Daffodil - 23rd April 2006

A short video that i took and by chance set to this Benedictus by Carl Jenkins (The Armed Man). It was taken on St Georges Day 2006 (23rd April).

"Nowhere in all of the universe can one find this daffodil; a moment of beauty that has passed forever. And, I came to discover months after, that at this moment "my muse" had only days left under this same sky. And, what has shocked me is that I could feel this but could make no sense of it.

Eleven days after it was filmed her radiance faded and it became that nowhere in all the universe could she be found. A moment of beauty, lost forever, in April 2006.

On You-Tube

Nanobacteria may just be lumps of limestone!!

They might have required a whole reworking of the concept of life... but maybe they're not alive after all.

http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080417/full/news.2008.762.html

The world is about giving!

Waking this morning a few things were a bit clearer especially this. A central problem I seem to have had regards "employment". It was clear that while I had certain skills and abilities, I had to be "employed". So it seems that the responsibility for "employing" me fell to my "employer" and not me. So why were people not contacting me to ask for my employment? I have to advertise my skills. But this seemed odd. A slave has to look for his master! where is the sense in this?

Plus I am skeptical of the employment system because of its links to the capital system and the degradation of the planets resources.

But this morning having watched my own bosses I saw something. My bosses despite their vast salaries had to seek employment from their client. And, this customer, whilst being the largest of its type in the world, has to constantly seek employment from its customers. And these customers, these are the people like me who have to seek employment from their bosses.

So actually the whole system is a great circle of giving, each link in the chain willingly looking to the next to give what they can to it.

This is often only seen as the flow of money in the opposite direction, so that my bosses motivation in this (they say) was to make money, and with this in mind the designed a product and found a customer. But actually they were involved in giving their time and skills to this customer.

Howard Katz (extremely worth a read) has illuminated me to the idea that economics is not demand driven. As he points out, how often have we seen a kid crying in the supermarket, but for all his crying was anything actually produced?

Combine these two and you have an insight similar to the "Diamond Cutter". The world operates not through demand but through supply, and the willingness of people to give.

So my problem it seems has stemmed from a reluctance to give, and to keep my time for myself. This simple oversight had led ultimately to failures both at college, with "my muse" and most probably everywhere.

However it should be added that I don't think this undermines the path I have been on. There are many lines of inquiry here which may or may not be fruitful... time will tell.

Mirror, mirror "where am I?"

Just reading an email which gave me a sudden insight... long have i contemplated my reflection trying to decipher what it means to say that the reflection if of "me".

Here's a thought. Do you see the reflection of yourself from the inside or the outside?

Obviously it's from the outside. This means that you must be outside of your reflection. If you are outside your reflection then, how can it be your reflection? You are after all inside yourself ... right?

In the mirror you look just like anyone else. Doesn't that suggest that in reality we look just like anyone else? If we reflect the mirror back to get an idea of what is real, doesn't that mean not only that we look like everyone else, but that we are outside ourself?

But if we were outside ourself then surely we wouldn't need a mirror? And in the mirror we wouldn't be able to see ourself, as is normally the case?

Whichever way we go the mirror seems to leave a paradox of "where am I"?

Bit closer, good email that (called "The Mirror" about the colleague who has hindered everyone and has died, but then people find a mirror in coffin!)

Why we should ignore the news (+ some economics etc)

If it wasn't already obvious I'll elaborate.

Robert Mugabe is in the news. Why? What is news worthy about him? He is arrogant, stupid, careless and selfish - and that is objective fact (imagine if i didn't like him). Zimbabwe is in turmoil because of these facts, that he is supported by equally childish individuals and because the people of Zimbabwe seem to accept him as a leader. The army, police and infrastructure seem to listen to him. As I've noted throughout this blog - government is always illegitimate.

+++quickly to add something. A protest might be that a "country has to have an organiser". But as I've argued also - countries are illegitimate. OK, so economies need a leader as the current crisis shows. Well actually no... the "leaders" are only propping up the system because if it failed it would evaporate the illusion of "a system". Let the "banks" fail - they are crooks anyway!

The law we should have learned from Bible classes is that usury is against God. Originally it meant that no Jew should lend at interest to another Jew. A gift is after all a gift. A policy that still works - never lend anything that you expect back! Well ideas have moved on from such Jews racism (even Jesus had to overcome the instinctive racism he felt as a Jew, "I am not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel" Matt.15:24). I shouldn't blame the Jews for racism the Chinese are just as bad. (Am I being racist? No! I use the very words that the Jews/Chinese would want me to use. I would say (and have said) "show me this thing you call Jewish/Chinese" but you find that really they are no different from everyone else. Mankind has been fully viewed a brother/sisterhood in Europe from around around the late 16th Century - although this still hasn't got through to the power crazed "leaders". So bankers are actually violating a basic law of reality! If we lend our money to banks then we are being embroiled in the same criminality. Sadly tho where do we put our money? Low interest accounts, and ethical banks are the best compromise.

But don't we need banks to raise capital for economic expansion. Why do we need economic expansion!! That pillar of everything today has no answer! Economic expansion can only lead to further environmental degradation, more work and more opulent life styles. All three of these are bad! There is no argument for economic expansion - except (suprise suprise) to maintain the social order that puts the "leaders" in place!

