The psychology of struggle

Men enjoy manly struggles.

When men suffer it is humiliating. Suffering is the punishment served out by kings to force their subjects into subservience. When a man suffers he has failed. Yet suffering happens, it is humiliating but it is fact.

A psychology to cope with this is to actively take on struggles which require endurance. Thus a man may create suffering, and face it, but on his own terms. Journeying to the Pole we will struggle against the limits of endurance and brave many hardships and if successful we will return more than victorious over distance, but over suffering itself – raising a fist aloft and declaring in pride a victory over a World that sort to humiliate us in suffering. That suffering that at first humiliated us, now through endurance has become the source of our pride. But we have become cold not because we have beaten suffering, but because we have become so tough that we cannot feel anything anymore.

And yet despite our apparent victory we will return to discover new sufferings, unhappinesses and humiliations. For all men it is a fact that we will suffer, and we will be humiliated and there is no power within us to stop this. In Christianity our God himself was humiliated exactly like this, treated as a common criminal and died a hated man. When we feel humiliated it is worth remembering that God must have felt more humiliated than we can ever begin to imagine!

With clarity I have seen the error of my early philosophy

The most troublesome part of the relationship with “my muse” was the seeking “an experience”. I was faced on one occasion with a casual acquaintance of hers who had just slept with her. He was incredulous that I had not done so. Between us lay an apparent void, but a void between what and what? I was not jealous at the time for I was secure in the nature of what i was seeking and tried in vain to explain the value of this to either of us. In retrospect after failing to find what I was searching for, and worse finding that it was all a mortal - temporary - illusion, I was drawn into the sense that all she was worth was the physical. But I was falling. It is hard to see clearly when you are drowning. But I am no longer drowning and what I have read and known, but not had enough faith in, is that both he seeking in the physical and me seeking in the spiritual are actually mistaken. It is not what film we see – of which there can be many - but the cinema itself of which there is only one! It is the mind we search for not the objects of sense – and yet even with knowledge of this we seek the objects - one after another – ranking them and measuring ourselves against each other according to these objects – seeking memory of these objects – desiring these objects – feeling our life dependent on these objects – our life itself just another object of sense!

I knew all along that there was a lot more at stake with “my muse” than merely a conquest – that mundanity I was avoiding at all costs – from the outset it was the opportunity to blow away the veil of ignorance. Like with a particle accelerator there was enough energy in this to achieve anything. Yet my mistake was to seek some unique and special “experience” with her – something that I had not experienced before. Indeed this was the fascination for any number of men. And it was the same with her scoring up new experiences that she delighted in retelling. What we all missed was that no new experience can reveal anything more about the truth because that is nothing else but the nature of experience itself. If objects can show us one thing it is the gradual realisation after raking up a lifetimes worth of experiences that really no One experience counts for much and the very need for so many different experiences illustrates that the truth lies outside individual experiences. Indifference to individual experiences, times and places, is what the worldly and wise person gains - and what the child has yet to learn. A poor substitute for this wisdom is becoming jaded where we are simply numbed to experience by regret, jealousy, disappointment, hatred and hurt – this is the opposite in many ways to the wisdom mentioned; we still believe that there are experiences that can lead to salvation and yet egotistically we feel we are denied these and so we hurt.

The first thing a blind man notices when his sight is restored is that he can see something – but it is not the “something” which he marvels in but the fact that there is something there at all. What I was searching for in “my muse” was not just the experience of another girl (of which there are literally billions), but the appreciation of experience itself… this is what all people are searching for yet we always confuse what we are seeing from the miracle of seeing itself – more than seeing, of “experiencing” itself.

My early philosophy followed the well trodden path of noticing problems in the view that I experience reality. This led to separating my experience of things from the things themselves. I then took this division and noticed the implication, as so many other have done, that it means we can’t experience real things. In a flash of inspiration I cast all real things into an unknown world just as 18th century European philosophers did. And there i got stuck.

Finally the realisation above gave me the root of the problem and the solution. I had sort “my muse” as an external completion of myself and my life. There is a sense when we are in love that we cannot survive without the “object” of our desires. Our very existence seems to depend upon something external to us, as much as a hungry person needs food to live. Yet what is happening here runs into the problems outlined above. How can we ever have anything other than our experiences of the other person? We cannot be them, we can’t even know them as they really are only our experiences of them. In actuality they are apart from us in the realm of the unknown. But what was I seeking behind the world of experiences with “my muse”. What did I feel I never got from her, why did I suffer at this perceived loss?

