Category: Science

Open letter to Nick Bostrom

Never mind existential risk, what are your politics?

An open letter to Nick Bostrom, Director of The Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University

By Phil Hall


Dear Nick,


I think you should be using H. G. Wells’s version of futurology, the one he explores in his book Anticipations and elsewhere and move away from the narrower, logical-philosophical-statistical definition you seem to be relying on at the moment.


H. G. Wells was political!


Are logic and statistics really the correct basis for a useful futurology? Are they sufficient? Of course they aren’t! Not unless to be a Quant is to be a futurologist. Can you really put a more profound discussion of understanding of the nature of human beings and their society and culture in their environment to one side? There is no ceteris paribus here.
Our psychology, shared needs, expectations, values and cultures shape our world, especially in the time of the anthropocene. They do so far more than ‘science’ or ‘technology’.


Science and technology have no agency. They are not independent actors. Developments in science and technology are mere trajectories based on the culture and values of the people who control the development of science and technology. We haven’t reached a stasis where we can make assumptions about what these are and forecast trends based on abstract technocratic principles.

Science and technology have no agency. They are not independent actors.


We haven’t reached the ‘End of History‘. We are living under capitalism, which is full of contradictions. The market rules, which means the rulers of the market rule. It is impossible for people whose principal aim is profit, to harmonise that motive with rational action for the social good. The two forces are incompatible. The interests of the many and the few are irreconcilable. People who are exploited will always rise up together against the people who exploit them. These forces, science and technology, have no agency in themselves. They are the product of our culture and we have the agency.

Zuckerberg’s Meta.


The uses of technology are too unpredictable to extrapolate. Watch Mark Zuckerberg talk about The Meta, his new company. There is nothing new here. In fact, Facebook is also a great place for discussing politics and collaborating and social organising. A new Facebook called Meta will not, primarily, be about gaming or business meetings or hooking up. Gaming, business meetings and hooking up are just the activities that Zuckerberg values. Neither is Facebook simply a ‘social acid’ meant to dissolve opposition to capitalism in consumption and provide the illusion of connection. as Catherine Liu suggests. Facebook is also a catalyst for collective resistance to exploitation – like the telephone.

The job of economics is to make capitalism work. To identify existential risks to capitalism and work around them and make it function better. That’s not your remit.


I do like your analysis and extrapolations. They do provide insights into Artificial Intelligence and existential risk, but they seem bloodless, and abstract to me. Your insights provide a veneer of objectivity to something deeply subjective; individual and social behaviour. The job of economics is to make capitalism work. To identify existential risks to capitalism and work around them and make it function better. That’s not your job. To me, your insights are far too technophiliac and techno-centric.

high angle photo of robot
Photo by Alex Knight on Pexels.com


Where, in your work, is there evidence of a broader concept of futurology that doesn’t make easy assumptions about the nature of people and society? You seem to ignore many of the insights available to society we can find in sociology, history, anthropology, psychology, literature and art? Where is the evidence of any ‘input’ from these disciplines in your techno-centric analysis? You are the director of The Future of Humanity Institute. Before you try to project the future of humanity, define what you mean by humanity. I challenge you.

Where, in your work, is there evidence of a broader concept of futurology that doesn’t make easy assumptions about the nature of people and society?


The greatest power to transform our society and our environment and to direct our efforts comes from our subjectivity not post facto trend analysis. Statistical correlation only has validity when talking about human society when it demonstrates that it understands human society.


If you love nature and animals and people, you protect them and that can shape everything around you. You spend money in a different ways; on hospitals and schools and not on roads and spaceships. That, in turn, affects existential risk and the nature of the AI we develop. And by AI I don’t mean conscious artificial life, simply advanced, autonomous expert systems.

Before you try to project the future of ‘humanity’ into far futures, define what you mean by humanity, I challenge you.


If profit and power are the motivations of the people in charge, technology takes a different route. Futurology for the Soviets or the fascists was not the same as futurology for capitalism or fascism. Politics shapes our world. Yet you present your findings as if they were apolitical. That’s strange. H. G. Wells was highly political. What are your politics? Behind the techncratic facade, your politics shape your version of the future, just as H. G. Wells’ politics shaped his version of futurology.

You are writing your magnum opus. Kindly make your politics explicit in the prologue to that magnum opus.


