, or you're just worrying about something you can't fix. So I, I avoid the second one and favor the first one. And then the third kind is just, is, is, is, and then that second one kind of links strongly to anxiety, which is something I have, I suffer from occasionally. So my, my, my cognitive therapy that I practice is trying to get out the second more to the first. And then there's a third type, which is just sort of fun thinking or, or, or relaxation or not thinking. So when you're watching telly and you're just relaxing and not solving a problem, that's a different kind of thinking. It's like sort of a low power mode almost. And that's an important healthy kind of thinking that you need.

Speaker A: 00:16:33

Just to interrupt, this is such a Peter way. Yeah, this is such a Peter way of thinking about thinking because it's quite utilitarian how you're talking about it.

Speaker B: 00:16:42

Yeah, so that's how I categorize modes of thinking. That's how, so that's how I categorize some modes of my thinking. Um, but yeah, so, but, but coming back to Rome, I don't, I rarely think about Rome. Well, yeah, because how many?

Speaker A: 00:16:59

Yeah, because, but once a month. Because you would only probably do it in a sort of, certainly the route into it would probably a fun kind of thinking, right? Yeah. Um, and I suppose we can sort of use sort of Roman examples to think, to solve problems and stuff.

Speaker B: 00:17:13

But, um. I mean, for me, for me, it's something like if I see an old road, like, like, or I look at a map and I see a very long straight road. And I think that's probably a Roman road. Or I go to somewhere like Chichester, where there are bits of Roman wall still standing there. And you go, oh, Roman wall, that's, that's pretty old. But it's, it's got, it's got to be triggered by something pretty visceral like that for me. But I think, but I think the Roman Empire is. It's not sort of, just not, it's not, the Roman Empire part of my brain isn't just, isn't very close, isn't waiting on the wings just to jump in and.

Speaker A: 00:17:46

But maybe, sorry, Nick, I know you're going to come in with something, but maybe it's an imaginative, creative thing. And I don't, I don't mean this in, I mean this in a sort of non-judgmental kind of way, but maybe you're. Not very imaginative or creative? Yeah, something like that. Whereas I think Nick and perhaps, yeah, Nick and I think perhaps myself probably are quite imaginative and always thinking, I don't know.

Speaker C: 00:18:09

Is that all, Jordan? I think, I don't know, because I think personally, I think I think more about the future than I do the past. And I would put Rome in a. Probably in the past. I think you can be imaginative about futuristic thinking and it doesn't mean.

Speaker A: 00:18:24

Rome will rise again.

Speaker C: 00:18:26

But I think one of the things I thought that was interesting about thinking is that we, it reminded me of that film, What Women Want with Mel Gibson, where he has this freak accident and he can start, he can start hearing women's thoughts. And but and that's beside the point. But the interesting thing is that he hears them speaking like he hears their internal monologue. Yeah. And it just sort of, it made me like he doesn't hear, you know, he doesn't see like abstract symbols or pictures. It's purely language. And I think that kind of struck me as something quite, it's there's some, there's a linguistic element to thinking that we do, which is just a kind of dialogue with ourselves. Running commentary. Yeah. Yeah. And that kind of made me think, is that all thinking is? And then another kind of related aspect is it's, it's a lot of it seems to me as well as about like scenario generation. We create these like specific, they're quite tightly constrained scenarios and we interrogate them. But we need to kind of imagine them first and then we get to think about them. Yeah.

Speaker B: 00:19:43

I've often thought about that as I have the same thing. And I've often thought that as a sort of modelling exercise. So I imagine some piece, like, I'm trying to maybe, for example, I'm going to be planning a party, which I don't do very often. But imagine that's the case. I, one of the ways of attacking that problem is to imagine a party and imagine kind of who I'd want to be there, what I would want, you know, what I want to organise for the people, what food do I want, what drinks do I need and that sort of thing. That's how I would go about tackling a problem. And that feels like a pretty imaginative way of doing it. Yeah, I've always thought about that as sort of I'm modelling that situation that I'm planning. How do I go about what? And then I can interrogate that. I can look into it like I'm watching a TV show and unpick the bits that I want, take, throw away the bits I don't want and then have a thing to have a plan, you know, have a plan on, to plan with.