Both problems have the same answer. We are like animals looking at our reflection and not recognising ourselves. What is it that lies “behind” the world of experiences? It is actually ourselves. This is why being lost in the world of experiences hurts so much because the more we focus on the nature of the experiences the more we lose sight of the cinema in which we are experiencing and in so doing we lose sight of the self that lies behind those experiences – the cinema screen so to speak. Daniel Dennett speaks of the Cartesian Cinema – does he realise that this is not only a metaphor for the idea that we are somehow looking at the data from our senses as much as the idea that we are separate from the outside world at all. What I sort so desperately in “my muse” and what seemed so unjust when she chose other people, was that in her I was actually looking at myself. Everything beautiful and enchanting about her is actually the same beauty and enchantment that I have failed as yet to find within myself. A girl may seem enlightened only because inside ourselves lies that very enlightenment.

Now desire is our enemy here because it fishes in the well of experience. It seeks to draw “things” from the depths of the world to feast on them. In so doing it is only interested in the contents of the well, what it can get. A mind that identifies with desire is short sighted and seeks to know only “what” it has got. It is interested only in the contents of experience. But, being free from desire the mind is not interested in “what” but sees purely only that it has got. The enlightened mind is again like the blind man who can see again, in wonder at sensation itself, joyful that they have arrived at the well. The mind clouded with desire fishes with anticipation in the well, discriminating what they fish out as good and bad, fighting for this and that, but never stopping to appreciate the well.

To the unrefined they see only a man on the stage; to the refined he is an actor or a dancer.
To the unrefined they see only a world of desirous or undesirous things; to the refined they are the product of our own self.

Raw notes: Desire fishes in the well of experience and so deals with the contents of experience not the actuality (not the experience is actual) . Things are, but the mind lacking wisdom makes things as is

Oregon Petition

A friend sent me a link to the Oregon Petition which aims to show a divided scientific consensus.

Noticing that the petition is in states with numbers per state already recorded it gave me the idea of testing the distribution of names against political orientation.

Quick look on the net gives good stats for all the states in alphabetical order so I could very quickly cut and paste into excel.

Observed values were collected from the petition and grouped according to their voting patterns over the past 10 years using the red, purple and blue scheme.

Expected values were calculated in two ways:

1) The first was by assuming that people were equally likely to sign the petition across all the states. The total number of signatures divided by the total population of all the states. Then the number of signatures in each state was expected to be directly proportional to the state population.

2) The petition selected for people with qualifications so patterns could have been attributed to the distribution of science establishments. (1) was repeated but using only the population of people in each state was a degree or higher qualification.

Here are the results for 2 (1 provides an identical conclusion)

X^2	Red (Republican)	Purple	Blue (Democrat)	Total
Observed (O)	9542	7919	13295	30756
Population (Degree or above)	20434	17688	43479	81602
Expected (E)	7702	6667	16387	30756
(O-E)^2/E	439.7	235.2	583.6	1258.5

X2 = 1258.5, df=2, p=0

In other words there is 0 chance of the hypothesis being true that scientists have signed the petition independent of state voting patterns. This is a major problem for the petition that claims that scientists are responding to objective research about the debate. Why should coming from a Republican or Democrat state affect your likelihood of signing the petition if it is based on research?

Well that is easy. Al Gore has biased the Democrats and the Oil industry is the second largest lobby group behind the Republicans. Just like tobacco it is not in the interests of oil giants to have us weaned off their product. And it is no surprise that the trend supports this with Republican scientists more likely to sign the petition than those from democrat states.

Now how does politics determine what free scientists think when they are supposed to be evidence based? Next time someone turns up with a “scientific” paper just find out who did the funding.

Something else that was interesting in this. Democrats substantially outnumber Republicans in the US. So Republicans governments don’t actually represent the people very well. It might also be true that Democrat states are more educated but I’ve not followed this up. That more than twice as many Democrats signed the petition as Republicans is an indication of how few Republican would actually qualify for signing the petition. Of those that do quality however they are much more likely to sign than those in Democrat states.

