The Salmon of Knowledge
I recently became a father. I can hardly claim to have not had prior warning, and yet find it’s taken me by surprise. The principal effect of this has been a bone-deep reranking of thought, feeling, and belief. Not an altogether unpleasant experience, but equally not something I am accustomed to. Once I’ve pinned a mental butterfly to the board, it is usually incapable of wriggling free. My usual response to the unfamiliar is to work and warp it, hammering away until it fits - however badly - into my personal ontology. Try to render it legible in the coordinates of my particular conceptric. The way I usually achieve this is to think with my fingers. Rattle away on a keyboard, or jab at dead glass. Keep making marks until some acceptable crystallisation forms. The problem is that every time I look at my infant son - all twelve days of him - it becomes apparent that this usual strategy is probably not going to work. But if you’re reading this, it means I’ve decided to give it a bash regardless. Happy to try, happy to fail, and happy to do it in public.
My memory of the run-up to the birth is… difficult to parse. A mental record of events that appears to belong to a different person. It began on the final Friday of February. I woke to my wife Sarah informing me that something appeared to be happening. But there was little urgency, and like a drowning man clinging to flotsam, I reassured myself there was still time. The reason for this is its own miniature drama, but it suffices to say that time is the coin I am hardest hunting, and least able to lay hands upon. By evening, it has become clear that Sarah has sprung a leak, and requires assessment. We make the drive to the hospital in truly foul weather. It is winter dark, and has been raining for weeks. Neither of us is quite sure what to do once we’re in the hospital, and - in a manner that perfectly characterises our mutual anxious-avoidance - get stressed at each other for being unable to approach the receptionist.
We do eventually sort it out, and find ourselves waiting in a grim little corridor for the promised assessment. This involves Sarah being laid out on a bed and me being plonked on a chair opposite. Then a curtain is drawn across her, leaving whatever will happen next to my imagination. After a few minutes three midwives - one of whom is an enormous Nigerian man - enter, and file behind the curtain. I hear with a certain vicarious dread the explanation of whatever instrument of medical torture they intend to inflict on Sarah. The reassuring voice is clearly trailing off to the point of contact, when there’s a sudden collective noise and two of them visibly recoil back into my field of vision. Because while the waters may have been leaking, the dam chose the precise second before insertion to break. We’ve been spared the necessity of an invasive procedure (for now), and Sarah is booked in for an induction the next morning. In the meantime, we are free to enjoy the remains of the day.
We go home, and sleep about as well as you would expect. At some point consciousness escapes me, and I wake in pain. My jaw had acquired a peculiarly intense breed of pain. I always grind my teeth in periods of high tension, and now my jaw is locked stiff and aching. As if I’m suffering the aftermath of a large dose of amphetamines, without even the compensation of the night before the morning after. I consider raising this complaint to Sarah, but she both looks and sounds as if her evening has been considerably worse.
We’re admitted to the ward just after seven am. There’s a current of nerves running between us, conducted through squeezed hands. Ever so slightly tighter than normal, powered by the anxiety of the unfamiliar. The asymmetry of the worry is not lost on me. For Sarah this is the moment when she is finally dealt the hand on which she has staked both the last nine months and the lifetime to follow. As for me, I’m simply discomfited by the strangeness of a parallel world run by women. Getting to the delivery room and starting the hormone drip eases the tension. After an hour or two, I am sufficiently relaxed to start taking photos of every reading on every machine, and feed them to other machines for interpretation. I’m generous enough to share the bounty of this knowledge, informing Sarah that whenever she makes that pained grimace, the number on the screen is going up and that means she’s having what’s known as a contraction. She finds my explanation of what would otherwise be a supremely mystifying scenario extremely helpful, and thanks me with her customary roll of the eyes. Those numerical amplitudes grow with the clock, and she eventually elects to have the old spinal tap. This works marvellously and she soon settles into a routine of napping and reading. I distinctly remember catching myself thinking that this arrangement was perfectly agreeable for all parties. And with Euripidean hubris, I privately designate childbirth as another of those experiential rackets that everyone exaggerates for the clout. In many ways it reminded me of the three months we once spent living in a van: both extremely tired, engaged in an apparently endless but undemanding task, and trying to cheer each other up through it. In reality I am mostly just complaining, but attempting to angle it with enough absurdity to make Sarah laugh. It’s a partial success, although I’m fairly sure the midwives want me sectioned.
