We don’t need no stinkin’ awareness

Consciousness is inference Karl Friston once wrote. A useful idea which can take us along some strange but strangely familiar paths.

For example, anyone disposed to accept a statement passed on by a social consensus or political party may easily sidestep the need to verify the statement via inference. When inference isn’t needed, neither is a conscious awareness that the statement only relies on consensus.

The consensus says – We don’t need no stinkin’ inference.

If inference is consciousness and consciousness is inference then to control inference is to control consciousness. Those who merely accept a consensus may not be fully conscious of good alternatives.

The consensus says – We don’t need no stinkin’ alternatives.

A slogan or mantra may be crude and inaccurate as a statement about the real world, but simple enough to bypass inference. In bypassing inference, awareness of the crudity and inaccuracy is also likely to be bypassed.

The consensus says – We don’t need no stinkin’ awareness.

In this stupid world...

In this stupid world most people never consider that a thing is good to be done unless it is done by their own set.

George Eliot - Middlemarch (1871-72)

Moving on from George Eliot's observation, we have Microsoft Copilot's answer to this question  –

"what is Karl Friston's free energy principle" –

Karl Friston's Free Energy Principle is a fascinating framework that explains how living systems, like the brain, maintain order and adapt to their environment. At its core, it suggests that organisms minimize a quantity called "free energy," which is a measure of surprise or uncertainty about the world. By doing so, they can predict and respond to their surroundings more effectively.

This principle integrates ideas from neuroscience, physics, and Bayesian inference. It proposes that the brain acts as an "inference engine," constantly updating its internal models of the world based on sensory input. By minimizing the difference between its predictions and actual sensory data, the brain reduces uncertainty and maintains a stable state.

The Free Energy Principle has been applied to various fields, including understanding perception, action, learning, and even mental disorders. It's a unifying theory that offers insights into how biological systems resist disorder and adapt to their environments.


As the AI system says, it is a fascinating framework. It may be a neuroscientific framework, but in practical human terms it is not dissimilar to the George Eliot quote above or B. F. Skinner’s outlook on stimulus, response and reinforcement. No doubt Socrates took a similar view of group rhetoric.

To take just one example, we see Friston's framework in our political parties where individuals from the governing classes place great reliance on measuring surprise or uncertainty via the approval of their peers, not the approval of voters. Collective responsibility they call it, but this is misleading. Instead it is the minimising of surprise or uncertainty within a government peer group, this being the group and the group rhetoric which count.   

Traditional political divisions ensure that the approval of voters has secondary significance at best, one reason why we cannot expect political parties to provide competent political oversight of the permanent administration - their measure of competence is not ours and as things stand, it often can’t be. A global outlook deepens the division with national voters.

It may be possible to remedy this by greater feedback from voters such as the use of a referendum to approve any significant government policy. This would involve voters in those individual measures of surprise or uncertainty within the political classes. The nature of collective responsibility would then be changed. Opinion polls achieve this to some small degree, but the effect is weak compared to what could be a simple 'Yes' or 'No' in a binding referendum.

Friston’s framework also explains the position of reality-bound sceptics who find themselves outside certain measures of surprise or uncertainty when reality provides more powerful measures. In the sceptic's world, scepticism does minimise surprise or uncertainty. Believers minimise surprise or uncertainty by simply denying it. 

A practical example of this is the recent failure of radical gender politics in the UK. The sudden legal clarification may have been a surprise, but the ultimate failure of radical gender rhetoric was probably not a surprise to a large percentage of the population. Most were probably sceptics on this issue, even if the consequences of open discourse were uncertain.

To expand the example of UK political parties, it is possibly too optimistic to see Reform as a powerful reforming political party. Its elected members will adopt at least some of the measures they encounter within the general government model used to minimise surprise or uncertainty. Compromise will be driven by the need for worthwhile communication between Reform and the government machine - compromise to minimise surprise or uncertainty.

 In this stupid world...

If machines are already conscious

Not to be taken too seriously, but a previous post presented Karl Friston’s idea that consciousness is not a thing but a process, the process of inference.

Conscious processing is about inferring the causes of sensory states, and thereby navigating the world to elude surprises. While natural selection performs inference by selecting among different creatures, consciousness performs inference by selecting among different states of the same creature (in particular, its brain). There is a vast amount of anatomical and physiological evidence in support of this notion. If one regards the brain as a self-evidencing organ of inference, almost every one of its anatomical and physiological aspects seems geared to minimise surprise.