Racial Dialectics & Faith

First of a series of realisations on midwinter day.

I awoke recalling an argument that i had had with this racist guy at college. Many hours of argument had stripped away the facade of philosophy and revealed the simple atomic argument that blacks should leave the country. I was actually frightened at this raw display of bigotry and my adversary’s seeming satisfaction with what seemed to me a compound statement with no cohesion. Yes some people are black. Yes there is a country here on the British Isles. And yes some of the people on these Isles and in the country are black. But some people are white also. For him it was OK for white people to be here but not black but there was no actual argument to link skin colour to anything else. He needless to say was white. I’m not saying there are not important points in the immigration debate but this was a dead end. I walked away quite shaken at his blindness and my faith in the power of reason was severely dented.

So I awoke with an answer to him over 10 years late. It is an immanent approach. Let us take his position which is that black people should go home and let us perform this segregation. What occurred to me is that this implies that white people should not leave home. If you strengthen the location of people based on colour it works for all people who have colour. Blacks should go there and leave whites here, which means whites can’t go there. Whites segregate themselves at the same time! This is why dualism is a prison and why dialectics is the source of freedom. I would be fascinated to see if he liked the implication of his own caging?

Now Tamar (as he was called) would probably resent having his wings clipped and recall the power of the empire and our right to roam the planet. But the moment he resented it his position was internally broken. The practical implication of racism then is three sided. We would have to create reservations for those who wanted to be segregated, white and black. Everyone else who did not want segregation would live in the free lands outside the reservations. Is this what racists really want however?

That morning (22nd Dec) my faith in the universal power of dialectic was re-strengthened. There is a pure and entirely clear and powerful way of seeing the world free from any imperfection, lack of clarity or confusion. When we have this wisdom everything is straightforward and unvexing. All we imperfect mortals need is faith that such a solution exists, a light to guide us through the misty worlds of twilight that characterise our imperfect lives. I had lost faith that there was a solution to the problem of “my muse” amongst other things – now I know there is to this and every other problem that we are faced. We may see things in such a way that there seems no way out, that we are doomed and will perish – but actually such a view is simple ignorance. Nothing in reality is a problem except the lack of clarity and wisdom required to see through it. This led to other realisation that day.

Ubuntu

Just found this name for the concept

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_(philosophy)

A brief moment of freedom

Today it snowed. I had time to take a walk around the university and came to visit the Harris Gardens. Last time I visited here was to see the cherry blossoms in the arboretum way back in May. It reminds me that I visited here on that fateful day in 2006, gloomy because I had no heart for the blossoms and desperately missing the heady days of “my muse”. But she was already gone by then it being pm of the day then,

Walking up the track to the arboretum I was very much enjoying the snow and by good fortune my camera ran out so I was forced to experience the walk as a “one off” … as I always used to promise myself with everything to do with “my muse” (how I’ve let myself down on that!!! reliving it again and again and again). Arriving at the skeletal trees, their dark sleeping branches reaching out from the white sheet of powdery snow all around, I was gripped by the sense that this was a “one off” just today and in particular the sense that “my muse” - no longer being here - was not experiencing this day of snowfall… it was mine. At last I am letting go. I am no longer grasping greedily for that “ecstasy” that she made me so jealous of – those moments of complete and joyful absorption into the world, the emersion in ones surroundings, that marked my time with her, and which I dreamed she was a frequent navigator. This was the root of the attraction that she was an ocean in which I could sensibly drown and be enriched with. That she was Indian, that she was born of the culture, above all others, which speaks of this, was the binding to the dream which promised my heart its goal.

Well today I heart stood firmly on its own feet without her. And, I have learned something too. I used to make a mistake that I called “the fetishisation of the moment”. Sartre and other Existentialists make the mistake of making too big a deal out of the moment. It is just a moment! As an eternal thing it is never replaced and as a momentary thing it is eternally replaced – there is plenty to go around, why do we value something so universal and common? Existentialists speak of the moment as though it were gold. In a way it is, but gold that makes the ground and the sky. If we cling to the moment, search for it too earnestly, and particularly if we become jealous of the moment (as I have been) we cast the moment in stone – raise its statue on a pedestal but forget what the statue is of.