Eleven hours later I have transited from relaxed to bored, and am entering the orbit of immensely fucking frustrated. Every four hours someone comes to stick their arm halfway up Sarah, and withdraw with some disappointingly minute reckoning as to the operational width of her birth canal. In the face of this, I do what I usually do. Complain to literally everyone in messaging range.
[6:54 pm, 28/02/2026] AlicilA: I am so excited
[6:54 pm, 28/02/2026] AlicilA: Either way it is so soon!!!
[8:34 pm, 28/02/2026] Gerard McCaul: Doesn’t feel like it
[8:34 pm, 28/02/2026] Gerard McCaul: In dilatory terms she’s only a Bon Jovi
[8:35 pm, 28/02/2026] Gerard McCaul: Taking fucking forever
[8:35 pm, 28/02/2026] AlicilA: We’re halfway there baby
[8:35 pm, 28/02/2026] Gerard McCaul: You got it
[8:36 pm, 28/02/2026] Gerard McCaul: I was genuinely thinking of reporting the dilation as a gamma factor
[8:37 pm, 28/02/2026] Gerard McCaul: So anyway I’m going to go get a kebab.
[8:42 pm, 28/02/2026] AlicilA: Is Sarah allowed to eat during this?
[8:43 pm, 28/02/2026] Gerard McCaul: Nooo
[8:43 pm, 28/02/2026] Gerard McCaul: So she’s tired and grumpy
[8:43 pm, 28/02/2026] Gerard McCaul: and hungry. Obviously.
[8:43 pm, 28/02/2026] AlicilA: wtf
[8:43 pm, 28/02/2026] AlicilA: Why does it suck being a woman
[8:43 pm, 28/02/2026] Gerard McCaul: Which is really what she deals with worst
[8:43 pm, 28/02/2026] Gerard McCaul: I mean it’s to do with the fact they needed to induce her because the water broke before labour
[8:44 pm, 28/02/2026] Gerard McCaul: So in case they need to whip it out she can’t have any food in her stomach
[8:44 pm, 28/02/2026] AlicilA: I don’t like it
[8:44 pm, 28/02/2026] Gerard McCaul: Neither would I
[8:44 pm, 28/02/2026] Gerard McCaul: Fortunately it’s not an injustice I shall ever have to deal with
[8:44 pm, 28/02/2026] Gerard McCaul: Blame evolutionary patterning and simple chance
[8:45 pm, 28/02/2026] AlicilA: Poor Sarah
[8:45 pm, 28/02/2026] AlicilA: Hope she gets a feast after
[8:45 pm, 28/02/2026] Gerard McCaul: I’m sure she will
[8:45 pm, 28/02/2026] Gerard McCaul: Also she at least gets a bed and lots of drugs
[8:45 pm, 28/02/2026] Gerard McCaul: Where’s the poor Gerard
[8:45 pm, 28/02/2026] AlicilA: There is no poor Gerard! Your wife is doing everything 😭
[8:46 pm, 28/02/2026] AlicilA: Why should there be a poor Gerard
[8:46 pm, 28/02/2026] AlicilA: She grew a baby and now has to push it out of her body while starving
[8:47 pm, 28/02/2026] AlicilA: I wish I were a man 😭
[8:48 pm, 28/02/2026] Gerard McCaul: You have said this a few times
[8:48 pm, 28/02/2026] Gerard McCaul: It’s not all a bed of roses
[8:48 pm, 28/02/2026] Gerard McCaul: Women are very unsympathetic to you. And control access to sex
[8:49 pm, 28/02/2026] Gerard McCaul: You’re also expected to be completely self reliant
[8:49 pm, 28/02/2026] Gerard McCaul: Nothing more pathetic than a man asking for help
[8:50 pm, 28/02/2026] AlicilA: Are you expected to push a human out of your body while starving 😭
[8:50 pm, 28/02/2026] Gerard McCaul: No I’m expected to sit there and watch
[8:50 pm, 28/02/2026] AlicilA: Bloodily shed the lining of one of your organs every 28 days
[8:50 pm, 28/02/2026] Gerard McCaul: And then look after two invalids for an indeterminate amount of time
[8:51 pm, 28/02/2026] AlicilA: I think there are people who would be sympathetic to you
[8:51 pm, 28/02/2026] Gerard McCaul: Like, I’m not denying the point!