Kind regards,


Philip R. Hall

Opposition to Avi Loeb’s unbiased, empirical inquiry

                      

Critical and logical thinking is not genuine Smart Thinking, it is merely a form of computation

By Bryan Greetham

In the film Free Guy a bank teller discovers he is actually just a character in a video game. This forms the basis of a question that many have asked. From Descartes ‘evil demon’, to Hilary Putnam’s ‘Brain in a Vat’ and the film The Matrix, all of them pose the same question: are you a real person living in a concrete reality or do you just inhabit an elaborate computer simulation, the product of programmers, who are able to control your every thought and sense experience?

However, despite the sinister implications of this, many of us are all too willing to hand over our minds in the same way to malicious programmers whose only aim is to control our thoughts for their own advantage. We live in an attention economy, where the most coveted product on any website is ‘click bait’ that draws and captures inattentive minds long enough to sell advertising space. People spend hours every day, whether they are standing at bus stops, walking in the streets or having lunch in cafes, just staring into screens. Aldous Huxley said, ‘Most of one’s life…is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself thinking.’1

In one study, subjects were asked to sit in a chair and do nothing but think. So difficult did some people find it to be alone with their own thoughts that, just to break the tedium, they took the opportunity to give themselves mild electric shocks, which they had earlier said they would pay to avoid. Of the men two-thirds gave themselves painful jolts during a 15 minute spell of solitude. One gave himself 190 shocks. Of the women a quarter gave themselves shocks. In 11 separate studies researchers found that people hated being left to think, regardless of age, education, income or the amount they use smartphones or social media.

acquiring knowledge or thinking logically can be done passively, almost as if the thinking part of you is not there

But what actually amounts to genuine thinking? Jacob Bronowski, who worked with John von Neumann, the creator of game theory, once suggested to von Neumann, during a taxi ride in London, that chess is a good example of a game. Von Neumann responded, ‘No, no … chess is not a game. Chess is a well-defined form of computation.’2 And this is exactly what is so much that passes as thinking in our use of the term. Critical and logical thinking, for example, is not so much thinking, but a form of computation. If you work according to the rules and follow the right procedure, you will arrive at the right answer.

Compare that with genuine, smart thinking. In this there is a dynamic component. To say that you are thinking means that you are actively processing ideas, whereas acquiring knowledge or thinking logically can be done passively, almost as if the thinking part of you is not there. Otto Frisch, who worked with the Nobel Prize winning physicist Niels Bohr, explained that Bohr never trusted a purely logical argument: ‘“No, no,” he would say, “You are not thinking; you are just being logical.”’3 Thinking means going beyond what you know, or what you can show logically, to discover something new.

Genuine thinking starts with the epistemological assumption that right answers are designed, not found by just following the rules.

Genuine thinking starts with the epistemological assumption that right answers are designed, not found by just following the rules. It is all about generating new ideas, creating new concepts, designing novel solutions to problems and producing new insights. What we know is shaped by the act of knowing. It is not out there just waiting to be discovered. This has surprising implications. Much of science involves what Kuhn describes as ‘normal science’, where a paradigm is accepted and scientists are merely working out the details. It is a form of computation: nothing new is being discovered that isn’t already predicted by the paradigm.

In 2017, there appeared in the sky ‘Oumuamua’, what Avi Loeb describes as an interstellar object that was briefly visiting our solar system. In July 2021 the Galileo Project was publicly announced declaring that humans can no longer ignore the possible existence of Extraterrestrial Technological Civilizations, and that science should not dogmatically reject potential extraterrestrial explanations because of social stigma or cultural preferences, factors which are not conducive to the scientific method of unbiased, empirical inquiry. For good reason this project was named after Galileo: its aim is to think as genuine thinkers and go beyond what we know.

What we know is shaped by the act of knowing. It is not out there just waiting to be discovered.

Beyond scientific theory this has implications for all those whose thinking has been systematically taken over by what they read on social media. Locked within their own universe of facts and self-reinforcing arguments, they are intellectually insulated from any evidence that might threaten what they believe. It even applies, perhaps more widely, to all those who are committed to political ideologies.