Better than gold, the moment is like pure water. It is essential for life, it cleans, it is pure and clear and leaves no residue. Yet it is bountiful and we can catch it whenever it rains so we often forget about it, or even curse it when we get wet. We curse the moment equally when it takes what we like away, but we miss the cleansing process that this is. We cling (as I have done) both to the things of the past not allowing then to wash away, and worse we cling even to the notion of moment seeking desperately for that liquid to run through the soul and nourish us. A mistake to give “my muse” the keys to this spring!

New Year is a time for cleansing and letting the past be washed away so that it can be remade anew. Timely that I should return to these musings that I first remember having properly while watching the sun set for that last time of 1997 from King Arthurs Seat in Edinburgh. I was seeking to get the essence, capture that moment in its entirely, focus the mind and rid myself of the past so that I could be one with that setting sun. I wasn’t but I was satisfied at the effort. Interesting that I switched my attentions from one setting sun to another – a setting moon who waned long before her time. Didn’t I realise something about moments?

Status n stuff

Can’t believe how long it is taking for me to fully digest this realisation of 2008/9 that humans seek “status” as a fundamental feature of the social existence.

Everywhere I look now I see the depth of status struggles. My old quest for a minimum standard of living is actually a quest measured by “status”. What people consider a minimum is nothing to do with physical requirement - I can say for sure that my current arrangements in a garage give me the same satisfaction and happiness as I had in a flat simply because I have everything I need in both arrangements. We consider minimum “acceptable” standard of living – in other words what do we consider socially acceptable, or what status is considered unacceptable. What we posses, and how we live is a measure of our social standing more than what we physically require. It is obvious, maybe I’m just stupid, but people keep buying new cars or computers for example long before the old one has ceased to perform the required function. The race for number plates etc another example of the games that are played to be the first, best, top dog: games that serve no other purpose than to position us in the social hierarchy.

Watching AutumnWatch 2006 last week I was a rather embarrassed to notice the perfect parallelism between the red deer ruts on the Isle of Rhum and our own human rutting. As Simon King explained, it is the grouping of females on good patches of grass that leads stags into competition. As was explained during my degree this is actually a common problem for organisms.

In an environment where the resources required are thin and evenly spread then animals forage randomly and it benefits to do so alone. Predatory pressure and family ties may lead to some grouping but the attitude to food and mates it random and even.

In a patchy environment things change. If the patches are frequent, small and quickly exhausted, like ducks feeding, then grouping occurs around the resource but strategies exist to know whether to join groups or search for other patches. Grouping can help in the discovery of patches too. Groups are very transient.

If the resource is patchy, scarce and fairly long lived it is worth fighting for a territory. Female deer only come into heat for a very short period of time – they are a rare resource and they group on the patches of best grass. A male seeking a mate finds nothing and then a high density of females. Other males arriving for this resource will gradually reduce the males chance of completing a mating so it is in his interests to repel them and fight for a territory. This behaviour as it generated more children - will lead to more deer with this behaviour and soon it is the dominant strategy.

Well its not quite the same for humans. The problem for us is the support of offspring that are born very prematurely and require a long period of intense care followed by a huge further period of teaching and support. Females are clearly interested in territories that will provide support for this process. Yet the territorial behaviour is the same – seeking to dominate a resource – and it is females that ultimately create the environment that males develop strategies to master.

Interesting also to see the diversity of behaviours in the females and what a job this makes for the males. In particular (In AutumnWatch 2006)  that doe sneaking away from the harem to chose a quite different mate that she clearly has a like for having mated with him in 2 previous autumns. So even the males which win at one territorial strategy still lose in the mate sometimes! Female choice certainly rules and that was my independent analysis of human sexual relations also (serious as well as joking).