[8:51 pm, 28/02/2026] Gerard McCaul: I would certainly take my end of the bargain
[8:51 pm, 28/02/2026] Gerard McCaul: But the cost function is pretty delocalised
[8:51 pm, 28/02/2026] AlicilA: Like at minimum your organs are stable 😭
[8:52 pm, 28/02/2026] Gerard McCaul: I’m not convinced yours wouldn’t be if you just tried harder
[8:52 pm, 28/02/2026] Gerard McCaul: In fact I’m equally convinced the only reason we weren’t in and out by lunchtime is just a lack of application by Sarah
[8:52 pm, 28/02/2026] AlicilA:😭
[8:53 pm, 28/02/2026] Gerard McCaul: I really believed we’d be out by lunchtime :(
[8:53 pm, 28/02/2026] Gerard McCaul: Anyway I’m going to go eat a fish masala naan and hope it doesn’t make me ill.
I did get that fish masala, and it didn’t make me ill! After the fact Sarah confided to me that the most upsetting aspect of the whole birth was the sharing of my dinner plans, and the smell of its successful execution afterwards. If nothing else, it should tell you what a remarkably tolerant woman my wife is. Not just of people but of adversity. She handles the punishingly slow progress far better than me, but in hour twenty four everything takes a turn for the dramatic. The pushing isn’t going well, despite my suggestions that they could try the chuckle brothers’ technique. Simply shouting push wasn’t quite doing the trick, and perhaps a hearty round of to-me to-you might remind the boy that there’s to be no slacking.
The joking stops when the reg comes in, armed with forceps and a brutally clinical explanation of their risks. Sarah nods her way through this legally mandated enumeration of hideous possibilities, and suddenly there’s half a dozen anonymous practitioners crowding the room. You know it’s going to be a horror show when they break out the blue sheets of mystery. After the fact - as the blood is being mopped up off the floor - I’m assured all this is pretty standard.
In the moment however, the following five minutes feel desperately out of control. A very large part of me would like to flee. The most and least I can manage is to squeeze Sarah’s hand, and count for her. I try to close my ears to all the biology I’m hearing. Worst is the scissors, making the sound of a blade cutting fabric. Which is of course exactly what it was.
I am so busy keeping my count - having subconsciously absorbed the rhythm of chest compression classic Stayin’ Alive - that the boy’s arrival takes me by complete surprise. This quivering blue thing is thrust into my peripheral vision, dripping with gore. A particularly nasty lump of red jelly sits jauntily on its head. Like a little hat. Then this living clot spontaneously begins to wail, and the texture of one’s identity is irreversibly changed.
I regard it with a kind of fascinated horror. This thing - this evidently living thing - is screaming at the maximum capacity its new lungs will permit. With each breath it acquires a more human colouring. Its head, its absurdly outsized little head, lolling and rolling as it is bundled away into a corner. I break my stare for a moment, and see Sarah looking semi-beatific with relief. I try to ignore the large dark stain going up her torso, the dripping leftover from her introduction to the gore-child. Seeing her dazed smile against the background howl unbinds the great tensile knot in my chest.