These, too, are engaged in mere computation, applying what they consider to be self-evident rules and principles that determine what they consider to be relevant and true. In such a world communication is no longer possible, because there is no shared reality; each person has retreated into their own safe world of predictable computation. They lack the abiding qualities of all genuine thinkers: pragmatism, an open mind, the ability to set aside what they would like to believe, play devil’s advocate, ask naïve questions, generate new ideas, create new concepts, and design solutions to the most perplexing problems.

As with the resistance to Avi Loeb’s hypothesis of an interstellar visitor, there is no room for the unexpected, the radical hypothesis or the hitherto inconceivable connections between ideas, like those Einstein made between mass and energy. After all, you aren’t thinking, you’re just engaged in a form of computation. Perhaps the ability to think freely, pragmatically, free from the structured certainties of a political ideology, cultural influences or a ruling scientific paradigm, is the ultimate freedom we have. As Immanuel Kant said ‘Dare to know’4, dare to have the courage to think for yourself. 

1 Huxley, Aldous, ‘Green Tunnels’ in Mortal Coils (1922) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1955), p. 114.

2 Poundstone, William, Prisoner’s Dilemma (New York: Doubleday, 1992), p. 6.   

3 Frisch, O.R., What Little I Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 92.

4 Kant, Immanuel, ‘Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment?’, Berlinische Monatsschrift, December 1784, pp. 481-94.

Bryan Greetham was born in Faversham, Kent, in England. He was educated at the University of Kent, where he gained a BA Hons in History, and at the University of Sussex, where he completed his MA in Intellectual History. He was awarded his PhD at the University of Newcastle in Australia for his work in moral thinking.

Bryan is the author of How to Write Better Essays, How to Write your Undergraduate Dissertation, both on writing and thinking skills, Philosophy, an introduction to philosophy for undergraduates, Thinking Skills for Professionals and his latest book, Smart Thinking, all published by Palgrave, Macmillan.

In the end, are religion and science compatible?

Does the answer lie in the ideas of Teilhard de Chardin?

By Matthew  Taylor

In 2014, Pope Francis confirmed that the idea of the expanding universe (the Big Bang) and Evolution are both true and compatible with Christian belief. At a meeting at the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy for the Sciences, Pope Francis said that God;

… created human beings and let them develop according to the internal laws that he gave to each one so they would reach their fulfilment. Evolution in nature is not inconsistent with the notion of creation, because evolution requires the creation of beings that evolve

(BBC News, 2014)

These comments by the Pope provoked debate. The supporters of the papal statement viewed it as a sign of the church progressing. In contrast, many conservative commentators, including prominent creationists, criticised and opposed the Pope’s comments.

The Hubble Ultra Deep Field, photo NASA and the European Space Agency


The idea that Creation, the Big Bang and evolution are compatible with each other has become increasingly popular within progressive and mainstream Christianity. Christianity is adapting to the 21st century. In fact, in a 2019 interview on Newsnight, renowned New Atheist Richard Dawkins expressed his satisfaction that the majority of Church of England bishops now believe in evolution, dismissing overly literal interpretations of the bible, like the story of Adam and Eve.

The overlap between the Creation and the Big Bang is even promoted in popular culture. For example in the 2014 film, Noah, there is a sequence where the audience is shown the Big Bang and evolution while the Book of Genesis is recited.

It is Georges Lemaître, a Roman Catholic priest and astronomer, who is credited with being the first to suggest that the universe is expanding.

Many people think religion and science can coexist amicably. Evidently, for the church to be relevant in contemporary society, it must adapt and incorporate new scientific ideas. Those who think the Creation, the Big Bang and evolution are compatible have their heroes. It is Georges Lemaître, a Roman Catholic priest and astronomer who is credited with being the first to suggest that the universe is expanding. Lemaître is widely accepted as having founded the theory of the ‘Big Bang’.

In my previous article, Towards A New British Liberation Theology , I discussed how the church needed to adapt to an increasingly secular society by adopting the progressive ideas of Liberation Theology. Religion and science coexisting in closer harmony is also a part of the solution. By accepting and incorporating the important ideas of science, the church stays relevant, and as a result, it can engage more effectively in debates surrounding science and the use and abuse of technology.

From the time of the Enlightenment, science and reason have been portrayed by its advocates as being superior to religion and in opposition to it. According to the enlightenment thinkers, religion would become extinct and science and reason would reign over the world. This legacy is alive today, and reflected in the fact that European society is becoming more and more secular.