In tandem with these clarifications I find that I am completely losing all interest in sexuality. It has taken a very long time! with multiple attacks from the intellect – especially Buddhism. The body is actually disgusting. There is some psychological mechanism I noticed as a child that turns off the sense of disgust when we are aroused – a necessary process! But it just disguises the nature that we in a more sober moment notice. The processes behind partnership and childbirth are certainly profound and intensely motivating and we do feel complete and whole when exercising these deeply ingrained impulses – going against a drive that has been with Life virtually from the outset is not easy or natural! But it is just impulsive, automatic animal behaviour and has no higher value – although we will try to justify it to ourselves. Yet the drive to reproduce does generate an awkward situation which stimulates the higher human qualities. Living together with another person for the huge lengths of time required for successful childbirth involves the development of one of the strongest bonds in human existence. It is chemical to begin with and anyone can do that! But as time progresses it requires more than chemicals. It requires awareness of the partner, sensitivity, forethought, compassion, caring and love. These are the highest qualities of the human being. Yet one does not need children in order to perfect these! Add to this the over population of the world, global warming, peak oil and the future doesn’t look particularly good anyway so not having children does everyone a favour and improves the lives of those children that are had.

Another interesting feature (and I realise that this is a vast subject seeing that human society and custom has evolved to embrace childbirth as one of the central processes in Life) is that of “my” children. There are millions of children born every day – why are these any different from “my” children. Why this impulse to have “my“ children as opposed to yours? Darwinism would explain this as a implication of reproduction itself - that those who father the most children are more likely to have their own behaviours replicated in the next generation. Thus having “my” children is going to create more “my” children than any DNA that makes us look after “your” children. But the point for humans is that we are beyond DNA – we don’t have to obey the instructions of chemicals – that is a ridiculous suggestion. Given that we are free – what is the difference between “my” children and “your” – and the answer is nothing! It is just the idea of ownership, property and essence (see Buddhism for further analysis).

Anyway wrapping this blog up the separation of human from animal is proving sensible at last – but it is frightening to discover the degree of human life that is just animal – simple, automatic, unconsidered and pre-programmed. Most people spend almost all their time in obeying automatic impulses! All the struggles to blend in and establish a “status” in a social group, to be social friends etc I now count as simple animal impulses of no actual value. It is logical in retrospect. How can we have a world of care for our fellow man, while at the same time we seek to promote our own wellbeing and success! They are contradictions and it is the latter which is at fault.

This was my sneaking suspicion about “religion”. This is simply the creation of society around some object. That object can be anything be it football or gods. The sense of power and well being that we receive is really just a selfish impulse to gain some status in a society. Obeying the religious teachers we know that actually self-sacrifice for others is the goal of our spiritual progress. Jesus for example died as a criminal, unloved and hated in the worst and most humiliating punishment the Romans could dream up – that is nothing about feeling good, passing on one’s genes or gaining power or status (altho this is what was incidentally gained). And I criticise the weakness that sends us into the arms of others too on the principle that nothing ever stops us relating in a loving way to other people – the door is always open for true society and love. We only feel alone and seek the comfort of others when we have closed the door to others ourselves and seek instead selfishly their attention and support! All those miriad thoughts about being abandoned, or worthless, or unloved stem from our own selfish desires to promote our self. No-one will benefit from such behaviour but our self. However we are weak and these are all just stages to perfection, so acceptance of our weaknesses is also an important act of love.

Smithian economics which says that the success of each man generates the success of all men in a free market may indeed work within certain parameters but as the planet is showing this simply isn’t the truth when there are limited resources. It is our social status which ultimately determines who get the oil and the food when they run out. Those at the top of the pile will eat to their fill while those at the bottom will starve. This is the simple nature of human society and status struggle. It can’t be changed as long as Homo Sapiens listens to his animal instincts. It is a very likely fact that billions will die in the coming century as food literally runs out – but these billions will be culled from what we call today the poor nations. Like stags that fail in the rut, these are humans who will have no new children. Law of Nature.

On the nature of live TV

I'm reposting stuff from facebook... watching old episodes of BBC Spring Watch...

Alva Gosson

Had a think yesterday while shopping... watching "old" TV is daunting cos we feel it's in the past and irrelevant ... but watch it and u get sucked in; it's not old any more! Immanently there is no clue to "age". Most of the fledged birds are now dead (2009) but within the program where they are fledging (2006) that is irrelevant. When we think it's "live" it's also irrelevant for the same reason - media creates its own time (celluloid heroes actually die again and again). 4 me its the same nausea as going to an art gallery and finding a note next to the painting telling u what it is ... why paint if you need words to do your art?! We need to be told its "live" cos media creates its own time.