Its a massive circular argument. The reason for leaders is to have leaders. No more and no less. Sadly no-one can imagine living in a world where power is shared. There will always be people being persuaded to back other people for no-reason (which is power) and the pointless struggles for power become wars - economic, racial, religious, political ... ... ...

So Robert Mugable is not only an idiot but he is supported by a brotherhood of equally idiotic "leaders" and a sycophantic press which "must" report everything unbiasedly for reasons of "objectivity" (except they don't have to report this at all - so they are biased in there very existence).

It is the status quo - yet it is meaningless. So best to avoid it.

Only God can eat the Ouroboros

Having made some inroads into the maths of quantum and relativity theory... I can begin to see how all this was constructed and it is not that amazing after all.

What must always be the case no matter what theorists do is that there exists a form of some description. Be it the form of the phenomena they seek to explain, or the form of the explanations themselves. A unified theorem is not the end only the beginning because why does the theorem, the hyper-universe, take this form rather than another. The theory will explain why our universe takes the form it does, within the countless solutions to the equations, but why does that condition exist? that form that has been discovered? A single theory to describe the bosons and fermions raises another question: why this theory and not another?

It is the Ouroboros at the heart of mankind and the universe. The physicists almost having eaten themselves and digested the universe look up and see their own head moving over the new theory. It too must be digested.

Mankind had better never digest all of existence because it would all be in our heads and on our lecture notes and there would be nothing alive.

This impossibility of the human mind to digest the universe. The observation that the illuminating works of generations of humans has left vast stories of a miraculous existence, vast expressions of the wonder of the things. But after all this work, the things, the universe the life remain exactly the same. It is that opening view of the world which remains always unchanged, that here, now in silence which sets the stage within which mankind's wondrous works are played out.

There is no escaping it, it seems. Pervading all things, and beyond all minuscule attempts to reduce Him to finite, fixed notions, presences God.

Regardless the mental capacity of a man, ask him to give account of his own capacity and he will soon see that he owes everything to God. Only God can eat the Ouroboros.

Self-Reference revisited

I'm determined to get this one.

So we have the Ouroboros pictured right from wikipedia. It typifies the problem I envisage with self-reference.

What happens if the Ouroboros keeps eating? The circle will tighten and tighten, but we know for a fact that it will never be able to satisfy its consumption. Even as a singularity it will not reduce to nothing. The knot will always be left of its head rising up upon its own head. Think we have eaten ourselves and we ask, "who ate us" and then we discover ourselves again.

Another fictional figure which captures the mood is the Woozle. While sure they are following a Woozle, Pooh and Piglet find out that really they are following their own foot prints.

The Ouroboros can complete its meal if one thing happens. It breaks into two. Then the front half can eat the back half. And so it seems possible that self-operations might always create an unbreakable knot, which is resolved only by the separation of what way one into two.

At this stage without thinking it through I suggest that the Ego struggling to found itself, can only do so by causing division and separation. Is this not a creation myth to explain the plurality of a world that the wise describe as One.

Turning the enquiry around this impossibility of self-operation might indeed be a test. Whereever insluable problesm exist that threaten to break unities, maybe it is because the two halves are really the same entity - only into 2 because of a self-operation.

Dependent (DSR) and Independent Self-Reference (ISR)

Take two coins. Call one "heads" and the other "tails" and then picking up "tails" ask it which coin to toss next. Toss it to find out. If it lands on "tails" is it not saying "toss me next"?

Well not really. This is dependent self-reference because the coin means nothing by itself. It requires the player of the game to understand that "head" and "tail" are names and which coin they reference.

In Godels proof he uses this. As I understand it, it goes something like this. He creates an ordered set (in others words item 5 of the set is always the same item) of valid sentences of the logic. There is a sentence then which says that "x is not in the list" where x is the actual position of this sentence in the ordered set. This can be interpreted to say that "this sentence is not in the list"... which it must be since it has a number. "Godel numbering" which is how he coded the "names" of sentences is quite involved and i haven't looked at all this yet (as you can tell), but I think I know enough to say that the proof is a case of DSR because the reader has to consciously make the identity between the number and the sentence.

Clearly DSR happens. But it is not of great interest because it is an illusion.

"This sentence has five words" is the same in DSR terms as "the sentence 'this sentence has five words' has five words". It is in two parts. The sentence making the statement and the syntax itself which I put in "quote marks".

It is not really self-reference because 'this sentence' does not by itself refer to the whole sentence. It requires the reader to understand this (semantically) and then do a count of the sentence as though it were an arbitrary sequence of words. One cannot count the meaning of the sentence! Consider again the semantics in translation. I have no idea about Chinese Tradition but assuming that Babelfish is even part correct this is the same sentence in Chinese 這個句子有五個詞. Where I do know that 五 means five. This sentence doesn't even have any words! So the semantics and the syntax are quite different and the sentence clearly isn't referring to itself.

ISR is what I am interested in. Where reference is to the actual self. Like the snake eating itself. Or a sentence which says "I am true". Translate that into any language and you have the same self-reference, because the SR is constructed within the system - it is independent of an outside agent.

Now the hypothesis to be proven is that ISR is impossible. The problem is just what form the proof might even take?