More religious people should accept and adopt proven scientific discoveries and facts, rather than opposing them.

It appears then, that the predictions of the Enlightenment could be accurate. But religion and science do not have to be at loggerheads with each other at all. One of them does not have to win out over the other. They can be compatible and coexist. There is no need for false enmity. More religious people should accept and adopt proven scientific discoveries and facts, rather than opposing them.

The 19th century saw great advancement in science and technology and in all fields. Unfortunately, the initial response of the church was to reject modernity. Instead of deferring to science, the First Vatican Council (1869-1870) reaffirmed papal infallibility. In the 19th century, fundamentalist Christianity started up in North America and gave birth to America’s powerful Bible Belt. Many people in the US Bible Belt, notoriously, oppose the idea of evolution.

Unfortunately, the initial response of the church was to reject modernity.

In the end, are religion and science compatible? What theology, philosophy or theory can align them both with each other? Who can achieve this task? Perhaps the answer lies in the work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955). Teilhard was a French Roman Catholic priest, theologian and a scientist and palaeontologist. Teilhard also believed in the idea of evolution. Teilhard worked towards establishing a creation theology that reconciled religion and science and modernised the church’s outlook.

When they were first published, Teilhard’s views were divisive and rejected by the Roman Catholic church, even resulting in a posthumous condemnation in 1962 by the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith. The Congregation accused him of doctrinal error.

In the 19th century, fundamentalist Christianity started up in North America and gave birth to America’s powerful Bible Belt. Many people there, notoriously, oppose the idea of evolution.

Then, slowly, within the church, attitudes towards Teilhard became more positive. Teilhard’s views on reconciling Catholicism with science may have influenced Pope Francis’s 2014 comments that evolution is consistent with creation. Meanwhile, the majority of scientists remain highly critical of Teilhard’s ideas. The majority reject these ideas outright, dismissing them as metaphysics.

Teilhard is not the only theologian to try to reconcile religion and science and his ideas are not the only ones available. Nevertheless, Teilhard has been highly influential in this debate about religion and science and he has won the respect of prominent church leaders over the years. He should be given greater recognition.

According to Teilhard, Homo Sapiens are not the final outcome of the evolutionary process.

Teilhard’s best known theory is that of the Omega Point. The Omega Point, according to Draper (2015) is a supposed future event where, eventually, the universe containing all matter, energy and thought will reach a point of divine unification. Teilhard outlines his theory in a book published posthumously in 1959, The Phenomenon of Man.

In Teilhard’s version, evolution is a progression that starts with matter and energy. That matter and energy transform into life and all life will evolve into a state of divine consciousness. According to Teilhard, Homo Sapiens are not the final outcome of the evolutionary process. Instead, life causes a cerebral layer to come into being in the form of thought. This produces what Teilhard calls the Noosphere.

Proponents of the Singularity cult borrow heavily from Teilhard de Chardin’s ideas

The evolutionary process continues and the Noosphere gains in strength, eventually becoming the Omega Point, the moment when all creation is united into a divine consciousness. In other words, for Teilhard, evolution is a work in progress until it reaches its final destination – unity with God. For Teilhard, as Hickey (2016) points out, Jesus Christ is the Logos and draws all things to him. In Christology, Jesus is the Word of God. The ‘Word became flesh’ (John 1:14, NRSV). By this logic, Jesus is God and he symbolises the future divine unification.

Pope Francis’s use of the word fulfillment in the context of evolution, strongly suggests the influence of Teilhard de Chardin.

Teilhard blends theology and science. His intention is to create a new Christianity that can coexist with modern science and that draws from science. However, Teilhard’s theory departs from traditional Christian beliefs. Mainstream Christianity believes that Jesus is God come to earth to atone for sins of humanity, whilst Teilhard’s Christianity focuses heavily on the cosmos and how eventually everything will unite in God.

Mainstream Christianity looks forward to a future event called the Second Coming of Christ, however this religious idea does not have anything to say about the fate of the cosmos, so perhaps there is room for Teilhard’s ideas in traditional Christianity.

… for Teilhard, evolution is a work in progress until it reaches its final destination – unity with God.