December 6 at 10:38am · Delete

Alva Gosson

I notice also that a lot of the animal watchers get a kick from photography - necessary since its a TV program but also because taking a picture is like a second permanent sight. Comparing the "image" to the "real" thing enhances the reality - makes nature more beautiful. Indeed its because of "media" that we have a notion of reality! Likewise it's because of media (like memory etc) that we have a notion of "time". Its worth knowing the '69 coverage of the Moon landings was "live" because it was an event in that huge media called "history". The temporality (sense of time) of the grainy images was less than impressive, but the temporality of that moment in history was impressive. "Time" must have been vivid on that day. In SpringWatch birds fledging is not history it has its own time so "live" means nothing in fact its irritating. So I guess I don't believe in Einstein's Spacetime - its just another narrative which creates its own time!

December 6 at 10:51am · Delete

Alva Gosson

Editing is the means of getting any "object". The sculptor throws away all that rock so that we have a shape but so 2 does any story maker :-) too much exposure to nature and the non-expert would be lost in detail and rock splinters and so unable to get a story out... so the experts create the stories on Springwatch for us. Its art&craft like any other... btw forgot to post this next bit which was sitting offline...

December 6 at 7:24pm · Delete

Alva Gosson

thinking again... "live" is especially irksome because it misses what "live" means. Media is recordable so it is not itself live. Live is unrecordable by definition cos if you recorded it, its not live any more. If you record a 24hour TV channel while u go out, you won't have time to keep up with the TV n watch the recording - u need a parallel universe; isn't that where physics goes wrong - trying to record everything? This is why I'm watching Springwatch 2006 in 2009 anyway. So that's the Zen point that only Live "exists" but u can't record it in words, thoughts, pictures, sounds etc. You have to be a- Live anyway to watch things so that's the clue to whether its Live or not ;-) ... just some thoughts on the unthinkable while shopping ...

December 6 at 7:24pm · Delete

-ve area

Completely random blog… was asked by a tutee yesterday what 2D and 1D meant… we then got onto 0D… this morning I got to thinking about –1D and then to an issue highlighted years ago by a friend at school that of –ve area. Well its easy: if distance is a vector rather than just scalar then a 2D cuboid with one negative side has negative area. In the quadrants of a Cartesian graph a cuboid with one corner at the origin has positive area in the top-right and bottom-left but negative area in the top-left and bottom-right quadrants. It can be seen that a –ve area is a reflection of its original, while rotation does not affect the area.

That is reflection through a line. Through a point is like the focusing of a image with a lens. Both sides are negated so the image is facing actually the right way up and is positive area just rotated a half circle. This is why a negative in a camera is a copy of the scene even though upside down and the wrong way around.

In 3D it’s the same. A reflection of a cube in the plane negates the dimension parallel to the plane’s normal. The volume becomes –ve. Through a line it is +ve and just a rotation of the original and through a point (if we could ever photograph in 3D) it is a negative image.

Now this makes me wonder how many orientations there are in a cuboid! In a rectangle with corners labelled clockwise there is only the negative area with corners labelled anti-clockwise. In a cuboid it is the same – obvious since you can only negate in one way. All the faces also change their clockwise/anticlockwise orientations also. Anticlockwise as we know from bearings is negative clockwise.

So –1D is simply a vector going in the opposite direction. –2D is a negative area etc. each is a reflection (a mirror image) of its 1D, 2D etc counterparts. Alice thus entered –3D when she went through the looking glass. One could imagine that time might go backwards in a -4D enhanced mirror in a 5D world.

Impossibility of Self-Reference

Things always take a long time with me. This is beginning to take shape at last.

Discussing democracy with a friend I posed the situation where a country took a referendum on democracy itself. Suppose in the ballot box room the vote tallies began to show that there had been a resounding victory for the anti-democratic vote. What should the vote counters do? Counting votes in a country that no longer wants democracy is a waste of time. What exactly would the result mean also?

This illustrates again the problem with things that are self-referential. When they are self-supporting they seem the work. But when they are self-defeating they result in nonsense or NULL as I have been calling it.

As already argued if they result in NULL rather than false when self-defeating then they can’t result in truth when they are self-supporting. Someone can’t give themselves as an alibi in court any more than something can be self-supporting.

