Scrapbook of ideas about Life

Stock Market Distribution

2011-11-15T12:24:00.003Z

Well a year late it seems I have my answer. I've already shown that a log/log graph of FTSE day changes is mostly linear. This indicates a scale invariant power law distribution!

Such distributions exist where the more you have the more you get. It implies, as suspected, that the size of a days change is liable to snow ball. Large losses encouraging more and more people to become bearish. Likewise large gains encouraging more and more people to become bullish.

This supports the "speculative" side of the market: that people trade not for long term fundamentals but try to trade in the short term and take advantage, or protect themselves, from current trends.

The question then is the distribution of bear/bull thresholds in the average human population. By which I mean if the number of people turning bearish increases with the size of the down turn there must be a distribution of thresholds beyond which people decide to sell. If there was just one threshold at say 1% then were the market ever to turn below 1% then everyone would sell. This doesn't happen.

Obviously the down turn is different from different people. People buying on that day will see a 1% drop. People who were perhaps 100% up will fall to 98% on a 1% drop. People who bought in after the 1% drop would only see a 1% drop where the market drop further to 2% down. There is a distribution of people going into the market, coming out and the existence of thresholds will need to be wrestled from them.

2Do!

Nature of Flagger/Coward Distribution

2011-11-07T09:35:00.000Z

A linear function was chosen to describe the number of flaggers in a group, such that the total number of flaggers across all the groups was equal to the total number of cowards.

f(x) = a + x (n-2a)/g , where n is the total number of rabbits in each group, g is the number of groups and a is the number of flaggers in the 1st group. This integrates to ng/2 i.e. half the rabbits. The gradient of the function is given by grad=(n-2a)/g.

Using this as f(x) the expression Gc – Gf (from before) was calculated. This gives the average predator pressure experienced by flaggers relative to cowards for populations of heterogenous groups with varying numbers of flaggers and cowards as described by ‘a’.

Gf – Gc =

Substituting the expression a = (n-g*grad)/2 into the expression enables a clearer expression of heterogeneity.

Results

p=0.5, n=10, g=10

Once the gradient is steeper then 60% then flaggers experience rapidly decreasing predator pressure. This is a distribution with group one having 8 flaggers and 2 cowards, and group 10 having 2 flaggers and 8 cowards a range of {2,8}

For 50 groups (g=50) the graph has the same shape but the gradient only needs to be 12% before flaggers benefit more than cowards. The general rule is that the cut-off is proportional to 6/g.

p=0.5, n=20, g=10

For groups of large size there is little extra benefit to cowards until the groups have a larger range than {5,15}. After which there is considerable advantage to flaggers.

p=0.1, n=10, g=10

If the probability of not seeing the predator is very low (10%) there is range of distributions which benefit cowards very much. Suddenly when the range reaches {0.5,9.5} is benefits flaggers. 0.5 isn’t possible so there are no distributions which favour flaggers in small groups.

p=0.9, n=10, g=10

A simple curve where ranges {2.5,7.5} and steeper benefit flaggers. Flagging strategy is an anti-predator strategy and obviously only benefits where predators are skillful and not easily seen by individuals.

Conclusion
Flagging as a strategy depends upon strong heterogeneity in flagger/coward ratios. Low dispersal of offspring i.e. children remaining in the warren will create such a heterogeneity. Sexual selection for flaggers is vulnerable to the evolution of a “slag” gene but may provide a mechanism for heterogeneity also.

Another avenue of investigation is in free markets. The local marginal strategy is always to defect and become a coward. However under certain situations strategies that benefit the group will lead to selection for groups of individuals who do not do this, i.e.e those who abandon local marginal thinking.

Co-operative genetics

2011-11-06T09:34:00.000Z

On holiday while looking at rabbits was wondering how genes for particular sexual attractions spread in populations. What if there was a gene that made brave individuals attractive. Decided to look at the old area I did at college that of tail flagging in rabbits to warn of predators (assume it’s a warning signal rather than predator visual confusion). If this is in doubt then alarm calls will do as another model. Let there be two genes F and C which cause their bearer to F=flag (or give an alarm call) or C=just run away. Let there be two other genes that cause their bearer to find this behaviour attractive Lf and Lc. I’ll ignore a ‘Slag’ gene that just breeds with anything for now (for good reason since it messes this whole argument up, unless there is another gene which doesn’t like Slags etc). I assume a simple haploid genetics to make like easy.

Cowards and Braves

F = brave flagger
C= coward who saves himself
Lf= find flagger attractive
Lc=find coward attractive

These parents: flag+likes cowards x coward+likes flaggers give the following children:

FLc x CLf –> FLc,FLf,CLc,CLf (in equal proportion)

It can be seen that only 1/4 of FLc and CLf matings are like the parent and 1/4 are FLf and CLc.

FLf and CLc parents however only produce themselves.

The other combinations won’t happen since the very nature of the Lf and Lc genes is to make the bearer look to mate with only flaggers and cowards respectively. So if you are Lc you will only look for cowards to mate with, and if you are a flagger yourself only Lf will mate with you so FLc must mate with only CLf.

As a result the population of FLc and CLf both drop by 75% each generation (assuming that all individuals mate freely). If low density means that it is harder to find a mate then this will be larger.

By contrast FLf and CLc populations replace themselves each generation and get added to by the 25% of the FLc and CLf populations.

CONCLUSION: (without the Slag gene) flagging genes rapidly become associated with genes that mate with flaggers at the exclusion of cowards, and vice versa.

The Population Models

Let p=the probability that an individual does not see a predator. This is the probability the individual will be eaten in some time frame.

Take a group n numbering f flaggers and c cowards (n=f+c). The group comes under attack from an ambush predator looking for 1 individual. To succeed the predator needs only catch the prey unawares, after which it is a certain kill. The probability of being taken P is:

P = 1 / Number of unaware individuals

However the flaggers alert the group so they all need to be unaware at once. If all the flaggers are unaware (prob = p^f) then the total number of unaware individuals is f (since all the flaggers are unaware) + pc (the unaware cowards). The probability of being taken as a flagger is then:

Pf = p^f / (f + pc)

The cowards benefit from the flaggers flagging but also the probability that they are looking too or conversely the probability they are taken is p^(f+1). The probability of being taken as a coward is thus:

Pc = p^(f +1) / (f + pc)

CONCLUSION: Thus as a coward your probability of being taken is always p less than being a flagger. Flaggers because of their relative generosity will decline in number relative to cowards in a given population.

However note that Pc has a maximum value when c==n and a minimum value when c==0.

CONCLUSION: Thus having flaggers around instead of cowards is beneficial to cowards. It is better for cowards to move towards areas with higher proportions of flaggers. However as will be seen this leads to mating problems if there are genes that don’t like cowards.

Model 1

Let the population be spread out in g groups. The predation pressure on the population as a whole can be estimated by looking at the individual average, that is the sum of f*Pf for each group divided by the total number . As a continuous function we therefore need (given that f+c=n so c=n-f),

for flaggers and

for cowards

If f[x] is a constant f (as before) then the equations decompose to the equations before i.e. Gf = Pf and Gc = Pc

If f[x]=x i.e. it linearly increases through all the groups so that groups have increasing numbers of flaggers and let there be n groups so that flaggers range from 0 to n, then the integrals to calculate are (where g=n):

Which numerically integrated for p=1, n=10 gives

Gf = 0.1
Gc = 0.1

As expected since the average predation in any number of groups of 10 individuals if they are blind (unable to detect the predator) will be 1/10. i.e. Gf/Gc = 1. For the following probabilities where group size is n=10, Gf/Gc gives:

p=0.25   0.264687
p=0.5     0.295375
p=0.75   0.496825

That is the average predation of flaggers is around 30% that of cowards for lower probabilities and rises relatively as both groups become less vigilant. For larger groups (and a larger range of groups) the effect is ever more apparent so that with groups of size n=30 predation of flaggers is 10% that of cowards.

CONCLUSION
When the ratio of flaggers to cowards varies linearly across all the groups it remains beneficial to be a coward as an individual in any one group. However the flaggers in mostly cooperative groups do better than the cheats in mostly cheating groups so the average globally benefits the flaggers. So while cowards will locally do better than their neighbouring flaggers, globally their population will drop significantly faster.

Model 2

In all groups the rate of reduction of cowards is p less than that of flaggers. That is cowards will therefore come to dominate all static groups and if the group size is limited (as by limiting resources) then eventually flaggers will become extinct in these groups. However it is beneficial for cowards to move to areas of high flagging density.

In reality offspring, likely to carry the parents flagging or coward gene, will disperse around the parents creating pockets of high density. Infiltrating individuals may be excluded by territorial behaviour. It would be in the interests of the cowards to let flaggers into their territory, but not vice-versa.

Sexual selection may also provide a barrier to migration as described above.

2Do
Model that looks at changing rate of populations in cells (with genetics) dy/dx = ry(genetic factors) – pred(y)
Model that looks at changing rate of populations globally (with genetics)

Model that looks at changing rate of populations in a cell (with steady influx of individuals) i.e. like mandelbrot… look to see if there are critical influxes that lead to changes in the cell ratios… then we know any cell with neighb\ours that cause that level of migration will turn themselves into such a cell. i.e. if their outflux goes to the level that needed to promote them.

Examine the shape of distribution of ratios across groups. Population heterogeneity can create incongruent local versus global properties! Apply to markets where marginal action (i.e. to become a coward) is offset by global benefits of being a flagger. Relevance of markets? Conditions where “Invisible Hand of Markets” no longer operates… consider information dispersal through a population as one means to create heterogeneity.

4 Points on Anti-Capitalism

2011-11-03T11:39:00.001Z

1) Anti-Capitalism doesn't exist. If someone described me as an anti-Nazi I'd attack the term because obv. they were trying to frame the discussion in Nazi terms. Anti-Nazism doesn't exist precisiely because we reject Nazism. No one supports "anti-unicorn believers" because we think there aren't any unicorns! 1st up: rejection of anti-Capitalism and all debate surrounding it (including the illegally biased news coverage). The correct thinking is: there is Capitalism AND everything else. Once the debate is allowed to start "anti-Capitalism" becomes a vast array of "other" views. Science and God-religions offer two huge subsets of "anti-Capitalism"... most "anti-Capitalists" are primarily attacking this fascism that refuses any debate whatsoever on the subject.

2) The problem with Capitalism for me is not itself, but how a society adopts it. Our society is making it the model of all human organisation. That is why scientists should be anti-Capitalist: because it is being adopted by prejudice and not research or knowledge. This is the main criticism of Capitalism. Final 2 points are why it is unsuitable.

3) Capitalism uses "exchange" in a market to value things. It has no other model of value. In a society where value is determined by exchange there can be no friendship, no family and no love. The reason is that when anyone interacts in such a society they keep an account book open of debt and credit. I help a "friend" only because I expect them to help me back. I have a child only because I think they will be useful to me. This does happen--and so does murder--but it is important it is not the only basis for human relationship. This is exacty what religions are teaching against in fact and why religions are "anti-Capitalism". "Real" wealth cannot be counted in account books they argue and the opposite behaviour of deleting account books is recommended (as the EU is being forced to discuss now ironically).

4) Who owns the wealth? This is the most famous "anti-Capitalist" issue. Mr Wheel and Mr Plough (the respective inventors of their namesakes) have brought humans literally untold riches. The human population rose on the invention of the latter alone from 1million to 100s of millions. If they somehow owned the rights to that then 1 family would literally own the world. Likewise if someone invented a single machine that could do all human labour more cheaply (a day that is approaching fast) would they really own everything, and more importantly how can an economy function when all humans are finally put out of work? It is clear to me that Capitalism isn't a complete, or even very well thought out system, all the time old problems remain to be solved... and the elite who are happy with the status quo will do everything to stop them being solved (like ever lasting light bulbs, and cancer cures, and DVD players that work longer than the warranty etc)... which is the greatest truth.

SRH is essence of contradition!

2011-10-25T11:22:00.001+01:00

To have a contradiction there must be self-reference since a contradiction is A & –A and so what ever A is must also be negated in –A… that is some quality of A is referred to in both A and negatively in –A. This is not “self” in the usual existential sense of a “thing” but rather self in the sense of “same”.

When we ask whether the hooded man has the same identity as someone we are asking are they the “same” person. To determine whether they are the same person we must, and can only, compare qualities: have they the same name, do both have beards and blue eyes, the same finger prints, the same DNA.

But all this is not sufficient the key thing to establish is that they are never in two places at the same time. It is a joke that because you never see two people together they must be the same person… I believed that for John Sergeant and Jo Brand until they appeared on the same game show. So we can only prove that someone has an identical genetic twins when we have them both in the same room together at the same time. This seems to be the “essence” of identity: the limitation of objects that they can only occupy one space and time.

Yet I use the word “essence”, and we speak of the “same” space and time. Ex: x is at home at 12am GMT on 25th Dec 1850. The location and time-of-location of x are predicates that we apply to the object x, they are things to be said “of” x but they are not x themselves. The idea of “x” as an existing thing necessarily lies outside the realm of description and predication because this is the only way B.Russell can avoid contradiction. If we allow existence as a predicate then we can talk about those things which don’t exist!

I = (x) x does not exist.

Now this creates a set, I, of all those things which don’t exist. So lets take unicorns. Unicorns don’t exist so they belong to the set I. But how can something that doesn’t exist have membership of a set?

Having hermetically excluded all existing things from predication we are safe, but at a cost there is no way to speak about existence: it is a normative assumption of language, that is we use it when we do predicate logic, and we use it when we communicate but only implicitly; a rule of the game.

Thus one wonders whether “existence” is any more than just a rule of the game. Certainly the idea that our “hooded man” is an “existing” individual, separate from others in some fundamentally true way that we can only ever guess at with more and more evidence, is just a vain hope, a faith in the fundamental reality of the world. Let us hope that physics doesn’t continue its path of upsetting this faith much more since little remains already.

So returning to the top, the idea of reference referring to the same existences may be only a rule of the game, in reality any supposed identity is always, and only ever, based upon evidence and predicates of the entities under scrutiny. We have no magical way of ever pulling away the veil of phenomena to look at the underlying things to decide which is which, and what is what, and who is who. Hesperus and Phospheros once thought to be morning and evening stars with evidence and a new model of the skies became the same entity: I wonder what they thought of this after all those years apart ;-)

Maybe then reference is always between predicates and when these predicates are the same then we presume “real” identity or non-identity… until things change and we decide they are different or the same.

Monkey King interpretation

2011-10-24T13:37:00.001+01:00

Posted here some time in 2002 I believe.

"Village of the Undead" (Season 1, Episode 22)

"The Matrix" is just a fairy tale compared with Monkey...

Initially it's a basic situation of good and bad. Pigsy the one representing crude desires is powerless and accepts the intoxication of drink and women without struggle. Quickly he renounces the walk to collect the sutras and is reduced to the level of an animal. Sandy is next. His symbolism has always been enigmatic, I believe it to be something to do with abstract philosophical searching: he never has much role, and always offers irrelevant analysis of situations. Fish is often associated with knowledge and intelligence anyway (maybe practically in its dietary effect on the brain). Anyway these are powerful demons and Sandy succumbs readily too. Both desire and intellgence are soon fooled, intoxicated, attached and literally married to the illusion. The demons are now almost in full existence. Only Monkey and Tripitaka remain. For once it is Tripitaka, they acknowledge, who is the greatest challenge for them.

Monkey's response to the evil is opposite is Pigsy and Sandy. As usual he detects its demonic nature, and typically he opposes it and fights it. Monkey is the ego: out of our control, self determined and always jumping around; basically irrepressible but useful because his self assurance is powerful and he looks after himself and his own very well. Being egotistiocal his relationship with those around him is always oppositional (either playfully arguing with foolish Pigsy or aggressively with demons). However these are a different type of demon from those before: if he believes in them (like Pigsy and Sandy) they will exist but by opposing them he is only making them exist all the more strongly. He cannot win, and quickly is given the choice by the girl: give in or run away. He runs away and joins Tripitaka.

Tripitaka (the monk) obviously represents the seed of enlightenment. Never sure up to this point in the series on the correct path, this time he is clear that they can neither fight nor run away. This is beyond a simple case of good and bad. He at least will surrender. Monkey is proud and loyal and follows his. So they are taken prisoner. All 4 now face death.

The demons owe their existence to the belief and imagination of the 4, but as long as they depend upon them they cannot be sure they exist independently. They need to kill them to prove that they exist freely from their captives minds: so in doing they will gain completely free, independent and solid existence.

One of the demons however doubts this and at the last minute she turns upon the demon king and ends the illusion. Everything vanishes and all 4 are free. What does it mean?

Firstly I shall explain very generally. The whole of Monkey and Buddhist teaching is aimed at teaching that it is our "thoughts which create the world" (as said in the narration at the start of every episode), or better it is the Mind which create the world. When it says "thoughts" or Mind it does not mean Monkey (the ego) creates the world. When we think "I am thinking" (Sandy) or "I want to rule Heaven and create the world" or just "I am going to do this or imagine that" (pure Monkey) or "I desire that" (Pigsy) or "I want to learn the Sutras" (Tripitaka) this is Ego (which monkey also generally represents to) not the Mind. The Mind creates all these thoughts listed and more. The Mind (if anything in Monkey) is the narrator himself who with words and pictures creates the stories. Our 4 characters, the demons and the places they find, are all created by the story, aka the Mind. In this episode they are learning not just to revel in their surroundings (like Pigsy) or analyse things (like Sandy) or change the course of events (like Monkey) according to their wishes and desires, but rather to surrender and ignore the demons and obstacles that the story (their mind) throws up. Without belief and attention fueling the illusion it vanishes and the story ends. The mind they will learn is what puts everything together into the problems they encounter each week.

More specifically I now write. All the things of the world are created by our minds, just as everything in the episode is created by the story. The demons represent ordinary things which because they are very attracive to the 4 travelers become an issue and distraction from the goal of gaining the sutras (which represent the achievemnt of truth). Not everyone passing through these place will find these demons - hence why they seem to lie in wait. Actually they are ordinary things, but because the travellers believe them to be attractive and special they become so. Thus they are distractions and become obstacles and the demons come into existence. The illustration is drink, girls and enjoyment to attract Pigsy and Sandy. "What is wrong with enjoying yourself" says one of the girls philosophically to Sandy as he falls under the spell of this hedonism. (A poignant question to todays rational and capitalist world).

Secretly we know that the Mind has created our obstacles. In reality when we become wise for example we get bored of things and they evaporate - forgetting them we normally don't wonder how they changed. Attraction draws us deeper and deeper into our obstacles, and intoxicated we wish they were really existing so we could feast on them and really gain something from them. Soon the belief that the things we like really are likable, gives way to no wish to escape the illusion (the blue pill in the Matrix 'story'). As we give ourselves up to the object of desire we are exchanging our very power to have an attraction and find something attractive for the very attraction itself. We are handing it the power and becoming its slave. This is the way we kill ourselves with desires and this is the strength of the demons. Its no good to reject the things we like either, because this does not stop our like for them. A classic learning curve for most religious people. When we reject things we still believe that the power of attraction is real and separate from ourselves, otherwise we would realise distance can't help. The ignorant run away like Monkey (becoming the subdued puritan here).

It is Tripitaka who has Buddhist teaching already! (strange if he is going to get the sutras) who realises that there is nothing that can be done. If you fight them you will become evil also he tells Monkey, i.e. they will become stronger and beat him. He neither gives into the objects of desires nor runs away. He (and Monkey) is then trapped (again :-)). For ego this is very painful and Monkey is suffering in the vat of acid. The next bit is not woven into the story I don't think. Tripitaka has sowed the seed of the end of the story here because he does not believe the demons fully. He is neither fooled into intoxication nor fearful - just trapped by his mind. The demon power is already weakened. The scene is set to end the story.

Already weakened it is then through the demon who has intoxicated our philosophical fish Sandy that the ray of enlightenment comes. "If we are created by these 4 prisioners how can I exist if they are dead". The very desire which has Sandy's mind transfixed suddenly realises its complete dependency on Sandy and so realises its own emptiness. It kills the king demon and so all the desires and illusion is ended. The obstacle is gone and all are free to pursue Enlightenment.

The narrator ends with the statement "Each day the clever mans learns something, but each day the wise man learns to accept a bit more uncertainty". The point and relevance is that it is our fixation on definite things which begins the path to evil. Rather it is with a mind which gives up definite things, realising that the interest and attraction for specific things, and the rejection and boredom of other things is all set in motion by ourselves. Reality is not a definite thing, it does not come in the shape of good and bad things, demons and heavens, or interesting and boring things, nor does it make sense like a story or even this explaination of the episode! Its just a matter of seeing the Pigsy, Sandy, Monkey and Tripitaka in ourselves, and doing the crazy journey for real (and being a little irrepressible to).

Facebook debate on Wales v France ref decision…

2011-10-24T13:29:00.001+01:00

Most interested in the argument that cropped up about not listening to other people. It’s not a valid argument (no-one seems to have noticed) but it raises a point about individuality. If we decide to base our thoughts on what others are thinking, what do we do if they are thinking you shouldn’t do that? Like when Brian—in the ‘Life of Brian’—tells the throng that ‘they are all individual’ what a stupid thing to say because if it’s true then how can you tell them? If they need telling then they already aren’t! Indeed the very fact we can talk about “individuality” at all is proof that it doesn’t exist! Is there an SRH argument here?

In the face of an outrageous ref decision that invalidates the outcome of a game isn't it better for the whole team to just walk off the pitch?
Like · · Share · October 15 at 9:26am via mobile
Alva Gosson Even if Wales win the cost will damage the final. Strike!
October 15 at 9:30am · Like

Jeremy Edwards It all depends on which course of action raises the most revenue.
October 15 at 10:02am · Like

Michael Sissons No! They'd be banned from competitive rugby. Not every commentator is agreeing that wasn't a red cardable tackle, either...
October 15 at 10:13am · Like
Alva Gosson Hi Jeremy, sadly I think you're right. I was against rugby becoming professional... yes it means the players have more time to concentrate on rugby and the rugby is better, but it risks people starting to play not rugby but the stupid game of trade and income... which is vacuous and pointless. Sadly too many people spend their lives playing this game. Unlike in football I still believe these guys play rugby.. which is why it is the far superior sport (still).
October 15 at 10:50am · Like
Alva Gosson Hi Mike, well if the IRB decided to back the decision and ban Wales then they would invalidate themselves, and set off a huge political battle. A niche would immediately open up for any group/tournament who would include Wales and other teams would have to decide whether they backed the IRB. The IRB could become isolated and defunct and a new rugby board evolve. I wouldn't let all that stupid politics get in the way of my team walking off. (As a principle it never matters what other people think btw.)
October 15 at 10:55am · Like
Alva Gosson ‎(p.s. reason for that is that if the principle was to base our thoughts on what other people believe, what do we do if other people don't believe that principle ;-)
October 15 at 11:00am · Like
Alva Gosson ‎(p.p.s. absolutely technically for an image processing computer, it was a red card, but I would expect the red card to be for something that was either deliberate or un-professionally sloppy. Being upended on to your shoulders from waist height is utterly trivial... I'll put money on it the famously shifty French played that for all its worth (if the player had leapt to his feet--as he could have--it wouldn't even have been noticed); no risk of injury at all, and nothing more than a fantastic tackle! Shocker!)
October 15 at 11:13am · Like

Cheong Kong Chen I bet u will be seriously torn when both of ur "favourite" teams get into the final. And I wonder if u r going to watch it ;)
October 15 at 11:49am · Like
Alva Gosson Well rugby is the most important bit, how the teams play the second, and who the teams are the third. First two apply to everyone; the third just personal preference. So won't make much difference who gets thru :-) Personally I hope it's NZ because a NZ v France final would be the most unpredictable (given history). Objectively I hope so too because if NZ don't win this the bomb on Hiroshima for the Japanese will be a firework compared to the fall out in NZ! Sadly the final is spoilt because thanks to Alain Roland (hmmm french/irish) the N. Hemisphere isn't fielding its better team for the final so everything is messed up on all levels for everyone. Plus Australia objectively can't win because that makes it 3 WCs from 7 and they're cocky little b*****ds at the best of times ;-)
October 15 at 12:27pm · Like

Jeremy Edwards Rugby, racing & beer ...
October 16 at 8:20pm · Like

The Tortoise and the Hare hold a key truth on rates.

2011-10-24T13:11:00.001+01:00

Fig 1: If a journey is split into two halves and the first half S1 travelled at the speed on the x-axis, then the y-axis gives the speed the second half needs to be cycled to get an average of 15mph. Given by this expression:

Going slow has a far bigger impact on average speed than going fast! Half the journey spent 3mph off at 12mph requires the other half 5mph faster at 20mph! The effect rapidly diverges as speed slows down.

As speed increases the energy required per mile increases with a square (or a cube per second) so to double speed requires 4x the energy. Thus the impact of the above means that total energy used in a journey rapidly increases if we spend time slower than the average we want see Fig 2. (Y axis has just relative units the numbers don’t mean anything.) So spending time at 10mph when we want an average of 15mph will result in us putting more energy in over the journey than were we to spend time at 25mph! If the speed even drops a little to 10.5 it doubles the energy you need to pull the average back! While 4.5mph the other way (19.5mph) only increases energy use by 35%.

The clear message is what I’ve heard from time trial cyclists that its “not the going fast but the not going slow.”

Now this is exactly what Aesop was saying. Short periods of spectacular performance are impressive but are highly wasteful and are easily out stripped by a slow but regular approach; the stream over centuries eroding the landscape versus the flood.

This applies to cars too. The car manufacturers would like us to think that cars with spectacular performance will achieve more but such performance will achieve very little if we spend time below the average we want. A Porsche driver wants to travel 100miles in an hour. If he spends 30minutes at 70mph he needs to spend the other 30minutes at 175mph! Or more sensibly we want to travel 60miles in an hour. The Porsche has to get out of an urban area and averages 40mph for 30mins of the journey, they will need to average 120 for the rest! While a car that simply found a route where they could cruise at 60mph the whole way would achieve the same.

The logic applies to any rate. To make money it is not making a few spectacular incomes, but the not ever making a little. Conversely to reduce rates and save money it is the little purchases, or the not buying things, that matters rather than the big buys. In chimps it applies to social status too: success has been shown to lie in saving energy by minimising skirmishes and putting it into big fights.