Someone asks if I’d like to hold him, and I feel I can’t politely refuse. They hand over the bundle, a knitted chippie bag swaddling a single angry potato. In the holding and the looking, something unexpectedly primitive occurs. I find myself singing a little song - the one that got him kicking during cooking - and to my astonishment, the spud reacts. He opens his eyes, looking as baffled by his response as I am. Three thoughts then fire in almost perfect simultaneity. First, that Guy was right. They really do all look like Alan Brazil.
The moment is saved by the thought that follows. That I am meeting the melody of my remaining days. Then finally and most importantly: I should start a blog.
This is not quite the non-sequitur it appears to be. It stems from a thread I have been failing to pull for a hot minute. For context, the foundational questions institute recently held an essay contest centred on the question ‘how quantum is life?’ Being jaded and smug the way only a quantum theorist can be, I had dashed off a quick polemic arguing that the trivially true answer was uninteresting, and the interesting answer was trivially untrue. You can read it here, if you’re into that sort of thing1.
The reason I mention this is that in the last gasps of that essay, I felt duty bound to offer a more positive thesis than the one implicit in the question, and which I had spent several thousand words attacking. What I settled on - and what I actually believe - is that life isn’t a quantum phenomenon but an algebraic one.
Now, if you’re unfamiliar with the discipline of linear algebra, this will sound insane. And frankly if you are it will sound even worse. But my claim is that properly understood, it is not only the best framework we have for understanding physical reality, it is the simultaneously the only account that can supply operational answers to questions on the nature of intelligence, and dissolve the tangled thinking that plagues it. In the essay I supplied the most ephemeral sketch, but the skeleton of that argument stuck with me. Waiting for the meat. Horror of horrors, it seems I’ve found it in the flesh of my son. Because even in that first encounter, long before anything like an identity has had a chance to cohere, I can see something behind those eyes. Those eyes, set in that little mushy head. You watch it, and at first it looks simply like what it is - a comically oversized brain set on a wriggly little stalk. But of course, that’s only the temporally local view. Because what it - he - is, contains the kernel of what he’ll become. The preconditions of what we call a mind. Too incomplete to be called intelligence yet, but the canvas upon which it will develop is already recognisable.
I am beyond excited to see the process in action. Both for the simple miracle of it, and for the opportunity to test my tools of explanation. Because I believe they might genuinely be sufficient to the task. So that’s the goal, and this is the promise going forward. I’ll be writing about a physics-first exploration of intelligence, arguing that whether it be artificial or natural, it is ultimately best understood algebraically. I’m going to frame it all with observations on the little language machine I now have the privilege to preserve. And to cap it off, my thermodynamic theory of everything will eventually make an appearance - if I can ever finish the preprint. That’s it. It’s going to feel radical, but - once you make the necessary representational adjustments - inevitable.
Writing this out, I suddenly realise that the interest intersection between machine intelligence, algebraic dynamical systems, theory of mind and parenting anecdotes is… Well it might be measure zero. I can only promise I’ll do my best to make it fun, as life ought to be. So smash that bell button and retweet, or whichever verb most shamelessly exploits the psychology of engagement. Go do whatever is required to get anyone to read anything that doesn’t come pre-chewed. I’ve no idea what people expect from these newfangled web fora, but if after reading this you’ve decided it might be your bag, you may wish to surrender your email below:
In the meantime I’ll be with the boy, sucking my thumb. Which reminds me. We called him Finlay. Finn McCaul, if you like.
I should say that while I stand by the essential correctness of what I said, there was something needlessly provocative about writing an essay so unashamedly antagonistic to the objectives of the quantum biology institute funding it. I was genuinely astonished and impressed they gave it any kind of award at all. I actually have a lot of sympathy for the judges, given they were caught between a question begging premise, a nakedly partisan financer, and a field of entries which were uniformly - let’s be kind and say creative - in their understanding of quantum mechanics.