The dragon in my garage (peer pressure edition)

Suppose I tell you there is a dragon living in my garage.

Naturally, you ask to see it.

Fair enough.

I open the garage door.

Inside are some cardboard boxes, a bicycle I have been meaning to repair since approximately the late Pleistocene, a lawnmower, several objects whose original purpose has been lost to history, and absolutely no visible dragon.

“Ah,” I say. “Of course you can’t see it. The dragon is invisible. Should have mentioned that.”

Right.

You think about this for a moment and suggest scattering flour over the floor. If the dragon is there, surely it will leave footprints.

“No. It floats above the ground.”

Very well.

You suggest bringing in an infrared camera. Dragons are creatures traditionally associated with fire, so it ought to give off some heat.

“This one doesn’t.”

“Well,” you say, “perhaps we could spray a fine mist of paint into the garage and reveal its outline?”

“Nooo. The paint passes straight through it.”

Every test you propose is followed by a new property of the dragon explaining why that particular test cannot possibly work.

“I see that you are still skeptical,” I say, disappointed.

The next day I bring twenty people to the garage. Some of them are your friends and family.

“Look,” I tell you. “All of these people believe the dragon is real. Do you believe me now?”

One of them looks genuinely puzzled by your hesitation.

“Millions of people believe in dragons like this,” she says. “Do you seriously think all those people could be wrong?”

A respected older member of the community steps forward.

“My belief in the dragon has given my life meaning,” they tell you sincerely.

Another person explains that the dragon helped her through the most difficult period of her life.

Someone else tells you that his grandmother believed in the dragon, and she was the kindest person he ever knew.

A fourth informs you that some extremely clever philosophers have also believed in dragons.

“Could we perhaps devise some kind of test to make sure...?” you say.

There is a small silence.

“You still don’t believe us?” someone asks.

Then a member of your own family, obviously embarrassed by you and hurt by your stubbornness, asks:

“Why are you the only one who cannot accept what everyone else believes is there?”

You mumble that you do not doubt anyone’s sincerity, but twenty people repeating a claim do not necessarily constitute twenty independent pieces of evidence.

Twenty people independently seeing a dragon would certainly be interesting. But if the twenty people learned about the dragon from the same tradition, heard the same stories, rely on one another’s testimony, and none of them can actually detect the dragon either, then their agreement is not twenty independent observations. It may simply be the same claim echoed twenty times over.

You say that their belief in the dragon may comfort them, inspire them, make them kinder, give structure to their lives, connect them to their parents and grandparents, or provide an answer to the rather unsettling business of finding oneself briefly alive in an enormous universe without an instruction manual.

All of that is interesting, and some of it is certainly beautiful.

But sincerity, comfort, tradition, intelligence, and a room full of people agreeing with one another are not enough to establish that the dragon is actually there.

So you return, somewhat tediously, to the original question:

“What observation could distinguish between these two possibilities?

1) There is an invisible, floating, heatless, intangible dragon in the garage.
or
2) There is actually no dragon in the garage.”

You continue, unabated:

“Because if no conceivable observation could distinguish one possibility from the other, and every failed attempt to detect the dragon can simply be accommodated by inventing another property of the dragon, then we have reached a peculiar situation. The claim has been constructed so that nothing we observe can count against it. There is no longer any obvious way to test whether it is true.”

By now nobody is particularly happy with you.

You have, after all, been invited to contemplate the remarkable properties of a dragon, and somehow you have managed to turn a beautiful evening into a boring seminar on epistemology. Boo to you.

You notice that everyone is now rather uncomfortable with your presence.

You think that, in the end, perhaps you have not learned very much about dragons, but you have certainly learned quite a lot about human beings.

You have dinner alone that evening. The others may have escaped your incessant questioning, but the questions, annoyingly, have followed you home.

* No dragons were harmed while writing this piece.

* Carl Sagan's "The Dragon in My Garage" is a famous thought experiment from his 1995 book The Demon-Haunted World that illustrates the burden of proof and why untestable claims are meaningless.

Sachsen-Anhalt 2026 election results

The result in Sachsen-Anhalt is historic. The last ARD projection I saw put the AfD at 44.0%, CDU 17.5%, SPD 9.2%, Greens 8.9%, Linke 8.6% and BSW 5.1%. The AfD has more than doubled its 2021 result, while the CDU has roughly halved its support. The AfD remains short of an absolute majority, so governing is another question.

Its programme calls for “remigration”, more deportations, compulsory work for asylum seekers, tighter benefits, stronger policing and citizen patrols. It wants more selection and discipline in schools, less inclusion, separate classes for some refugee children, and greater emphasis on traditional German culture.