I think the main difference between working and middle classes lies in this too. The rich buy quality occasionally, while the poor make lots of cheap purchases. The rich work consistently at a reasonable rate, the poor accept low rates and hope to make up the difference by big wins in gambling/lotteries and occasional lucky deals. Capitalists know this and try to encourage us to spend a little often thus sapping our wealth.

On Time

2011-10-20T10:31:00.000+01:00

The suggestion of neutrinos breaking the light barrier finally raises the possibility of time paradoxes. A clock strapped to one of these neutrinos will have moved backwards the next time it is checked, while the neutrino—from the frame of reference of the observer—will have travelled forward in time to a new place. A future cyclotron—using perhaps the gravity of planets—could bend the path of neutrinos so that they return suitable close to the starting point. If a detector position here could signal rapidly enough for the neutrino source to be moved then a very bizarre situation would arise. A clock strapped to the arriving neutrinos would see the change of position of the journey happen before they had set out! So that in fact their arrival would be moving the position back so that they could set out on the original path… has some difficulty saying that!

Anyway got me thinking about the great unsolved question of time.

There is an obvious problem with time. The standard model sees it as having a direction—Past, Present and Future—and somehow the Future becomes the Present which becomes the Past. This change from one to the other is imagined like a river, or an arrow or in someway a movement. Once so established we then use time along with space to relate positions of moving things so that like static frames of a film they may be strung together into a flowing phenomenon of change. But if we wish to explain the movement of an arrow or a river by using static events linked by time, we can’t then use the river or the arrow to describe the flow of time. At root we still (in the 21st century despite millennia) have no way to think about the time apart from the observation that things change. This idea that movement was ineffable was first posed to me by a friend, Andrew Rennie, at college. And being ineffable I have been reluctant to take up the gauntlet for what is 21 yrs now!

It would appear that the standard view of time serves to separate events into film like frames that are static and frozen. These are describable pictures and numbers may enumerate the points in these pictures and the frames themselves. But how they fit together—how the points in space are differentiated from one another, and the frames in time are differentiated from one another is beyond such insight. How they comes to be joined together into a changing phenomenon remains utterly unexplored in this frozen world. Perhaps essentially so since the very process here is to encode and produce in language the phenomenon of change, which is essential to differentiate the sequence of symbols and thoughts of the process.

Returning to the start, phenomenologically, what we begin with is the observation of change. That nothing remains as it is. We may sit and stare at a leaf and, if stationary, we will start to notice that it has movement in the wind, and as the days go by its shape will change as it grows or is eaten or decays. We like sudden changes, but most change is a very morphing from one shape into another and from one state into another. This morphing, refusal to remain what it is, is the essence of Being. We must I assume begin with this idea. It is the flux of Heraclitus, the Power of Nietzsche, that is forever in turmoil undoing what is, and becoming what is yet to be. “Becoming” is what came first, the Become only steps along the journey. Language being entity biased prefers the Become, the established things that have happened, but it forgets that they are only here because they Became, and like the Little Mermaid the cost of having Become is to one day Begone. Unenlightened life, as Buddha taught us, is dominated by fixation on the Become, the Becoming, and the Begone. Enlightened life is the realisation that true reality is built upon the shifting sands the both build and destroy the sand dunes of our minds.

Time travel is a mine field of paradox. As I read once paradox is a sign that something has gone wrong in our language and thoughts since in reality there are no paradoxes. If I was to return to 1859 what assurance have I that it is the ‘same’ 1859 as recorded in History? A paradox requires that it is the same 1859 so that in a century and a halves time I will be building my time machine. But how do I know this? More importantly how could I know this! What even does the ‘same’ time mean? Its normal usage would be concurrent events in different places, but the idea of same place but different time moves the question of same ‘time’ to same ‘place’. The question in 1859 is then is this the same place as in 2011. If I was in Downe House in Kent in 1859 I would be witnessing Darwin putting the finishing touches to ‘On the Origin of Species’. Downe House lies on certain identifiable roads and in relation to certain other places. In 1859 these would remain the same so I could give a normal definition of same place. Likewise I would recognise Darwin, and the house and grounds having seen paintings of him and visited the house, so could give a normal definition of same house and man. But this is deceptive. What if I was visiting an exact copy of the Earth? Crazy but what if I was the visit the area 100,000 years before: how would I find the ‘place’ where the house now stands. I need a point of reference. I could use GPS and make that a point on the Earth’s surface. But what is my 0 position. The rotation of the earth, precession around the sun etc all mean that there is no fixed point 100,000 years ago that I can find to map to the present. I would need to map the current 0 longitude and latitude back through time to find it 100,000 yrs ago. Likewise the whole issue of the English plate moving from the South Atlantic over time to crash into the Scottish plate. 100,000 yrs ago the GPS reading for Downe House would have been in the sea and wouldn’t even refer to the same rocks as today. So same ‘place’ is entirely relative, the problem I have when trying to reference the next sentence clause: it must be relative to a mysterious thing called Here and Now which is always assumed a priori and cannot be defined.

It is that mysterious Here and Now which is the true Place and Time and this remains the same even when we travel back to 1850. It is just another day. True that people carrying future knowledge don’t show up very often. If I was to tell Darwin the impact of his book in my world it would be a very odd occasion for him; and the fact it doesn’t happen suggests that there is something else wrong here. But assuming that it does happen the point is that I would be retelling Darwin of a world that is not in his future as though I was from further down the river than him, nor now is it in my future. The point is that we are both in a new place and time, as ever and the future remains as open to us as it did. If I went and killed one of my ancestors there would be no paradox as my own history doesn’t change, there are simply two ‘pasts’ one before in my memory and one after in my memory.

A rational agent can’t know their own probability distribution

2011-10-05T11:16:00.001+01:00

If it did then it would be able to construct choices that differ from that distribution.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_probability

On Boredom

2011-10-02T18:06:00.001+01:00

Cut from Facebook

Boredom is one of the great sufferings in life (largely unacknowledged I think!). Decided yesterday (after 20yrs of filling my bored moments thinking abt it) that isn't it just a type of greed, coming after an more exciting period of time has ceased?
Like · · Share · September 23 at 10:42am via mobile
Weng Leong and Richard Pickles like this.
Alva Gosson The mistake all addicts make is to be motivated to recreate the high when maybe the best approach is just to go thru the withdrawal? Needless add an economic spin to that ;)
September 23 at 10:44am · Like · 1 person
Alva Gosson Now i got my answer i'm bored ;)
September 23 at 10:46am · Like · 1 person

Jerry Cloony what about less thinking and more doing Alva !?
September 23 at 12:16pm · Like · 1 person

Jeremy Edwards Boredom is a state of mind. If something's become boring it's no longer fun. And when it's not fun it's time to stop doing it. One of the one-liners in quality assurance ...
September 23 at 12:53pm · Like
Alva Gosson Hi Jerry I'm sitting on the toilet in the middle of a 60mile cycle how much more doing do you want :) you know i'm only going to think of an answer to that ;) I take a Tao approach at mo that doing is really non-doing if you look closely. Certainly whenever i do anything i realise i depend entirely on other people and the 'doing' wasn't mine anyway + sun 'doing' a gr8 job drying my washing today ... The world goes around thats abt all we can say. + i just 'did' some thinking so done even more :)
September 23 at 3:05pm · Like · 1 person
Alva Gosson Jerry u just reminded me of my new year resolution which wasn't to 'do' anything spectacular (that is just ego) but rather to harmonise between the worlds around me... Not 'done' that at all! Still 1/4 yr to go!
September 23 at 3:18pm · Like · 1 person

Jerry Cloony hehehe !!! Just get on with it and don't share you sticky mobile phone with anyone. hahaha !!!
September 23 at 3:37pm · Like
Alva Gosson Eco-friendly home made anti-theft paint ;) Sorry there was a purpose to being so frank it was to highlight the difference between the base nature of reality and doing and the more sublime realm of thought.
September 24 at 1:17am · Like · 1 person
Alva Gosson Indulge me here this interests me a lot! A visit to the toilet is preceded by some sense of urgency and desire for something, and a process which leads to some satisfaction and the evacuation of something which the digestive processes have made. So it is with thinking itself, tho Socrates prefered the analogy of child birth... At risk of suggesting he was talking shit perhaps, 4 which he was killed anyway ;) anyway was digesting this in bed this morning and now i give birth to these ideas ->
September 25 at 8:09am · Like
Alva Gosson themselves BUT, and this is the point, the process of having these ideas IS NOT the idea itself any more than a baby IS the birth, or a shit IS the pooing -> therefore i can't think abt thought itself as it happens real time! So there is the distinction between what a thought is about and a thought itself and they CAN'T be the same... I call that SRH-it's called Non-Identity in the books. So buddha asks us to go to the toilet and be the pooing not the poo, and be the thinking and not t thought.
September 25 at 8:35am · Like
Alva Gosson Problem with ego, property and Capitalism is that it protects and values the poo more than the pooing, and it is the poo which becomes marketed and fetishised by the customer rather than the industry and the skill of its pooers. So you have worthless shiters in the streets seeking to buy poos that they think are worth something. Bad mistake!
September 25 at 8:41am · Like
Alva Gosson Interesting cos most of the time we think that with enough doing, working, living, shopping, thinking, scientific investigating, pooing we WILL have sometime to show for ourselves when actually we ARE those things.

What makes us happy or sad is not Reality

2011-10-02T18:04:00.001+01:00

cut from Facebook…

IF how we think about something determines whether we are happy or sad, then it is our ego that is making us happy or sad. LIKEWISE if there are two sides to a situation that matters to 'us', then that is also our ego making us happy or sad. Reality can only be one way or the other, everything else is ego.
Like · · Share · 6 hours ago
Alva Gosson We know when things are Real cos they actually ARE, and they don't need a STORY to accompany them to tell us how they are. Most things aren't real ;-)
6 hours ago · Like
Alva Gosson like this post :-)
6 hours ago · Like
Alva Gosson Qualify that: like what this post says (obviously it can't 'say' anything).
6 hours ago · Like
Alva Gosson I ended up in a situation that was unfair... at least it suddenly occurred to me as such 3 days later which made me unhappy. So I made a decision to deal with it. Everyone i told about is said it was unfair. Then it turned out that the situation I was thinking about hadn't even arisen. All that storm in a tea cup over a story I wrote myself... one that even convinced everyone I told... my mind, my ego, making me trouble :-)

To be constrained, and the constraint.

2011-10-02T15:46:00.001+01:00

For a system to be useful it must have constraints. For example a system of N degrees of freedom can be represented in an N dimensional space, however without constraints it occupies that whole space.

The problem is the opposite for a system that is seeking to express itself. It needs freedom from constraints so that it may be large enough to contain all possibilities. The N dimensional space is the ideal system in which to express other systems because it is free from all constraints other than its dimensionality.

For a system to express itself it needs to have less constraints than itself. If it has the same constraints as itself then isn’t its representation the same as itself?

Consistent Networks and Rugby World Cup

2011-10-02T15:42:00.001+01:00

Exploring a way of using networks to create means and therefore predictions of missing links in the network.

If a team A plays a team B then a statistic can be formed of their relative strength(RS) r by dividing r=A/B.

If a team plays itself then we would expect its relative strength to be r=1

In a round-robin competition where every team plays every other team a network of RSs exists. Where loops exist it is possible to calculate the score where team A plays team A. For example in the Tri-Nations competition, where 3 teams play, suppose Australia plays New-Zealand with r=2, and NZ then plays South-Africa with r=2. This means that A is twice as good as NZ who is twice as good as SA so we would expect SA to be 1/4 as good as Australia (assuming it is the same Australia we started with). It is this assumption which is flawed as teams are never the same and so can never play themselves! This is a kind of SRH where relationship with oneself once again proves impossible. However holding the assumption that loops multiply to 1 and that such consistent networks reflect the underlying dynamics of competitions the following calculations can be made.

In a competition of N teams there are N-1 degrees of freedom in a consistent network. So with N=4 teams playing there are 3 unique r values. Imagine the network (a square with diagonals drawn in). Once we know 3 of the sides (a,b,c) the 4th side is simply d=1/(a*b*c). One diagonal is e=1/(a*b) and the other diagonal is f=1/(b*c). Care must be taken to treat these as vectors where direction from A->B always means A/B.

Once real values are known for any of these values the following expression can be used to find the “nearest” consistent network.

If each arc of the network is treated as a dimension then the space of all possible networks between N teams is represented by an N(N-1)/2 dimensional space. However only certain points in this space are consistent networks. The consistent networks obey the loop constraints as discussed so the distance from the real network to a consistent network is given by D. Numerical minimisation of D offers the easiest way to discover the nearest consistent network, that is the consistent network that gives the smallest overall change to the data values.

UPDATE (3/10/2011)
However this method means reducing a score from 1 to 0.5 is considered a smaller change than increasing one from 1 to 2 when actually they are the same change. Instead it makes sense to calculate the difference between log values D, then take Exp(magnitude of D) as the Euclidean distance. This forms each part of the above expression.

Recap on 2011 6-Nations championship

N=6 teams play, with a network of size 6.5/2=15 and N-1=5 degrees of freedom (size of the system). From the final championship scores the following relative scores r were calculated (original actual scores before minimising in brackets):

Eng/Ita=4.08 (4.54)
Ita/Ire=0.35 (0.85)
Ire/Fra=1.44 (0.88)
Fra/Sco=0.99 (1.62)
Sco/Wal=1.04 (0.25)
Wal/Eng=0.47 (0.73)
Sco/Eng=0.50 (0.73)
Fra/Eng=0.49 (0.53)
Ire/Eng=0.70 (3.00)
Wal/Ita=1.94 (1.50)
Sco/Ita=2.02 (2.63)
Fra/Ita=1.99 (0.95)
Wal/Ire=0.68 (1.46)
Sco/Ire=0.71 (0.86)
Wal/Fra=0.97 (0.32)

D=3.15

Tri-Nations 2011

N=3 with 3x2/2=3 arcs and 2 degrees of freedom.

This year only 2 matches were played with the following relative scores and geometric average.

A/SA = 1.65
SA/NZ = 0.51
NZ/A = 1.19

For geometrically averaged r D=0.33!

Geometric because if a team does 4x another on one occasion and 1/4 on the next occasion they are on average the same as that other team!

Very much the teams didn’t play as well as themselves! Also the limited size of the network means it doesn’t hold much information. Both rounds are consistent within themselves (small D), but contradictory between themselves. Since the scores represent how many times one team scored than the other it is perhaps better to use the geometric mean for averaging them.

Rugby World Cup 2011

The first week is done and South Africa/Wales (r=1.06), Australia/Ireland (r=0.4!!) and Australia/Italy (r=5.33) have both played Southern Hemisphere teams. These two games link the networks above and enable a consistent network to be calculated for the top 9 teams.

N=9,full network arcs=36 (not all games will be played),d.f.=8

There are 6 more arcs to add to the 6 Nations network
Aus/SA = (1.65)
SA/NZ = (0.51)
NZ/Aus = (1.19)
SA/Wal = (1.06)
Aus/Ire = (0.40)
Aus/Ita = (5.33)

Numerically minimising the new expression gives the following network seeds from which the rest of the consistent network can be calculated:

D=3.30632

a -> 3.95592, b -> 0.218121, c -> 1.97058, d -> 1.09539, e -> 1.02128, p -> 5.10258, r -> 1.17188, t -> 1.33486

Eng/Ita=3.96 (4.54) [a]
Ita/Ire=0.22 (0.85) [b]
Ire/Fra=1.97 (0.88) [c]
Fra/Sco=1.10 (1.62) [d]
Sco/Wal=1.02 (0.25) [e]
Wal/Eng=0.53 (0.73) [1/(a b c d e)]
Sco/Eng=0.54 (0.73) [1/(a b c d)]
Fra/Eng=0.59 (0.53) [1/(a b c)]
Ire/Eng=1.16 (3.00) [1/(a b)]
Wal/Ita=2.08 (1.50) [1/(b c d e)]
Sco/Ita=2.12 (2.63) [1/(b c d)]
Fra/Ita=2.33 (0.95) [1/(b c)]
Wal/Ire=0.45 (1.46) [1/(c d e)]
Sco/Ire=0.46 (0.86) [1/(c d)]
Wal/Fra=0.89 (0.32) [1/(d e)]

Aus/SA = 1.84 (1.65) [p b c d e/t]
SA/NZ = 0.46 (0.51) [t/(b c d e p r)]
NZ/Aus = 1.17 (1.19) [r]
SA/Wal = 1.33 (1.06) [t]
Aus/Ire = 1.11 (0.40) [p b]
Aus/Ita = 5.10 (5.33) [p]

Using this consistent network we can walk between teams multiplying with the arrows and dividing against the arrows to find the relative strengths of games not played. This provides a ranking of teams.

EvNZ=0.67
EvA=0.78
EvI=0.86
EvSA=1.41
EvF=1.69
EvW=1.89

6 Nations further study

The values of the 6 nations network was evaluated after each game in two ways. (1) the nearest consistent network NCN was calculated each time in one step from the raw data network (2) the NCN was calculated from the last network plus the new dimension of data, i.e. in a series of incremental stems. Version two allowed for teams to gradually improve or weaken during the tournament, while version one assumes that games at the start are as important as those at the end.

Results from 1 step calculation.

The first 5 games do not complete any loops so offer no network with which to work. Team strengths relative to England are given on a Log scale and games mark the x-axis.All teams strengthen against England as the tournament progresses, in particular Ireland who storm ahead in the game against England.

Version 2 – Incremental

Essentially the same results but changes in teams (i.e. the walk through the Network space) is smoother. Scotland in particular should be happy with the way their team improved the most during the tournament, perhaps however because they started so weakly. France and Ireland take the last two games very seriously.

UPDATE 3/10/2011

Following the decision to work in log space to make 1/4x the same magnitude change as 4x the 6 nations 1 step calculation yields:

D=8.13701 – the large D value is because %increases above 1 are as valuable as %decreases below in this method.

{a -> 1.04727, b -> 0.745217, c -> 1.32598, d -> 1.43158, e -> 0.76705}

So relative to England the teams would score:

E-W = 0.955
E I = 1.098
E It = 1.432
E F = 0.939
E S = 1.245

Using this method there is very little between the teams! England is stronger than Ireland, Italy and Scotland, but Wales and France are the threats.

A General Note on Networks

If one walks a network making sure that no “loops” are formed then after N-1 arcs (where N is the number of nodes) the “seed” arcs will be laid from which all other arcs can represented by an alternative route through the seed network. In other words the number of arcs A = N + R – 1(R=the number of “regions”). However regions are topographical in N dimensional space so that no arcs ever cross. I believe this is a recognised formula … will check.

ToDo
It has also not been fully tested whether deciding which arcs to make seeds (i.e. degrees of freedom d.f.) and which are dependent on the network leads to different minima. Easy to test just try a few variations of network.

Debt: First 5000 years.

2011-09-02T09:36:00.001+01:00

David Graeber is my new man http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2009-08-20-graeber-en.html not read yet but seems to fit exactly into my own embryonic thoughts that society (& economics) is the means by which the powerful try to keep themselves powerful and the poor remain slaves.

Brave v Coward & Sexual Selection

2011-09-01T11:10:00.001+01:00

Thought up a genetic model on holiday. I always call my automata “bugs”. So each bug has two binary genes. Gene1 decides whether on seeing a predator the individual signals to the group or not, giving us a brave allele and a cowardly allele. Gene2 decides who you wish to mate with a brave or a coward.

The bugs were distributed in a 15x15 grid, with a 10% chance of moving to adjacent squares randomly, and with a 1% chance of mutation in the genes. Bugs died if they were preyed upon or ran out of energy. The total amount of energy in the group was kept constant by scaling each bug up when the energy fell.

The chance of being caught was determined by the number of braves in your square. Let a solitary individual not see a predator (and get predated) on 70% of occasions (p=0.7) then a group of B braves will be predated on 0.7^B of occasions. If you are a coward in a group of braves you benefit from the braves and yourself so 0.7^(B+1) the extra protection is the benefit of cheating.

2DO-- Originally I wanted to create an expression in the classic style of economics and ecology to express the marginal point at which cheating became less beneficial to being brave. A coward having a lot of non-mobile cowardly children will not benefit as much as a brave having lots of brave children so a dispersal factor will be needed to determine the probability of meeting your offspring.

Instead I did a model. Interestingly being 11 or 00 means that you can produce a self sustaining population since 11 are braves who breed with braves, and 00 are cowards which breed with coward. However as explained under heavy predation groups of braves do much better than groups of cowards.

If you are 01 or 10 then you wish to breed with a different type from yourself. This means that only a mixed population strategy works and is more complex and liable to failure than the simple 11 or 00 strategies.

In the few test runs I performed the 11 quickly became the most dominant type, but then entered population dynamics due to other factors. This eventually gave an opportunity for other types to take over, which usually lead to extinction of all the bugs. One notable feature is the prevalence of type 10 i.e. brave bugs who seek to mate with cowards. As the 11 population falls away and cowards become more frequent it is beneficial to mate with a coward. However under heavy predation large groups of cowards get decimated, so braves are selected for which benefits 10s. However as the cowards fall away 10 run out of mates and if 11s can’t respond fast enough the system collapses.

The program worked by setting the probabilities of each bug, and then throwing dice to select individuals into the next generation. Thus it was not that whole squares got selected for (as in reality) but rather than probability of being selected was increased in good squares. I thought this would reflect general dynamics better.

2Do The model doesn’t have proper diploid sex. A proper diploid genome with sex (genetic mixing) and dominance effects will complicate this logic.

Hereness & Existence

2011-09-01T10:08:00.001+01:00

Slowly condensing an awareness of “hereness” and existence.

While working in the Walthamstow FoodGiant in 1994, washing my hands and looking in the mirror, I suddenly experienced that the “thought” that I had a brain (the mental picture so to speak) was better illustrated by the fact I was having the thought. That is the existence that we attribute to other brains was in my case proven by the existence of the world. To put it again: if we survey the objective world we can identify any number of objects, all of which occupy the same status of being part of the world. Then there is the question of which object is myself, it is as though I then need to “enter” the world and when I do I discover that the object of my “brain” corresponds to my experience of the world itself. The existence of my perceptions and my world is the same as the existence of my brain – there is only one level of existence. This is the identity theory which states that brains are consciousness, rather than cause it. Now this runs into problems so expressed but is the beginning of the awareness.

Yesterday came a similar awareness that the existence of the Universe is the same as my existence. It followed from thoughts inspired by a hypothesis on TV that Jack the Ripper was a known criminal with a mental illness that occasionally made him need to kill. This raises that ancient question of freedom and choice and evil once again. If he “needs” to in a way that he cannot control then is he culpable for his crimes? I believe, and have it supported in Buddhist teaching and others, that there is always choice. However if we sink to such a low level of consciousness that we can’t gain perspective on our desires then indeed it will seem to our consciousness that we are overwhelmed by forces beyond our control. Indeed he quite possibly had a desire to kill and mutilate women (this is after all only an extreme type of hatred and greed), but that he “needed” to suggests that his mind was already in a very low state when the desire hit. Once the awareness hits that we always have the possibility to escape the confines of our genetic and mechanistic programming (our body that is) the question arises about the nature of our experience of the world: is this the result of our genetics and mechanistic programming or does this transcend these? What we sense is purely mechanistic—the colours we see depend upon the receptors in our eyes and the wiring of our brain and even the language we speak—but the fact we sense is beyond this. Like Kierkegaard trying to separate the dancer from the dance it is hard to separate the actions of the mind from the mind itself. But if some people might want to say that the ability to see is only the sum of colours and other perceived elements, they might also want to say that a dance can exist without a dancer. Yet and this is crucial the dancer can’t be another type of dance! If we speak of transcending our experience of the world we are going outside experience. Now it is at that level that I realised we are no longer separate from the world. To use Heideggar’s metaphor, the light that shines through our experience is the very light of the Universe. To experience our existence is to experience the existence of the Universe.

On Community

2011-08-29T16:01:00.001+01:00

Why do we need context? Determine that and you have the SRH.

===============

Heraclitus says “Only the waking share a common cosmos; each sleeps alone.” Indeed Human existence is one of community, from which extends the whole issue of being-in-a-community and so therefore being-an-individual and then the fear of being-outside-a-community.

Humans mediate their being-in-a-community in many ways from socialising, to having a family, to talking, to working. The latter is of particular interest to me as I prepare to write a book because it forms the basis for economics while the others do not. Work I will argue is simply a social phenomenon; unrecognisable from the activity of survival animals are engaged in (in particular the impact of work by machines, and productivity arising from ethnotechnological efficiency will be examined).

Just listening to Kick-Ass sound track and reminded of the long discussion on Facebook (ironically a community website) about the riots. I was arguing for social inclusion of the rioters; everyone else arguing for social exclusion. Why do some people like Kick-Ass exercise their freedom by fighting for social justice, while others do so by becoming the criminals? (Essentially the problem of evil). Briefly if some people just “are” evil then they have no choice in what they do, so technically they are not evil. If they chose to do evil then in some way they don’t see it as evil. Viewing from a social perspective I suggest that they do evil because they believe it will lead to social inclusion in their peer group, or they are dreaming not realising that social inclusion was their goal.

Last night I dreamed I was a mass-murderer; today am I a mass-murderer dreaming I am sane? After reading Raymond Tallis’ discussion of Zhuangzi And That Bloody Butterfly it is clear that the answer is “No”. It also reveals the problem with the mass-murderer because he might be fooled by this puzzle! If I am a mass-murderer who is dreaming then who today am I talking to, or writing for here? If I am simply dreaming all these words, then the mass-murderer will awake and remember all this and then who is he remembering it all for; the people he wants to kill? Thus whichever way I turn I recognise that the desire to remember my dream and its words are inspired by an audience (an unspecified audience, implicit in the existence of language) and so the murdered finds himself in a community, one that he wishes to annihilate or at least alienate himself from. Why would he do this? I suspect, as with all crime and violence, it is ironic. It is because his desire to be in-the-community is so great that he ends up being-outside-the community, just as people whose desire for peace is too great end up creating wars, and people whose desire for non-crime end up committing crimes as do Kick-Ass and his partners.