Karl Friston

As far as I know this isn’t Friston’s view, but if his idea is sound, then surely some machines are already conscious because inference is one of the things they do. From complex inputs they infer the best output. It may be a remote, alien and robotic consciousness and it may not be intelligent as we understand it, but it can be adaptive with the ability to infer and learn enough to improve the next inference. Not all of us can do that consistently.

Many, most or almost all people may dismiss Friston’s idea either because they don’t like it anyway or because it can be adapted towards such a tricky conclusion. One obvious reason to dismiss the idea is that machines merely follow algorithms and following an algorithm is not the same as being conscious. It’s a good argument and deeply convincing because we do feel as if we humans are fundamentally different from machines. We feel as if we could do this or we could do that in ways which are not mechanical.

How about the political convictions of Jeremy Corbyn and his followers? In an interesting sense they follow political algorithms and that may be part of the chap’s appeal. His concept of government is essentially a socialist algorithm and his response to any political input is restricted to whatever the algorithm allows. Even the way he assimilates input is dictated by the algorithm.

Following a similar line of thought, it could be said that Theresa May’s problems are caused by her following no obvious algorithm. One could even claim that this is the problem with politics, it places too much weight on algorithms and too little on pragmatic flexibility.

None of this need be taken too seriously, but there are at least two reasons why we might play around with the idea of machine consciousness however dubious it feels.

Firstly the obvious one – forewarned is forearmed. Many of us must regard artificial intelligence with at least some degree of trepidation, possibly mixed with scorn, scepticism or a hard-nosed tendency to dismiss it all as hype. It may be more than hype though. If so then it may be as well to adjust now and not have the adjustment forced upon us in the near future.

For example, if self-driving vehicles ever take to public roads, and it is not certain that they will, but if they do then one might say that these vehicles are able to drive themselves because they are conscious. They constantly infer the current state of the road from a range of sensory inputs and act on that inference - geared to minimise surprise. Not only that but they do it within an unpredictable environment – just as we do.

Admit this and the possibility of machine consciousness makes some kind of sense, if only as a means to assess any threats it may pose. There is an important sense in which self-driving vehicles are more aware than human drivers, a sense in which they are more conscious of their environment, a sense in which they are much more conscious of their environment.

Secondly a linked problem – the wider issues of automation and employment. As we all know automation kills off old ways of working and consigns old forms of employment to history. This should not be a problem if new jobs appear, jobs we probably haven’t thought of yet. Or so we are often told.

However, automation via conscious machines may be different and for that reason the new jobs may not appear or they may be inaccessible to many people. A key problem could be the rate of progress. In time, and that time may be now, conscious machines may acquire new areas of expertise more quickly, cheaply and comprehensively than their human competitors. Million may find themselves out-competed by conscious machines.

I mean – look around you. How unlikely is it?

It is abduction all the way down

But fortunately not that kind of abduction. 

A few weeks ago Aeon published a fascinating article by Karl Friston, but first of all it may be worthwhile to see what Wikipedia says about the man who wrote it.

Karl Friston pioneered and developed the single most powerful technique for analysing the results of brain imaging studies and unravelling the patterns of cortical activity and the relationship of different cortical areas to one another. Currently over 90% of papers published in brain imaging use his method (SPM or Statistical Parametric Mapping) and this approach is now finding more diverse applications, for example, in the analysis of EEG and MEG data. His method has revolutionized studies of the human brain and given us profound insights into its operations. None has had as major an influence as Friston on the development of human brain studies in the past twenty-five years.

In which case we may take it that Friston is no professional waffler. However, it is not easy to summarise his article because there are a number of interwoven strands, but his starting point is to focus on processes rather than things.

I have a confession. As a physicist and psychiatrist, I find it difficult to engage with conversations about consciousness. My biggest gripe is that the philosophers and cognitive scientists who tend to pose the questions often assume that the mind is a thing, whose existence can be identified by the attributes it has or the purposes it fulfils.

But in physics, it’s dangerous to assume that things ‘exist’ in any conventional sense. Instead, the deeper question is: what sorts of processes give rise to the notion (or illusion) that something exists?

To accept consciousness as a process rather than a thing is not at all difficult and many people may do that anyway, but from this simple adjustment to our thinking some remarkable conclusions follow.   