The AfD also proposes defunding equality, integration, gender and some democracy programmes, and rolling back wind power while preserving coal and reviving nuclear energy. It combines cultural nationalism with economic populism, promising family benefits and free school meals despite an estimated annual financing gap of at least €2.2 billion.

On Europe, it wants a “Europe of nations”, rejects further transfers of sovereignty and debt mutualisation, and says Germany should be prepared to leave the Euro. Some currents openly question EU membership.

On Ukraine, it rejects sustained German support, opposes sending long-range weapons and calls for an immediate ceasefire and negotiations, rewarding Russian aggression and weakening Kyiv. It wants sanctions against Russia ended, economic relations restored and a pragmatic partnership revived, while often blaming Washington, Brussels or Berlin for the confrontation. It also wants Ukraine permanently out of the EU and out on NATO.

Continued growth of the AfD would risk conflict with the Bundesbank, German industry, financial markets, European partners and the legal foundations of the European Union.

Why did almost half the electorate in Sachsen-Anhalt vote for it? Migration, crime, schools, economic stagnation and rejection of the federal government all played a role, shaped by eastern Germany’s history.

Reunification brought freedom and material improvement, but also industrial collapse, unemployment, westward migration, demographic decline and the replacement of eastern elites by western ones. Many feel ignored, abandoned and looked down upon. Eastern Germans remain underrepresented in senior institutions; in Sachsen-Anhalt, 73% said in 2024 that they are still treated as “second-class citizens”, while only 16% in a 2026 poll had strong confidence in the state’s basic functions. The AfD has capitalized on concerns about migration, energy, insecurity, Berlin politics and decisions made elsewhere.

As a state government, the AfD could redirect school curricula and funding, change administrative priorities, strengthen police and deportation infrastructure, withdraw discretionary funding from NGOs and cultural projects, and begin leaving broadcasting treaties. But it cannot rewrite Federal asylum or citizenship law, dictate foreign policy, abolish constitutional rights, overturn EU law or dismiss career civil servants. Foreign policy, defence, sanctions and monetary policy remain Federal or European matters. Still, the AfD will use its influence to slow down or disrupt Federal legislation. Almost all other political parties still reject cooperation.

It would be a mistake to treat 44% of the voters in Sachsen-Anhalt as stupid, racist or morally contaminated. The “Brandmauer” will not restore trust. Parties must credibly address migration control, public order, infrastructure, schools, rising energy costs and eastern representation, acknowledge failures and offer believable liberal democratic solutions. They must also explain clearly that undermining the Euro threatens prosperity, abandoning Ukraine emboldens Russia, ending sanctions increases dependence on Moscow, and weakening Europe damages Germany and its allies during very dangerous times. They must also force the AfD to confront arithmetic: which promises are constitutional, who pays the €2.2 billion, where will workers come from, and what would weaker European integration and abandoning Ukraine mean for German jobs, security and global influence?

At 44%, moral quarantine has largely exhausted itself. The answer is more competent government, universal rules and empirical scrutiny. It is not about more lectures on morality, but about acknowledging the problems, offering believable solutions and rebuilding trust.

AfD promises are pipe dreams. Reality may eventually collapse them, but not before they cause real damage.

Life, the Universe and Everything (4)

This is the fourth in a series of essays exploring a chain of questions about complexity, life, consciousness, intelligence, and ethics. Together, they form a rough map of the journey, hopefully with not too many imaginary dragons along the way.

In the previous essay, we moved from life that responds, to systems that bind the world, to experience that may eventually feel like something. We distinguished responsiveness from consciousness, and consciousness from sentience. The next question is agency: how information about the world, and in richer cases experience of it, comes to guide action.

An agent is a system that uses information to guide action in relation to its own condition, its surroundings, and possible future states. At its thinnest, agency is self-relevant action. A living system acts in ways tied to its own maintenance. The world is no longer just happening to the system. It is being used by the system.

Agency becomes richer when action becomes flexible. The system learns from what happened before, adjusts to present conditions, and behaves differently when circumstances change. A conscious being may have experience without much abstract reasoning. A non-conscious system may perform difficult calculations without anyone being home inside. Intelligence, in the sense we are considering here, is the capacity to use information to adapt action to changing conditions. It is agency made flexible.

The intelligent agent does not encounter the world as a neutral catalogue of facts, but as a world of relevance: danger, shelter, food, obstacle, companion. Things matter because they open or close possibilities for action. The world becomes not only what exists, but what can be done with what exists.

To act intelligently, a system must allow possible futures to influence present action. It does not need language or abstract thought for this, but it does need some way to connect action with consequence. The future enters the present as expectation.