Speaker A: 00:20:40

Yeah, I mean, there's an argument. Fundamentally, thinking exists presumably because it has a purpose and it's presumably something like the subjective experience of computation. So what it feels like to process information in some way, like otherwise, what's the point of it? Don't, I know phrase, I know you're thinking, well, because it's fun. No, but why would it be? Why would we find it fun? You know, there has to be, it has to be, there has to be a purpose to it. And I think Peter's right. It feels to me, certainly some, if not all, or a large percentage of thinking involves creating something which can be, which shares in some sense features of the real world thing that it's representing so that you can find out about it so that you can manipulate that thing. And I don't mean imagining a physical object or anything like that, necessarily, although it can be, you know, you can imagine a, you know, like a mathematical construct, you know, do, can a, what are the angles on a square, on a quadrilateral add up to? You might imagine a quadrilateral and imagine moving it round so that you can fit the angles together or something. But I mean, often it's, as Peter says, like it's an abstract concept that you're thinking of, you know, which might be represented in a whole bunch of different ways. But in general, I think that it feels very plausible to me that all of it is geared around somehow drawing an inference, which is helpful for you. Now, why would we be thinking about the Roman Empire in that context? And I think it is, you know, it's a side effect of the fact that in the real, in the evolutionary environment, there wasn't a Roman Empire or anything like it. Almost all the information you encounter is potentially useful. Stories about things are useful because they teach you about, you know, things you might have to do. And it feels to me like the Roman Empire, well, to me, has the characteristics of a really good story that has lots and lots of things in the same way that I guess I probably think about the Lord of the Rings a fair bit because it's a big story with lots of things in it, lots of relevance to lots of different things in some way. And the Roman Empire, in terms of the way it intrudes on my thought, is like a really, is like a really good story with lots of real world examples, you know. So what's the point of thinking about the fact they didn't have tomatoes? Well, you know, maybe it's about, well, what would I, what would I do if I didn't have tomatoes? Well, that's right. I'd just use, I'd use just wine and some herbs. That's not a, don't worry, it can be done. You can make a stew without tomatoes. But the, but you see what I mean? Like, like thinking about what it must have been, the Romans were great people and they had smashing dinner parties, but they didn't have tomatoes. I'm just, I'm not saying this is what I was thinking about, but you can see that there would be a reason that we have evolved the capacity to think the Romans managed all that without tomatoes, you know, because at some point there might not be any tomatoes and we've got to make do. Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, I completely agree with you, despite your sort of mischaracterisation. Anyway, I've rambled on about the subjective experience of thought, but what else have we got to go on? Yeah, yeah. Well, exactly. Before, just before you come in, Jordan, I think there's a, especially when you're talking about the evolution side of things, elephants don't think about the Roman Empire, I think. Fish don't think about the Roman. Animals that are not humans, as best we know, don't think about the Roman Empire. Well, the Roman Empire certainly thought about elephants, though, particularly during the Punic Wars. They did. Let's, hold on. All right. So, so I think there's something there about, you know, why and there must be for a purpose, right? Now, I want to keep on this thought thing.

Speaker B: 00:24:18

I have a hypothesis as to why I don't think about the Roman Empire. Okay. Jordan, you first.

Speaker C: 00:24:24

And then I just want to, yeah, because I think you're right. I think there's like a higher meaning to thinking about something. Like, like if you, if you're looking at a painting, you're not just looking at, if you're thinking about a painting, you're not just looking at like the strokes and the colour and you're kind of thinking about the meaning behind the painting as well. That's what it means to think about something. So I think you're kind of, you're relating it to your existing knowledge to gain more information about the thing you're thinking about. So maybe people think about Rome a lot because we're taught it in school. We have a kind of existing database of Roman knowledge that we can then interrogate new information with.