Many of my progressive Christian friends reconcile religion and science in cosmic terms in a more straightforward way. For them, the trigger that caused the Big Bang was God. This is a traditional, commonly held Christian view. They find no obvious contradiction between their Christianity and the concept of an expanding universe. Perhaps, Pope Francis also takes this simpler view. However, Pope Francis’s use of the word fulfillment in the context of evolution, suggests the influence of Teilhard de Chardin. Teilhard is an influential figure.

There are different ways to reconcile religion with science. This article does not argue in favour of Teilhard’s ideas or against them, rather it argues that Christians and non-Christians alike should take Teilhard’s ideas into account in their conversations and give him more recognition.

References

All Bible Quotations are from NRSV

Aronofsky, D. (Director). (2014). Noah [Film]. Regency Enterprises, Protoza Pictures.

BBC News. (2014). Pope Francis: Big Bang and evolution confirm God exists. Retrieved from: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-29799534

 BBC Newsnight. (2019). Richard Dawkins: Religion shouldn’t be passed from parents to children. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQUN_6XKKVs

Draper, L. (2015). Could artificial intelligence kill us off? Retrieved from https://www.newsweek.com/could-artificial-intelligence-kill-us-off-329208

Hickey, M. (2016). Get to the End: A Catholic’s View of the End Times. London: UPA. ISBN 9780761867333.

de Chardin, P.T. (1959). The Phenomenon of Man [sic] (B. Wall, Trans.). Glasgow: William Collins, Sons. (Original work published in 1955).  

Taylor, M. (2021). Towards a New British Liberation Theology. Ars Notoria: Humane Socialism. Retrieved from: https://arsnotoria.com/2021/04/14/towards-a-new-british-liberation-theology/


Matthew Taylor lives in North Wales. He has a Bachelor of Arts in Religious Studies from University of Chester. Matthew has an interest in the humanities and current affairs and which he writes on. He is an active member of Christian, voluntary and campaign groups.

Will Eugenia Kuyda Game Us?

If capitalism really gets hold of software that can manipulate human behaviour, then game over.

By Phil Hall

Soviet Science Fiction authors, when they were not Communist Party suck ups, were often serious people, scientists. At the very least they were social scientists. In one story written by a Soviet author an AI becomes sentient. The story explains how: the computer is incredibly powerful, it has many sensory inputs and it has an effective iterative learning programme that adjusts at every go round to create a better representation of the world.

Easy to imagine, hard to design. This is was basically the thought underlying Demis Hassabis’ DeepMind and the results have been spectacular for games that can be abstracted into axiomatic systems. Computer software systems like DeepMind have increasingly higher performances. In the future they will win any game that can be abstracted and defined according to a set of identifiable rules.

What can be gamed?

Well, tumor imaging, protein folding and plenty of medical applications could be ‘gamed’. Everything in increasing complexity that exists in physical reality right up to modelling whole world weather systems. Modelling Gaia itself is a prospect.

O.K., these future applications will require more than the Lenovo Carbon 2016 ThinkPad Hassabis ran AlphaGo on. They will require parallel-computing, quantum computing – heaven knows what else. Moore’s Law must hold for a few more decades.

results have been spectacular for games that can be abstracted into axiomatic systems.

Ultimately, this idea of AI is just about pattern recognition and computing systems based on optimality. Now, these are the ideas that underlie a Bongard Test, but not necessarily a Turing test. If you could trick someone into thinking they are talking to a human, then that’s a different kind of game.

Linguists and philosophers usually don’t agree with electronic enginers and computer software engineers about what can and cannot be defined as intelligence and consciousness. For philosophers, consciousness is something we will only understand when we fully understand the workings of the human mind.

But, people attracted to working with computers are, on the whole, empiricists. They care about results. So, if you make the mistake of saying that chess and Go are characteristic abilities of the human being, then you are just setting up skittles for these new empiricists to knock down.

DeepMind wins at chess and Go. Is it intelligent? Of course it is. Is it conscious? Of course it isn’t. Does the definition of intelligence include a definition of consciousness? It depends on who is defining intelligence.

Can Human Beings be Gamed?

This is the conceit behind the film Ex-Machina. Is there the example of an actual social robot? Well, in fact, there is a programme designed by yet another Russian turned American, Eugenia Kuyda, who has designed a companion chat bot, Replika. There is also the famous social ‘robot’ Sophia. Now, if an algorithm tells a chatbot to produce a sentence that cannot be distinguished from a sentence produced by a human, then can the chatbot be considered to have a human-like intelligence or consciousness?