What exactly is going on then with the statement: “This sentence is composed from seven words.”?

It seems to be true. Let us test it: “This sentence is composed from six words.”. This is false so we have shown that there is not true self-reference (if one accepts the SRH)

“This sentence is true” seems to be ok. But famously “This sentence is false” gives us an undecided result- NULL. This is true self-reference so “This sentence is true” is actually NULL!!! A self-referential statement is not true because it can’t be false. It can only be NULL since the opposite of NULL is NULL also.

Now all this looks trivial. However it points to a very important piece of wisdom which keeps being rediscovered: that all things are interconnected, have a dependent origin, and that there is no-self.

If self cannot support itself then it must be supported by things that are non-self. Thus self is actually non-self when you look into it. It means that everything gains its existence and its meaning from the things around it. That truth and existence do not reside in the object of scrutiny but rather in the objects not-under scrutiny. It means that what is inside is so because of what is outside. I am what I am because of you as the Orange advert recently revived. Tat tvam asi in Sanskrit and ‘This is this because that is that’ in the translation of the similar Buddhist doctrine.

What remains is to determine with greater clarity the process by which we link statements like “This sentence is true” with “This sentence is false”. If they have no link then how can I use these pairs to test the structure!

Secondly what exactly is the “this” in “This sentence is compose from six words”. It seems that the reference is not dependent upon the statements truth.

However “This statement of nine words has eight words” is running into problems. I need to stick it on the back burner again… will update eventually !

New Computer Blues

Yesterday I received the biggest present I have ever been given ... an early Xmas gift of a new laptop.

I was pretty relaxed about it because I use loads of computers in my life ... but this was different... it was mine and it was new! Two of the most important concepts in modern society and I don't get to examine them very often...

Well I was a bit disappointed by the screen because I thought 15" was smaller. It is that annoying 768 depth which means that you are forever scrolling down... I don't see the point of wide unless you are watching video but that seems to dominate the mindsets of laptop designers at the moment. I knew that I didn't like Dell keyboards and true to form the keyboard is not great - the enter key needs quite a smarp hammer to register. I had been persuaded that HP has changed the Dell keyboard - evidently not so. The mouse pad is sometimes unresponsive. I can't believe that of the 3 USB ports 2 are right next to the power socket so you can't plug in anything that has more than a 5mm overlap - amazing oversight. The soundcard has quite high latency on midi processing but I didn't buy it with this in mind. I've already filled up the 150GB drive - thought it would be enough but see that more is an advantage these days. It doesn't have a video out and it has no expansion slot if I ever want to upgrade the sound card. Quite a lot over oversights by the designers!! Amazing given the obscene amount of work stored up in the chips and display design.

Now that is the negative list and compiling it took me through some interesting landscape. This is "my" computer and being "mine" I want it to be perfect. It felt for the first time in a long time that "new page" feeling that I used to get at school when turning to a fresh leaf in my exercise book and writing on the fresh clean paper. This computer represents a new start, it is pristine and possibly perfect.

I had a gentle resurgence of the mind set that I had held with "my muse". Of the being in competition with other people. "My" computer was now ranked with other computers - if it failed then I failed. I would be sitting with my failed computer against those people with bigger and better computers, living lives of greater perfection, greater and cleaner new starts, fresher and lighter. I would be left behind in the dirt.

I was drawn into that mindset again and started to think that it was true again. That really I ought to fight for "my muse" - or now something like her - I ought to fight for my piece of perfection, my pristine pure self.

It is incredibly evocative. It looks like truth ( and I thought I had seen it all!).

Then I got a grip on myself with a few well chosen thoughts. I am created this perfection at the expense of others. It is inside me, and outside I care nothing for. "My" computer is a world of perfection, and as long as it is perfect and satisfies me I care for nothing else. This is exactly like the world of "my muse" that I so dearly (and still dearly) wish for. I can still dream with all the radiance of before in that place of stunning beauty and peace where all wishes are fulfilled, where everything is light and perfect and leaves nothing wanting. It is still there like it actually exists! Still so evocative a thought; its fragrance fills the heart and the mind effortously and I am brought under its spell.

Well not quite. I'm a lot tougher now that I was 10 years ago! and I've had 10 years of Buddhist training.