Been having a discussion with friends upon the whole nature of private and public funding, that is between Capitalism and Socialism. Read Hayek’s “Road to Serfdom” and then started Jim Collins - Books - Good to Great and the Social Sectors. Hayek argues that putting power in the hands of all powerful people leads to abuses of freedom both by implication of giving up freedom, but also because powerful people have to get used to hurting a minority in every choice and so lose compassion. Big planning he says is thus anathema to freedom and so free-markets and individual competition is the best of a bad world. Collins argues that business thinking revolves around money as both input and output, while social services has money as an input but needs other measures of its output than money. The Cleveland Orchestra is used as one example of how other measures than profit were used to chart its progress to the #3 orchestra in the world. Collins’ articulation of the point that there are other measures of success than profit cuts to the root of the debate about Capitalism for me. A profitable organisation may have unmeasured costs on the community and the welfare of people, even amounting to more cost than profit when viewed against other baseline measures; something which a purely monetary economics can’t stop. Private funding ignores the impact on the public; public funding ignores the impact on the private. Thatcher, and other post-Hayekians, would say there are only individuals and on the level of man to man they cannot be wrong (in Kant’s terms each man is an end in himself), but like the dreamer they ignore the a priori necessity of a community that ought—if they awake—to inform their individual choices as leaders. Clearly there is room for a dialectic, as indeed we have!

Death implies Other

2011-08-07T10:03:00.002+01:00

Further to the post on 25th Sept 2007 "Notes as I read..."...

The chicken egg problem means that a system can never be the "exclusive cause of itself" (XCI) because if it was then how was it created in the first place.

Thus a system is either Eternal and XCI or it is not Eternal (mortal) and not XCI.

To be not XCI a system must be caused by something other than itself (even if it can also be caused by itself). Thus no mortal system can exist independent of other systems. Death implies Other.

Now the SRH (which states that referring to oneself is impossible) is based on similar logic. To refer to oneself we must also be in existence, for if we were not existing then how could we be referring. Equally if the statement is a self-referring statement, then it must be referring in order to exist (as a self-referring statement). So we have the chicken and the egg again, albeit rather loosely:

If the statement fails to refer to itself it is still an existing statement so we can say that the existence of the statement is prior. The fact of whether it is self-referential or not, is built upon the statement existence. So the SRH is complaining that the reference is apparently to something which somehow embodies "itself", as though failure to refer would destroy the "self". The reference to a statement is thus not strictly self-referential:

"This statement has five words." could refer to the existence of a statement alone which is independent of the further judgement that the statement referred to is itself. This wouldn't raise the chicken egg problem. Yes, there is a statement here which has five words, it happens to be itself, it could have been any statement on the page, it just happens to be the same one as we are reading. Very boring.

However to be self-referential it would have to be taken to mean that "This statement has five words." is really the statement we are reading. This exciting possibility is why these statements are so alluring. This is the feeling we have of ourselves, it is more than one person amongst billions who just happens to be us. This means that "this statement" is only true when there exists this statement which also refers to itself. This raises the chicken and egg problem. There is only a statement with 5 words, if there is a statement with five words.

Put another way if the statement is "really" and "essentially" and "necessarily" self-referential (EN-SR) then it must refer to a self-referential statement. It is not good enough to set up reference to any old statement and then notice that this statement is itself. That is only partial, secondary and non-essential, non-necessary self-reference. This point has been made before in this blog.

To further illustrate. Suppose this page forms an ordered set of statements, P. We now have a statement "Statement x of P" where x is a free variable. Now I could list on this page random versions of this general formula with random natural numbers substituted. Eventually one of these statement must be numbered with the same number as its position in the page P. Alternatively I'll just cut to the chase with the next statement. "Statement 37 of P." Now this happens to we statement 37 on the page because I just counted all the current statements and added 1. Now I added one because I knew that once the statement was formed it would be a new statement but I did this before it was formed, before there were 37 statements, done in anticipation of it being the 37th statement. Before I typed it out and put the full stop at the end it wasn't true. Thus I built a system by other means whose self-reference only became "switched on" when the full stop was put in place. Thus it was built without self-reference being in place. As above if self-reference was needed to build the statement then it would have to be immortal. But because it is created, there must be other ways to create the statement other than itself. So we know that the real nature of a self-referential statement is actually just a statement and this is what is referred to. The statement does not refer to a self-referential statement, so it is not really self-referential! This is the SRH.

Form v Process

2011-07-31T13:00:00.001+01:00

It’s an old Buddhist teaching but was clearer to me at the weekend… the rose growing on the pile of shit (or more usually the lotus flower growing from the pond mud).

The simple point is that the rose is made from the shit, yet in particular its smell is appealing while the shit is unappealing. How remarkable that what is horrible can become what is desirable. This is the teaching of emptiness.

It is sensible to think that something substantial passes from the shit to the flower, and this would not be entirely wrong, but what is that “thing”.

In scientific terms it is the atoms of the shit and its bad smell that can be transferred and reorganised into the atoms of the rose and its pleasant fragrance.

But as has been discovered the quarks in atoms can be reorganised to produce different atoms so atoms are not the real building blocks. And, as will be discovered (if Buddhist theory is correct) there are no fundamental building blocks and whatever we take as the fundamental untransmutable base will always be changeable as its components become reorganised.

So what began as an Democritic (after Democritus) reductionist analysis to explain the qualities of things by find the components which bring those qualities into the mix rather flounders as we discover the nature of reality. Indeed a flower is made of nothing different from the shit, but it is never-the-less different. The flaw is thinking that the nice flavour of a sponge cake is somehow a mixture of the flavours of flour, butter and sugar. But these when mixed taste horrible. Something new has emerged that wasn’t there before, an illusion that is caused in our senses by these raw materials.

This is a slightly simplistic version because it is not that something nameless passes between the shit and the flower. The rose needs nutrients but also sunlight, water and carbon-dioxide. Like the cake the ingredients alone are not enough, it requires heat in the oven to help reform the structures of the ingredients. This is the full picture that when the correct conditions all come together then and only then does the emergent property appear. It is not that something nameless passes from the ingredients to the product, but that the resulting “form” is entirely new depending only upon the interaction of its component conditions.

One may persist in the view that something is present in the conditions that is passed and reformed into the product, but then one may observe that the conditions themselves are only emergent properties caused by as the result of preceding conditions. So we can always rewrite the ingredient list as an infinite series of prior conditions and never have need to mention a root and core substance.

One however should not attach to the idea of emptiness and of flux and change only. It is only the less common side of the coin. The common side of the coin is still valid which views station stops of emergent properties linked together by the railway tracks of processes. It is just that this view lives side by side with the view that sees the station stops as simply momentary hiatuses in the endless cycle of train services.

Mass of Higgs Particle

2011-06-26T14:05:00.001+01:00

For a while I thought that physicists had explained the origin of Mass by describing it as the interaction of particles and the Higgs particle.

By the SRH then the Higgs particle can’t have the quality of Mass: that is it can’t have either a zero or non-zero mass.

It turns out that the Higgs Particle has mass, and that interaction with the Higgs explains only the masses of other particles but not the Higgs (obviously by SRH). But assuming that the theory proposed that the Higgs gained mass from interaction with itself, reveals the very fine distinction required for the SRH.

Borrowing the terms “inner” and “outer” from Hofstadter we can examine the situation where a particle. Suppose it gains mass by interacting with itself. Now the “inner” quality of the particle, the nature of the particle that enables it to give mass, must be mass-less. This would mean that mass is simply an “outer” quality, a superficial veil draped over the core nature of the particle.

Returning to sentences this distinction enables a better analysis of the sentence: “This sentence has five words.” The inner nature of the sentence is indeed a reference to itself, but it refers only to an “outer” quality that has no intrinsic relationship with the essence of the sentence. Using Google Translator into Chinese gives “這句話有五個字" which in the “inner” sense is the same, but clearly the outer quality is very different. Thus the sentence escapes actual “inner self” reference and so escapes paradox.

So just as Use/Mention is a distinction, so Inner/Outer are distinctions just as Hofstadter argues. I need now re-read that chapter of GEB to understand the 3rd distinction he makes and whether that is relevant also.

I AM

2011-06-25T14:58:00.002+01:00

I'm bike riding with an mp3 player these days which I put loosely in my pocket. I'm often finding myself thinking whether it has fallen out, only the realise that if I'm still listening to music it must still be connected.

Yesterday this thought was a bit deeper. Exactly the same is true of our eyes, and is the basis of the arguments in this blog against brain science. We may factually wonder whether our eyes are still working, only to be reminded that if we are seeing then they must be (and everything else in the process of seeing also).

Now, the question is this: What is the extra information that I have as a result of hearing the music, that I don't have by doing an examination of my pockets to find the mp3 player? It is clearly very significant knowledge because it tells me not only that the mp3 player is there, but also that the headphones are still in my ears, and that the cables are not damaged, and that the battery is still active--all deduced from the simple observation that I hear music! Imagine how hard it would be to determine all this otherwise.

Even if I did take the mp3 player down to a laboratory for testing to ensure that it was working, the data by itself locked in a cupboard would not be sufficient: I would need to see that data and understand it. In other words the critical feature of "hearing" the sound would have just become "seeing" the data.

So this key feature is what is called "subjectivity". It is what is missing from the scientific view. It is also the underpinning of the scientific world: raw data is not in itself meaningful (altho some like Hofstadter have argued for data having some intrinsic entropic existence).

Now the idea that I can tell I have eyes in tact by virtue of being able to see, and that I have a brain in tact by virtue of being able to think that (which the close to the most recent progress on the SRH), and that I have the ability to reason and be cognisant by virtue of recognising that very fact is basically Descartes. And one can extend this to realisation that the fact that there are things at all, and a universe (a Brahman) shows me instantly that I AM (Atman or Yahweh). Thus the creation of the universe is done so by the I AM and they are sides of the same coin. The Tat Tvam Asi.

What we can't argue and where the problems occur is that as seeing proves I have eyes, and cognisance is proof I have a brain, the presence of a universe is proof that there is some thing called "me". The presence of the "I AM" is not thus proof of a thing called "I AM".

What is More

2011-06-22T16:58:00.001+01:00

What is "More"?
29 minutes ago · Like
Alva Gosson in brief answer it depends only upon what we have now... which means that we will always be seeking more, and once we find it we will always feel we have less. This is the force that leads into the brick wall of suffering.
28 minutes ago · Like
Alva Gosson So we want "more" fish, but sadly it will mean "less" fish. That is the problem.
24 minutes ago · Like
Alva Gosson A friend who was very happy with his new house a few years ago said recently he needed a bigger house. Its a systemic problem, the solution goes to the root of human life and our understanding of existence itself. "More" government, or "less" government, "more" policy or "less" policy: its all framed within the very problem itself. I read all this btw its freely available and people have been talking about it and living it for millennia, its just unfashionable since Plato (at least) onwards.
21 minutes ago · Like
Alva Gosson I could go on (as you know ;-): here's the question that puzzled me - who is richer the starving man who finds a half eaten burger in the bin, or the man who ate that burger in the first place? To me (after some considerable thought) it's clearly the starving man, while the other man didn't even finish the burger so it meant very little to him. Now economics is the science of creating more wealth... clearly it's a complete jumble of rubbish! I believe that a new fashion in politics is waking up to this "Science of Happiness" but maybe too late for the oceans and the forest and the land anyway.
Another question that puzzled me for much longer. Is the person in a concentration camp waiting to die in actual poverty? Well we are all waiting to die so we can remove that from the equation. I believe that an identical structure of wealth and poverty would develop here just much as anywhere with people having better and worse bunks, and more or less sleep, and better or worse jobs etc.

Close Distribution Difference from Normal

2011-06-19T13:47:00.001+01:00

Here are the actual difference from Normal for the frequency distribution of change in Ln(adjusted close prices). The y-axis corresponds to %s of the population, and the x-axis is the size of the move in Standard Deviations from the mean.

Unlike the original approach the purpose now is no longer to model this, but rather to understand it so that it can be incorporated into a fractal system.

If we assume that the markets are random (from the standpoint of the market there are random events in the industries) then the pattern here is due to investors (a feature of psychology, and interactions between markets).

There are 2 noticeable shortfalls in this chart which mean that events of –1.5 STDEV and +1.4 STDEV are far less likely than expected. The events that would have fallen into these are mostly pushed to the centre (-0.5 to +1) and to the extremes (<-2.5 and >+2.2). I explain this as follows. Small drops in the daily price (>-1.5) get bought into returning the close price to near or slightly above the open price, and likewise small daily rises in price (<1.5) suffer from profit taking causing the price to fall.

Daily moves below 1.5 lead to worry in speculators and they sell causing a larger than expected move. Once the rot sets in investors will follow and cause the fat tail.

Daily moves 1.5 lead to euphoria which seems to happen in two waves. Closing prices 3 STDEV from opening price are less likely as a second wave of euphoric buying pressure pushes the price higher. There after irrational exuberance stretches the price upwards.

This chart is for the majority of events (speculators). Another chart can be produces to study the behaviour of the extremes (investors).

V for Vendetta

2011-06-19T00:52:00.001+01:00

Finally got around to watching this film… In a land far, far away… it depicts aspects of contemporary society and has its good points but its main premise is for me a bad point. I’ve certainly missed many points on a first casual viewing but the fundamental premise that by somehow destroying the haze of illusions that masks people hiding them from each other and themselves—by creating a world of genuine love—we would make a better world. Well in one sense of course this is true and it is the religious dream of reuniting people with God, cleansed in the rain of his love; but, what makes V think that after he has set things back on course, people won’t drift back into inauthenticity? You won’t kill the devil that quickly. I’m not being negative. Each one of us, exactly as V intends, can see through the illusion and gain enlightenment. Indeed V says that precisely because the illusion is created by ourselves we are the ones to over come it. The “totalitarian state” here is not meant literally but symbolically for our own failure to master ourselves which leaves us slaves to our own whims and fancies and like leaves in the wind. Obviously those disaffected by totalitarian states are projecting their dissatisfaction with themselves onto the outside world. It is interesting how popular this film seems to be and I suspect in those circles that take it to be a literal representation of the control exerted on us by modern governments. Certainly such mechanisms of control as shown in the film are thoroughly pervasive but as the film shows we don’t have to be susceptible to them. Happiest time of my life was the 2 years I didn’t have a TV and didn’t follow any external official narrative, I fell in love (‘my muse’), and followed my own inner narrative. Problem with that approach is it doesn’t work because wisdom means awareness of both the outside and the inside! Wisdom of the external narratives on TV and the papers is the easy part; what about wisdom of ourselves: that is almost impossible because it is different for us all. As V says he can show us the fear of death that leaves us helpless to control but he can’t actually make us face it as she does. It’s the blue versus red pill in the Matrix: how many of us would really throw away the comfort and fake peace of our lives to pursue a path that goes beyond our own death? Put more directly, if we were prepared to within ourselves why do we need a film like V to persuade us! Anyone persuaded by V needs to look very deeply at why they weren’t being authentic anyway! Isn’t being inspired by V just another mask—one we can’t remove at the end because it is the film itself!

But I don’t want to dissuade from the purpose of the film which as an instruction to ourselves to be themselves and to treat others with unique respect and love is excellent. It also raises a point for me: what was she prepared to die for? Until we have something we are prepared to die for, or better we are not afraid to die, then we can’t live. This has been a point in the blog before but the film raises the point excellently. But what do I have that I would die for? That would be a suitable answer to this whole blog: at the moment there is nothing!

===

Just in SRH style fun would I die to save myself? Need to think up a plot (a lying fiction ;-) where this actually happens.

Stock Market Distributions again

2011-06-12T22:07:00.001+01:00

THIS MAY BE FLAWED

I’ve returned to this problem again. Working out the expected distribution of votes at random in the Eurovision song contest (which will be biased because countries get to vote against themselves!) I noticed a similarity with the stacked charts I had produced for stock market data (simply ordering the raw data). In the Eurovision the game is simply dropping in one of the 10 scores to the pigeon hole of your chosen acts and then adding the scores up at the end. A variation I used for this stock market simulation was repeatedly adding a line of bricks of random length randomly along to a wall. The result is very like a stock market chart but has a more normal distribution (essentially it creates a random walk – this remains to be proven). However by fortune I made a mistake and forgot to reset the array I was using to hold the daily change data before producing the frequency histogram. The result was that over time the array became very large and the distribution narrowed and became more like the stock distribution.

The area of the green normal is the same as the blue FTSE data but the size of the peak and the squeezing is very pronounced.

Why this particular game should lead to this distribution I cannot explain at the moment. A similar game of repeating a unit with a percentage of Gaussian random changes produces the expected result that only certain events are produced more often depending upon when they enter the unit and how long they survive in the repeating unit. Need to look at again.

Contradiction in Self-Interest & Individualism

2011-06-07T16:04:00.001+01:00

Neither Individualism nor Self-Interest can be a political principles. If people are told to pursue their self-interest or to become individuals then they are being treated as a collective and are being centrally instructed and governed. Indeed I would say that political regimes use Individualism to weaken the power of the collective so that it is easier to govern: the classic divide and conquer. The last thing a government wants is for people to join together and over power it as happens in revolutions.

Monty-Python satirised this perfectly in ‘The Life of Brian’ when Brain tells the masses that they are all Individuals and they reply in unison that they are all individuals. Maybe this was poking fun at the mindless nature of people of faith, but really for me it was driving the stake into the idea of telling people that they are individuals. It is fashionable in our culture to be an individual; it is the common philosophy of people here; it is the collective consciousness to view oneself as an individual; if Individualism is the truth then there is one thing of which we can be sure: all people share solidarity in being individuals.

This is the problem of the usual understanding of Individual: it is contradictory. One is only an individual when one doesn’t know it, doesn’t codify it and tell other people about it, and doesn’t enforce it upon other people. Anarchy as I’m trying to show in this blog isn’t a form of truth that can be taught, understood or made into a political movement like the others.

Giving up Women

2011-06-06T19:40:00.001+01:00

There are two ways to become satisfied:

Get what you want.
Not want it anymore.

I began crudely on path 1 especially with women, but quickly began to realise that even if I did get what I wanted it would never be exactly what I wanted (since both it changes and what we want changes) and also it was a lot of effort for an uncertain goal. I also realised through escapades with “my muse” that worldly struggles are extremely impure and are at best only a compromise with what we originally set out to gain, and are often set to completely fail (her death in this example). Path 2 is not easy however and trying to get what you want here i.e. freedom from wanting things, is built upon shaky self contradictory principles.

With women I have become much more at ease of late. The observation is to separate one’s actual desire for them with one’s ego and desire for success with them. It is a difficult thing to accept but to be free from women one must accept that one is also a failure with women. Often we don’t really want a girl, but we also don’t want to admit we were a failure with here. The desire to conquest and success, for pride and ego is actually greater than our original desire. The suffering we feel when we fail is far greater than simply not having what we dearly, honourably wishes for, it is the suffering of ego and the struggle to avoid being labelled a failure. As my friend once put it after failing spectacularly with a girl he had been pursuing “I’m such a loser”. It wasn’t the losing her that was painful, it was the being a loser! This is ego and underlines 95% of the struggles we have in life.

A friend said last weekend that I had given up on life. I know I’ve succeeded here because I simply took this as a statement of fact and examined it as such. Only now over a week later am I reconsidering that conversation and what it entailed. Originally I was examining his attitude, but now see it reveals much about my slow advances in this department. I had been cautiously pushing the idea that “given up on what?” trying to reveal that there is no higher purpose or God given path in life. He has pursued Ayn Rand’s thinking and the notion that there are better ways of living that the Illuminati are pushing mankind away from. I’m cautious because I know that for highly driven people facing the oblivion of “giving up” is a depressing state that can be very unbalancing. I’ve faced that myself. I should be a bit careful I guess with what I write in this blog because for the wrong person at the wrong time what I say will not be very helpful, even positively unhelpful. Its not that I don’t believe in a higher cause or principle in life—this is what this whole blog is about—it is just that I realise that whatever we decide upon must enter the arena of game playing in a very Kantian sense and must play against itself so that highly driven people fighting their own corner is exactly the whole problem. Any solution must side step the tiresome worlds of politics that have dominated the mind’s of men since antiquity. Even Ayn Rand and her supporters enter this arena to some extent. Admittedly rather than take on the Corporations in Atlas Shrugged they try to set up a Shangri-La, but this is hardly a new idea, and it has happened countless times before. Even America itself was an attempt at a new Shangri-La and now it is the diseased carcass from which people flee. No this certainly is not the way; nothing new needs be born. What is new-born is born to decay and die and be re-born-a-new anyway; so what is the difference between new and old anyway; so what is the point! Here I diverge from the Bhagavad Gita and Krishna who says if there is no point then one may as well perform one’s duty. Problem for me in a modern liberal society is that unlike the warrior classed Arjuna I have no class and no duty to perform!

Accepting that one is a failure is certainly very hard to do. We may do it as a reaction to not being a success: belligerently, “If I can’t have success then I don’t want anything” or depressively, “I’m no good, I don’t deserve success” or in self –denial, ”I never wanted that anyway”, or in hope, “I’ll be a success next time.” All these share a common cause: they are born from ego and a desire for success and achievement that we adorn our self with. When this fails to materialise we adorn our self in the cloak of failure. But what is the point of all this Chivalric bearing and collecting of coats of arms? Who really cares what banner we march under if for no other reason than they are busy worrying about what banner they are flying. It’s a pointless game and I give up.

Here my friend is right I have given up on the circular, self serving and endless game. It makes no difference whether we play or not, so why bother. Life, once one has simply laid down ones weapons, is a lot simpler and it is hard to believe that I was ever afraid to just stop playing. For a white, middle-class well educated individual my parents tried to instil in me duties that Arjuna bore but unfortunately they also brought me up in a liberal society of individual rights that I have used to shake off their pressure: they can’t have it both ways. Are we feudal or modern democratic?

So what comes next. Firstly there is one battle and that is to stop the ego flaring up. It still doesn’t like being a failure. I see other people getting the girls of their dreams, marrying , settling down, buying houses, getting promotion and having children: this is great fuel for the ego. But if I am going to be a failure do I want to do it in self torment and suffering, or in peace and freedom? I always remind my ego this :-)

SRH : Existential Contradiction

2011-06-06T18:36:00.001+01:00

While on holiday on Snowdon to celebrate my 40th Birthday I was taking a rest on Y Lliwedd when this development of a thought from a few weeks before struck me. Originally I had mused that “ownership” is a thought, but who owns that thought? In one sense there is the ownership of the original thought many millennia ago when language was first constructed. Before that territories would have simply been fought over without any recourse to reasons or labels. The other sense is this actual thought that I am having when I think of “ownership”. That thought is “my” thought so surely I own it. However what about the thought “there is no ownership”, do I own that? This raises deep questions about the nature of ownership but is subject from a previous blog.

On Y Lliwedd on 8th April I switched the idea to the think about something existing. The idea may be about the existence of something e.g. the existence of the mountain, but the idea itself exists when I am thinking it. So we have the Quine’s use/mention distinction in action. In one sense we are using the idea of existence to say that the mountain exists, in the other sense it exists itself. This is what I have referred to before, and now call, the “right angle of Zen”, which is the way in which the “present moment” presents an orthogonal dimension to the space of worldly events; no matter what is happening the “present moment” is at right angles to this. Now naturally I asked does the idea of existence (when I am thinking it) refer to its own existence. That is in the moments when I am thinking about existence itself, do I contemplate the quality of the thoughts themselves as existing in that moment. To answer this I considered whether an idea could ever be about its own non-existence. Can an idea ever consider the occasion when we are not thinking it? Well it can but only in the sense of use above, the idea of non-existence can never be congruent with its own nature because by definition we aren’t thinking it when it becomes itself! The idea of non-existence is true to itself only when we don’t think it, and the moment we start to contemplate it it becomes only a reference to an already lost entity. Like using a torch to search the darkness our very investigation destroys what we were looking for. We cannot think non-existence. But since existence and non-existence are only opposites of one another if we can’t authentically think of non-existence we have problems with existence. From notes: “If an idea cannot be about its non-existence then it cannot be about its existence either.”

After returning from holiday it dawned on me that meant that the SRH was really to do with existence.

I use the logical syntax:

(x) : for all x it is true that
(Ex) : there exists x such that
¬ : not/negation
<statement>

Thus the proof of God is this:

The simple sentence “this sentence exists” seems unproblematic:

<(Ex) x is this sentence>

But consider:

<¬(Ex) x is this sentence>, or equivalently
<(x) x is not this sentence>

These sentences are equivalent and are false because the sentence itself serves as an entity which contradicts them.

Now we can’t say that the sentences are “not sentences” because that would eliminate the entity we need to make them false. So it is not that self-reference is impossible as was naively proposed by the SRH. However there is something odd.

The sentences are necessarily false. Once we have read the sentence we cannot then deny that the sentence exists, for what did we just read? So by the time we have understood the sentence we are already committed to its existence; we are already committed to its falsity. It is an analytic statement false by virtue of the definition of its own words. However it is a posteriori to the extent that we must have experienced it to have proof that it exists. (This is in contrast to Kant’s synthetic a priori.) It is thus a necessary contradiction.

It follows that its negation (statement 1) is not just true but necessarily true. It is a tautology, an analytic a posteriori.

So all the sentences above carry no information that the reader isn’t already familiar with by virtue of reading them. While they seem to make profound statements they are actually meaningless just as “Black swans are black” doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know: if we can find a black swans we already know it is black. More generally then for any predicate:

(x) S(x) & B(x) –> B(x)

clearly doesn’t tell us anything i.e. anything which is S and has property B has property B… i.e. all swans(S) which are black(B) are black(P).

What this means is that no entity can carry information about its existence or any feature which is required to identify it.

This means, and this is the SRH, that entities can only be meaningful about the existence of other entities apart from themselves.

To put it another way: we are very unlikely to hear that we have died and if we did we would know it was false. Thus the statement that we are alive is meaningless to us. It is this meaninglessness which means that we must be silent when it comes to issues of our self-existence and non-existence. Death, or indeed any word, doesn’t make sense here.

In contrast however other people can die and so we can make meaningful statements about their being alive or dead. When someone else makes a statement that we are alive then it is meaningful, but only from their point of view. This is social consciousness. If we attribute meaning to “I am alive” it is because we have adopted a social consciousness. This is not a good thing because why would we do this when we can see with our own eyes the truth? I suspect that the search for fame and social status derives from this weakness of our own eyes. The need to make noise and words (as I do here) is also such a weakness. For such a consciousness Death is a very real thing.

From this stems all the rest of the SRH. Most importantly that no system can exist independent of another because if it was an Ultimate theory of Everything it would need another system to state meaningfully that it did indeed existed as the ultimate system.

Likewise for every entity that seeks knowledge of its existence there is always an Other outside it that it must acknowledge first. This is the God Proof. Not the proof of a particular entity amongst all the others (the naive view of God) but the principle that there is always and necessarily an entity outside.