I hope to show you that nature can drum up reasons without actually having them for herself. In what follows, I’m going to argue that things don’t exist for reasons, but certain processes can nonetheless be cast as engaged in reasoning. I use ‘reasoning’ here to mean explanations that arise from inference or abduction – that is, trying to account for observations in terms of latent causes, rules or principles.

This perspective on process leads us to an elegant, if rather deflationary, story about why the mind exists. Inference is actually quite close to a theory of everything – including evolution, consciousness, and life itself. It is abduction all the way down.

Friston then moves on to the oddity of life as repetitive, self-organising behaviour which as he says, seems contrary to how the universe usually behaves.

Complex systems are self-organising because they possess attractors. These are cycles of mutually reinforcing states that allow processes to achieve a point of stability, not by losing energy until they stop, but through what’s known as dynamic equilibrium. An intuitive example is homeostasis. If you’re startled by a predator, your heartbeat and breathing will speed up, but you’ll automatically do something to restore your cardiovascular system to a calmer state (following the so-called ‘fight or flight’ response). Any time there’s a deviation from the attractor, this triggers flows of thoughts, feelings and movements that eventually take you back to your cycle of attracting, familiar states. In humans, all the excitations of our body and brain can be described as moving towards our attractors, that is, towards our most probable states.

A little further on we get to a crucial point in the whole piece.

It’s at this point that we can talk about inference, the process of figuring out the best principle or hypothesis that explains the observed states of that system we call ‘the world’. Technically, inference entails maximising the evidence for a model of the world. Because we are obliged to maximise evidence, we are – effectively – making inferences about the world using ourselves as a model. That’s why every time you have a new experience, you engage in some kind of inference to try to fit what’s happening into a familiar pattern, or to revise your internal states so as to take account of this new fact. This is just the kind of process a statistician goes through in trying to decide whether she needs new rules to account for the spread of a disease, or whether the collapse of a bank ought to affect the way she models the economy.

Now we can see why attractors are so crucial. An attracting state has a low surprise and high evidence. Complex systems therefore fall into familiar, reliable cycles because these processes are necessarily engaged in validating the principle that underpins their own existence. Attractors push systems to fall into predictable states and thereby reinforce the model that the system has generated of its world. A failure of this surprise minimising, self-evidencing, inferential behaviour means the system will decay into surprising, unfamiliar states – until it no longer exists in any meaningful way. Attractors are the product of processes engaging in inference to summon themselves into being. In other words, attractors are the foundation of what it means to be alive.

As suggested above, there is little point in trying to summarise Friston's article, not because it is too difficult but because all the steps are worth following. However, one more quote may give a flavour of the whole piece.

Applying the same thinking to consciousness suggests that consciousness must also be a process of inference. Conscious processing is about inferring the causes of sensory states, and thereby navigating the world to elude surprises. While natural selection performs inference by selecting among different creatures, consciousness performs inference by selecting among different states of the same creature (in particular, its brain). There is a vast amount of anatomical and physiological evidence in support of this notion. If one regards the brain as a self-evidencing organ of inference, almost every one of its anatomical and physiological aspects seems geared to minimise surprise.

So consciousness is a process of navigating the world to elude surprises. That at least is no surprise, as indeed it shouldn't be if Friston is right.

The EU and low-energy voters

We all seem to have a collection of comfort zones where experiences are aligned not with the real world but with one of our comfort zones. A comfort zone is where we go for our opinions, our world view and our personal philosophy. It is much easier than brain work, just ask a Cabinet Minister.

There are political zones, religious zones, family zones, comedy zones, sport zones, pub zones, employment zones, book zones, environment zones, music zones, art zones, blog zones and so on and so on. There are even imaginary comfort zones reserved for other people such as enemy zones, often populated with imaginary people.

All these zones offer the subtle and strongly addictive comforts of low-energy thinking. In return we give our allegiance to the zone together with its myths, stories, truths, lies, language, social benefits and important ambiguities. In real life nobody actually has to do much brain work – it isn’t compulsory. We all have the low-energy option of comfort zones.

If answers have already been supplied and accepted into a comfort zone then not thinking is more efficient than thinking. This is how we would expect our brains to work, efficiently. Brain work is work, the energy has to come from somewhere. From a survival point of view we would expect our brains to use as little energy as possible consistent with survival. This is how the natural world works, through the path of least energy.