Memory gives agency depth, because the past can become part of present action. Attention gives agency focus, because no system can use everything the world offers at once. Learning gives agency flexibility, because the world has the inconsiderate habit of changing.

More complex forms of agency often involve some kind of self-model. This means that the system tracks itself as the thing acting: its condition, limits, capacities, and possible actions. The self is a practical structure that helps an organism coordinate perception, memory, action, and consequence around its own continued existence. A simple organism may have only a minimal boundary between inside and outside, but a more complex animal may have body awareness, memory, expectation, and social recognition. In humans, the self becomes elaborate enough to include identity, ambition, shame, and hope.

A richer self-model can deepen agency. A being that models itself as the one acting can compare possible actions and select among them. At greater levels of complexity, an agent can also evaluate some of its own habits and, through reflection and practice, alter which responses become more likely in the future. This does not require us to solve the ancient problem of free will. For the cases we are considering, flexible choice among possible actions is enough. For now, we can simply say that intelligent agency involves flexible action guided by memory, prediction, and self-relevance.

This naturalistic account also helps explain why intelligence takes many forms. Different environments reward different capacities. Predators, prey, tool-users, and social animals all face different problems. Intelligence is not a single ladder. It is always intelligence for something, somewhere, under particular pressures.

Human intelligence is not detached from this broader pattern. We are agents with memory, prediction, self-models, and flexible action. Our particular kind of intelligence was also shaped by social life. We became human among other humans, and other agents are among the most complicated things any mind can encounter.

A social world is made of intentions, threats, promises, loyalties, and expectations. To live among agents, a mind must model not only what things are, but what others may know, want, remember, or do. This may be one of the great engines of intelligence. A solitary practical problem can be difficult, but dealing with another flexible mind is a challenge on a whole new level.

And perhaps here we can see the first outline of culture. Once agents communicate, imitate, teach, and remember together, intelligence begins to escape the limits of the individual. Knowledge can accumulate. Tools can improve. Stories can preserve experience beyond a single lifetime. Minds become unbound from time and can begin to shape other minds. But we’ll leave that for later.

For now, the important threshold is agency. Responsiveness means that a system is affected by conditions. Life uses information to maintain itself. Agency is that self-relevant regulation expressed through action. World-binding integrates information into a perspective. Where experience exists, it can further shape action. Intelligence develops when action becomes flexible, predictive, and adaptive.

The ethical picture also becomes deeper now. A sentient being can suffer, but an agent can also be confined, manipulated, deceived, or stripped of meaningful possibilities. Harm is not only pain. For more complex agents, harm can also be the narrowing of a life.

This is why practical freedom is important, though we are not yet arguing ethics. Practical freedom is the space in which agency can operate. Greater agency creates additional ways in which a being can be harmed when its possibilities are narrowed. Of course not all agents, be they biological or artificial, are morally identical. But once agency exists, we must also consider what kinds of lives beings are capable of pursuing, and what it means to prevent them from doing so.

When we are specifically thinking about an artificial system, it may already process information, select actions, learn from feedback, and operate in complex environments. That does not automatically prove consciousness or sentience, nor does it by itself confer moral status. But if an artificial system were to bind information into experience, develop memory, model itself as the agent of its own actions, form preferences, and suffer from the frustration or destruction of its possibilities, then dismissing it merely because it is artificial would become harder to defend. The substrate, once again, is not the point. It is the organization that matters.

So the chain has moved one more link. Matter may become organized complexity. Organized complexity may become life. Life may bind the world. World-binding may become experience. Experience may guide action. Flexible action, shaped by memory and prediction, is the beginning of intelligence. And as we have seen here, intelligence does not always remain trapped inside individual beings. It can disperse. Once agents communicate, teach, imitate, and build shared worlds, something new happens. Intelligence becomes collective. Which brings us to culture.

Nolan's Odyssey

 So, Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is coming in a few days, and a  lot of the publicity and brouhaha has focused on the sheer scale of the production, the casting choices and visual authenticity. For me, what will be more interesting to see is whether the film will attempt to capture what lies beneath the swashbuckling adventures: an ancient civilization reflecting on what it means to be human. I don't expect that much of that philosophical layer to survive the journey to film, though I reserve the right to be pleasantly surprised. I do like Nolan.

For the ancient Greeks, the Iliad and the Odyssey were part of an education. Children encountered courage, cunning, loyalty, betrayal, hubris and mortality through these tales. They learned that even the best of their gods and heroes were flawed and imperfect. That whatever civilizational order comes, it is borne through human acts, not some divine order. That they cannot count on the Gods to be fair or just, and that any attempt to make the world a bit fairer was a human undertaking, with no guarantee of success.