This also explodes the narcissistic, solipsistic world view. No self can know its existence before it knows the existence of another, and worse for the self it is the view point of the other that it adopts as its own proof of its existence! If it really looked at itself with its own eyes it would be speechless because what can its eyes “see” that his “seeing” hasn’t already told it?

Loren Carpenter

2011-06-06T17:13:00.001+01:00

Adam Curtis’ new documentary features an experimental game of Pong operated by the ratio of red and green paddles held up by each half of an audience. The experiment was performed on an minimally instructed audience by Loren Carpenter (of Pixar fame) in 1991. Excerpt of the documentary: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3wH0W0Mj8U.

Quote from Adam Curtis,

"It was like a switch went in my head," Curtis says. "Carpenter saw it as a world of freedom with order. But I suddenly saw it as the opposite – like old film of workers toiling in a factory. They weren't free – they looked like disempowered slaves locked to a giant machine screen. It was a video game, which made it fun, but it still made me wonder whether power had really gone away in these self-organising systems, or if it was just a rebranding. So we became happy components in systems – and our job is to make those systems stable."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2011/may/06/adam-curtis-computers-documentary

Written up here.
http://www.capatcolumbia.com/reading%20packet/Out%20of%20Control.pdf

Comment:
Curtis’ analysis is naive. We are not individuals either free to pursue our “own” interests or individual caught within the web of group interaction… we aren’t individual at all! Each of us is the accumulation of interactions just as much as the game is the accumulation of individual interacting. It is fractal and hierarchical.

To reductio ad absurdum Curtis I need only point out that he is trapped within the confines of the collective understanding of English. Where is his “individual” if he frees himself from language? Where is the freedom in even generating media that necessarily requires an audience?

The experiment is interesting I need pursue it more. It may be useful to understand the stock market also especially the frequency of oscillations and size of movements induced by slower feedback (less volume), and the fact that bird flocks have faster response rates than individual birds so that groups adapt to signals faster than individuals! Really suggests that there are emergent “entities” (which is an oxymoron since we are discussing the dissolution of selves into groups so what sense in making groups just new individuals).

Technorati Tags: loren carpenter,adam curtis

Freedom, Ayn Rand, Individualism, Selfish Interests, Addiction

2011-06-06T16:56:00.001+01:00

Technorati Tags: Freedom,Ayn Rand,Individualism,Selfish Interests,Addiction

Dissenters of the traditional view that we ought to sacrifice ourselves for other people might consider this post simply a dogmatic reiteration of the “traditional” view. But if we fear whether our thoughts are fashionable or old-fashioned we most certainly reduce our freedom. I’d rather ignore current fads and simply say things as they are.

Individualists like Ayn Rand, Sartre, Nietzsche speak a lot about “freedom”. So what is so free about “freedom”. A prince in a Hollywood film says “True I can have anything I want, but like all men I can’t chose what I want”. Thus we often end up wanting things that really it is best for us if we didn’t want. This is the whole naivety of the Individualist view. It is also said traditionally that it takes a great man to command an army but only the greatest man can command himself. This is the essence of the Religions: the learning to be master of our self. Shakespere’s Othello is a model of how lack of self mastery makes us to weakest of men. We need only see an addict swearing they are in control and demanding “freedom” to do what they want to see the weakness of this type of thinking. A asked a Buddhist once what was wrong with the ego he said that the ego works in its own interests even at the expense of the whole self. This has turned out to be a very deep understanding of the problem; far deeper than the allegory of the Devil used by religions. The drug addict, or anyone with a compulsive habit, finds that what they want to do, indeed need to do, is actually bad for them.

“Simply look at how many people have died in the name of Freedom—far more than all other causes added together.”

However because the wish to do it is so strong they are prepared to ignore the side effects. I once saw a film of a smoking addict in a wheel chair who had lost both legs due to blood clots. The interviewer said that clearly the smoking was killing him, he said he didn’t care and was prepared to die bit by bit. That is a strong desire. Everything was sacrificed for the need to smoke. We would argue that at least a more balanced life with a mixture of other activities would be more worthwhile. But the addict won’t see this and their addiction and need to do what they want will be more valuable to them than even their own life. This is the nihilism and meaninglessness at the root of self-interest, exactly what the SRH says. In any case it is clear to see here the extreme individualist sacrificing everything here for a desire, when originally he wanted to be free from sacrifice altogether.

So “freedom” where does it go wrong?

In a world where we really do determine our own future and every road is open what do we do? Are we like the Dice Man and freely pick 6 random possibilities like: {Eat, Sleep, TV, Sex, Defecate, Kill ourselves}. With complete unconditional indifference to the future and complete “freedom” from the Past we roll the dice and do whatever is says. Except we are deciding to then having our future dictated by a dice. What if we decide to obey a new die: {obey the dice, don’t obey the die}. Decide to roll that a few times and we’re back to square one!

Alternatively Individualists put emphasis on our “will” (Nietzsche/ Sartre) or “desires” (Rand). The idea is that we are what we do/will/desire. For Sartre it is our choices that make/build/design the future. For Nietzsche it is our inexorable innate will to supremacy that drives our very action. For Ayn Rand it seems (and I have only caught whiff of her philosophy) it is our desires/wishes which determine our future. Hers is by far the most juvenile and trivial philosophy: we are slaves to our own desire then exactly as in the above paragraph. She preaches the worst kind of imprisonment and her followers walk in the opposite direction to freedom. As religions endlessly try to persuade people, the Devil is most cunning and will promise you everything so that you submit your soul to him—he is the most expert door to door salesman. As far as I can see it Ayn Rand basically says give into his demands and do whatever you want even if it is bad for you.

Sartre and Nietzsche are however better versions of Individualism but they still seem to suffer from a lack of freedom. To say that we are free to exercise our will to power is to say that we are a slave to power. My personal life at the moment is exactly the will to gain power over the will to power so that I no longer need to be viewed as successful or worth something. Isn’t this the contradictory zenith of Nietzsche’s philosophy—freedom even from this universal principle? With Sartre my problem is that any choice we make to be successful must take into account our environment. If I wish to buy some food I have no choice but to go to a food shop. If you analyse why I wish to have food it is because my stupid body needs energy. I have no choice over this. I may chose to sit down and die from starvation, but really this is my stupid mind rebelling against having to do things which becomes just another thing I feel compelled to do. Whichever way I turn I find myself embedded “in a world”—immersed as a friend once called it. When we are underwater we cannot move without displacing water around us. So it is with the world we cannot move without the world moving with us—there is no escape, indeed even thoughts of escape are movements in the water!

No freedom is a complete misnomer. Even the search for freedom binds us to an activity that becomes a bore and an oppressive tyrant. Simply look at how many people have died in the name of Freedom—far more than all other causes added together and squared. Freedom begins when we accept where we are rather than confronting it and trying to change it. If we are trying to change it then we are just slave to another force from within. What proponents of freedom are really responding to is the notion of a sovereign self: it makes a difference whether the tyrant is from within or from without. That is the next discussion. Historically Freedom is an obvious major issue in the West because we are in opposition to our history of Slavery. Like a guilty man we are particularly sensitive to slavery and rather over do the freedom angle. What we ought to see immediately though is that without the possibility of slavery how can there be freedom? When we speak of freedom we are really admitting that slavery still exists.

Most of this is blogged already in this blogroll. The puzzle from ancient Greece of whether the Argo returning from its 10 year quest was really the same boat that left since every plank of wood had been replaced at least once on the journey. So it is with us. Which thought, which desire, which body part, which possession is really us? Are they all us? If so do we lose a bit of ourselves when we lose one? If we do then where is that bit of myself in my car, or in my hair on the barbershop floor? Rubbish it is just a car, it is just hair. There is nothing about me in them either on the shop floor on in my possession. It is the same as a piece being in check in a game of chess. It isn’t really in check unless you understand the rules of the game: we simply make it up. That is all the self is: something we make up. The search for freedom is just something we make up; and we can just as easily unmake it! If we were truly free we would be able to unmake it… but we can’t! Especially when we believe in a philosophy that is based upon that very belief in self. Free yourself; stop believing.

Like all things, Individualists are right about something however. It is correct that we take responsibility for what we do and we do find our self so that we can become master it. It is not good enough to just follow the crowd like sheep, any more than it is to simply switching off saying it doesn’t matter it’s all just make believe. This just sends us from one make-believe world into another where everything is make-believe—we start believing that everything is make-believe! It is not that easy. What does “make believe” mean anyway? Ayn Rand started off in the right direction, she saw the irony is forming a “group of believers in Individualism” but the Devil is strong and she fell foul very quickly of her own philosophy believing that this meant that she should follow her desires. She ironically became to a slave to herself as she ran from what she perceived was others becoming slaves of the mass. True Freedom ain’t so simple which is why mankind has been pursuing it for 10 thousand years and why so very few have ever achieved it.

Why Natural is Better

2011-06-06T16:54:00.001+01:00

Humans find the world as it is after many millions of years of life evolving to utilise many of the Earth’s resources. As these resources have been exploited they have been transformed from one source into another. Perhaps pure water is used to excrete unwanted compounds from the organism thus rendering it polluted, or some entirely new waste compound is produced like oxygen from plants. As time progressed the raw materials became scarcer and the by products and waste products became more available. The pressure was in for some organism that could exploit the growing waste products to evolve. As soon as it did, like oxygen metabolism, it flourished in the environment now rich in the resource its specialised in. And so it came to pass that quite naturally recycling was folded into the ecology of the planet. Resources that could not be recycled were eventually all exploited and the organisms that depended upon them naturally gave way to organisms whose survival was ensured by the endless production of their resources by recycling.

Then arrives man. Man has for one reason or another (analysed in depth in this blog) required progressively more and more resources and has developed means of exploiting resources in ways never fully developed by nature like for example the mass uncovering of organic minerals like coal and oil. While bacteria exist that recycle coal and oil, its natural rarity means that they are not major components of the Earth’s ecology. But in just a century Mankind has brought coal and oil directly to the centre of the lives of all organisms. Such rapid changes does not allow for evolution to establish recycling and so these resources may be once again lost.

Another angle to this is that what Mankind feels he must make Nature is not already making. If Nature is not already making it then we can be sure that there is no place for it in Nature. A good example would be trans-fats. Partially hydrogenated fats come in two varieties the low energy trans fats and the higher energy cis-fats. Cis-fats occur naturally as products of animals and plant metabolism; trans-fats naturally occur rarely because they do not fit into metabolic processes. Unsurprisingly Man’s metabolism belonging to the same system as the rest of the Earth’s biosphere prefers the cis-fats and cannot metabolise the trans-fats. In the 1900s Mankind developed new, cheaper and unnatural ways of producing food fats which unfortunately favour the production of the trans-fats. These now dominate our food and it is these trans-fats which are primarily responsible for the huge rise in heart-attacks in the West making this by far the biggest killer in the West. Yet it is obvious that this was a risk we took because the new Unnatural chemistry doesn’t work the same way as the established biological Natural chemistry that has dominated this planet for a billion years, and upon which Mankind himself depends, and so there was no assurance that the products of the Unnatural chemistry would suit the complete pathways established in the Natural chemistry.

We cannot escape our Natural foundations that easily. Maybe, as fantasised about in Manga and Sci-Fi Fiction (which I love), we may one day be able to download “ourselves” from inside Natural bodies into artificial machines and so finally be divorced from the Biological Mother that spawned us a billion years ago. In reality however this is completely the wrong way to understand “ourselves”. We are embedded in a Natural system so deeply that even what I write here is the product of it; the energy to press these keys and to think these thoughts; the meaning of what I say is fuelled and dictated by the structures of biological life. I am a biological entity; within a biological world; there is nothing non-biological or non-natural to escape from this realm and inhabit a non-natural realm of Mankind’s making. Mankind cannot think in terms of a struggle between the Natural and the products of His labour; a realm of freedom from Nature. As all the religions try to remind us we do not own the products of our labour: they belong to God.

Nature and God are inseparable. In ancient times before agriculture when the fruits of the world mysteriously grew on trees, and in the oceans and in the forests for us to harvest and hunt we thanked the gods for what they had mysteriously given us. As agriculture was developed and we progressively over the millennia saw our own actions turn up on our dinner plate we gradually forgot that there was anyone else involved but us. Now we think it all comes from Mankind and as if from thin air Man makes food. So the markets would want us think anyway so that we feel that we are spending our money on something worthwhile. We have forgotten that all this food still springs from the ground quite magically. We may have studied it in depth, we may even be able to copy and replicate it in laboratories to some extent, but copying the Masters doesn’t make an artist a Master. We are still bound within the system that we have always been nurtured in. Our Sisyphine struggles to produce food in the end are only struggles to replicate, or direct the work that this global ecology system already does. We are slaves to our biology. We have no more escaped it than any of our ancestors and the only option we have is to enslave our fellow man to provide a buffer between us and our slavery to Nature. In this we have progressed no further than the simplest animals. God and Nature punish those who do not listen. Science at least does listen, that is its job, to listen well to Nature’s structure and heartbeat. Good science, as commented upon in this blog, understands that it is servant to Nature for without Nature to study what use is Science? It can’t make its own truths for then they wouldn’t be truths! And in making Nature’s truths it is obedient servant. Bad science however thinks that Nature should obey Man and so inevitably tries to push it in directions that it doesn’t want to go. Since Man is born of Nature, in so doing Man ultimately pushes against Himself and to his bewilderment the harder he pushes the harder the problem becomes until he is defeated. (This is all explored in the SRH).

Yet Mankind needs to live and is an inextricable part of Life on this Planet. We need to eat, we need to move and breathe and excrete. It is wrong to say we are doing anything “wrong” as though there were stone tablets dictating how this Planet should be used. However there are stone tablets that have been written in the Past and which Science is rediscovering and rewriting which tell us what will happen if we do one thing or another. If we develop and unnatural way of living too fast for Nature to evolve and accept it then Nature will quite naturally eject us and we will go the way of all those other organisms that depended on unsustainable resources. We may believe that Mankind’s resourcefulness is so immense that we can ignore Mother Nature at last and leave the Maternal Home but we make a huge amount of work for ourselves and if we ever get it wrong we end up working against ourselves; for we are born of Mother Nature and we are made of the same Nature that She is made from. We may escape from her but we can’t escape from ourselves. So she will haunt us forever in whatever corner of the Universe, or Multiverse, that we chose to hole up in, and one way or the other we have no choice but to understand what we are, what we need and what Nature is. Nature is our Home and so there is no place like Nature. Natural is always better.

Our Hedgehog

2011-06-04T12:56:00.001+01:00

I’ve started to explain how we got into this ridiculous state of affairs where everyone duplicates the same structures again and again through this country; everyone has their own: car, house, phone, computer etc. Its a lot of extra work and its a lot of waste as most of this goes unused most of the time. However it has evolved and we are for the time being stuck with it.

Its not just us however that suffer because of this problem. Foraging animals that require habitats in different shapes and sizes to us get excluded by the repetitive parcelling up of resources. Had this argument with my mother who is hell bent on isolating her house and garden from the outside world. Watching Springwatch this year and being alerted to this project http://www.hedgehogstreet.org/ it seems I wasn’t wrong. Our hedgehog was found face down in the frost a couple of years ago starved on its meagre rations from our 1/3 acre garden and presumably trying to top up unsuccessfully with food in the winter it died. Now if we had a vegetable patch we’d be over run with slugs (their favourite food of which they eat about 200 a night) and my mother misses our little friend. A parable being written large in Man’s habitation of Earth!

The Horatio Principle, SRH, Russell’s Paradox and Zermelo

2011-05-29T15:21:00.001+01:00

ZFC does not assume that, for every property, there is a set of all things satisfying that property. Rather, it asserts that given any set X, any subset of X definable using first-order logic exists. The object R discussed above cannot be constructed in this fashion, and is therefore not a ZFC set. In some extensions of ZFC, objects like R are called proper classes. ZFC is silent about types, although some argue that Zermelo's axioms tacitly presuppose a background type theory.

In ZFC, given a set A, it is possible to define a set B that consists of exactly the sets in A that are not members of themselves. B cannot be in A by the same reasoning in Russell's Paradox. This variation of Russell's paradox shows that no set contains everything.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell's_paradox]

This could well be the style of proof I’m looking for with the SRH. The above says that for a set A we can define B = {x in A & x not in x}. Thus if B is in A then there is Russell’s Paradox so B is not in A. This assumes the Zermelo axiom that existence can only be asserted for subsets of a given set, not for subsets of “all things”.

Freedom, Ayn Rand, Individualism, Selfish Interests, Addiction

2011-05-28T19:28:00.001+01:00

Technorati Tags: Freedom,Ayn Rand,Individualism,Selfish Interests,Addiction

“Simply look at how many people have died in the name of Freedom—it is far more than all other causes added together.”

So “freedom” where does it go wrong?

No freedom is a complete misnomer. Even the search for freedom binds us to an activity that becomes a bore and an oppressive tyrant. Simply look at how many people have died in the name of Freedom—it is far more than all other causes added together and squared. Freedom begins when we accept where we are rather than confronting it and trying to change it. If we are trying to change it then we are just slave to another force from within. What proponents of freedom are really responding to is the notion of a sovereign self: it makes a difference whether the tyrant is from within or from without. That is the next discussion. Historically Freedom is an obvious major issue in the West because we are in opposition to our history of Slavery. Like a guilty man we are particularly sensitive to slavery and rather over do the freedom angle. What we ought to see immediately though is that without the possibility of slavery how can there be freedom? When we speak of freedom we are really admitting that slavery still exists.

Loren Carpenter

2011-05-27T21:30:00.001+01:00

Quote from Adam Curtis,

Written up here.
http://www.capatcolumbia.com/reading%20packet/Out%20of%20Control.pdf

Technorati Tags: loren carpenter,adam curtis

Multiverse & SRH

2011-05-26T16:06:00.001+01:00

Think I had it in for the Multiverse concept at some stage; obvious change of mind now. Multiverse is the concept that instead of quantum waves collapsing into discrete recordable events, instead they create new universes, one for each event. David Deutsch champions this idea in connection with quantum computing where the possibilities in many universes can be utilised to compute results in this universe.

My problem with this is—after recent developments in the SRH—just linguistic. A universe suggests already that there is nothing outside it. To coin the term “multiverse” is completely oxymoronic and contradicts the meaning of universe. What quantum theory has opened is the realisation that what we thought was the limit of the universe is really just the limit of one bubble of space-time and other bubbles might exist. The “multiverse” is just a name for our better understood universe. For analogy how absurd to call the other planets multiverses in the days when the universe extended to just this planet and its atmosphere.

It might seem trivial but this lies at the heart of the SRH conception. A SRH Universe is unlimited just as Cantor showed that the sets of numbers are unlimited—that is not just that the numbers in each set is unlimited by the sets of infinities is unlimited in a way that can’t be grasped by any set! A fractal that extends in both directions with an infinite hierarchy of scale going upwards and downwards—the proper conception of Universe is something that in its very nature is ungraspable. The SRH says why very simply—if a body of understanding ever did try to grasp the scale of the Universe it would always need something outside itself in order to say something meaningful about itself. It cannot by the SRH ever say anything meaningful about its own existence, because that is a given from which the theory necessarily already depends rather than explains.

QED

Technorati Tags: Multiverse,Universe,Absolute,Self,Theory of Everything

SRH + Time

2011-05-23T17:03:00.001+01:00

Ideas forming. The SRH depends upon a type of relativity. It says that any entity lives within a unique ontology where it is a given that it exists. In other words it can never be the case that it doesn’t exist within its own “frame of reference”.

This hierarchy is the same as we see with a brain scientist looking at their own brain patterns. Whatever they conclude “objectively” depends a priori upon what they experience “subjectively”. If they find a pattern that corresponds to them thinking they must realise that their conclusions are based upon the perspective of everyone else, not upon their own perspective. Within their own perspective it is rather pointless the conclude that they are thinking from the image, since “thinking” was what they had to be able to identify anyway in order to determine the correspondence between image and “thinking” in the first place.

Now, as is well documented, this is all a linguistic feature since patients can only inform scientists that they are “thinking” through language. The correspondence is between events in the body and things said, between phenomena and mysteriously the meaning of what is said (which is somehow for materialists an unexamined, unexplained, given). Typically scientists rarely question that what they are doing, and how they understand it, is within a prior world of language so they can only imagine that their experiments are somehow mysteriously beyond language. In reality language and culture precedes their enquiries. This hierarchy is the SRH also as above. As an aside I mused recently that “myth” which we attribute to the ancient stories is just as active and important today, it is just that the wealth of phenomena and facts that we weave together with myth today is so much denser. We have facts on everything and so the stories are that much more convoluted to account for all these details.

Finally the relevance to Time. We can never be outside our own time frame. Whichever time we end up in, be that Past, Present or Future for us it will be just our own time frame—it will always be Today in other words. Just as an entity cannot meaningfully make a statement about its own existence, it cannot, it seems, make a meaningful statement about its Time either. Time, like existence, only happens through the eyes of someone else for whom we may be dead or for whom we have been gone a long time. To explain the death of my grandfather to my young sister my parents said that he had gone on a long trip. There is little difference. The point is that these things are only meaningful to someone else, necessarily never ourselves. So the idea of Time travel actually contradicts the nature of Time. If I travelled in time it would mean nothing to me, in reality it would still be Today when I arrived. What would be different would be my memories and expectations. I would have memories of things that hadn’t happened yet and would have the habits of the world I left. I wouldn’t be able to meet the people I remembered and might not know the language or the customs if it was a long time before for example. However while everything might have changed it is still Today and the Time in my frame of reference hasn’t changed. Only by finding out the year from someone else and comparing with my memory of the year (which I was told before I left) would I be able to say that I had time travelled. But this is just language not reality; it is only what other people would say.

Now does this shed light on the murder paradox? Can’t see it for now…

Snakes

2011-05-23T11:36:00.001+01:00

Wonderful day’s snake watching in Berkshire - March 20th 2011

Technorati Tags: snake,herpitology,adder,nature

. Particularly nice female adder fresh from hibernation in expert hands (not mine).

Snake Watching in Sevenoaks (8th May 2011) – 3 juvenile grass snakes (pic 1 & 2 same individual)

Grass Snake (male): fresh from hibernation (Reading April 2010)

SRH (summary) and Time

2011-05-23T10:21:00.001+01:00

Technorati Tags: God,proof,meaning,cogito,self,existence

The SRH is purely linguistic. There are no contradictions in reality—things just are—problems only occur when we try to assert things one way and then change our mind. The reader is left unsure what we mean and complains.

To summarise: the SRH (which needs a new name) notes that when referring to something by some description (essence) or asserting its existence one cannot then meaningfully attribute that essence or existence to the subject e.g. “(Ex) x exists”, or “(x) P(x) & Q(x) –> P(x)” respectively “there exists something which exists” or “for all x where x has quality P and quality Q it has quality P”. These tautologies sound ridiculous in logic but “all black swans are black” sounds almost meaningful and “I think therefore I exist” is famous.

To recap further the problem with these tautologies lies in their negations: they are contradictions or at least always false. Respectively above: “(x) x ¬exist”, “(Ex) P(x) & Q(x) & ¬Q(x)” that is “for all x, x doesn’t exist” and “there exists an x such that x has P, Q and doesn’t have Q”. The latter is a typical contradiction the former is a type I don’t know that i’m calling existential contradiction. The famous Descartes’ statement has this SRH problem at root: its very appeal and certainty lies in the tautology that to be thinking at all he must exist (we know what he means even if it doesn’t technically imply an existing self like entity). But the statement is misleading because its negation is an existential contradiction and so there being no situation under which it can be false (it is always true) and so fails to convey any particular meaning! We know nothing after reading it that we didn’t know before. Another way to put that is there is nothing to learn about such a sentence’s use; we can say it anytime and anywhere in any imaginable universe.

The relevant to a proof of God is firstly not to prove “(Ex) x is God” i.e. there is a thing called God. This is clearly nonsense at first sight since God made “all” things so one presumes he either made himself or he isn’t a thing. It staggers me that Dawkins et al. waste time pursuing this dead end. It makes more sense for God to be a principle (principal perhaps) namely that nothing can assert its own existence, instead depending upon other things. The name of God in the Arahamic religions is Yahweh in Hebrew which means “I AM”. It is important to realise that because of the SRH we cannot meaningfully assert this for our self. Any sense of “I am” comes from outside us.

Returning to the thread if this blog entry. The SRH and existential contradiction is linguistic. There is one famous field of existential contradiction namely time travel typified by the paradox of going back in time and killing oneself. The problem then arises was there a murder? If there was then the person who was murdered is also the murder. But if there was a murder it also means that the murderer was killed before he did the murder. However if there wasn’t a murder then what exactly did the time traveller do?

It is only an embryonic thought at this stage but similarity to the SRH signals an alarm bell that this “time travel” and indeed “time” itself may be only linguistic at root and not real. This wouldn’t be a new idea but I don’t grasp it yet. I read earlier in the year (but can’t remember where) a poem in which it is said that “self” is only a feature of our Indo-European languages and with a different language structure we would be able to avoid this cultural artefact all together.

SRH : Existential Contradiction

2011-05-22T17:43:00.001+01:00

A month ago I had a brain wave. It occurred to me that the SRH is to do with existence.

I use the logical syntax:

(x) : for all x it is true that
(Ex) : there exists x such that
¬ : not/negation
<statement>

Thus the proof of God is this:

The simple sentence “this sentence exists” seems unproblematic:

<(Ex) x is this sentence>

But consider:

<¬(Ex) x is this sentence>, or equivalently
<(x) x is not this sentence>

These sentences are equivalent and are false because the sentence itself serves as an entity which contradicts them.

It follows that its negation (statement 1) is not just true but necessarily true. It is a tautology, an analytic a posteriori.

(x) S(x) & B(x) –> B(x)

clearly doesn’t tell us anything i.e. anything which is S and has property B has property B… i.e. all swans(S) which are black(B) are black(P).

What this means is that no entity can carry information about its existence or any feature which is required to identify it.

This means, and this is the SRH, that entities can only be meaningful about the existence of other entities apart from themselves.

Video Compression for Nokia Phone

2011-05-14T16:35:00.001+01:00

Just compressing some files with MediaCoder and did some reading and looking at the various options. MediaCoder is a front end for the various opensource and free solutions that have emerged over the years. Have settled on the following settings after comparing various options:

Container: MP4

Audio: AAC seems better than MP3 for high compression (<44kbps variable). But >77kbps, variable, AAC versions 2 is worse than version 1 and as compression is reduced quality doesn’t increase much for either so MP3 becomes the favoured compression.

