Being a node in the system.

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

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.

In

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.

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.

FTSE Probabilities

The structure below represents the probability of successive up (green) and down (red) moves in the stock market on successive days. [This is worth redoing on 2 day, 3 day trading windows]

The underlying belief is that Up/Down data is what is critical for a trader in a stock. This determines the buy/sell behaviour. The size of the moves on the other hand is only critical for the trader who is choosing a stock. Those stocks with the biggest moves might attract the attention of high-risk investors looking for big gains etc.

The daily FTSE close price since 1977 is linearly skewed so the data set ends on the same price it started. Reason for this is to try and reveal more of the intrinsic up/down data away from the background of economic growth and inflation.

Chains of particular sequences were then counted through the data set. There were 6715 days in the data. This meant that for strings of 4 days (e.g. uddu) of which there are 16 possibilities the total count of all 16 possibilities was 6715. This was true of all sequences. The probability of a particular sequence was easy to calculate as: Occurrence/6715. Dividing each probability by its parent (so that udd is the parent of uddu) gave the probability that the market went up at that point.

The obvious point is to see if there are daily trends in the stock-market that drive patterns of movement. While not tested yet these data are very likely to be significant so that the distortions to the tree below represent actual features of the FTSE.

Because this is FTSE data no single group of traders is responding to the FTSE moves. This is not speculative strategy, but rather patterns in the whole market together. The tree ought to be more regular than it is!

Red means a move down in the price, Green is a move up. The higher the probability the longer the bar and the heavier so it tilts in that direction. For example, the first branch between a stock going up and down from a random entry point is biased in the up direction, as is the second move.

"Services" that rip me off

Interesting page here with old tickets on it:

http://www.joyce.whitchurch.btinternet.co.uk/tickets/c7.jpg

From this we can see the cost of a single from London to (with year, average salary, relative salary index):

Av.Salary Relative salary

Bath £6.65 1975 114.5

Feltham £0.52 1979 6K 126.7

2010 23K

There is incomplete data on salary, but very roughly approximating exponentially gives a value of 5k for 1975 against the relative salary data which suggests a true figure of 5.4 ; I'll take 5.2. So the expected value of these tickets is £28 for the trip to Bath and £2 for the trip to Feltham.

Surprisingly the price today to Bath (for the cheapest ticket) is £28. If you fail to get these the next is £34 but to travel at peak time costs £77. In contrast the trip to Feltham costs £5.

This is my experience also. What the travel operators have done is not logical on the principle that we pay for what we buy. Instead the charging plan is designed to maximise the cost to the customer. I have been equally displeased with mobile phone pricing and as a result refuse to get involved with mobile phone companies any more. I am ASDA (Vodaphone) pay as you go - this ensures some of the logic that I get what I pay for.

Thus, for short journeys that cost only a few pounds, the new costs seem to be only a few pounds more and so bearable. Expensive journeys have carefully kept down so that they don't spark too much anger since 100% on a £100 ticket is very noticeable when you start spending £100 in one go more!

Yet most journeys are short journeys, I assume, so the average increase experienced across the the population is very high, and the profits gained by the operating companies huge.

Now what I don't understand, and which I have argued with customer services on many occasions, is why I should pay for "services" from a company that is clearly trying to rip me off? Where is the "service" is that? Where above all is the trust!

So sadly companies are stuck between a devil and the deep blue sea. They have fickle investors demanding big profit reports and dividends, and they (hopefully) have customers refusing to be ripped off. Sadly in the age of private/public monopolies most customers don't have the choice but to be ripped off, probably the biggest oversight of all by the governments.

I should add of course that the public services were subsidised by the government from the tax payer so we did indirectly pay more for our rail services than today. Government spending on transport in billions is as follows:

Spending GDP AV. Salary Av Salary as millionth%

of GDP

1975 3.8billion 106.7 3.56%

1979 4.5 199.2 2.30% 6k 3% (millionths)

2010 21.5 1474 1.46% 23k 1.56% (millionths)

http://www.ukpublicspending.co.uk/uk_year1970_0.html#ukgs302

What doesn't tally however is that salaries have not kept pace with economic growth. We take home on average half of what we did in 1975 compared with the total countries productivity. One explanation is that the extra money lies in the hands of just a few thus biasing the average figure. This makes the data using GDP difficult the compare.

Let us take the government spending per head (assume 60million) and compare it with ticket prices, and salary:

1975 £68/person/year 10 trips to bath 1.3%

1979 £75 144 trips to Feltham 1.25%

2010 £358 12.8 bath / 71.6 Feltham 1.6%

SO extraordinary result that actually we are spending more on transport now than we were! So the rail operators can't complain about changes in funding... although I do suspect that the money we do spend goes on cars.

Can we be Wealthy and Equal?

This Xmas has been a time of upheaval for me. It seems that the ground work for the alternative way of thinking has been set and now it is time to be accepted back into society and see how it fares.