Homer does not begin the epics with “God said”. He asks the Muse to sing. The poet does not claim to be delivering a final revelation. He gives form to inherited stories and offers them to human judgment. The only authority he has is poetic, rather than absolute. The myths could therefore be retold, across the ages, contradicted and turned against themselves. Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides could accuse the gods, dismantle heroes and offer different versions of the same stories, and it was all done without violating some fixed divine canon. Challenging the story was not only acceptable, it was part of the fabric of the story. Human beings listened and still had to judge for themselves.

Take the episode of the Cyclops, for instance. If you've ever had some passing interest in mythology, perhaps you still remember the story between Ulysses and his unfortunate crew and Polyphemus the Cyclops. In one of his lectures in the 1980s, speaking at EHESS in Paris, philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis, asks his students to notice what Homer points out before the killing in the cave begins. The Cyclopes have no laws, no assemblies and no common deliberation. Each of them rules his own household and cares nothing for the others. The Cyclops is monstrous, yes, but not only because of his size and demeanour. How he appears visually can also be interpreted as a metaphor for the fact that he inhabits a brutal, lawless world, a pre-human collective. He sees things only from one absolute perspective. He recognizes no law above his own appetite and power. 

Ulysses tries to appeal to hospitality and to Zeus, protector of strangers. Polyphemus replies that the Cyclopes are stronger than the gods and need not care about such trifles. His cave is a household despotism sealed inside stone. For Castoriadis, this is evidence of an early intuition of the political order. He proposes that a collection of human-like beings does not yet constitute a society. Society begins when people create something beyond themselves and between themselves: common laws, obligations and a public space in which decisions can be discussed. The opposite he says is Cyclopean existence, each household enclosed within the absolute authority of its master.

Another philosopher, Dimitris Liantinis, offers another interpretation of that same episode. Ulysses, Liantinis writes, introduces himself as Nobody. It is only when he escapes the ordeal that he reveals his true name. Liantinis reads this in a rather Nietzschean fashion, as the movement from anonymous existence to a realized self. He says this is actually the story of each and every one of us. We all begin our lives as “nobody” in a deeper sense, existentially untested and only partly awake. It is only through overcoming challenges, through dealing with our own life’s Odyssey, with attention, effort, and the recognition of our own mortality, that we may become someone with a name. But he notes that most of us will most likely remain anonymous and be lost in history, like the crew of Ulysses. So, for him, the episode with the Cyclops, this seemingly inescapable natural force, is also about our own personal confrontation with our own death.

Castoriadis sees the emergence of the political person. Liantinis sees the emergence of the existential person. Both perspectives can be made to meet at the point where a free individual cannot develop without a common world, and a common world worth living in cannot exist without individuals capable of sound judgment. Of course neither Castoriadis nor Liantinis are uncovering some secret code hidden in Homer’s writings. They are merely using the poem as food for thought, as was intended. 

As for Ulysses himself, he is far from perfect. He is both a hero and an anti-hero. His desire for recognition, his vanity, allows Poseidon to identify him and prolongs the suffering of his journey. The man clever enough to become Nobody when need arises, does not understand when it would perhaps have been wiser to remain silent for a little longer. Ulysses is clever, but not wise.

Almost all homeric heroes are admirable and deeply flawed in roughly equal measure. Achilles is magnificent and catastrophic. Agamemnon is kingly and contemptible. Ulysses is ingenious, resilient, deceitful and vain. The listeners are not given a perfect hero to imitate. They are required to judge for themselves, and to think about how to be better.

And this may be one of the deepest differences between myth and propaganda. Propaganda supplies pure friends and irredeemable enemies. Homer gives us mixed creatures acting imperfectly under pressure, ignorance and necessity. Nobody escapes this contradiction, not even the gods.

These were the stories that encapsulated the shared values of ancient Greek civilization. Values that were contestable, mutable, subject to human judgement. The stories were told as poems, they were not delivered as catechism. Hospitality becomes clearly visible when the Cyclops violates it. Measure becomes visible when our heroes exceed it. Political community becomes visible when we encounter beings without an assembly. The stories were educational because they presented moral dilemmas and refused to make life simple. And this is why they persisted through the ages. Because every age can see its own reflection in them.

Perhaps Nolan will understand these aspects and carry part of them in his retelling of this very old story. Perhaps his Cyclops will be more than just a formidable monster on the screen. Whatever he makes of it, the story will endure.

(For a quick, expert refresher before the lights go down, Mary Beard and Charlotte Higgins' Instant Classics podcast has just the primer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMJj0SUREkk )