Conclusion:
For low quality TV storing am using HE-AAC V2 (Nero Encoding). Quality=15. 32kbps (voice). 44.1kHz sampling - seems to affect quality a lot if lower.
For movies MP3 (LAME), 112 Average Bit Rate i.e. cassette quality (CBR is pointless!). Original sampling.

Video: have settled on XviD (opensource version of DivX) Advanced Simple Profile Level 5 for phone, and H.264 for movie.

Conclusion:
Movie Video Quality: 90 halves video size.
Phone Quality: 80 seems to provide good quality and less than 1/4 size.

If interlaced (i.e. TV format) needs to be converted to progressive to aid compression codecs. This has bonus of removing some unneeded frames too. (Interlacing refreshes the screen in alternating lines so frames come in pairs called fields, these pairs are combined into single frames for progressive.)

Frame rate: the phone is 15fps. For movies and long video keeping original as low frame rate is tiring on eyes.

Aspect Ratio (AR). The phone is 320x240 pixels (4:3). Set Display AR for phone 4:3 but without crop squishes the picture but is watchable.

Desire is the measure of all things

2011-05-11T11:51:00.002+01:00

Returning from a photo trip to a field where I thought I had seen a rare species of butterfly (it wasn't) I was thinking out the "value" that such a discovery would bestow on the land. Money would be available for its conservation. People would be interested in it, and desire it.

It raised and solved the hindrance I have felt with conservation since I was a child (and why I don't work in conservation at the moment)... people by definition don't want it... if they did then we wouldn't need to conserve it.

What people want is row upon row of clothes shops selling fabrics with different patterns on in essentially the same shape with minor differences which attract a lot of attention. People also want restauants which sell essentially the same 5 meats, 15-20 vegetables, 10 sea foods in a variety of combinations which also attract a lot of attention. These are a few of our favourite things but the natural environment is not very well represented and indeed the natural environment is transformed to provide the above items.

There is no intrinsic value to the rare species of butterfly, just as there is no intrinsic value to a particular cut of fabric; what is different is that people desire the particular cut of fabric more than the particular cut of butterfly.

However there is a real difference beteen the latest fashion item and a butterfly: once the butterfly is extinct there is no way to recover it. This is not a black/white point but it does press for a resolution of value.

There are two things here: matter and ideas. Traditionally ideas are free but you need to pay for the acquisition of material objects. I imagine this is a practical issue of supply. However consider a society where ideas were protected by eleborate codes of secrecy like with the Greek Mysteries and the various secret societies today e.g. Masons. In such a world we might pay large amounts of money to enter into such societies, while in a world where mass production powered by very cheap energy would provide free acquistion of goods. Alternatively if we established a culture of sharing the the latter could be achieved also. As an aside I was thinking how free bikes might work. It was tried in Amsterdam but they were all stolen by people belonging to property systems outside. It might be that badly working bikes were more common so we could cycle them to a garage and have them replaced with a working bike - this way covering the maintenance. Only the garages would need to be funded then - but could easily be operated on a voluntary basis. My mother says of all this that it is "unrealistic" and that it is a "hard world" - except that such thinking is exactly what makes and maintains it as a hard world ;-) Anyway a diversion.

Returning to the main thread the point is that the butterfly could be just as valuable as a crutial city hospital if we so desire it, or as unvaluable as a piece of litter: the point is that there is no intrinsic value.

A friend's father once invited me out of the swimming pool at his home and sat me down and asked the 17 year old me what I was planning to do. I said Zoology and conservation. He, a doctor, said couldn't I think of something more useful. This essential point has lingered in my psyche all my life; it is the question of how best to use ones life; what exactly makes a life valuable; what would it mean to live one's life well and not waste it.

Well I realise there is no absolute answer in a free monetary market: it is simply a matter of what people desire.

Beyond the market there are many arguments about life but crutially they lie outside the mechanisms of economics. The real answers to these questions cannot be understood by markets, nor then can value really be established by markets.

The Bus Problem

2011-05-05T14:48:00.001+01:00

Having waited for many buses the question arose of why it always seems that a bus comes first on the other side of the road.

Assuming that it is the same buses running in a circle on the route then we know that the average probability of a bus on either side is the same (call it p).

However the fun occurs if there is any synchrony. Suppose that there are no delays and the buses are scheduled to arrive at 10mins past the hour (PTH) on the other side and 20 PTH on your side. In order to see your bus come first you need to arrive between 10 and 20 PTH which is only 1/6th of the time. At such a bus stop you will experience an apparent “unfairness”.

In reality buses set off on time from the depot but synchrony happens en route. The reason is that the number of passenger to board a bus is proportional to the time since the last bus, and the time spent at the stop is proportional to the number of passengers. Any delays thus feedback positively. A large party of people turning up at the stop, or someone looking for their ticket will delay the bus. It means they have more people to pick up at the next stop, and the bus behind will have caught up a bit and so have less people to pick up and so very quickly it will be following the bus in front. This is why buses never come singly (especially toward the end of the day or the bus route). This means that there is a different grouping of buses for people waiting on the outward and return routes of a bus route.

2Do…

I still need to do the maths here…

The other thing I wanted to do was use appropriate distributions to show the exact probability of n buses passing on the other side…

The Launderette problem

2011-05-05T14:48:00.000+01:00

I once had an argument with an ex about whether it was cheaper to put all our wet clothes in one drier and run it for longer or split it between two driers and run each for less time. She thought two, I thought one. I should have known that in such heated dualistic debates there is truth in both arguments!

All the water in the clothes (above the dryness level) needs to loaded into air and removed from the dryer. First up a model of the air moisture curves from both scenarios.

Let us assume that there is a maximum water load that air through the drier can take, there is therefore a maximum rate of drying at saturation. The amount of water removed at saturation is this rate multiplied by the time at saturation.

Once the rate of evaporation of water from the clothes falls below saturation of the air then the moisture of the air will decay. I assume an exponential decay curve and some arbitrary percentage as “dryness”. The moisture in the air through the load with twice as many clothes but the same air flow one would expect to reduce at half the rate of the half-load. The area under a decay curve that starts with half some rate R is twice that of one with rate R, and also takes twice as long to reach some arbitrary level. So once the moisture falls below saturation there is no advantage to either method.

It is then easy to see that, at saturation, the remaining water (which is the same in both scenarios) will be removed in a time proportional to the amount of water. So the large load will take proportionally longer.

From this argument there is no difference between strategies. Which is easier to argue in terms of energy. The cost of any scenario is proportional to the amount of energy (electricity) put in. The length of time to dry is also proportional to the amount of energy put in, or in other words the cost.

The only variable remaining is the efficiency of drying, that is the possibility that one scenario allows for air to be “unused”. Originally I thought that putting all the clothes together increased the chance of a air coming into contact with a wet surface. However if we over-load the drier so air cannot flow between the clothes then this reduces the efficiency. On the other hand if we put just one sock in the drier then most of the air will flow through without ever coming into contact with the sock. It seems that (as usual in such arguments) we were both right and actually there is a bell curve with an optimum loading. That optimum will be around the loading where the clothes are freely spinning in the tumble drier, but not so far apart that air can pass through without good contact with the clothes.

Today is the vote for AV. First past the post is good for immediate and decisive action, but as seen in this exemplary situation above, in reality the correct action requires understanding and resolution of both sides of an argument. This is why an educated King making decisions based upon the competing input of his advisors makes the best form of government.

How big is an acre?

2011-03-31T17:37:00.001+01:00

Interesting discussion revealing an example of the disjunction between ideas and reality: http://ask.metafilter.com/130521/How-is-acreage-measured-on-nonflat-terrain

Does exchange value have a foundation?

2011-03-28T18:20:00.000+01:00

Market Value i read got a boost when Von Neumann amongst others took it 2 be a relative term definable by peoples choices of 1 thing over another - given a choice between things. Like my results network this runs in to problems if one attributes an actual quality 2 this difference. 1 may expect some one 2 prefer A over B and B over C but one cannot then assume they will then prefer C over A! An example of this occurs in my relationship with things. When home i use t internet and at t moment i use t library in town. Because i do this it is obvious to assume i value them and t argument would go tt i should pay 4 them. But i was thinking 2day tt had neither of them been created i wouldn't be using them and would be doing something else instead. In other words where a comparison cannot be made then no relative value can be assigned. One can only say i value there things because i use them. This does not assure tt i will use them in future or miss them if they suddenly cease 2 exist - tho human habit makes people return 2 what they know in favour of seeing things tt no longer exist as if they had never existed. But does this make things valuable? So in a free market where shopping is something people do anyway can we really use t actual exchange of goods as any evidence tt people value there things?

Resonance

2011-03-26T11:39:00.002Z

Lot of what I'm heading into seems to be to do with resonance: stock markets showing up fibonacci, planets the same, earthquakes even brains and consciousness.

Schumann standing waves in Earth/Ionosphere gap have 7.83Hz frequency which is a frequency which crops up in the brain.Earth Breathing www.earthbreathing.co.uk
http://www.earthbreathing.co.uk/sr.htm

Random links from Last week...

Interesting site suggestion experimental evidence points to interaction of mind and wave-functions.Consciousness Studies www.fourmilab.ch March 21 at 4:14pm

Most balanced discussion on global warming I think I've ever seen https://www.planetseed.com/node/15200 (and Schlumberger are in the oil/gas sector)

V. nice orrery!!! http://dd.dynamicdiagrams.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/orrery_2006.swf

Earth Quake Frequency

2011-03-22T00:12:00.005Z

After the Asian tsunami in 2003 had a quick look at sun-earth relationship with regards to quakes as this one happened near the solstice. There is no obvious correlation.

However getting a bit more into it after the Tohoku Earthquake I just looked at the angle between the Sun and Moon.

The chance of a quake almost doubles when the Sun-Moon angle is 70 degrees.

This is a number I am rather familiar with after all the Phi stuff earlier in the year. It is 1/5th a circle and the angle of a pentagon whose inner pentagram has sides of ratio of Phi.

The data in the graphs is upto 2003. Checking the angle of Sun and Moon on the fateful Friday it was 73 degrees!

What does come out of the brief look today is that there is no correlation between the longitude of quakes on the earth surface and the position of either sun or moon (not looked at together). There is also no correlation with distance so the recent Super-Moon is a coincidence.

Discovered that the Sun's gravity accounts for 44% of the tidal energy and the Moon 56%. The moon creates a 30cm Lithosphere bulge by itself so as it passes over, the ground rises 1/3 metre! Sun and moon combined not sure how to work it out. Is its simply 79% more i.e. a 54cm bulge - probably not linear but that is a heck of a massaging of plates!

There is certainly much to know (this is just a day spent finding code to do the planet predictions) enormous thanks to Keith for the functions:

'Astro-functions

'Keith@xylem.demon.co.uk

'http://www.xylem.demon.co.uk/kepler/

'http://www.stargazing.net/kepler/astrovba2.html

I do wonder why the scientific community always say they know nothing in this field:~ Weather forecasters have a much more complex job and at least they try.

===

Actually if there is a grouping, it suggests more Earth Quakes at closest approach to sun (late Dec-early Jan at moment) + when the Moon is farthest away. The graph on left shows frequency of major earthquakes against distance of Sun (the peak would be much more obvious if the x-axis was wrapped around and started in mid scale!). The graph on right shows distance of moon on x-axis (I don't get the units of this function) and distance of Sun (again relative to mean distance = 1). There is a clear increase in frequency as the moon moves away from the Earth! Combined with the Sun this means that mid-winter and distant moon make the most likely combination for an Earthquake, combined with a Sun-Moon angle of 70 degrees which is a 1/3 Full/Empty moon.

Looking Moon phase during Earth-quakes here's an odd coincidence: when the angle (from Earth) between Moon and Sun is 70degs (peak Earthquake angle), the angle (from Moon) between Sun and Earth is 109.86 degrees. The Moon phase is then 0.33 (1/3 illuminated or 1/3 dark) using the equation: phase = (1 + Cos(angle))/2. Now the coincidence is that 0 (full moon) & 109.47 (1/3 moon) are the only two angles where the size of the projection of the Earth vector into the Sun vector (from the Moon) is the same ratio as the Phase of the Moon! ie. |Cos(angle)| = (1 + Cos(angle))/2. What significance who knows.

This is to say that the projection of the Moon-Earth Vector (e) in the Moon-Sun vector (s)

as a proportion of (e) is the same ratio as the moon phase when t=0 (fullmoon) or t=189.47 (1/3 moon) and this corresponds to a moon-sun angle from Earth of about 70 degress which statistically is by far the most likely time for earthquakes.

What possible reason?

Logic/SRH notes

2011-03-21T11:10:00.002Z

All arguments are double edged. If we take an argument over the things it is meant to apply to and apply it elsewhere we will see that it has the opposite effect. For example "everything is worthless". If this argument is worthless then rather than proclaim that everything is worthless it states that it is worthless to state that everything is worthless - which is probably the source of depression itself realising the worthlessness of this kind of activity it is involved in. If it is worthless to do this then it must be worthwhile doing something else and so we contradict the assertion that everything is worthless. This is SRH.

In the notes I applied it to the statement that "Life is pointless". In which case there is no point to me spending my life coming up with statements like this.

So a negative statement defeats all sides of an argument, and a positive statement supports both sides of an argument. The note concludes that arguments make no changes.

===

The world of difference is itself indivisible. Thus the world we see of many separate entities cannot be separated into a world of many separate entities and a world of one indivisible entity. There can be no difference between these because if there was then that difference would be part of the world of difference.

For the same reason a world of indivisibility cannot be indivisible from a world of indivisibility.

There is a meta level here (by SRH) that is neither divisible nor indivisible. But it is neither the same nor different from Derrida's Differance ;-)

===

§ open set + neighbourhood SRH, complement s in R3 = all points not in s, p on boundary if neighbourhood contains both s & s'

===

There is a contradiction in the idea of "self-replication". One can replicate "like" features so that one's child is "like" oneself, but one cannot replicate "oneself" for two identical copies are still two and not one.

===

In a processes each step of the process must change the state of the machine. Each step thus exists in the state space of the machine (the set of variables that hold the computation).

Now to get a self-referential system the whole state of the machine at any one point must be present as a point within its state space and so a reference to this state must either create a change of state, or to fix the state of this system the self-reference must be recorded as a state outside the system.

For example I can work out that this sentence has forty six words while the sentence itself can't because I can step outside the system complete the sentence count the words and then change the system from outside, as indeed I am thinking of doing now. I knew that most numbers between 21 and 99 have two parts so just added 2 to the word count of the sentence. Now in true Turing style I could not count the state of the system (the sentence) before it was written because how did I know when the sentence was going to finish without actually creating the sentence first. The sentence can't work out itself if it will finish so can't decide how long it will be.

So it is only because the author can decouple from the sentence after writing that it looks self-referential. It never was able to refer to itself. What it refers to is something that I made, and I am part of that essential state system that the sentence can't exist without namely the English speaking world and actually the Universe in general.

Now for exercise can I create a state machine that runs into the problem above? It seems easy to create a machine that outputs an apparently self-referential number like one that is hard-coded to output 5 which happens to be the count of variables, or a Quine even. What has alluded me so far in the SRH quest is a definition of a machine that is "authentically" processing a self-reference and one that just happens to do so either by design or by accident. Of the set of all possible state machines obviously some will appear self-referential. My question is to find the meaning of a difference between Quines - that simply have self-referential output - and "Ruines" which have a self-referential process that has self-referential output. And what would the difference be?

Do I own the thought "There is no ownership"?

2011-03-21T10:59:00.006Z

Do I own the thought "There is no ownership"? If not then do I own the thought "There is ownership". If not then do I own any of my thoughts? If not, then what part of me can I own? If there is no part of me I can't own then what can I own? No still don't agree with John Locke.

Shockingly bad program last night http://www.channel4.com/programmes/civilization-is-the-west-history ... well a question posed for almost an hour and then a single 1 line answer that the N.American system was better than the South... which is a circular argument since we say it is better because it has risen to power but then that is what we wanted to explain so no explanation ... but excellent question why did N.America rise to power rather than S.America... does anyone have an actual answer?

[cut from Facebook]

Notes on Economics

2011-03-21T10:31:00.003Z

"He who pays the price calls the tune" goes the old saying. Yet for the person to pay the price to call the tune, they themselves must have sung a tune for someone else who then paid them. So everyone in a good economy thus sings other peoples tunes! This is the essence also of a good society.

Economic theory thus points to the truth that we can't sing our own tune. This is a plus for economics.

However this simple truth is under threat in Western economies because of ownership. An owner not calls the tune but they also get paid the money too (by return on their investment). So in property owning economies the saying ought to be "He who owns the piano calls the tune and gets the wage."

Now an owner like this goes out of business because they aren't playing the tune the customer wants, at least in theory. In reality the owner finds the marginal cost of playing each tune and selects those tunes that give maximum audience response for minimum skill and time of the pianist. The capitalist might also do marketing, or introduce complex pricing to confuse customers like (2 tunes for the price of 1, knowing that they are more likely to buy a drink after the first tune). Blanket advertising on media channels might be expensive but if it raises sales of particular tunes is profitable. So the audience ends up with a limited selection and reduced expectations that all benefits the owner.

Now I realise writing this that really what difference is there between a customer asking the pianist to play a tune and the owner of the piano asking him to play a tune! I guess the only difference is that the customer/pianist relationship is between someone who wants some music and someone who is skilled in producing it. One might say it is an authentic relationship. The customer dealing with the manager/capitalist/owner who then deals with the pianist is experiencing a relationship with someone who is not actually interested in the product but in the mechanics of producing it. There is no reason that this should be an inauthentic relationship (owners and pianists can both be bad people), but it is not the same type of relationship as that of the first example.

Conclusion:

1) In a free market the good principle that each person plays another persons tune is true. However when people become too powerful then they start to decide what tune other people hear and then economics breaks down.

2) The relationship between a customer and the service provider is not the same as the customer-capitalist-provider relationship and should be recognised in systems of property. It seems on this analysis that this is my central issue with Capitalism that it places authority in the hands of the owner and so doesn't respect the skills of the provider which are at root what drive a societies ability to meet its needs. As Veblen argued capitalism actually works to stifle the creativity of the working classes in order to maintain wealth in the ruling classes.

===

It seems to me that Capitalism is primarily a ponzi scheme. Prices are inflated and then we borrow increasing amounts from the future to maintain the rising prices. Everyone feels wealthy and so we are encouraged to borrow more which inflates prices more. The house of cards builds higher and higher with everyone expecting to find an even more extravagant fool in the market to buy off them. Eventually the system becomes so unstable that a tiny blip and it all collapses leaving the biggest fools high and dry with relatively worthless assets. The market over corrects and it all starts again. What wealth is really created in such a system apart from simply redistribution of what exists from the stupid to the smart? How in other words can anyone support such a system?

Where is the sensation?

2011-03-20T19:45:00.007Z

It occurred to me while leaning on my hand in the library and looking at my reflection in the window that I could see my hand on my head. Before that I was concentrating on the feeling of my head at my finger tips, feeling the hair and the scalp and massaging it. It then occurred to me that my mind as it was, positioned at the tips of my fingers, was very much involved with the outside of my skull. Looking at my reflection I then switched to the usual visual experience of the image on the retina that I have long considered before, and my traditional question of whether the visual space is inside or outside the brain. What was different this time as I kept my mind at my finger tips was that clearly my mind was outside my brain because I was experiencing the feeling of the hair on my scalp and that on top of my skull, and that housing my brain.

This is the question: where is the sensation?

It is not so simple as the plain visual question where all space can be reduced to looking out from some central view point. With the mind at the finger tips we are already out-there. Where when we feel something is the in-here. There are no cues of perspective to infer an in-here at all, a homunculus at the centre looking out. The fingers are far away from "me" sitting on my head in the out-there feeling "my" head... how can I feel "my" head I need to be outside "my" head to feel it, but if I am out-side it then whose is it? Very Shurangama but first time I had it so clear.

On Endless Desire

2011-03-20T19:31:00.006Z

(From notes)

Either I'm not very good at it or I'm a coward, or secretly sceptical, or unlucky but whichever way I realise today more deeply that getting something is only ever a means to another end. There is no thing you can gain which will end the craving. My belief that I have been stuck with for a long time was that falling in love would give me the thing I am missing in life. This become "my muse". I realise then however that it wasn't so simple because that entailed fighting for status to be desirable and to be eligible. Now I realise that even had a fallen in love did I really think that would be the end of it and I would lie my head in my lovers lap adrift in halcyon summer meadows for the rest of eternity? Somehow my heart still believes this is how it is. Watching others (as if I needed to to see this almost a priori truth) lovers become families. Even homosexuals who one would have thought had sort not to be fertile and sort not to involve themselves with children are now gaining the rights to family. It seems a certain progression for all couples. And then there are other issues like a better home, and a better job, and then schooling for the kids , and then the desire that our children do well at school and all the desires heaped on them and then just as we think it must end, we then end up having desires for grand children and expectations for their lives and then finally we die ... to be reborn and the cycle continue.

Desire is never satisfied, yet it is Desire's power that makes us think that the next desire will end all others. This is the most ancient realisation but I am only awaking to it slowly now.

>A quote from a 1060s Hollywood film I forget went "A king can get whatever he desires, but can he chose what he desires?"

>A friend was saying what if some magic was powerful enough to influence the lottery balls. But then we realised that if such a power existed everyone would be using it so the result would be no change. What we need is not the power to make the lottery balls come up how we want them, but the power to make us want what the lottery balls will come up like! Of course even with this power the lottery would then just get split evenly and no-one would make any money either.

Sexual Power and Self-Esteem

2011-03-20T19:01:00.004Z

(From notes made last year)

Low Self esteem means we don't believe we deserve happiness. This is a poison that infects us. We then seek self justification, narcissism and kingship and so we in turn subject others to suffering and torture to enforce our weak grasp of our validity. Now this creates a particular species of sexual interest. The "whore" and pornography (specifically the images of whores which is what it means) is based around the low self-esteem male seeking to reinforce their weakly based ego in expressions of power. Power being the ability to obtain resources, territory and achieve matings is thus logically what a male seeks both to obtain sex but also through sex. So the "dirty whore" is logical expression of the power-sex of weak males.

Now with females it is equally complex. Just as the weak, low status, low esteem male seeks kingship and domination so the weak female seeks enslavement so that she may experience power through it use on her (Hegel master/slave dialectic). Through her success as a slave she becomes ironically empowered.

In both cases the seeking of ecstasy in the giving to another in love (Aphrodite) , the being selfless, is confused and is expressed as Eros and the abandonment of self to another in a power relation. This is futile since neither party gains. Aphrodite by contrast is mutual respect n esteem.

I realise that power is expressed in a battle of esteem. We are aware that each person is looking both to be king and slave and it is based upon esteem and status. Attractive well turned out girls of higher class we don't expect to seek kings in unattractive scruffy males. Yet the truth is that probably they have low esteem too and are actually seeking quite low kings. It is the source of the surprise when we hear that a desirable girl debased herself is some cheap sexual act. And our response is one of measuring it through power and esteem, that were such a girl to offer themselves to us we would perceive it as a king experience which would raise our status and self-esteem.

It is surprising to me how much of sexual relations is of this type and how low in esteem most people are. Such a realisation is useful though because it teaches us not to seek esteem in the endless and fruitless struggles of Eros but to pursue the path of mutual respect and love which does not demand master/slave relations and offers freedom and growth to all partners. This is the difference between Eros and Aphrodite and indeed suggests that sexual liberation is actually a dead end and the wrong path.

Interesting to hear Germaine Greer on the radio last week in a program on Wilhelm Reich saying that the sexual revolution that she promoted had expected people to embrace sexual freedom with "humility" and responsibility and admits they were wrong in their expectations. While I agree with Wilhelm Reich that sexual awkwardness and repression leads to neurosis and destructive use of energies it's a bit primitive to say that releasing it solves the problem. Like a steam engine if the pressure is getting too high you release it to stop that energy doing harm, but really you want to use all that energy for something useful and this points to understanding orgone energy and applying it ... which is exactly what Buddhism and Hinduism for certain and probably all the various energy/spiritual teachings aim to do. It is the forgetting how to master our energies that leads all those lost generations to get sexually frustrated, and then to blame the spiritual teachings for repressing sexuality and then to realise it all in a popular revolution embracing this ignorance.

6 Nations: what is the score with 1 team playing?

2011-03-20T18:02:00.007Z

Finally got around to a bit of analysis I thought of at school.

In a round robin contest where everyone plays everyone (like the 6 Nations rugby contest) it seems to me that there is a lot of information redundancy in the network e.g. in a contest of 3 teams A, B and C then after 2 games we ought to have a good idea how the third game will go. If A easily beats team B and team B easily beats team C then there is a fair chance that A will very easily beat team C. We might create a concept of "goodness" to determine that A is better than B which is better than C so A is better than C.

For notation let teams be A,B etc and games be AB, BC where the value of AC = (score of A)/(score of C) in the same game. If AB = 2 (i.e. team A scored twice as much as B) then BA = 1/AB.

On the assumption that a team has some fixed quality of "goodness" then a loop such as above of AB * BC * CA ought to give a value of 1 since if team played itself one would expect it to score as much as itself. Now this is a huge assumption that I will show is false!

In the 6 Nations there are 6 teams and so (n^2 - n)/2 possible games: that is 15 for this contest. So the results space is 15 dimensional with points representing the 15 possible (AB, AC, AD,...) network arcs or strengths. Such a network is "inconsistent" because AB * BC * CA != 1, abbreviated to ABCA = 1

A "consistent network" where all loops multiply to 1 has only n-1 dimensions, in the case of the 6 Nations that is 5. It is the reduction from 15 to 5 dimensions that creates the redundancy that I hope to exploit in predicting games.

The source of this redundancy was that concept of "goodness". The idea is that a team has a goodness that we can determine by considering that were it to play itself it would be as "good" as itself. Now the SRH claims this is an impossibility and a meaningless conception. This is all to say that a team has a self, or a substance which is invariant and determines qualities about that team. So by appealing to the concept of "goodness" of "self" we reduce the world from (n^2-n)/2 complexity to simply n-1. It is no wonder that the human mind appeals to ideas of fixed self, upon which it bases its understandings and which is only updates periodically, in preference to seeing everything as entirely new! It is also interesting that the concept of "loop" is actually the foundation of the concept of "self" here. Previously a link was seen between loops (non halting programs) and Godel statements both of which put limits of systems and raise the question of incompleteness and imply the a meta level. It is this insufficiency of "self" and impossibility of "self" founding it-self and so inherently depending and being built upon what is "non self" that the SRH seeks to prove.