The impact of the heavy snow showed up the weakness of capitalism very clearly to me: a socialist economy would be able to redirect huge resources much more precisely and efficiently than the fragmented capitalist industries watching their profit margins at every turn. That said I was brought to consider more how BAA might be operated as a capitalist venture than to use it's failure as a demonstration of Thatchers far reaching errors. If we can mend capitalism would it be better than a mended socialism? My only problem is that I still see Capitalism as working superficially in a society of competitive and selfish individuals better the socialism but intrinsically it remains illogical and flawed; Socialism on the other hand is fundamentally rational but superficially fails because of errors in the Western cultures. It seems absurd to justify Capitalism based on a human culture that is flawed. And so here we are at the big challenge: is Human Culture and Society flawed? A summary of this blog's positions says yes and also how.

It is Xmas and the church is spreading the message of peace and goodwill. The Archbishop of Canterbury calls for the rich to shoulder more of the burden of the economic down turn, there is the (brilliant) adaptation of "The Christmas Carol" on Dr Who this Christmas Day (most satisfyingly well thought out by Stephen Moffat - lots of SRH in there) and the general looking after the poor. But I have always wondered why there are poor at all and why they have and always will exist. The Christian message is missing something. Well this blog seems to have the answer and now i see it vividly.

Firstly Wealth is Relative. It is a simple idea but gets held up the the belief in "needs". Whatever a human situation there will be a hierarchy of value. Even if it comes to dying some ways of dying are better than others. "Needs" are a red herring completely - this should be apparent hearing kids learning English and, realising that want is not as good as effective as need, decide to need everything. Once we realise that Wealth only exists in relation to other things then naturally it follows that a wealthy society must have a poor also. This is not an accident it is fundamental to the concept of wealth.

Secondly is the idea of Power. This is the other type of hierarchy. Humans exist in a society that is dominated by relative social status. We judge our position, obviously, relative to other people. A friend's girlfriend was saying that she was offered a better title at no extra pay, the title supposedly being the reward of the new workload. What has confused me about authority hierarchies, but now I understand, is that obviously systems of organisation must exist in order to harmonise complex groups of people working together. "Orders" mean that information and responses to new information can rapidly spread through a complex network. Certainly in the army an order enables very fast and accurate implementation of plans.

Yet lots of people who take up positions of authority seem to confuse this with something else. It is I now see the hidden notion of status. By being in power people can consider themselves "better" than other people. It is the instinct of status and hierarchy.

So why does all this exist? The obvious place to look is biology. Higher animals have very complex dominance structures. I discovered on BBC Autumn Watch this year that even birds at a feeding table have strict dominance hierarchies - and these aren't even considered to be social organisms. Dominant individuals will take control of the food resources with progressively marginal individuals getting less and less control. When a predator strikes and the birds scatter, researchers have found that the most subordinates return first - I am guessing because an empty feeder offers a high reward and so it is worth risking breaking cover. Once they have proven that the coast-is-clear then the dominant individuals return and take charge of the food again. Thus individuals experience risks from predation and also other birds on the feeder - and the two are balanced. I was surprised to find this in rabbits when I studied them at BSc but see that it is a universal phenomenon that predators offer a similar level of danger to one's own species and kin! The evidence is that Rabbits spend as much time watching for predators as for proximity to dominant individuals! This is the one thing that Darwin got wrong that there is nothing special about individuals being of the same species - fellow species members and even clan members are as likely to kill you as predators!

Dominance is expressed essentially through violence. Birds for example have very sharp beaks and they don't use them for feeding only! Rabbits don;t just use their powerful jumping feed to move they can disembowel with a single kick. So why do individuals go to such lengths to achieve dominance and be violent to other individuals? It is so that they can secure essential resources. The issue is not our own absolute fitness but our relative fitness. If we can ensure that no-one else breeds then we don't need to be that fit to secure all the future offspring and so spread this gene. Thus it pays to spend time upsetting ones competitors as well as acquiring resources. The balance depends upon circumstances.

So given the simple brutality of nature it is no surprise to find EXACTLY the same structure in humans. Humans find that rather than play the game straight it is actually beneficial to dominate other humans and ensure our mastery of resources that way. With humans, and the sophisticated way we can communicate our wishes, it is possible for dominant individuals to steal (tax) resources from others and get them to completely support the dominant individuals. Of course we do this because being in the hierarchy to a powerful dominant individual places us in the running for resources ourself (from which non loyal subjects are excluded) and also offers us protection from other dominant individuals who would wish to upset us.

Large populations can be supported within violent systems when resources are plentiful, but when resources become scarce it is the "poor" subordinates who die first. When food on bird feeders is scarce the strong dominant individuals will be able to secure the food better and so remain strong, while the subordinates will die. This ramping of fitness offers an inbuilt buffer to extreme environmental changes. It may be (and I like the idea of group level selections) that species that don't incorporate a hierarchy of fitness, when faced with sudden scarcity, experience the shortage equally through the population and all individuals out compete themselves and the population dies together. So in this view intrinsic violence is actually an adaptation to environmental heterogeneity. It would be an interesting test to see if dominance hierarchies are more ramped in species from temperate climates where winter produces a regular time of scarcity and so group level selection. In humans it certainly seems that it is the historically recent Northern tribes who have been the most socially organised and dominating in human history (Aryans, Mongols and Saxons especially). Anyway pure speculation here.