A great deal of human thought may be drivel, but if it is low energy drivel, does not threaten survival and attracts a socially significant consensus then the net survival effect may be strongly positive. Consensus promotes social cohesion which in turn promotes survival.

So we may worship the most ludicrous gods, but if doing so promotes social cohesion then the overall survival effect may be positive. In which case it pays to worship the gods and explain the natural world through their supposed actions. Even the most abject drivel can be socially effective by creating and maintaining social bonds. 

Our leaders have always understood the value of low-energy drivel designed to appeal to low-energy voters. The pro-EU campaign for the UK’s forthcoming referendum will rely on herding low-energy voters into what the EU has become, a low-energy comfort zone. There is no real defence against it either. The low-energy voter was bound to be the Achilles' heel of democracy.

The totalitarian within us

A recent Sunday found us walking the hills above Matlock. For some reason lost in the mists of time, Matlock attracts hordes of motorcyclists, especially on a fine day and especially on a Sunday.

The rumble of exhausts seems continuous. Even high up on the hill it was loud. Low frequency sound carries and motorcyclists seem to love it. At street level it can drown out a conversation. Looking down on yet another stream of big blokes on big machines it momentarily seemed ridiculous, excessive in the something should be done sense...

...but not for long. I was once a motorcyclist myself and even now I fancy a ride on a big beast of a bike. Not through Matlock though. Yet the worm of intolerance was there right enough, poking a scowling head out of its little hole when the rumble became particularly loud.

All of us seem to have these worms of intolerance, the inner totalitarian who would ban even the most innocuous activity. Politics thrives on it, but where does it come from, this totalitarian worm? Why has it become such an integral feature of modern life?

A fundamental aspect of human behaviour is the way we follow whatever path seems to lead to the minimum number of surprises. It’s a survival trait. When confronted with a range of possibilities we seem to be programmed to seek the safest and that is the one with the lowest likelihood of springing surprises. We minimise the number of situations where we may have to adapt in unexpected ways.

It’s why our ancestors formed tribes, worshipped gods, built castles, made laws, formed treaties, developed medicines and generally tried to insure themselves against all manner of eventualities. It’s why we are suckers for an infinite number of promised lands where punters supposedly live in a state of bliss and perfect safety.

The sinister link with totalitarian government is obvious. Totalitarian madness  is what we get when ruling castes rigorously root out potential surprises as a key element of their political schema and their own survival. That’s the problem, when our leaders and their senior functionaries aim to minimise surprises – all surprises - everywhere.

Doesn’t work forever of course. With totalitarian government we lose the ability to adapt and surprises become more dangerous to the rigid structures built to keep them out. Eventually a fatal combination of surprises leads to collapse, we have to adapt all over again and in so doing we pave the way for another bout of totalitarian control.

If so, then the most interesting question is where are we in the eternal totalitarian cycle? Pretty obvious I’d say.

We are on the that part of the cycle where totalitarian plans, schemes and laws are spewing all over us until we don’t know if we can get through a whole day without breaking some law. It may be a long climb to the peak though. That pesky adaptability keeps us going for a long time.

The key point seems to be that we can do nothing about it, nothing whatsoever. The ebb and flow of totalitarian rule is a feature of our mental biochemistry. We may have big brains with amazing capabilities, but the inexorable logic of personal safety always seems to screw us up.

It appears that we are unable to choose a path which is likely to lead us to more surprises than the alternative. Our biochemistry just doesn’t allow it. How could it? This is the totalitarian within us and until we untangle it, understand it and learn how to veto its imperatives, until we learn not to seek safety at any cost then the cycle is bound to continue.

In short, we sample the world to ensure our predictions become a self-fulfilling prophecy and surprises are avoided. In this view, perception is enslaved by action to provide veridical predictions (more formally, to make the freeenergy a tight bound on surprise) that guides active sampling of the sensorium.
Karl Friston

Burying surprises

source

If we pursue the path of fewest surprises, and according to Karl Friston we do, then it explains why we put such a vast amount of effort into burying them before they have a chance to surprise us.

Surprises in this sense are confounding evidence or experiences – those which offer a serious challenge to a narrative, doctrine or other preconception. For most of us, such surprises are upsetting experiences. They suggest that the world is not as we supposed. So we bury them before they occur. 

Usually the path of fewest surprises is an all-encompassing narrative, set of doctrines or merely an attitude within which surprises are virtually impossible. That’s the main function of many types of belief – to bury surprises before they upset us.