The method used to solve the 6 Nations problem was to construct an expression that determined the distance from the 15 dimensional point to the 5 dimensional point in the consistent network. In a 4 node completely connected system the experimental data consists of 6 arcs and the consistent network needs to obey the loops where ABCDA=1,ABCA=1,BCDB=1,DAB/DB=1,DBCD=1. So if AB=x1,BC=x2 then CA=1/(x1 * x2) . If CD=x3 then DA = 1/(x1 * x2 * x3), and DB = 1/(x2 * x3) so the consistent network has points on

This squared distance between these is thus:

d = (AB - x1)^2 + (BC - x2)^2 + ... + (DB - 1/(x2 * x3) )^2

It occurred to me that this should all be done in log space. I've not thought it through properly yet. Update: NO because the reason for "nearest" was to change the values as little as possible from the ratios established by the data. In log() space this would mean change the scores as little as possible which is another interpretation but since I'm looking for the "goodness" of a team it is sufficient to change this value as little as possible.

This is then minimised either numerically or by partial differentiation in the 3 dimensions, setting to zero, and then solving to give the values of and the full 6 dimensions can then we calculated. These are then the values of arcs in a network where each node is a particular number. This number can then discovered and the relative "goodness" of each team can be found.

After two weekends of play in the 6 Nations it is clear that the predictions this system gives are useless. At best it is 200% out. Maybe for larger systems that 6 teams there is more interaction and so more meaning to "self" but I suspect there is something else wrong.

Teams do not play as well as themselves on each occasion. This is the flaw. Ireland played an amazing game against England on Saturday. Had they done this on all the other occasions they would have won a grandslam. They didn't. So there is no predicting team if they play like different teams on each occasion. It is all down to conditions and just because two teams seem to be the "same", and have the same name, and be the same "selves" on each occasion we should not be fooled into believing that they are the same as before. What is the sound of one hand clapping? What is the score with 1 team is playing? So we can't meaningfully separate a team from its opponents and so we can't meaningfully speak of how "good" a team is. Seems very much to support Buddha!

What shape are trees?

2011-03-10T11:42:00.002Z

What shape is a tree?

The standard classical way to think about this would be to first consider what is a tree made from. We can pulp it all up into a block of wood pulp and weigh it and see how much "stuff" there is. Then we might consider how all this "stuff" was put together. We might isolate trunk, branches and twigs and show how they are stuck together end to end in a "branching" pattern - the very concept of branching here comes from familiarity with trees (an SRH problem).

But if we shift to thinking fractally we see that each part of the tree is identical with the whole tree. Cover up the rest of the tree to show just a branch and it is a copy of the whole thing. Obviously this only works with an infinite set, where removing a finite amount from the start of the set leaves the set still infinite. That is a branch of the tree really is identical (apart from scale) with the whole thing. Interesting that infinite regress is linked here with notions of self again, just as it is with paradoxes and non-halting programs. See the image to the left. So the real building blocks of the tree are actually the tree itself. And with just a simple geometric relationship defined between building blocks we can avoid having to define a substance at all and just say that it is made from itself!

Now this blows apart the SRH... but not quite.

The SRH says that things cannot be made from themselves because there is a contradiction in the idea of "substance" being built with itself. The proof is oneday supposed to show that things are always made from what they are not.

In a fractal however there is no substance either because things are made from the whole structure not a "part" or a "thing". The only substance is a relationship between parts, but parts with no substance.

It is a new way of thinking for me - that of total relationships. I need to "fix" this - it is what I'm searching for.

===

The above was written in a hurry. Some more elaboration. 21/3/2011

Visualising fractals poses a problem because a definite point needs to be added to the system, or to put it another way a start needs to be made in what is an infinitely deep system. In the tree it is customary to start with a trunk somewhere (after our experience of real trees). This is really just a branch of an infinite fractal tree that could be projected into larger scales. We only focus on the smaller scales - the contracting affine transformations in an IFS.

So a fractal that really is infinite and doesn't have a start point is just a set of all the possible applications of the transformation rules, branching just like a tree but in logical space. This is a very familiar structure for example probability trees, or wave functions, mapping all the possible outcomes. But there is something unfractal about all these because they do "collapse" into discrete actualities, the substances of rendered fractals that we can sense and interact with. That said the point of this blog is the appreciation that the real structure of what we see does not lie in the inner "substance" but in the hierarchy of functions that relate the scales of a structure. That hierarchy is of the mind and not of substance and enables a thing to be made from itself which the SRH says is impossible.

However to recover the universality of the SRH it need only be pointed out that while the tree is made from copies of itself under transformation, the simple transformation rules that govern the shape of that hierarchy are not themselves built from the tree. There are three affine transformations needed to make the whole tree. These must be constructed "outside" the space in which the tree is constructed - e.g. in a symbol space for example. Thus the SRH is not really affected by this shift in understanding.

Ayn Rand

2011-03-03T11:28:00.002Z

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayn_Rand

A friend of considerable academic merit has decided that this woman speaks the truth. After only 5 minutes of hearing her I note that in my opinion what she speaks is about as far as one can get from the truth. I wouldn't bother to blog other than she seems to have a considerable following in America so add a drop to the ocean of rejection of her ideas. I needn't say much as this entire blog is examining the opposite poistion to that which she holds.

A single line from Jesus addresses what she believes. In response to those who say an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth Jesus reminds us that there is little merit in liking those who like us and hating those who hate us (essentially Rand's position) - any automaton and primative creature will do this. What is remarkable is those who can love both those who like them and those who hate them. I understand most people are animals and primative people, and such talk sounds like nonsense, but then so does Higher maths to grade 1 students. Just because you can't understand something doesn't make it wrong. Rand speaks to the grade 1 so I imagine this explains her following.

"My Muse" & Self

2011-02-24T11:46:00.002Z

The whole issue of my muse is all certainly digested and in the Past. 14 years from start to finish - I'm clearly a slow learner; I hope the other issues in this blog resolve more quickly!

Put very simply the actual issue was that of self - which i was deeply aware of at the time but lacked perspective. I valued my muse a lot (more than anyone else) and certainly sex with her was more valuable than anyone else. She on the other hand did not share either this value of sex or herself. Now at the time I could take that three ways: either I was wrong and she was not valuable (as a friend said about herm as he didn't consider her worthwhile), or she was wrong and she was valuable, or thirdly we were both wrong and right and depending on how you looked at her she was valuable or not valuable. Certainly the third is correct. For example not everyone would find her attractive, and more obviously not everyone would be sexually attracted for example other women.

The problem then lay in my bias to my own conditions. I found her attractive, the most attractive, and it was my existence stuck on that side of the argument that I found so difficult. I now don't see her as so valuable so I haven't resolved the issue of self, but I am able to see her side of the argument now which is that she is just another girl looking for sexual thrills and why shouldn't she have them. But to see her side I have had to forget about my side.

What is ideal is to be able to switch between sides while they are prevalent and relevant. But to do this we need to understand and master ourselves.

This is the essence of the illusion of self and of attachment: the inability to switch between our own desires and attitudes and those of others. It implies that we remain ignorant to the fundamental reality that what we find ourselves desiring and attached to is not of our own choice: it is rather chosen by the situation we find ourself in; but this is chosen by our past actions - that is Karma. So when we see our own mind state and desires as the total product of our genes and experiences we then understand that we have as much "right" to it as anyone else, and also we understand that it is only relevent to our own genes and conditions. Now to deeply understand that means we can step outside the limitations of our conditions (by SRH that wisdom cannot be conditioned itself and must be un-conditioned [it is only the lack of wisdom that is conditioned - the onion skins of illusion that we must remove as it is often referred to]). Once we can step beyond our own limitations then we see how other people are trapped within their limitations and that inspires (1) compassion, (2) equnimity toward the interaction of our position and theirs, and (3) the loss of suffering.

That is the theory I'm still on the road of ending Dualism by weakening one side to see the other. The next step would be to desire again but not be attached to it, keeping equanimityand freedom as I go... dangerous... not ready yet.

Stock Market analysis update...

2011-02-22T12:59:00.006Z

Here is the 1st attempt at implementing the IFS from that Chinese paper (which they misquoted from Barnsley)...

The paper fails to explain the importance of the "d" stretch parameters, and does not explain how they were discovered. I don't believe after searching that there is a set of "d" parameters that will recover the Shanghai stock trace as described in the paper. Is this another mistake in the paper, a failure on my behalf or deliberate fraud... don't know.

===

Rather than look at only the price some thought was given to the role of volume. The population of sellers and buyers in a market will change respectively in size and also in mean and standard deviation. This reasonably I assume does obey the normal distribution. Where the two curves over lap is where trading occurs. Large differences in mean will result in large shifts in price, with respective numbers of traders determining in whose favour the price goes, while large overlaps will result in large volumes of trades. Flattening standard deviations then are associated with large volumes, and different means correspond to price changes. Somehow deducing these parameters from the stock charts would be good insight into the markets...

===

Following the logic thought about the "stack price". The stack might be the pile of held stock. Some is for investment and will be held for a long time so is far down the stack, some is speculative and goes around quickly. Assuming that stock is traded only once a day then volume as a percentage of the total issued shares combined with the mid price of the day determines what the average holding of share holders is the next day, loosely called the volume weighted average price VWAP here.

It was thought the VWAP would give more information about the behaviour of investors than the chart price.

This is the number of days spent at each VWAP price for the BP-NYSE chart (prices are in 3dollars). There are very distinct prices to which the price returns and of interest (but not yet explored) is the fractal bifurcating peak in the middle. The whole peak is split into two in the same ratio as each prong is split into two. This is also a bifurcation tho no evidence for the Feigenbaum constant.

===

Again BP the frequency distribution of Volume and daily High-Low price on suitable X scales. Interesting how volumes and size of days range appear to obey the same law.

===

The Blue curve is the High/Low distribution the Magenta is the Poisson distribution. When have time it's another probability distribution search.

===

Conclusion still no decent attractors, or any real understanding of the stock market - 4 months coming up... should knock this on the head for a while... but give it 4 weeks more first.

Golden Rule

2011-02-20T11:53:00.002Z

It's got a name...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Rule

Not read the page yet just blogging its existence. I wonder if it explains the reason why the Golden Rule is true... namely the contradiction of Self (SRH), the dialectic of Self/Other, and the nature of the Grand Illusion of Reality. Doesn't start well tho talking about "individual rights" which is a contradiction already.

Human v Machine: Watson

2011-02-20T08:39:00.000Z

On the subject of machines taking over the last remaining jobs...

http://smartdatacollective.com/stephenbaker1/32872/watson-less-efficient-human

When it comes to computing efficiency, humans beings blow Watson away. As Jonah Lehrer points out, the human brain requires with less power than a dim light bulb. Watson, as it labors to replicate only one function of the brain--question-answering--heats up a room full of computers, and needs a bank of roaring air-conditioners to keep them from melting. There's no contest.

But the efficiency of the human brain won't prevent machines like Watson from encroaching on certain jobs, starting with call centers. First, these computers will grow dramatically more efficient. That's the nature of information technology. Not too long ago, generating the computing power in an iPhone also used to require a roomfull of hot machinery. The other point is this: While human brains are efficient, we consume a lot more energy than that single lightbulb. We drive cars, we heat and cool our houses, we eat food from all over the world. From a company's perspective, operating a human, at least in this country, costs tens of thousands of dollars a year. When it comes to efficiency, they'll be comparing the cost of the entire human being to Watson. We're far more than our magnificent brains, and we cost more, too.

Stock Analysis Notes

2011-02-07T23:56:00.002Z

Change of direction (ironic ;-):

Measured the dimensions of some price series - using the counting boxes method (executed in Excel VBA):

FTSE 1.8241

BP 1.425

GKSR 1.1058

They are progressively less fractal.

Now for the FTSE and BP it seems that a velocity approach is not the most appropriate approach since dy/dx is not defined for fractals. While moving averages are appealing in watching trends: I wonder what theoretical foundation exists for their use now.

The shift in approach now (altho I will return to other approaches) is in search of attractors that drive stock charts.

===

This paper is exactly what I wanted to do all laid out tho I've not got the IFS to work yet:

http://it.swufe.edu.cn/UploadFile/other/xsjl/sixwuhan/Paper/IF132.pdf

===

From discussion board

http://www.ai-stockmarketforum.com/showthread.php?t=8

As so many fields investigate variables which change over time, there is widespread interest in the analysis of time-series. Probably three of the most well-developed time-series specialties (there is sginficant overlap, despite varying terminology) are: business forecasting, spectral analysis and digital signal processing. For further research, try these keywords:

-Business Forecasting: "moving average", exponential smoothing, dynamic regression, deseasonalization, ARIMA, autocorrelation, correlogram

-Spectral Analysis: "Fourier transform", FFT ("fast Fourier transform), DCT "discrete cosine transform", wavelet, coherence

-Digital Signal Processing: FIR ("finite impulse response"), IIR ("infinite impulse response"), Wiener

Of course, many other, more generic, techniques have been applied to time-series. I suggest an on-line search for terms like "fuzzy logic" or "neural network" in combination with time-series terms such as "forecast", "prediction" or "denoise".

Aristotle on Robots/Work

2011-02-07T13:26:00.001Z

~ 322 B.C.

The Greek philosopher Aristotle writes...

“If every tool, when ordered, or even of its own accord, could do the work that befits it... then there would be no need either of apprentices for the master workers or of slaves for the lords.”

http://robotics.megagiant.com/history.html

Except (as explored in depth in the blog) Aristotle misunderstood a very deep aspect of human Life - that society implies hierarchy. Robots (99.95% of work is done by machines) will never release us from employment because that is a hierarchical feature.

Here & There

2011-02-01T16:42:00.003Z

http://www.mcescher.com/Gallery/ital-bmp/LW268.jpg

After seeing Uranus last night for the first time and commenting on Facebook that I had now seen them all I was going to update with what a fraud I am since I have not yet seen Earth...

This irony commented on before (1st occurring to me as I looked at a holiday photo from the side of Ben Macdui mountain) that to see the here we have to be over there, is broadly explained by the SRH that we cannot have "self" knowledge.

I now totally concede to Hofstadters way of thinking. The world is fractal in nature infinitely twisting in through itself. What we think is here is really only visible to us when we are there. What is there is only visible because we are here: to understand what is There, we HAVE to be Here! There and Here are the essential poles of the mirror. M.C.Escher above has to paint a glass sphere in his hand to show himself what he looks like. The only other way is to have someone else paint him. It is a head-over-heels world. (I am writing bitty lines here to rapidly try to catch the general point). It is not a matter of finding a fixed "reality" or series of material building blocks but rather as Hofstadter argues the folding of the large scale into the small scale. What we look into become what we look at; what we look at becomes what we look into. Put more physically it is as though the doors that we pass through during our investigations becomes the things we are investigating and what we were investigating inside those rooms becomes the building where our science is done.

This kaleidoscopic world is all brought about because of the deep contradiction that "objective self" would bring about.

Materialism... again

2011-02-01T10:39:00.002Z

Watching the BBC Horizon program on Pain last night I had two thoughts. Firstly the issue of the Sciences great achievements and secondly the issue of materialism. A quote from the discussion board at http://richarddawkins.net/discussions/584583-my-daughter-has-made-me-realise:

My name is Mark and my beloved daughter's name is Sophie-May. Almost 6 years ago she was born with pontocerebellar hypoplasia type 6 caused by the RARS 2 gene fault. This is a progressive metabolic disorder which is very rare: as far as her geneticist knows, there have only been 4 other children born with the condition and all sadly passed away before they reached 18 months.

Sophie is severely brain damaged and depends on my wife Kelly and me for her daily care. Like I said, it is a progressive neurological disorder so things will get worse. Anyway the point I'm trying to make is that Sophie will be 6 in May and she wouldn't have got this far if it weren't for her geneticist who helped in discovering her diagnosis, her paediatrician for his medical knowledge and care, the ear nose and throat surgeon at Bristol Children's Hospital for my daughter's tracheostomy to enable her to breathe, the metabolic specialists, physiotherapists, homecare nurses, etc etc. I could go on but you get the picture.

I used to go to the church on the camp where I work (I'm in the Royal Marines) but since watching The God Delusion, Enemies of Reason and The Genius of Charles Darwin plus reading The God Delusion, I've realised that going to that church, all the praying, the begging really, never did anything to help my daughter. I'm an atheist now because I know that religion has never played a part in keeping my daughter alive.

I'm so humbled by the work her medical team do, it has made religion seem petty by comparison. Please tell me what you think, thanks very much!

This same thought came to me watching the program on Pain. There is simply no substitute for clear investigation of phenomena. I used to argue in the Mahayana Buddhist Temple that if you wish to help people then get a profession; what can a monk actually do to help in say medicine? "Helping" is a very complex issue.

But the problem as always is a mismatch of scale. You can't discuss this with people like Mark (above) this because they are utterly devoted to the immediate small scale. The story of Buddha's approach to death is revealing here. A woman who had lost her daughter cam to him pleading for some magic. Buddha said he would revive the child but only after she had been into the village and found a house that had not been touched by death. She went from door to door discovering as she went that everybody has been touched by death. When she returned she understood it was not death she was grieving but the loss of "her" daughter. This is why we can watch the news day of day and see people dying and it mean very little to us, that is until it happens to us! This is where Mark above is. However that said one cannot, and shouldn't, dismiss the wonderful work done by the researchers, it is just we must put it in perspective to see the real nature of the world. Technological science shouldn't become a prop to maintain our fantasy land. It ought be pointed out here also that Jesus' miracles are perhaps more complex as well. After the feeding of the 7000 the disciples were talking amongst themselves and Jesus was quite abrupt with them saying "hadn't they understood yet". One wonders whether anyone really gets the Kingdom of Heaven and what Jesus was really trying to say.

And so to the second point. The Nature of Reality: Materialism. If I hear it enough I might start to believe it! Apparently Pain is created by the Brain: it is not "out there". This is the new religion almost and is branded across all science to do with human beings. It is not a bad place to start however, but it is only a start. For me the revelation was realising that colour was not "out-there". But there began a long investigation into what is "out-there". So lets list some suspects for "in here": pain, colours, emotions, feelings in general. The reason we conclude that they are "in-here" and not "out-there" is because there is variation between people's experiences (in-here) while there is only one "out-there" that we all agree on... (well that is one reason there are many).

So now what about tastes: sweet, sour, bitter, salt? There are four regions of the tongue that respond to these so we might argue it is more a feature of our tongue than anything "Out there". Chemical come with a variety of properties why should these 4 be so special? So taste, and we can add to that smell are "in here". So that leaves sound. We can see sound waves on an oscilloscope so we agree that pressure waves in air exist what we can question is the "tone" of these waves. IN the West we split the scale into 7 intervals, there are mathematical reasons for this but other cultures and animals don't and there is no reason to value these mathematical relations especially. So we can rapidly split the perceived phenomena into brain features and more abstract "real" features.

But what about movement. Surely movement is a profound fundamental, mathematical, feature of space-time and reality. A simple brain injury can destroy the sense of movement. I remember an interview with one such woman who described that crossing the road was very difficult because cars would be stationary and then suddenly be right up next to her without moving. We are beginning to run out of "real" things, and everything seems "in here".

So to reverse the process... a quick reductio-ad-absurdum: if we put a blender in our brain case and mash up our own brain what results do we expect (only a "thought" experiment not a "brain" experiment - which leads to the next point ;-). This is where it gets tricky. What is the sound of a tree falling when no-one is there to hear. Well I've just argued for very little "out-there" but now it seems absurd that when I have no brain, then is no "in here" either. This is all very Shurangama Sutra (previous post).

Now we are into the realm of "thoughts" because that was a thought experiment (as indeed this whole thing has been) and I made the assumption that there was a real brain to blend in the first place. Put that another way: how could I have blended my brain if there was nothing "out there" in the first place. This is now were the SRH kicks in. This idea is growing in robustness. In short it says that any statement which results in any loop is meaningless (exactly why is still unclear). Now if I say that everything is "in here" the question is in what? Whatever "here" is, is that in "here" also. OK there is the loop and so it is meaningless -> end of discussion.

Likewise if I say that everything is "out there" the question is what is "there". IS that "there" out-there also. OK loop -> end of discussion.

So almost all the time you can't say "All" anything because it will include itself and so you get a loop. I say almost because it seems that putting a limit around oneself is the problem, so to say everything we need to have an open set. You can't make a close set with yourself inside (that is the SRH bit) because then the limits of the set are then within the set and so what are they within... this is the paradox but it seems a bit more complex to show up in maths...

SO we can't take the "here" and "there" as fixed aspects of reality. What we are left with importantly is the idea of "ideas". Now not everything is an "idea" by SRH but what is not an idea can't be expressed in an idea, which is another idea and we start spiralling very fast into the net of the spider of Structuralism and private-language arguments. Best to leave that as an open set also. But once we are thinking about ideas Scientific Materialism gets its "substance" because the ideas that Science has about what "is" are really just that "ideas" about what is. Everyone may agree and we have a "reality" but it is through consensus that it has its power not some God given material fact. And, there is the irony: the Materialists are still appropriating factual immutable Creation [uk ho Richard Dawkins = more contradictions].

SO looking for the absolute truth we have spun out of the low orbits of materialism rather fast but realise that there is no limit to the orbits we can enter. That is the ancient long ago seen point that whatever we do we are in orbit. Hence the Swastika and Dharma Wheel in Buddhism. What are we in orbit around? That is the intangible next step but its takes a different approach to what is here.

Fibbonaci: Little Evidence

2011-01-28T15:05:00.006Z

Well finally got around to looking for evidence of Fibbonaci retracement in stock markets... which would have been the logical place to start this investigation ;-)

BP (LSE) data from 2003 to 2011 was used.

Data was transformed into a simple stochastic oscillator STO: price as a percentage of High/Low range for the preceding period (p).

1) Method: The number of days in at each percentage point was summed.

Result: With p=10,20 the graph has 3 noticeable points.

i) Price spends most of its time just below the High >80% (about 1.2% of the time for each STO percentage point). This is near a subtracted Fib point.

ii) Price spends the next longest duration (0,.75% time / STO point) at about 20% of the range. This is near one of the Fib points.

iii) Price spends the least time (about 0.6%) in the middle of its range.

Conclusion: This crude measure would expect movement to Fib levels to show up as longer time at these levels with the price moving fast through other levels. This is not in the data. However bouncing off these levels would not show up in this measure.

2) Method: The Gradient was calculated as the regression slope between the preceding week and the subsequent week.

Result: Gradients are negative and fastest near the Low and positive and fastest near the High. They oscillate in the middle band. A moving average smooth of the curve shows that they are flat at 60%. This is a Fib level.

Conclusion: The flat level at 60% is as expected. The data is not fine enough to conlcude anything however. It also suggests that movements out of the range occur at high speed, while there is fluctuation within the range. Little peak at 70% suggests that prices travel fast through here to the 60% range and 80% range.

3) Method: Same but with average volume.

Result: Volumes decline as the price moves up through the range, with a peak before 20%. Thus suggests that people trade based on ranges like this with buyers buying in expecting the price to rise again into the range and sellers afraid that it will fall below the last low.

4) Same with Volume x Gradient

Result: Movement into stock positions increases as the price rises and accelerates upward as it approaches tops. Peaks at 35% and 70% of range.

Conclusion: No evidence of Fib here. It suggests that it is safe to add into high volume upward trends even near the local high because the gradient down is less. Conversely it is dangerous to add to low volume downward trends... as I discovered in gas last year where I threw away 20% of my portfolio!

Now there are two ways to do Fib. Time to examine the other one.

===

Taking the trend into account with High/Low calculated from the previous 40day period gives these results. It was calculated on actual prices of the BP graph not on LN - that was a mistake above. After a falling trend the SSTO was calculated normally, but after a rising trend the 100-SSTO was calculated since Fib retracement is calculated from the most recent reversal point back in time.

Fib retracement means that prices bounce off the retracement lines which means that days with this closing price ought to be rarer than random.

Instead the below trend is found which is essentially a probability distribution as this measure actually captures the volatility!

Rather than days at each level the average absolute gradient (calculated as regression through each point and week either side). This measures the rate at which the price was changing (either going up or down) at each point. At Fib levels, if they do resist movement, the gradient ought to slow down.

The 3 middle black bars are the main Fib levels (38.2,50,61.8) with 78.6 an official additional and 23.6 a logical 5th.

With some imagination there are periodic sudden increases in gradient (sudden acceleration) before Fib levels but certainly no indication of a slowing down.

Next up would be a distribution of turning points... but given that the stock market is fractal and turning points occur ever second, minute, hour, day... what scale do we chose? and how do we approach the issue of scale?... it is not exactly a 3rd dimension since scales are discrete (we choose maybe a 9day, 20 day, 50day moving average) but which scale would be best and why? .... to come back on this one.

SRH more

2011-01-28T11:02:00.002Z

There are 2 sources of work. Old jobs not completed and new jobs.

Now the formulation of this system creates a new job and problem: how to improve the processing of jobs. So it adds a new problem to the stack.

Now since the consideration of jobs and problems is itself a job and a problem it means that we can never revolutionise this level of reality. It is a normative given that we must accept within the paradigm of problem/solution.

So any model of something (a diagram so to speak of the component parts) can only be about itself if it agrees entirely with itself. A tautology in other words.

A statement can be about itself positively or negatively. If the statement is always positive then there is no problem, but there is no truth either as it is a tautology. If at any point it is negative about itself them there is the liar paradox. Now the liar paradox is famously odd. I suggest for now that its nature is the opposite of a Tautology which if it is Always True or False is Always neither True nor False. This is a non-logical statement with no truth content but so is a tautology in this argument since Always True or False has no truth content either! The only non-value in Logic is the contradiction which forces re-examination of assumptions, so maybe Tautologies and Paradoxes work like contradictions also.

I realise there is a confusion here between types of Truth. Deductive Truth works by tautology e.g. "¬(A & B) === ¬A v ¬B" (equivalent). While Inductive truth depends upon the possibility of falsehood. "Ducks === Ducks" has no information value.

OK need to think that thru...

So the SRH suggestion is that any existence of self-reference forces us to abandon Truth Content leaving the statement/system vacuous.

Meme Theory - the proof (finally)

2011-01-28T11:01:00.000Z

[Response to Facebook].