So Human Society and culture obeys the most fundamental laws of nature, and many right wing thinkers would happily stop there. But as this very argument shows humans exist on a higher level than mere resource allocation. One of my poorly realised argument against Dawkins is that "his ideas" do not have fitness: they don't obviously make his children fitter; and, if they are fitter memes of the mind, so that they spread, then the prevalence of meme theory is attributable only to what meme theory says and not being a theory of Truth we can't say that meme theory is True! Why Dawkins then gets so irate about other memes doing well I don't understand: it can only be because he secretly believes in Truth as the measure of fitness and this contradicts meme theory which is not a theory of Truth! This is SRH in action. It is incredibly hard to argue even after all these centuries of art, philosophy and religion, and these many thousands of words in this blog, but the Human Mind transcends the physical and even its own contructions. This is the realm of the essentially indefinable which has been called the spiritual. It intersects human society in this issue of wealth and equality.

We have only two choices. We understand that wealth is relative and so have to accept inequality; or we believe in equality and so must abandon wealth. It is the argument at the heart of spirituality and it is why those who seek the Higher Mind have such a difficult relationship with the material.

If we abandon wealth then we also abandon Hierarchy and this was difficult even for World spiritual leaders. Jesus most famously in Matthew 15 called a Canaanite woman a "dog" because of her low standing with the Jews. It was here commentators say that he had to face this side of his culture and understand that faith, and hence the Lord's power, extended outside normal social hierarchies. It was with Buddhism that we first see a spiritual leader teaching equally to all. This was as far as I know the first time that the idea of Equality arose (2500B.C.).

Our Western society is certainly a messy admixture of contradictions. We believe in professions, education and skills yet we also believe that the unskilled masses can run a country (or at least have the collective power to chose leaders to do highly skilled tasks). We believe that each person has equal power to vote, yet in the market place some people can buy multimillon pound pleasure yachts while some can barely buy a car... it goes on. Democracy is based upon an idea of equality that is completely (and essentially in places like the flight deck of a plane) absent. At least we have made the effort to incorporate this idea but democracy is just a superficial add-on the a society that is at root flawed because of its belief in wealth.

The great economists have resolved huge problems in markets, and modern oil based transport and communication have aided in providing us with an efficient trading world that rapidly distributes produce and information to maximise spending and money flow. Complex debt management has also increased the availability of credit and the flow of money. People have more to spend and more work to do. It is a miracle of wealth. (Personally I attribute almost all this apparent wealth to energy from oil rather than economics but I'll gloss over that here.) Most apparent of this success is the fact that people in the West don't starve any more. It appears to produce the solid basis for a belief in wealth. Yet Economic growth seems to contradict this notion of wealth. If there is an absolute wealth then at what point will we be satisfied? It is hard for modern people to realise but we are no more wealthy than at any point in history. At every point there have always been people more wealthy and less wealthy and we have always felt "as" wealthy as we do today. It is by focusing on this inequality that we get the sense of wealth. Indeed it is by the difference between things that we get the sense of physical matter at all. Wealth sadly for economics is not a real thing and it can't really be created or destroyed materially.

The problem that we face is the growing belief in this most basic and tragic idea that what is relative creates things that are absolute. Dawkins, and his cohorts are, unbeknown to themselves, no different from rabbits or tits on a bird feeder. It is a great irony that those who would seek to be better and correct are applying for status through arguments that apply also to the lowest organisms who have no choice whether to argue one way or the other. Surely Materialists can see that the very freedom to "apply" for this status places them beyond the level that they are applying to! This is the still poorly realised SRH idea. Dawkin's mind is master of the arena that he believes his lives within and wishes to confine himself within. If you can describe what your house looks like then you must have been outside so you are only choosing to stay inside and that the root choice of Dawkin's and all materialists and atheists' etc that wilfully clouds their vision.

Once we are brave enough to step outside we are faced with a huge challenge: are we ready to abandon wealth and accept equanimity and equality?

De Facto/De Jure

These terms already distinguish the argument made a while ago in this blog between "law" that is natural and "law" that is man made. The existence of "de jure" (de rigueur also) is the evidence of the nature of society in this blog. The rules which have no "real" basis other than custom and norm. Language and maths fit mostly within the "de jure" conception since how a language or maths is constructed is relative. By contrast the knowledge that a man jumping off a cliff will never lead to him flying is de facto and no matter of relativity of construction can change that fact. As Eddie Izzard says " some things ARE impossible, like eating the Himalayas. It can't be done." and I add no matter how fanciful the logic system, story being told or persuasive the King's orders!