Take life after death as an extreme example. For those who believe they will somehow live on after death, failing to do so would be an extremely unpleasant surprise. Yet by a stroke of ancient ingenuity, this surprise remains forever buried beyond the grave. Surprise is impossible, worthwhile argument equally impossible. Where would one find a surprising argument against life after death?

It is much the same with a vast array of other beliefs, from organised religion to politics to economics to climate change. Surprises are buried before they occur by narrative flexibility and the endless resources of hindsight.

For the political left, surprises such as the success of free enterprise are buried in advance by a vast and complex burial narrative. The successes of free enterprise may even be admitted, but so loaded with caveats that burial is a foregone conclusion.

For the political right, surprises such as the success of government regulation are buried in advance by a similarly vast and complex burial narrative. Again the successes of government regulation may even be admitted, but so loaded with caveats that burial is a foregone conclusion.

The climate catastrophist may be up to the ears in snow, but sees is as yet more evidence of global warming. Climate change is an interesting example, because potential surprises were initially buried in the future. A tactical error as we are now passing through some of those future scenarios.

"Our projection of 2013 for the removal of [Arctic] ice in summer is not accounting for the last two minima, in 2005 and 2007," the researcher from the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California, explained to the BBC. "So given that fact, you can argue that may be our projection of 2013 is already too conservative."

Source

Oh dear - stupidity comes in many guises. Nothing that can't be buried though.

Climate surprises have been much more effectively buried by including any and all environmental phenomena in the official narrative. From snow-clogged roads to heat waves, from floods to droughts it’s all grist to the burial game. There Shall Be No Climate Surprise.

In all these cases, the possibility of error and therefore surprise is buried in advance by a narrative’s limitless flexibility. That’s what narratives are for, to bury surprises in advance, or in the worst cases by the revisionist resources of hindsight.

Yet with huge irony, the only effective way to minimise surprises is blanket scepticism. Believe nothing.

Withheld assent

...experience seems to teach us especially clearly, that we are able to suspend our judgment before assenting to things which we perceive ; this is confirmed by the fact that no one is said to be deceived, in so far as he perceives anything, but only in so far as he assents or dissents.

Baruch Spinoza - Ethics

Karl Friston thinks our brains are wired to seek a state of fewest surprises. It’s a least action idea where the brain does as little work as possible while processing sensory data.

In short, we sample the world to ensure our predictions become a self-fulfilling prophecy and surprises are avoided. In this view, perception is enslaved by action to provide veridical predictions (more formally, to make the freeenergy a tight bound on surprise) that guides active sampling of the sensorium. 

Karl Friston

It seems to me that Friston’s idea works well enough, but doesn’t explain why some people are inclined towards scepticism, the awkward squad who see no merit in following the consensus merely because it is the consensus. Social pressure tends to create situations where not following a consensus surely requires more brainwork than following it. So what drives scepticism?

Suppose some people see fewer surprises outside a particular consensus. Or suppose they see fewer surprises in simply withholding their assent because the consensus seems flaky. If so, then there may be brainwork benefits to withheld assent even if the majority don't see it.

As an aside - maybe the majority do see the benefits of withheld assent. Maybe it is mostly the chattering classes who assent too readily to fashionable consensus. As this isn't the least action approach their brains overheat.

Withheld assent feels similar to detachment if we see detachment as perpetually withheld assent. We've known about detachment for centuries - where some people seem to prefer to remain outside the easy brainwork of consensus. 

Detachment or perpetually withheld assent may lead to fewer surprises anyway, especially in areas which are so complex that a number of interpretations always seem to be viable. Until they go wrong that is.

All of which seems to fit modern life quite well.

No surprises (2)

Following on from yesterday's post about Karl Friston's neurological work on how we act to minimise surprises, it may be worth applying the idea to politics. Do we vote for political parties because we judge them to be less capable of surprising us?

Maybe so. Human beings are programmed to seek out and value predictability. It’s a key survival trait which seeps into every aspect of our lives. The key attraction of big-government politics, is its promise of predictability through endless schemes of social control and the systematic elimination of surprises. 

So libertarian and free market politics are unattractive to most people simply because they embrace the dynamism of unpredictable outcomes. They promote the idea of adapting to and learning from surprises, but don’t seek to eliminate them. To many this is not acceptable - they don't want any surprises at all, especially from their government.