Agreed as long as we stick to truth. I personally agree with Meme Theory (think he based it on mimesis) it explains why Mozart never wrote Schoenberg ;-) It is demonstrably "right" (I had the same idea at school so it's pretty obvious). But I also think that God is "right" (ironically for exactly the reasons involved in this argument!) Now the problem with RD here, it seems to me, is that he has slipped into dismissing some ideas as popular simply because of Meme Theory (e.g. God) and doesn't regard their truth value any more. They do the same thing with Terrorism: it is spread by Radicalisation; but I have never heard anyone discuss it rationally. All all Terrorists just sheep? 'Personally I think suicide bombers are as clueless as the people who are trained to shoot at each other by governments' - at least that is a clear discussable point of view unlike the Meme Theory approach. With Meme theory so clarified it can then be seen as a sophisticated marketing tool which can be (and is! see MIT research) used to engineer society which for a Libertarian principled society is quite sinister; it is what the Nazis started - but that contradiction is a different debate.

Anyway with this abuse of Meme Theory in sight then follows the argument above. Religion may go extinct in people's minds but that doesn't make it wrong so why is RD using Meme Theory in his arguments then? That's how we know he is a fascist bigot :-)

Thought of a purer reformulation of the problem. Meme Theory, if taken as a measure of validity (e.g. 'God' idea is only around because the idea spreads well), makes claims about its own truth value. Then we have the liar paradox. If we model the conditions for the extinction of Darwinism and Meme Theory (maybe a rise in Religious Fundamentalism) then on one hand we are taking the model to be true (the model results), but on the other hand the results say that the model is invalid because it is extinct. Contradiction so ergo we can't say that Meme Theory can ever make claims about something's validity. So the prevalence of Religion tells us nothing about whether it is right or not... (which proves Meme Theory's fascist roots also) QED.

SRH - is this it?

2011-01-27T11:15:00.002Z

SRH:
A statement that refers to itself is either a tautology TT or a contradiction TF.

The most famous example is the liar paradox.

TT: "This statement is True."

TF: "This statement is False."

My favourite object of contemplation from a few years ago doesn't actually refer to itself!

T = {T}

Makes an equality between T and the set containing T which are different objects.

So SRH is not about Impredicativity. To define something in terms of itself is to enter a "temporal" version of the SRH which is a loop. One is then left with a different question of starts and ends which is not an immediate problem. Loops are the root of the Halting Problem, and I have speculated isomorphic with contradictions. Induction is maths famously has survived this problem.

I'm busy on other stuff so this will have to wait for further thought...

Memes

2011-01-27T09:49:00.002Z

On Dawkin's again, after Facebook discussion...

Darwin first introduced the world to a natural selection based evolution theory (NEST - apt since it's the home of species creation ;-) in his explanation of the diversity of species. From this huge revolution in thinking the idea has found application in everything. I have just built a model of the solar system which evolves by NEST from dust (to look at the emergence of Phi in dynamic systems). It is everywhere. It was the biggest shift in thinking since Renaissance clockwork universe Mechanics and before that the idea of Divine Order. It is that massive an idea.

Now Dawkins has taken Darwins idea and revamped it for the Capitalist Free-market 80's generation telling the tale of individual successful in free competing genes. Then he observed the process in ideas also and dubbed them memes.

At which point the SRH kicks in because Meme Theory (MT) is an idea and a meme itself. I have struggled to turn this into a fully fledges problem however (as with the SRH also). It is more revealing however to take NEST as a Meme also. Now if NEST fails then MT (as a subset of evolutionary theory) must fail also. Now there are many theories about the origin of diversity in the world not least the idea that things are immutable, don't evolve, and have a design or blueprint, an essence, imparted to them by The Creator. Now it is quite reasonable that NEST, which was unknown to the world for many millennia might once again fall into obscurity. It is this threat which has made Dawkins so animated. This in written into the rules of MT. Now if MT can envisage the extinction of NEST from the human mind then it envisages its own extinction from the human mind.

Now a theory is true when it can provide an answer under certain known conditions. There is no Universal theory yet (I have pages in this blog trying to argue that it is a fundamental contradiction - an argument which must be as close to a universal theory that there is). An incomplete theory has a problem because it must be able to define when it is not applicable. Quantum Theory is not applicable for gravity (as I very crudely understand it) and Relativity fails on the small scale and the other 3 forces. Each theory is incomplete, but that incompleteness is unknown to the theory. Relativity doesn't predict that it can't apply to the small scale we just know that it doesn't. Being complete and incomplete are meta statements about a theory. A Universal Theory, being Universal, must account for all its own meta statements... that is the root problem captured by the SRH but I can't quite see it yet. Now MT predicts a possible future when NEST will no longer be a meme of sufficient frequency to really be used in constructing the world... Dawkins' huge effort is proof of this possibility. The world will be thought about in different ways. This means that MT will no longer be relevant and applicable. Yet this contradicts the assumption by MT that it is relevant and still explaining this event! So if MT goes extinct which is it: is it still relevant but in hiding, or is it no longer relevant.

What this argument reveals is the dogmatism behind Dawkins position that fundamentally he believes that he is right and the NEST is true. I don't disgaree with him (I have a model right here of the solar system evolving by natural selection) but I do have a problem in the theory making claims about its own validity!

Boundaries

2011-01-26T19:45:00.002Z

I asked someone over Xmas, a manager for Bechtel, whether they thought that management was necessary, or whether things could manage themselves. Her answer, obviously, was that management is essential; quite rightly also because certainly things wouldn't function without some level of management. But looking deeper no-one manages the course of history or human development, or love or wars, and more fundamentally no-one manages nature; and, yet these things have their own passage and logic; something sufficiently benevolent and orderly because we somehow "manage" to survive. This I have commented on before as being the "wheel of the world", it is one of the fundamental ideas that Mankind would seek to forget in His drive to supremacy. Mankind is at best obedient to Nature and at his most foolish ignorant of Nature. More importantly this illustrates the breadth of influence of whatever lies at the heart of the SRH. It is obvious that "management" can never be a complete world view because what manages management? So last night and this morning in bed I transform the problem (once again) into topology and the notion of regions enclosing one another.

In this diagram there are 3 regions. Region A, region B and the black ring. Region A is separated from region B by the black ring through which any path from a point in A to B must pass. The ring encloses region A and "excludes" or "excloses" region B.

Region B depends upon the context. In this case we are in the real plane R2 so we know that B is simply the rest of this plane. If we were to define "swan" then it is harder to say what not-swan is, because the field is not clearly defined. For example if someone was to produce the skull of a swan, is that swan or not? It is true that it is not "a" swan because we assume here that we are talking about actual animals. But in a physiology class where skulls were the topic we might agree that this was swan rather than goose.

Exclude/Exclose: Region B is defined in terms of the ring just as is region A, but the ring is enclosed by region B. Exclude illustrates that region B is subject to the ring, and it gives the ring the active part of the sentence.

Now two issues arise from this. Firstly the "Dual Nature" of definition and secondly the question of whether something can define itself.

Dual Nature

The ring performs a dual function. By enclosing the region A it automatically excludes the region B. This has been commented on before in this blog in connection with the dual nature of "false societies" that exist by including some and excluding others; any structure with a name, description or definition has this dual, false character. I say false because true Society is about people, but if it exists by excluding some people then it is self-contradictory. Regions of space are not so elevated and self-contradictory. That space within A is separated from that space in B. Without the process of separation of A from B then we cannot define A, so to define A we have to define B. B is often termed its negation, ¬A or not-A.

Now it is because anything we wish to define and name equally defines its negation that we have problems if we try to define something in terms of itself (the problem flagged by the SRH).

If something could define itself then it could define what was not-itself also. So we might have a function that defined a family of functions, for trivial example y= a*x where a is an integer. So the function y = 2*x is defined by this rule and y = 3 + x is not defined.

…

Other point is that about boundaries. If we say ¬A then we include B and we include the ring. So the ring seems to be included in the negation of what it defines. Let us assume to begin with that this is a real world example and the ring is a wedding ring. Region A is the space through which a finger can pass and the ring begins with the gold atoms whose structure holds the ring on the finger. Region A is thus clearly defined with gold atoms on one side and something else on the other. An imaginary line exists between the various atoms. Now in which region is this line? It is actually between the atoms. We shift now to maths.

If I was to say that point (2,0) was in region A and (3,0) was in region B what would we know? If I was to add that this was integer space then we know that the two regions are side by side at these points. The points could be defined/selected by the rule for the circle of radius 2 centred at (0,0) in integer space:

{ (x,y) | x,y are integers & Sqrt(x^2 + y^2) <= 2 }

(0,-2)

(-1,-1), (0,-1), (1,-1)

(-2,0), (-1,0), (0,0), (1,0), (2,0) …. (3,0)

(-1,1), (0,1), (1,1)

(0,2)

What is not clear here is the notion of a boundary. We simply have a set of points A and a set of points B with nothing in between and nothing relating them. However we have defined region A to be those points at a distance from the centre with a limit of 2. This is clear in the definition but not in the areas. The areas do not contain the definition.

In the ring above the black region is supposed to be the definition of region A. Negating region A then creates the region including Region B and the ring! The ring seems to define itself!

...unfinished...

Colour Cube

2011-01-26T17:29:00.004Z

Saw this on a BBC documentary last night but with a single explanatory line that gave much greater insight than I have heard before.
The question is to determine whether the blue squares in the left picture are the same colour of different from the yellow squares in the right picture.

Now it would seem an easy question to answer, after all the question has given away that they are different by referring to them as blue and yellow squares. But not everything is at it seems.

The thing to notice for the discerning aesthete is the setting, or the context, of the two pictures. The left picture is apparently under yellow light, while the right is under blue light.

As a result of this seeming triviality our brain is forced to make some rather deeper than usual decisions. Yellow light (a mixture of red and green) lacks any blue light and so nothing will look blue under yellow light: it will simply be a shade of grey. As a result there is ambiguity and the brain cannot tell whether in thi context there is a blue or a grey square. It could be either. Faced with this problem and presumably because of the other bright colours, and also because it is comparing with blue squares in the right picture, it it reasonable to decide it is a blue square.

The blue illusion is not so good because we know that there is red and green light present because we can see the red and the green squares, it is quite possible that yellow is present. However in blue light (lacking in red and green) it will be a much duller tone more similar to grey. It is easier to bust the illusion in this picture which is why we look at it second.

Now here is the point. With the context removed this is the actual colour of those squares. The Blue on the left are actually the same as the yellow on the right. With two piece of paper held close together to create a slit over the picture above this can be verified.

What was so good about the casual comment in this BBC documentary was the recognition that it was the context that fooled the brain into making the logical deduction.

In a sense the squares on the left (if they were real squares under yellow light) would indeed "be" blue. The grey squares on the right most likely would be yellow and not grey.

This goes to show however that what we "see" is not early in our visual processing but actually after a good deal of assumptions have been made by the brain.

Here I agree with the science. Where I rapidly fall out with the science is this. It has taken a good deal of study beyond the visual system for mankind to deduce this feature of his own visual processing system. That is to say that where the visual system does some study to work out what it is "really" seeing, mankind has now done a lot more processing to show up the visual system as not always consistent. Thus we can fill gaps (with considerable time and difficulty) where the primitive system fails. We now claim to know "reality" better than the visual system, and this I have a problem with.

It is correct that we have shown that what we are conscious of is not reality. An easier way is to wonder what a dream was "of". We were certainly conscious of something: we can tell people what happened and we can sometimes even describe colours, smells, touch, sound and tastes. I once dreamt of eating a banana and the unripe texture and taste was so bad I was put off eating them for years! But what was the "reality". We seem fine about dismissing this as make believe. Now in this illusion we are seeing/dreaming colours that are not there - that are created so it seems not by "reality" but by our personal "brain". Yet to prove the illusion we turn to another picture where we see "grey". Now are we dreaming that also? Why scientifically are we allowed to consider the "grey" in this experiment as reality and the dreamed colours before as illusions.

It is only because of logical inconsistency. Our thinking mind is referring to memory and within the framework of language, culture and history. As if to prove that point see this entry in the online etymological dictionary for blue [http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=blue]:

c.1300, bleu, blwe, etc., from O.Fr. blo "pale, pallid, wan, light-colored; blond; discolored; blue, blue-gray," from Frankish *blao, from P.Gmc. *blæwaz (cf. O.E. blaw, O.S., O.H.G. blao, Dan. blaa, Swed. blå, O.Fris. blau, M.Du. bla, Du. blauw, Ger. blau "blue"), from PIE*bhle-was "light-colored, blue, blond, yellow."

Blue comes from the root word for pallid, light coloured, blond and even yellow. Our thinking mind claims this knowledge that the visual system is inconsistent as proof that colours are not reality, and that it is closer to reality. A scientist will pull out a spectrum analyser and measure the bend of electromagnetic radiation to find our exactly what wavelength it is. That is reality he will claim, "I can tell you more about this light that even your own eyes". And this is fine he can. But can he claim that he could do without his useless error strewn eyes then and just use his spectrum analyser? After all, the eyes, it has been proven, don't show us reality at all only colours that we have made up with our brains. This is the problem because in fact he can lose all his senses because they are all prone to errors but what else has he got? Maybe he can invent some new senses that are more accurate; Terminator or Robocop senses; but they will still be imperfect. And exactly what are we to make of the "consciousness" of these new dreams through new senses: are they just made up also? It is a mess.

The point is that consciousness is about sensing. But sensing is not some useless telescope that lies between our pure thinking minds and some pure reality. And our pure thinking minds can somehow exist free of this telescope and can even examine it quite objectively to discover that really the "blue" and the "yellow" in the telescope don't "really" exist... but somehow the "grey" does "really" exist... and then discard the telescope. It was with the telescope that they ever "saw" anything in the first place. All the thinking that surrounds colours, spaces, dimensions and the language of all this exists inside the telescope... you can't escape it. And what we are looking at is not outside the telescope either... if it was then how would we ever know what it "was" apart from just light. A man limited to looking at the stars with only a telescope will never be able to tell if they are just holes through the cosmos letting light in or whether they are actual material things. What was the illusion for our eyes above, of deciding between grey or blue, becomes the equally intractable illusion of deciding whether the stars are just pin holes or material things. Thus matter and reality itself becomes an illusion of our mind just as colour was an illusion of our eyes. There is no outside the telescope.

So when we discover that indeed we are tricked, we do indeed discover something about our visual systems... namely that they can be tricked and we can learn the ambiguous circumstances. Just as an illusionist will make us "think" that the ball is in one hand when really it is in the other. The mind is as trickable as the eye. But while scientists don't like to dismiss the "ideas" as dreams when they are caught out, they are happy to dismiss the colours as dreams when they are caught out. And worse the scientists will say that colours are created by the brain, and not realise that the "brain" (which is just an idea) must therefore be created by the brain also which is an absurdity (a la SRH).

The conclusion is that either everything is an illusion and a dream (which I used to believe) or nothing is. They amount to the same thing! because if everything is an illusion then what does the dreamer who dreams the colour experiment above think is happening when he makes up the colours blue and yellow?

Humpty-Dumpty

2011-01-21T22:19:00.000Z

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less."

Lewis Carroll -- Through the Looking Glass, Chapter 6

Excellent and laterally this is the problem with "internal" self-reference.

Finally the Phi answer

2011-01-21T21:51:00.003Z

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/week203.html

ebook
http://ebook30.com/science/mathematics/305483/introduction-to-the-perturbation-theory-of-hamiltonian-systems.html

Back to more my type of analysis of stock markets ...
http://finance.martinsewell.com/stylized-facts/distribution/Gabaix-etal2003.pdf

esp. "Such a theory
where large individual participants move the market is consistent
with the evidence that stock market movements are dif®cult to
explain with changes in fundamental values." [Cutler,D., Poterba, J. M.& Summers, L. H.What moves stock prices? J. Portfolio Management 15, 4±12 (1989).]

Excellent something workable really seems to be building here.

It gets deeper...

2011-01-21T19:44:00.003Z

This Phi thing is extra-ordinary. Self-relationship at the heart of the universe... I still maintain the SRH but there is a lot more to Self!!!

http://icanseefar.tripod.com/phitheoryweb.htm

and just as I accept Caitin's argument I'm beginning to see Wolfram's and this is before I've even read the book! Amazing, and probably stupid, that I assume so much about things I've never read... but I guess if you hear someone calling from over the hill you go over there even before they've come to fetch you!

===

ok this guy might be talking a load of rubbish the sqrt(10) thing is a tautology... shall examine later

Now we're talking...

2011-01-21T12:49:00.001Z

Brilliant discussion of this feature here...

http://scienceforums.com/topic/13548-do-a-spiral-galaxy-and-a-hurricane-share-a-similar-formation-mechanism/

Virtually every aspect of fractal geometry and type of dynamical system can be expressed by variations upon the simple quadratic iterator: X = X**2 + c which expresses the particular type of feedback being examined, Phi can be expressed by a related but more archetypal variation to derive the Fibonacci series: X[n+1] = X[n] + X[n-1] which incrementally gravitates towards a particular ratio which possesses unique qualities. Numerically, it can be derived from the relation: (1 + sqrt(5))/2. For example, if one diminishes Phi by Unity you derive its reciprocal. Additionally, Phi is the unique ratio that fulfils: 1/Ø + 1/Ø**2 = 1 in other words, Phi is also the only possible geometric and arithmetic, expansion and partitioning of One.This leads us to the other cardinal feature of Phi. There is only one proportional division of One possible using two terms, with the third being One itself. From Euclid's ELEMENTS Book Five, Theorem Three (Alexandria, 3rd century B.C.):"A straight line is said to have been cut in extreme and mean ratio when, as the whole line is to the greater segment, so is the greater to the less."The Golden Mean then, is an archetypal fractal in that it preserves its relationship with itself (its inherent similarities under scaling are conformal symmetries - with topological consequences, that are invariant about themselves), in the most mathematically robust, economical but also elegant, way. It is analogia exemplified.As we shall see, this reciprocal, squaring behaviour about One, or Unity, as it is more properly termed, is far from being mathematically trivial.All feedback loops deterministically involve the passage of time. The quadratic iterator is derived from Newton's differential calculus, and from a period when nature was seen as a mechanistic and time-reversible automaton. Recent science demonstrates that in fact it consists of both the above and irreversible processes, known as the entropy barrier, or the arrow of time. The Golden Mean can also be seen as mathematically (because of the above) the simplest and most stable way of communing or mediating between the two, as we shall see.Nigel Reading
Quote
You may assume.But it is never safe
Quote
According to the Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine, these far from equilibrium dissipative systems locally minimise their entropy production by being open to their environments --- they export it in fact, back into their environments, whilst importing low entropy. Globally, overall entropy increase is nevertheless preserved, with the important caveat that the dissipative system concerned often experiences a transient increase (or optimisation) of its own complexity, or internal sophistication, before it eventually subsides back into the flux.This is known as the region of alternatively, Emergence, Maximum Complexity, Self-organised Criticality, Autopoiesis, or the Edge of Chaos. (Nascent science debates nomenclature routinely - and appropriately, in this case, the crucial point being that they are all different terms for essentially the same phenomena.)Lifeforms, ecosystems, global climate, plate tectonics, celestial mechanics, human economies, history and societies, even consciousness itself - all manifest this feedback-led, reflexive behaviour; they maximise their adaptive capacities by entering this region of (maximum) complexity on the edge of Chaos, whenever they are pushed far from their equilibrium states, thereby incrementally increasing their internal complexity, between occasional catastrophes.Remarkably, this transition zone is mathematically occupied by The Golden Mean. This ratio acts as an optimised probability operator, (a differential equation like an oscillating binary switch), whenever we observe the quasi-periodic evolution of a dynamical system. It appears in fact, to be the optimal, energy-minimising route to the region of maximum algorithmic complexity, and to be a basin of attraction for the edge of Chaos.

[credit Nigel Reading]

worth a read

2011-01-21T12:28:00.000Z

http://www.foundalis.com/phi/WhyTimeFlows.htm

Name

2011-01-17T14:45:00.001Z

How do we know our own name?

We know someone else's based on some character. This is most evident with identical twins where physical characteristics are so similar that it is hard to tell them apart. What we may need to do is talk to them to see their personality. If this is also the same we can check for information they remember which links them to a place and a time. For example if they can't remember what they ate when you last had a meal together.

If the twins were never apart however then this is hard. It would be like a Turing test where we had a fixed period of time to determine who was who and if we couldn't then we could conclude, not that they were "a conscious person", but rather there was no difference between these two persons. We would then have to rely on what each of then told us, in other words what they called themselves. No good one saying "i'm me and not them" and the other saying exactly the same. We need them to uniquely identify themselves.

Now how can we tell whether they are telling the truth? We have to be able to mark them with a constant characteristic and compare what they say relative to that mark - measure them so to speak. Suppose we could put them in different cells then ask them their name, write it on the door and ask them each day. They need to always say the same thing AFTER isolation. What was said before is not important!

But what if they are called the same name? Lots of people have the same name. What we tend to do in that situation is give them a nick name. Two Marks renovating my cousins place gained the names Mark-the-floor and Mark-the-plasterer for obvious reasons just as people gained the names Margaret Thatcher or Adam Smith in days of yore. And usually people come t accept their monikers. But it is not satisfying if our two twins keep calling themselves say John. It is as though 'inside' they still don't accept their difference. Outside however we can test their memories and gradually their different histories will show up; for example if we give them different meals and then ask them to remember their meals. This is what Buddhism calls streams of consciousness which I believe is the way that we pass through time for Buddhist theory (but i am unsatisfied by this explanation: it doesn't really get to the heart of the illusion of "self" because we can just replace the idea of self with "my stream of consciousness").

Now is this how we know our own name? Do we look for a character in order to know that it is us? That is the problem for a speculative philosophical moment. In reality however we don't think like like this. Our name is a part of our learned behaviour. From a young age we know what to do when addressed. Almost like a dog who can tell when he is being called because his master is looking at him and saying this word in that high pitched way. Our name becomes part of the language game that surrounds us and in which we have grown up. In this way our name is unique to the social context in which each of us finds ourselves. It is not about naming some object but rather 'being' part of a team and social reality. So how do we know our name? It is because we are part of a social reality in which our name gets used. What is my name? Is a question we are a fool if we can't answer just as I felt very childish not to be able to spell my middle name when I was 11. In the same way we learn to address other people in this culture for a variety of purposes. So it is not so much a case of directly refering to a 'self' when we use a name - a thing called 'Alva' that is naming that thing (any self-reference) - but rather being part of a society that uses this word in particular situations and "Alva" becomes just a social context rather than an object . . Just as a "goal keeper" is a context in a game of football so "Alva" is a context in the game of English Western society. So our twins above are perplexing because they seem to be able to cheat at something that is so fundamental to this society. Just as a man the size of a goal mouth would 'cheat' at goal keeping!

On reference & Custom

2011-01-17T11:51:00.002Z

When someone is called "John" in human culture it means that the word "John" is taken by speakers to replace the actual person John (who may be short and dark haired with a light hearted attitude) in verbal structures. When John hears his name he knows that he is involved in the conversation.

But this is only convention. John could just as easily refer to the person who is also called Mike. Now we enter the problem of identity loved by Elizabethan playwrites. Quite when we use the name John and Mike can only be determined by custom, context and circumstance. In an alien culture there may be complex formal rules governing when to use particular names that will seem random and of no sense to a human guest. Imagine explaining the old use of you and thou to an alien who doesn't have a concept of intimacy or informality!

Now isn't the same true of sentence themselves. It is customary to interpret a sentence that described the previous sentence as having eight words as meaning the sentence before this one. Were the customs of English different it might mean this sentence itself. Likewise a sentence that says that it has nineteen words might be customarily interpreted to mean the previous sentence.

What is true however is that to create a current point of reference we need some level of identifying the here and now. A sentence which says "the first sentence of this blog entry" must still make reference to the here and now even while not envoking itself. This shows however that "this sentence" is actually referring to itself only by use of an external here and now reference which is customarily accepted for the English language. It is certainly external self reference and so of little interest.

I need also be careful here of use/mention. A sentence can't actually refer to itself so easily because "this sentence" is just a quote and marks on a page. While this sentence is an actual sentence. Or is it because it doesn't quote itself so it is actually non gramatical within the rules of English.

Intrinsic/Extrinsic Self-Reference

2011-01-14T16:31:00.004Z

Almost certainly blogged this before but its clear at the moment:

One type of self reference (extrinsic self-reference) involves a system being able to select itself from amongst others. This sentence has five words. The previous sentence has selected itself from the rest of the text and in particular distinguishes itself from the next sentence. This sentence has five words. It is as though the system looks out into the world, identifies itself and then looks back in again. In reality it is using us, the reader, to do the looking and the thinking and we lie outside the system - or at least we are not the sentence. However I am unimpressed with external self reference because what is the real difference between the second and third sentences of this paragraph, or even this sentence here. The second sentence refers to itself and the third also refers to it. Both sentences are selecting one of the sentences on this page, in that they are the same. So the fact that the second sentence "happens" to select the sentence that is also itself is quite unmiraculous and is just a trivial feature. There is no "self" here other than that which a reader may infer when (or if) they realise that the sentence is referring to the same sentence they are reading.

The other type of self-reference, and the one which I'm saying is logically impossible in the SRH, is intrinsic self-reference where the entity refers to itself within itself. Now this is non trivial and quite miraculous if it exists. It is the situation monists believe is true within humans where somehow we have a secret mirror in which we can see ourselves, and know our own thoughts and wishes. This they believe would be true even on a desert island or in a world where nothing else existed but them. I used to hold this view and it is through failure to actually find consciousness or a self and after being given a push by Buddha that I changed view.

The idea that somehow self-refernece and recursive feedback in the brain causes consciousness just doesn't go anywhere. Recursion does indeed creates a many leveled intersecting fractal structure (which is Hoffstadter's brilliant view) but that anything would be mysteriously "created" is untenable. What "I" am would be just be phantoms in the swirling mix of data (the hall of mirrors as it is called in this blog). What I am careful to avoid however is the suggestion that the "world" is any less a phantom. The belief in material entities like brains that somehow mysteriously underly the "self" or consciousness implies some special knowledge of "reality" which I am yet to see myself! After all if it was so easy to escape the hall of mirrors why hasn't everyone other than Hoffstadter and Dennett!

Intrinsic self-reference involves not having to identify oneself from other things by "external" features but involves having an almost tautologically connection to oneself - and inner bond to oneself. The "I think: I am" bound into ones existence. I'm not taking sides and saying that outside is better than inside (though the Western Materialists side totally with the outside while Buddha said that inside/outside is just part of the illusion) , just looking for an immanent problem with holding the inside view.