Speaker A: 00:25:08

Yeah. Yeah. Also, I think the Roman Empire in particular is extremely infused in our, you know, modern day culture. And I haven't done this, so I don't know. But I think it would be interesting to see if you were to ask North Africans how often they thought about Egypt or Chinese people how often they thought about the Han Dynasty or whatever. You know, there might, it might be a similar thing that they might not ever really think about the Romans, but they would have their own version of the Romans. Which would serve a similar kind of archetypal great people from the past sort of role. Yeah, could be. Peter, you were going to say?

Speaker B: 00:25:48

Yeah, just so I mean, I think that the reason I'm an infrequent Romist is I lack data on it. I don't actually know a great deal about Rome. I don't think I've ever read a book specifically about Rome. What I know is from pop culture and from going to the odd museum and stuff and having a cursory glance at things. I've never really sort of spent any time studying it. So I think I'm just suffering from a lack of data. I haven't got those stories in my head that I can pin stuff to. Do you study Latin? I did for a year or two.

Speaker A: 00:26:30

Caecilius est parta. Yes. There's no doubt about it that, you know, I don't spend very much time thinking about feudal Japan because it's a very thin, boring picture that I have. Because I don't know very much about it. There's no doubt that must be true. Like the more things you know about and associations you have, the more interesting it is to think about that. The more things it's connected to.

Speaker B: 00:26:56

I think a great deal more about the Industrial Revolution. Yeah, I was going to say. The Second World War, about just computers and IT and systemy things, because that's what I spend a lot of time thinking about.

Speaker A: 00:27:08

How often do you think about the Industrial Revolution?

Speaker B: 00:27:10

Probably once a week, if not more. Once a week, right, yeah. Sort of like spot something that's, you know, that's really recent. That's probably been replaced by something modern, but there's been a factory there for a while. That kind of thing.

Speaker A: 00:27:27

Yeah, yeah. Because just say I probably think about the Second World War more than I think about the Romans, right? I think that's true of me as well. I think it might be like a three to five day thing. I don't know. OK, have we, are we done with discussing the thought side of it? Because there's an area I want to go, are we done? Is there anything else we want to say? Well, I just, I think actually it is quite hard to say whether you have thought of something, which sounds like a weird thing to say. Because surely the only person who can say whether we've thought of something or not is us, right? But actually, see, to me, it feels like that our thought is like a little searchlight that is moving through a huge dark space, which could be all the things we think about. And the thing is that when that searchlight is, we imagine that big dark space as being there, right? So if you think about something, which is sort of perhaps one little tiny bit of it connects to the Romans, I feel justified in saying, well, I've kind of thought about the Roman Empire. But if my, even if my brain hasn't really quite gone there, to some extent, you know, the concept of, say, a sandal is infused. I can't think about a sandal. You've passed the Roman string, but you didn't pull on it that time. No, exactly. But the thing is that have I thought about, when I think of a sandal, at no point might I actually think about a Roman wearing a sandal. But I feel like when I think about a sandal, my concept of a sandal includes the Roman Empire. So it's almost like just the idea, just thinking about a sandal. It's in much the same way that, you know, if you think about your hometown, you are thinking about it as your hometown and not, you're not, no part of that thought might say this is your home. But it being your hometown is part of the concept you have of it. And I feel like that's the case. So I'm saying it is, it's not straightforward. And what we don't know is whether, in fact, men and women might have very different bar for what counts as thinking about something. Like, I have not picked up the Roman Empire and examined it in my brain. But I still feel happy to say that I thought about the Roman Empire, even if it's just a flash of an image of a Roman sentry walking past the Shillelagh kebab shop. Yeah. Wasn't this, isn't this very close to what we were talking about in that, how it's a peplum thing we did about. Yeah, yeah, we did. I can't remember where we got to with that. I feel like the trouble is that I actually got that here, but it belongs earlier on in the podcast. So I think we should. Yeah, I can jettison that bit. No, I'm just saying it sort of feels familiar. It is absolutely right. Yeah. Peter, you were going to say something?