Adapt and survive may well be what we evolved to do, but one the whole we adapt by preferring predictable situations over unpredictable surprises. So it doesn’t actually matter how stupid governments are, what matters is that they should be perceived as predictable and incapable of surprising us.

Ed Miliband will not spring any surprises on us.

David Cameron may have a few surprises up his sleeve.

So unless circumstances change, Ed Miliband is likely to be our next Prime Minister. He will of course be hopeless, but politically that doesn’t matter too much. What matters is that his hopeless performance will be unsurprising.

It's what most of us want.

In which case, there are aspects of human behaviour we can't change, but are only able to mitigate, however rational we may think we are, or could be, or ought to be. One of them is a natural tendency by government and institutions to build unsurprising social, economic and political structures. Many of us perceive these structures as authoritarian or totalitarian - because they are.

It seems to me that the problem we face is that this tendency is innate. It may well be the reason why civilisations fail. It may even be the reason why they will continue to fail - including ours.

Finally.
It's obvious I know, but Friston's theory, if correct, would also be subject to the goal of minimising surprises. I may like the theory because for me, it minimises surprises. The map is never complete.

No surprises (1)

In 2010, Professor Karl Friston wrote an interesting, if somewhat technical paper about the Bayesian brain and work being done on unifying theories of brain function. In simple terms, the idea is that the human brain functions in such a way as to minimise surprises, which as Friston says are neural costs in the sense that surprises have to be dealt with by non-routine neural activity.

This non-routine activity may be a change to our mental maps of reality or a change to reality itself  - a change we make to physical environment.

We walk through a room and a chair is in our way - that is a surprise in the sense that alerts us to a mismatch between reality and route we are taking through the room - our mental map of it. So we move the chair or deny its existence - these are two of the remedies open to us.

So a surprise in this sense is a mismatch between our mental maps of the real world and our sensory inputs - which has to be unexpectedly corrected.

Not a remarkable conclusion of course, because it is consistent with survival strategies. When we adapt to an environment or situation, we act to minimise any surprises it may spring on us. When we learn and imitate others, we are acting to minimise surprises by doing what has been done before.

We do a huge amount of surprise-limitation at the interpersonal level - constantly nudging the behaviour of other people towards our own comfort zones, while at the same time being constantly nudged ourselves.

It never stops.

It can be as subtle as failing to smile or as crude as a fist in the face. It's also government policy, because all government institutions want unsurprising citizens with predictable behaviour. The corollary of course is that we ought to see this kind of government behaviour as unsurprising.  

Friston and others in his field are using this commonsense view as a mathematical model for how the brain operates efficiently, how it processes sensory inputs as efficiently as possible by keeping to a minimum those inputs which require more than routine processing – the surprises.

If surprises occur then sometimes we act on the outside world in order to minimise future surprises. We move that chair to avoid falling over it, have the boiler serviced to avoid a breakdown, drink less alcohol to avoid a headache. 

What interests me about this approach is the way Friston uses the simple word surprise to bring out how crucially important it is to minimise mismatches between experience and expectation. If his approach is sound, then this is the goal-seeking aspect of brain function at a cognitive level.

To my mind, this use of the word surprise also fits in very well with common sense – how we differ in our attitude to surprise and our reluctance to change either our ideas, our behaviour or the outside world. Although there is a loose end here, because there is such a thing as incompetence.

We attempt to minimise surprise in numerous ways. Conventions, consensus, institutions, training, teaching, instruction manuals, points of view, prejudices, braking systems, suncream, vaccinations and so on. The list is endless, because this is a very general idea.

At some point, if it hasn’t occurred already, somebody will suggest that we vary in our tendency to avoid surprise. Not that such a possibility would be surprising of course, but what if it turns out that these tendencies differ between the sexes, between races and cultures and across age ranges?

Some people may be –

• Better at what we might loosely call administration – surprise is minimised now.
• Better at what we might loosely call exploration – surprise is minimised in the future.

 Exploration in this sense is a search for new situations where surprise is more minimal than the present situation, from building a better mousetrap to proposing a new drugs policy to finding the Higgs boson. It's the search for better where better means more efficient, more predictable and therefore less surprising.

Obviously the potential for controversy is huge if it turns out that men and women differ, if only marginally, in their propensity to avoid surprises. If there are cultural or racial differences too? The outcry will be formidable, but why?

Because for many, the findings would count as a surprise.