The chatbot, of course, has no awareness because it is part of a machine, an inanimate object. In an example used by the linguist and philosopher, John Searle in his lecture at Google: just because a pen makes marks on paper doesn’t mean the pen knows how to write. Neither the pen, nor the chatbot are alive.

However, for many of our superstitious ancestors – and quite a few of our superstitious, technology worshiping contemporaries – a social robot might seem to be alive – though I feel Socrates would have seen through the smokescreen of words generated by a non-sentient machine pretty quickly.

Put your consciousness in a machine and it will not live.

For me, Kuyda has borrowed an idea from Douglas Hofstadter, one that he discusses in his book, The Mind’s I. Hofstadter mourns his wife, who died of cancer. His idea is that he somehow preserved a working copy of his wife that lives on inside his mind. Kyuda, who also lost someone close to her, attempts to operationalise Hofstadter’s insight.

She cannot actually do this, because she cannot capture the mind of her departed friend, but her insight is that AI can develop a working model of its user by interacting constantly with the user. This has become her business model for developing companion robots.

Imagine the following, rather anodyne, conversation between an AI and a human.

Hi, I am feeling sad.

Really? Why?

I’ve lost my credit card.

So why does that make you sad?

Well, I was planning on going shopping this weekend.

Why don’t you just go to the bank?

I’m really busy.

And so on .. and it’s hard to tell who is the AI and who is the human and which words are produced by a consciousness and which words are produced by a machine. All the same, even if the machine could trick you into thinking that it was human, the machine would not be alive in any way. The Turing test is a test for human-like intelligence not human-like consciousness.

Put your consciousness in a machine and it will not live. It might say some of the things you say and do some the things you do, and comfort your relatives and friends, but it will be inanimate.

Eugenia Kuyda has a secret strategy to win the ultimate game of conversation. The strategy is to use Theory of Mind. Except, again, the strategy is merely empirical. It focuses on outcomes, regardless of philosophical truth or insight. For an empiricist a zombie machine is, to all intents and purposes, alive.

For an empiricist a zombie machine is, to all intents and purposes, alive.

To have a conversation with a human we need to have a theory of what is in another person’s mind. The robot develops a theory of mind by finding out everything it can about the person it talks to. For example, the robot tries to find associations in the mind if the human that it interacts with regularly makes between people, events, places and emotions. Perhaps the chatbot studies the subject’s Facebook and online activity. Then it deploys this knowledge in conversation. It knows the name of your mother. It knows that your mother is dead. It knows that this probably affected you badly.

Imagine that, in addition, the companion robot has a vast database of hard observable knowledge about you. It knows everything that you have actually said and done. It has a record of every place you have ever been. It has real input for every moment of your life. It tracks every action you have taken. It has a record of all your vital statistics.

Now that the AI has a pretty good theory of what’s in your mind it might will be able to anticipate many of the things that you would do.

This is the problem we face with software like this. Now that the AI has a pretty good theory of what’s in your mind it might will be able to anticipate many of the things that you would do. The robot will be able to game you; it could ‘outplay’ you.

The so called AI, the zombie code, might not actually be intelligent in the sense that it is conscious. The robot is certainly not alive. However, the machine will have enough information on you to predict your next move with some degree of accuracy. This is the underlying fear of non-sentient AI.

If capitalism’s elite gets hold of software that can game humanity, if Kuyda succeeds then game over. We will see the start of a thousand year Reich. It is interesting to note that Eugenia Kuyda has no Wikipedia entry herself – almost every famous person has one – and she seems to have done her best to scrub information about herself from the Internet. Clearly, she has no intention of being gamed.

Phil Hall is a college lecturer. He is a committed socialist and humanitarian. Phil was born in South Africa where his parents were in the ANC. There, his mother was imprisoned and his father was the first journalist from a national paper to be banned. Phil grew up in East Africa and settled in Kingston-upon-Thames. He has also lived and worked in the Ukraine, Spain, Mexico, Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi. Phil has blogged for the Guardian, the Morning Star and several other publications and he has written stories for The London Magazine. He started Ars Notoria in May 2020.

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