The power of the blank

2011-01-13T15:34:00.002Z

Quote from 'Black Books' comedy sitcom.

Was thinking again about an acquaintance who has decided for mysterious reasons yet to explain to lose me from his friend group. It came after the death of his mother last year and I wonder if connected.

Anyway was watching my own mind in relation to this. It is interesting how the first line of defence is to decide that he was not a good freind anyway and to look for faults in him. Needless to say I gave up on this whole line of thought and just gave him the freedom to do whatever he was doing. I myself have blanked two people before (one being "my muse") and it is only fair I expetrience "not being liked".

This is an interesting illustration of the dynamics of human relations. We give people recognition when they give us recognition, and devalue them when they don't. It is all Hegel. We cannot give someone the authority to judge us, and then have them judge against us; that is tantamount to judging against ourself. Except it isn't if we can give them freedom; but it is hard to do this because we also have to give ourselves freedom and that means we weren't looking for the recognition in the first place. But we can only gain freedom if we know what freedom looks like (after Hegel) and we begin this process by giving people power over us: and that is the slave mentality. Ironic that we are gaining knowledge of freedom by actually losing freedom ourselves. But like the monk looking critically at the prostitute and the prostitute looking respectfully at the monk: it is the prostitute whose mind is clean! Or as noted here in this blog, if we want to see a mountain we climb its neighbour! And Pygmalion says the same quoted in this blog elsewhere.

So there is very much in the coming, but also the going of relations; and one can't really point at either as being more important or better.

Why do humans need to do things?

2011-01-13T15:26:00.003Z

This appears to be one of those big unanswered questions. Indeed even asking questions is one of those things that huamns 'do'.

It seems that Life entails doing things. I don't think it matters what we do, we just seek to be doing things. Even people with money enough not to work will try and find ways to do things, even if it is only parlour games and activities of light amusement. I am entertained looking at teh world around me and trying to explain it, I keep this blog, I do reading and lot of instinctive thinking: yet what is in common is that I am always trying to do things. Even my search to do less (since doing things I have seen before is the cause of most of our problems today) has ended up in an active search and so is doing something.

What is the root of "doing" - that seems to lie at the root of Life itself. It seems to be perhaps more than just part of our economic paradigm, tho I know of tribes in other paradigms where they would rather go hungry than do anything. They have the lowest working hours of any primate at just 2.5 hours a day.

Worth looking at the "optimum" hours of work. After a while we make more work for ourselves by working. For example with everyone in the construction industry for example there is more competition, pulling down otherwise fine building, and negotiation and selling to be done than if just a few people worked in it. Certainly the rise in marketing is an excellent example of where people work to get other people to buy things they would never have bought otherwise, do they need to work more to pay for them and the wheel turns a little faster - but for no other reason that we were trying to do more!

I meditation doing something? What is actually doing "nothing"? If we don't know what doing nothing is like, then do we really know what doing something is like?

=== Update 27/1/2011

I must never forget what the Master of Fo Guang Shan temple says: pure action is compassion. It is the corollary of: pure mind is wisdom. These are the two parts of enlightenment; there is not one without the other.

This morning I also saw a parallel between inaction and the problem of singularities in physics. Models are excellent until they crunch into a singularity which squeezes all the information out and the compass fails. The Big Bang is one such famous singularity. Once the Universe is compressed into an infinitely small point the theory becomes useless. Just as f(x) = x/2x is a straight line for its entire length at y=0.5 with the momentary exception of x=0 where we can assume it has a value of y=0.5 but can't define it as such. If we did say that 0/(2*0) = 0.5 then do we say that 0/(4*0) = 0.25. Yet the denominator of both are the same 2*0 = 4*0 so we have an inconsistency so we can't decide what the value is.

This same problem occurred to me when we "think" and model action. It is fine to muse on the motivations of people in history or in law courts and even our motivations as we struggle to understand who we are, but that thinking runs into a singularity in the present as we cannot predict what we will do Now. It is undefined. This is the origin of the concept of freedom which Existentialists amongst others find so terrifying; the staggering vastness of the possibilities that face us now make most shy into inaction. This Hamlet mentality troubled with contradictions and resolutions (myself as well) led Sartre to dump essence all together and start with existence. Don't decide between "possible" worlds of whether or not to marry the girl, he said to a hesitating student, make the future... let history write the essence in books afterwards. I've never been so sure; that seems to me simply follow social pressure or ones desires without questioning type of behaviour: carpe diem. If I have learned one thing from my walking it is that the two most crucial stages of a long walk of many hundreds of miles are the first and last few hours. Errors you make at the start are the most costly, travelling large distances in the right direction is then very easy, what then poses a problem is the small scale again where we try to locate a specific place. I imagine the same with Life. If we head off in the wrong direction we will waste a very long time getting it right. But then what is the right direction? That is the whole question since the dawn of antiquity! If there is no right direction then there can't be a wrong direction and then it doesn't matter what we do... this is blatantly not our experience as we discover regrets and disappointments in Life. But what then "ought" we do, or have done to live better Life? I am wondering here if even "doing" is the right way to look at this. What if I really did nothing for my whole life ... and I'm half way through having done nothing. I have to respond to an old friend of Facebook sometime soon explaining my life. I have to honest I have done nothing: no career, family, property, responsibilities, titles, achievements, even wonderful experiences: the lack of all this bumph just says simple peace and happiness to me. Yet this seems fine to me, just sounds a bit boring in the retelling, so am I so wrong?

Planets, Fractal, Phi and Stockmarkets

2011-01-10T11:23:00.006Z

Following up on the Ouroboros stuff from ages ago, which is related to the SRH thread, and through an article on Alchemy I came upon the presence of Phi in the planetary orbits. Odd I think and am trying to explain that becauise it is also used in charting stock markets. It is commented already that stock markets show fractal geometry, and Phi is the limit of the relationship between adjacent numbers in the Fibonnaci Sequence - a sequence that is gained by recursion i.e. fractal! Consider two systems A and B which proceed by adding the value of the other system - this is the Fib sequence. A and B can start at any value (as long at they are different).

A 10 24 etc
B 14 38

They will come into Phi relationship ... why? Algebraically it is obvious:

B(n) / A(n) = [ B(n-1) + A(n) ] / A(n) = B(n-1)/A(n) + 1 (ok not quite I've got this in notes will update)

Anyway looking further this is interesting and I note it for reading later:
http://www.cyberalley.com/G-Home/R&D/R&D5/FofL12.html

===

http://www.ermanometry.com/

===

Funny how everything appears to fit together ... or is this an illusion because I want it so? Actually I don't want it so because if Phi is this fundamantal then it will end up explaining things rather than being explained!

http://www.miqel.com/fractals_math_patterns/visual-math-phi-golden.html

So it seems that in iterative processes the repeating units come into Phi relationship *for some reason*. This link describes it as "self-reference" - I don't call it self reference because it isn't. A large structure being composed of structures "similar" at many scales is only "self" in the sense of "similar". Altho I must conceed that a set which is made of copies of that set at a smaller scale is more extraordinary than one that is made from dissimilar material. This really questions what we mean by "self". What we don't mean (a la Buddha) is a material existing thing called self. Fractals actually illustrate this "self" that is built from "copies" of "itself", and so not self and self at the same time.

But why Phi?

Web site here were the writer seems a little carried away with the patterns. If there was no pattern that itself would be amazing. It is Wolfram versus Caitin on whether the universe is full of information or whether the apparent diversity has underlying rules. I part company on ths page and this statement "There is no natural explanation for these unusual relationships" [http://solargeometry.com/34power.htm]. I reckon there is a very good reason. 2 options. Either:

(1) the planets formed in this relationship and it is a feature of the fractal collison and amassing of dust in the emryonic nebula + the expulsion of massive rocks that were too excentric and out of phase with the system. OR

(2) over time the planets have evolved into this relationship. Evidence for this would be that the inner planets (with more revolutions and periods of evolution) have tighter relationships.

Some things to note. All the planets bar Earth are in a 2*Phi relationship. Mars is the most deviant. And there is a missing planet (from the pattern) between Mars and Jupiter, where instead is the asteroid belt.

Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus are massive and it seems likely to me that the planet that formed immediately inside jupiter's orbit suffered some catastrophe and either never formed properly, was broken up by the gravity of Jupiter or there was some massive early collision creating the asteroid belt. Mars, which is incredibly light, will be hugely affected by Jupiter and aided by early collisons from the drama in the asteroid belt has a distorted orbit.

However such speculation leads no closer to why Phi.

The inner planets are in almost circular orbits. This is most likely the influence of Jupiter which I understand would accentuate any eccentric orbits and eventually fling the planet from the system. By simple evolution only circular orbits exist. Given radius from the Sun, and assuming nearly circular orbits, the possible velocity and therefore orbit period are hugely constrained for the planets. I need develop my calculus a bit before describing that in detail.

Then it remains only to find out why only certain radiuses from the Sun are favoured for planet formation and stability.

I expect the iterative dynamics to be something of the form Sqrt(x+1) = x or x = 1/(x-1) both of which converge on Phi...

Then I have a demonstration of my hunch that a similar iteration exists in the Stock Market game mentioned a few posts ago. After all the stock price is what speculators base there trading on, and their trading affects the stock price so there is an iterative system and ergo it will show fractal geometry (with patterns feeding back through the system at scale) with stable points existing at solutions to these interations ... like Phi.

Do Big Caps Pay?

2011-01-04T17:33:00.003Z

A revealing look at two large caps. Above is Tesco and below is BP for data between 2003 and end 2010. The Magenta line is the actual stock price.

The Blue line is data corrected for percentage change in the FTSE for that day:

C(n+1) = C(n) * S(n+1)/S(n) * F(n)/F(n+1)

= S(n+1) / F(n+1) * F(0)

C(x) = corrected price for day x
S(x) = stock price for day x
F(x) = FTSE price for day x

Assuming that the FTSE grabs the general economic data, including growth and inflation, then the remaining graph is the actual performance of the stock. What is surprising is the low return of only around 50% in 8 years or 5% per year. This is admittedly growth on top of inflation (which the FTSE data ought to remove) but it isn't impressive given that a careful trade can gain you 5% in a day. There was 9% just today on an oil stock in my portfolio (RRL) that I have held for only 6 months; that against the FTSE of only 2%. That's equivalent to 16 months investing in Tesco! I must thank a friend for alerting me to the potential of oil stocks at this time.

Essence of Trading

2011-01-03T22:05:00.004Z

Just writing a very simple sampling program to test various trading strategies on actual stock data: this seems the most productive way forward at the moment - characterising the "nature" of stock movements is a bit to complex for me at the moment!!

Ideas stripped down look like this.

Trading is a game which involves stepping between two side-by-side conveyor belts, which constantly change their rate and direction.

It is simpler to consider one (money) as static and the other (stock) as moving (though this makes the difference a more complex function). We step from money into stock, travel a bit and then step back.

The object of the game is to get as far up the money escalator (to the right) as possible as this escalator is next to all the other escalators (can buy anything with it).

The optimum solution (to be tested) is to be in Cash as the stock escalator passes to the left and then to step onto the escalator as it changes direction and starts to move right. We leave a doughnut or something to mark where we were. We stay on the stock escalator until another hypothetical point H (the High) passes the doughnut and we step back onto cash escalator. This way we have travelled up the cash escalator.

Superficially I'm noting this is like a Turing machine. Turning machines have States which are like the stock and they travel up and down the data-tape or cash "register" ;-) Whether this similarity is of any use only time will tell.

It seems a game we can't lose on. However there is the problem that we have to pay to change escalator .. in other words we have to take a step down the cash escalator every time we step off or back to the cash escalator. It means that we have to be able to think head just a little bit to ensure that we will recover that initial step.

To ensure that we always move right we need to determine these H/L points and whether they are far enough apart to make shifting escalators worth while. That is all there is between being broke and making a fortune...

But the escalators do not move randomly. There are only so many people allowed on stock escalators and to get on someone must step off. We have to decide who to swap places with. If we think that someone is standing near a L then we are more likely to swap places with them so the escalator gets dragged up so we can cross over. They in turn get to step onto the cash escalator higher than where they were. The opposite happens also dragging the escalator down.

So the actual movement of the escalator is caused by these differences of trade. There is a strong feedback process where the response of players to previous movements is actually causing the current movement. This is most evidential in the fractal patterns in the market.

Fractal systems are iterative systems where a simple input data is fed through a system repeatedly. It means that the basic "motif" or pattern is very simple but by repeating it at different scales a very complex structure of repeating units is created. This is the stock price trace (SPT - my term) the price plotted against time. IN essence it is simple but the simple patterns are repeated in complex structures. I have lost it now but I had a wonderful plot of the gold price I think at 5 day, 3 month and 1 year and the three plots could be virtually over laid. There is certainly no way of telling from an SPT what the duration is... except perhaps the macroeconomic features like inflation and economic growth.

Boxes

To try and characterise SPTs I'm using an idea of Boxes. They are essentially the standard "candles". A box contains the SPT between two dates. How the stock gets from the entry point to the exit point is irrelevant (a black box). We only know its max and min prices (top and bottom of the box) .

The problem then is to replace an SPT with a succession of boxes the only variable between the width of each box. We want each box to not contain too much information about the SPT preferable a straight line between entrance and exit is best, but most importantly a box should start and end at an extreme or turning point. This way each box represents an optimal trading window or period, and that is all we are interested in.

Now because the charts are fractal we have to chose a scale, or trading scale. Apparently short trades are traditionally of period of months to a year and long trades many years. Day traders trade between days and weeks. From experience as a private investor with access to delayed chart data and high costs of entry and exit to the market I've only succeeded a few times in day trading. The advantage is however that through compound interest a small percentage each day compounds to huge gains a year. IgIndex and the like is perhaps a better type of gambling for this scale. Really I'm aiming at the short scale: months.

Anyway that is progress so far and now back to coding... end of Xmas holiday tonight so this may get stuck for a while...

Smart Dog Chaser

2011-01-03T15:47:00.003Z

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/12/23/worlds-smartest-dog-knows-words/

It seems, and I'll assume, that there is a cognitive ability here and the dog isn't simply mapping a sound (sentence) to an action Pavlovian style. In which case are we to think that dogs in their natural social groups have this level of communication being able to code 1000s of different individual things?

We it seems obvious that to interact in the world (putting a bone here, picking up some meat etc) a dog must have this level of complexity in their world. Being able to link this complexity with an audio world (of command sounds) seems not so extraordinary. Why should decoding the audio world be any more important that decoding the physical world? A stone marking the place where a bone is, or a coloured button, or a researcher saying "go to bone" which both give the desired outcome. I'm impressed by the dog but not so much by the remarkableness of the skills which seem essential to any creature that can live "in" the world. That world becomes a human world and the creature simply adapts to human details rather than wild details and then we suddenly applaud their cognisance which was always there. Am I missing something here? I blog this so I am reminded to think about it again...

Being a node in the system.

2011-01-01T13:27:00.004Z

AN idea that has emerged in this blog and my life is the realisation that most of the work we do is caused by other people.

The most important example is that of war. Imagine how simple this life would be if we weren't constantly beating people up, and then having them beat us up also. At the end of it nothing ever changes and after people give up hitting each other over the head then life continues as before. The biological reason for this is "competition for resources" and there is an unfortunate bi-product of reproduction that population growth leads to increased competition which affects individuals differently and so selects (to some extent) their transferable characters which leads to drift in population character. It is however a drift in "character" and not in "identity". Tomorrows population may have 100 people in it of which none are "my" children, or of which some are my children. There is actually no difference because "my" children don't inherit any of the "myness" they only inherit my characteristics but they are no more "me" than your children...

That is unless I wish to define my "identity" in terms of my characteristics in which case an identical copy of me is the same identity as me. Now in Dawkins terms this is true. If we were to make a genetically identical copy of Richard Dawkins and him and his copy in a crashing plane with only one parachute then they would have to toss a coin to find out who lived because it makes no difference to them. For normal people however we have a problem because it is not the facts of our character we are trying to preserve but "ourselves". If I die and my copy lives that is a very different event, to if my copy dies and I live. Most importantly I get to parachute to safety, mourn the loss of my copy, get home and tell everyone what happened; if I die with the plane that is it - game over.

SO this is the crux of life, death, reproduction, personality, self and existence. We have the teaching that actually but Richard Dawkins and I are wrong (and me more so) because the truth is that it makes no difference who takes the parachute: even if we were completely different people. Given that it makes no difference the standard solution is to offer the parachute to the other person this way the person who lives knows without doubt that the person who died wanted that. It also proves that the person who died understood that it didn't matter. This could be taken to undermine the value of life (as some pointless suicide) so it is important to understand that this choice only makes sense in the situation where only one can live. If we take the parachute for ourselves then we never know whether the person who died accepted their fate, but it also means that we didn't accept the situation. We have simply avoided the situation by taking the parachute and continuing as if everything was all right. For such a person the only situation where they can approach death is where there are no parachutes (either their opponent took it or there never was one). Such a person thus rejects choice and therefore freedom!

Returning to the main thread at the top: much of the struggles of life are created by an unfortunate by product of reproduction. Without competition for resources we would have a very much easier life. Another example apart from war was my last job where I made a coating for medical equipment used in heart operations. Most of these operations arise because of unhealthy life styles created by the very food and motor industries that people spend their time working for. It is depressing to realise that the work you get paid for is simply pasting over the cracks of the work someone else has been paid for. It really is no better than the hamster running in its wheel.

But to take this argument to its final conclusion, what about a planet of bare rock. There is no work to do here at all. Work only ever arises because of people. All the work we do is because of people. It is therefore slightly erroneous to seek work that has an absolute meaning. We may work in the Red-Cross and heal people who have only been injured by the actions of other people that we are fighting. We may work in hospitals healing people who are only unwell because of the food or drink they have been sold by someone else. Yet we are always only ever addressing the issues made by other people.

My life has been organised about the principle that I am as least work for myself as possible. This is where Buddhism is so important. To be happy with little makes life very much easier. If a single apple makes me satisfied then I don't need to deal with the complex problem of getting hold of truffles or caviar. But it is a double blessing because I don't need to involve other people in the problem of getting hold of truffles or caviar. So well mastered individuals not only make their own lives easy but they make the lives of those around them easy.

But this doesn't work in reality because most people cannot be easy. In particular I have noticed (and blogger recently) women can't be easy. Women are always scheming, changing and working towards things. I suggest it is part of the "nesting instinct" where they feel the impulse to create homes that the maternal instinct will then want to fill with children. It means that they are never easy having these very strong, and poorly understood, impulses. These impulses are also extremely complicated and difficult to satisfy. In men I suggest it is a bit simpler - we have impulses for sex, and dominance. Desiring women and dominance (which is implied by having women) is enough to enslave us to their impulses. As a result people are never easy and this means they can certainly never be happy.

But I must (and this is the point of this blog) never take this argument too far because without people at all then everything goes. If people didn't reproduce then in one generation there would be no problems for anyone, but then there would be no people to be easy either. Like the equation 0/0 we have eliminated both the numerator and the denominator at the same time and so have no answer still!

The equation for peace is much more sophisticated and Dialectical than simply eliminating difficulty. I need to eat, sleep and various other "troubles" that I make myself... and in so doing I make them for other people because I can't eat that apple unless someone drives it to me, someone picks it, and someone plants it and keeps it free from predators and thieves until I eat it. So inevitably I make troubles for other people, and I am engaged in working for their troubles also.

The middle ground must be in "harmony". The war industry is probably the second largest in the world after the health industry. War is not a complete waste of time. There are times when certain groups simply refuse to be harmonious or dialectical and inevitably an escalation of power will occur. My personal view is to walk way and let the ignorant fight, but I must understand that where a lot has been invested (say in a hospital or government) it is not so easy to walk away and conflict will occur. This will make work for both the war industry and the health industry. The point for me to contemplate this year is not so much how to stop causing trouble for other people (mastering desires and minimising life's requirements), but instead to find a way to assist as many people in their goals as I can thus choosing to become a node in the place where my own actions and existence is "harmonised" with the environment I find myself.

This seems to be a step above the simple view of minimising ones needs and in so doing reducing the load on other people. Rather it is the seeking modes of behaviour which link my activities with those around me to maximise their effectiveness. So it is not a matter of stopping the war machine and the health machine, but rather find a mode of action for myself where I improve the goals of both.

Simple SRH

2010-12-30T15:49:00.009Z

Just formatting a column in Excel using VBA I thought I'd just do it quick and replace each cell with itself formatted. Just checking the logic to make sure it would do what I thought it would do I found myself thinking that the value of the cell would be copied to memory, formatted and then copied back into the cell. This is the behind the scenes computation of this code:

Cell(2,2) = CDate(Cell(2,2))

Yet the code looks like it implies a self-reference where the contents of the cell is made the same as a function applied to the contents of the cell. A more absurd example would be:

Cell(2,2) = Cell(2,2) + 1

Why don't computers ever end up with a paradox here? It's not really a question because everyone knows that the "=" sign is not a statement of equality but of assignment. The contents of Cell(2,2) are to-be-given the value of themselves + 1.

But semiotically it is interesting that we use the "=" sign here. Better languages than VB have three signs: = for assigment (add 1 to y and put it in y), == for equality (are they the same), and := for definition (resolve the value of y=y+1) . Yet they all recognise these three quite different things as belonging to the family of =.

1) Cell(2,2) = Cell(2,2) + 1 is an instruction

2) Cell(2,2) == Cell(2,2) + 1 is always false

3) Cell(2,2) := Cell(2,2) + 1 is the contradiction! It actually ends up in a recursive loop.

Now it is (3) which is the problem for logic. Loops I have suggested before are the computational symptoms of the same problem as contradictions and paradox in logic. Where a paradox occurs in logic, a computer hangs in a loop. What Godel discovered by contradiction in his famous statement, Turing discovered in his non-halting looping programs. There is a deep connection. I am just starting to read Chaitin on this; looks like it will be very promising.

So what the SRH is crudely saying is that a definition (:=) can't be constructed from itself i.e. impredicativity.

Iterative processes and self-organising systems are a different type of equality (=). They are not created from "themselves" but from their output. Obviously if they were created from themselves then they could never change because they would always be themselves. The equation y = (y ^ 2 - 1) / -3 iterates to its roots -(3 +/- root(13))/2 for certain starting values of y. The complexity of successive applications of a function is extraordinary in many cases. Unlike a snooker ball bouncing around a snooker table where very quickly the ball ends up following a repetitive trajectory, with relatively simple function systems, paths can be created which never repeat (except for precision rounding errors)! Link here to the Lorenz curve. Fractals etc illustrate the enormous hidden structure to iterative/recursive procedures (things built from identical copies of themselves). But the point is that this is all a distraction from the SRH issue of things being built from actually themselves, rather than copies and things that are similar.

An issue here is that of identity. A floor can be completely tiled in repeating shapes. This is of interest to the builder because a simple production process specialised to a few shapes can create tiles that are guaranteed to fit together anywhere and cover any expanse of floor. A wonderful example of mass production. Yet this simplicity ought not be misunderstood as Penrose discovered with just 4 types of tile it is possible to tile a floor without ever repeating. Apparent infinite complexity from a very finite set of building blocks. Shades of the Lorenz curve here where something built from simple components iteratively never repeats. Yet each tile is intellectually the same as its type (same angles and lengths of side) each individual tile (token) is necessarily different. A floor cannot be covered by one tile. It is exactly the interaction of many tiles that covers the floor. The patterns that arise can only occur between tiles, they are not intrinsic to any particular tile. Indeed to even "be" a tile requires that we have seen other tiles before, are familiar with the culture of tiling, and speak this language where they are understood as tiles. A single tile all on its own in the universe is more than useless for covering a floor, it doesn't even get given a name by the people of that universe.

SRH only applies to things built from their own token. Now in maths, unlike with the building trade, this is far from clear.

y := y + 1

There are actually two marks on the page here corresponding to the single letter 'y'. If there were not two marks we would not be able to write this equation. Once read however we understand that the two names, 'y' on the left and 'y' on the right, are supposed to be names of the same thing.

In the case above

y := (y ^ 2 - 1) / -3

are we to understand that the thing 'y' has two possible stable values (a superposition) so to speak. Very quantum physics ;-) This finding of multiple possible values to fit incomplete conditions seems to be me to be more a feature of the language of maths than anything "real". We don't think that some mysterious entity is lying here under the page with two values.

y = y + 1

They are names of the same 'storage place' or 'variable' which can have any value. Unlike above the value is not what is named by 'y'. Strictly the two variables should have different names e.g. y(n+1) = y(n) + 1 and a starting value given also y(0) = 0.5. As a function the relationship is a mapping of left and right hand sets. In this case it forms a zig-zag relationship through all members of the sets.

Also things that are defined in terms of themselves can't change because they can only ever be themselves. To change we need to become something else. This means that things that are defined in terms of themselves are both immortal and can't be created. SO impredicativity is violated in immortal, a priori, analyic, uncreated entities. This means obviously that you cannot "build" or "create" something using itself, you can only support it. This is the castle in the sky with its foundations built upon its walls.

So the only problem that SRH is referring to is the idea that something is built with exactly itself. It is perhaps an ontological problem as much as anything.

2010-12-30T15:49:00.006Z

If r is a random number between 0 and 1 then how do we model a coin flip?

The set of outcomes is {x >=0 & x<=1 & x in set of Reals}

I am blogging this because it is the same problem as boundaries before.

To split this set in half we cannot use a member of the set. So the obvious choice is 0.5 but what about 0.5? It is infinitely unlikely to occur in reality but never the less it sits there "outside" the sets.

The set {0,...,0.499...99} maps to {1 , ... , 0.50...01} or better the intervals

[0,0.5) (0.5,1]

This is an old problem that still gets me. When programming a for loop we need to set the condition to end. But what when counting through a string. Happily C style languages are 0 based so the following will work

for (int i=0; i < length(string); i++) {

//the length function returns the number of characters e.g. length("hello") = 5

//but conventionally the first character is in the 0th position

//and the last character in the 4 position so the loop above works

}

More obvious in a ruler where each interval has a start and ends with the start of the next interval until the final measurement which needs a final 'cap'. So there are one less intervals then measures. Hence the old problem that the millennium actually came at the end of the year 2000 not the start.

Now are these issues of boundaries connected? I'm in a hurry here not sure. I understand that this is still a real problem in some areas of topology.