Speaker B: 00:30:06

Yeah, I just briefly want to turn to thinking about thinking. So I, as I mentioned, I do it in a very haphazard, it feels like way. And being a technologist, techno optimist, I'm looking forward to the future where we can all bend our brains with silicon or some other sort of hardware. Because what bugs me when I'm thinking, often I get the notion that I'm sort of retreading old ground or I've already thought about this and I've parked it or got distracted and not really made any progress. And I'm sort of back at an earlier step than I might have been. So I'd love a few things to plug into my brain. A short list, a short list. So I'd love some way of saving the state of a thought and its history to get to that point. A sort of file, a thought file. I can go, I've got to stop thinking about this now, save, come back to it later. That would be brilliant. You could make so much more progress.

Speaker A: 00:31:02

Before Peter goes on, how wrong was I when I was saying I don't think Peter's creative or imaginative? What a load of bollocks that was when I said that.

Speaker B: 00:31:09

Yeah, don't worry, we're used to you being wrong.

Speaker A: 00:31:12

I reinstate what I said.

Speaker B: 00:31:14

Another thing I'd like would be a better index of thoughts or a search function so I can find these thought files I had. But also just more generally browse the stuff I know and stuff that's maybe personal to me. Because this is a very frequent phenomenon for me. It's like trying to remember someone's name. I know I know it, but I don't have it to hand. It's on the, in inverted commas, tip of my tongue. Or I know something's important I need to tell Nick. I've just seen him and I could tell him something important. I can't remember what it is. It would be great just to be able to search histories and that kind of thing.

Speaker A: 00:31:54

By the way, bad news for you. It's going to get worse.

Speaker B: 00:31:56

Yeah, well, exactly. And then the other thing I'd like is some sort of task management, task orchestration thing for managing my thought, my computer time. It's something that would tell me what's the next most important thing I need to think about. Or what is on my list of things I want to think about. So I can start making progress on these thought projects that are always going on.

Speaker A: 00:32:21

It feels to me like what you're saying is that you want to be some sort of autonomous, AI driven computer.

Speaker B: 00:32:29

I'd like to be an AI augmented human.

Speaker A: 00:32:34

I think I might have a solution to Peter's problems. It's called a notebook. It's called pen and paper. I can't help but notice that he's writing on a tablet. Well, exactly. And where does that come from? Yeah, I mean, and that is exactly, I mean, I feel like all of the progress I've ever made in thinking about stuff has been thanks to pen and paper and having tools like, you know, mathematical notation or being able to draw a grid and go, right, oh, that thing. Oh, yeah, there's two dimensions here. Then you get to sort it out. But it's very difficult even to hold a grid in your brain and to think of more than four things that might go in it at once. So, you know, I've got sympathy for those, you know, for our ancestors, pre-Roman ancestors who didn't have cool things like slates and bits of chalk to write stuff down.

Speaker B: 00:33:26

The externalization of stuff onto pen and paper, let's just call it onto information technologies, be that pen and paper or computer. Yeah, that's the only way I think I can make progress. But I've always found with pen and paper, it's messy. I've got several different notebooks on the go. Which notebook's the one I want to have that day? There's no, it's not searchable. It's not in any way linked to what's in my head. I'd like it all to be plugged into my brain, basically, directly.

Speaker D: 00:33:56

Yeah.

Speaker A: 00:33:58

Again, as we often do, we're getting very close to borders as well with all this. Well, indeed.

Speaker B: 00:34:04

Are we done? No, I think we can tie this into a thing that we often think about. Collectively in LF is artificial intelligence more broadly. So we say in particularly in media, not so much in academic literature, there's a very strong tendency to anthropomorphize AI. OK, so people will talk about AI in terms of it thinks such and such. It wants to achieve this thing. It believes another thing or it understands something else. These words, things, wants, believes, understands. They're all things that we do as humans. And we've got a pretty good intuitive sense of what that means. But we apply that concept to AI in lots of very inappropriate ways. And I, this got me thinking again about thinking that we, is this laziness or is this, or do we need some new concepts that we can apply to AI? Because it just, I just wonder, is there like a limit to our capacity for understanding things that means we have to rely on these concepts of which we're familiar? That will mean we'll never be able to understand really how a general artificial intelligence works. And then a subsequent question is, does that then mean that our thing, our intelligence isn't actually all that general? It's actually pretty narrow.

Speaker A: 00:35:48

This is so close. This is, yeah, you think you're an engineer, but you're a theologian, Peter. That's what it feels like to me, which is, that's a compliment, by the way. I think, yeah, there is, we've, I, my feeling is we've got a particular approach to thinking. We've evolved a way of doing it, which also happens to have, for reasons we, nobody really knows, a certain kind of subjective experience associated with it. And it feels, not for everyone, as I understand it, but it feels to me like, you know, it's a combination of imagining visual images and kind of, you know, words and that kind of thing. It's kind of almost sensory, you know, a thing I'm thinking about is almost real, you know, when I'm thinking about it. And I think we're inclined to say that that's what thinking is. But perhaps, you know, what Peter's touching on is, well, actually, maybe you can do thinking in totally different ways. Maybe you can have a machine that thinks without having any subjective experience. Like, it doesn't mean you have to have subjective experience just because, you know, to say that you're doing the same thing as thinking. We struggle, I think, to imagine what that might be like, because there is nothing that it is like, because there is, it's not like any being anything. You know, but it doesn't mean it's not thinking. Just because that's how we do it, it doesn't mean it's true to say that a machine isn't thinking. I'm also not saying it means it is true. What I'm saying is that thinking doesn't have to feel or be like the way that we as humans happen to do it. I think, yeah, I think we get into semantics here as well.

Speaker C: 00:37:37

I mean, not really a meaning of words, but go on. Because I think intelligence is something we think of as a human thing. But then I think there's this other, like performing computational tasks in a systematic way. It bears a very similar resemblance to what problem solving and all these things we associate with thinking looks like. So I think, I kind of see why we would use those kind of anthropomorphizing terms to talk about AI, because it's strikingly similar to a lot of the ways we perform maths or attack problems.

Speaker A: 00:38:18

Absolutely. Computational tasks is something both of you had said early on, well, it seems to be maybe that's a kind of thinking. And the only way we have got to think about thinking is the way we do it. So it's difficult not to anthropomorphize.

Speaker C: 00:38:34

But also we program the machines, right? So the way we think about solving a problem is the way we program them to solve a problem. So like, they're thinking about it the way we think about it, because we built them. Yeah, maybe, maybe, maybe not.

Speaker B: 00:38:49

But in sort of deep neural net recursive learning kind of approaches, it very isn't how we think at all. That's a very sort of brute forcey kind of way.

Speaker C: 00:39:02

But isn't a neural net just a brain?

Speaker A: 00:39:05

Like, it's analogous to a brain, it's very different from a brain. It's like saying, what are the wings? To try and draw, like, because birds fly, and we've designed aeroplanes to fly. It doesn't mean that an aeroplane has feathers or a brain or anything like that. Like, we've managed to replicate the same fundamental thing. From biology. Yeah, but it doesn't mean that it has to share other features with a bird. And I suppose what I'm saying is that if a machine is able to perform the task of thinking, it doesn't mean it necessarily shares any other features, other than producing the output.

Speaker B: 00:39:43

So two black boxes, one with a human and one with an AI producing exactly the same outcomes. What's going on inside those black boxes is very different. Yeah, one black box might not feel anything. It could be different. But it might be the same. Might be the same. It doesn't have to be the same. But it seems extremely unlikely that we could reproduce in code in silicon something that evolution has produced over millions of years in biology. It just feels like it probably feels more likely to me that there are other modes of thinking than the one we have. Than there is just one way of doing it.

Speaker A: 00:40:19

Well, I think we've got a lot of too many things here. We've unopened a big box. Yeah, there's a, yes. Of tricky concepts. A lot of food for thought there. We're going to stop there. So thank you, as always. I thought that was super interesting, but I loved that. I thought Peter was, but I think Peter needs to go to the top of the class. So thank you, as always, for listening to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast. I'm Fraser McGruer. We've been here with Peter Coghill, Nick Hare, and Jordan Fermanis of Aleph. Until next time. Goodbye.