Quite extraordinary to find all this still intact inside me. There is some truth. The computer can and should be a symbol of rebirth and restart. If that is what it takes then good that I am brought to slough off the past and take this vehicle into the future. Hopefully it will be the platform on which I begin to write Anura and Alexandria. When I first picked up the box I hugged it to feel if this destiny was possible - it's not blinding but it is there.

I have come to think recently that maybe I have become defeatest. I have an arsenal of arguments which disintegrate any desire of wish. These are good, they have enabled me to espace from "My Muse" and to find some stability and peace but i think maybe they can be overused. Maybe it is time to reembrace the other side the "allez" as I was calling it - but in balance with the "arretez" this time. What starts must stop and vice versa.

Well it is fair to say I love my new computer. Dillion is its project name. It is not perfect - its a bottom of the range Dell - but bottom of the range is good enough these days to do what I want and it does exactly that. No complaints really - the positives are unlistable because they are boundless - that is why we often miss them :-)

Addendum: didn't quite get this point out. The problem above was that i was beginning to define myself in opposition to the world around me through the computer. This Dell is unique and so it sets inself apart from other Dells. By it becoming "mine" I am then made to separate from the other people who own computers and other things. This is that feeling I hated with "my muse" of being brought in to opposition with other people. It is a cage in which we become limited, finite and mortal. It is ridiculous really that beings who are fundamentally birds gets trapped into cages so easily. This separation of people is the move which begins all that "ego" stuff I was discussing. The wall goes up and we start to work on perfecting the inside of our "ego" nest. "my" computer becomes an object of concern because its imperfections become my imperfections.

This is the first time I've had the opportunity to experience this. Now I see with more clarity the attraction of cars and handbags and shoes and houses and partners and children etc etc - these are "mine" and enable us to play the game of being "someone". It is as Hegel says the process with which we start to understand the notion of self. What I find tiresome tho in retrospect is that already I can see where this goes while I have the feeling that for many people they play this game blindly and with no purpose... at least none that has become apparent to me... yet.

What did we breath before oxygen?

Flicking throught TV on Sunday morning I found CH4's T4 presenter Steven Jones telling us that Priesley was the chemist who discovered oxygen followed by Jameela explaining that we could still breath and had oxygen before it was discovered...

...small but deep point...

What did we breath before oxygen was discovered? It can't have been "oxygen" because it wasn't discovered. Indeed I don't even think that respiration was at all appreciated and certainly not oxidation in the Kreb's cycle. People would have known that we needed air to breath and that air was needed for fire and probably had an idea that the two were related... I'm too short of time to catch up on 18th century science today...

Well the answer is NULL which was true then and is true today. How we mentally construct our ideas around the evidence gives us our "image" of reality - that is a creative piece of work that occurs in history and evolves. But, the "reality" itself is NULL.

What does something look like when you are not looking at it? This is another identical question with an answer of NULL. Nothing really is everywhere!

SRH progress?

The self-reference-hypothesis again

To recap it hypothesises that "true" self reference is impossible. In other words a statement cannot gain meaning from refering to itself.

The progress is the realisation that self-referential statements are true a priori. Because if they were false you get a NULL statement. The classic example of this is the liar paradox.

"This statement is true." Is apparently a solid statement and we gain apparent security from its claim of truth which only goes to support our security in the statement. However

"This statement is false." Leaves us with a problem. We assume it is true when we read it but find that it is telling us that it is false. So we reread it with this in mind and negate the truth value and find that infact it is true. It is neither true nor false but is undecided. It is meaningless. It is NULL.

The most recent argument regarding the SRH is that if the second statement is NULL then the first statement can't be true!

The reason? True is used in a dialectic with false. When I say that potassium burns with a crimson flame this is only false because I should have said it burns with a lilac flame. Likewise if I say that potassium burns with a lilac flame this is ONLY true because it illiminates all the other things I could have said like crimson etc.

However "This sentence is true." can only be said one way. Say it the other way and it is nonsense. It seems that rather than true and false at work here it is more Existence and NULL. Self-referential sentences are either existing (self supporting) or NULL (self-defeating). This is much like real systems then which are not true or false but working or not-working. Real things where there is feed back require that feedback to not blow the system apart otherwise the feedback ceases to be and such systems no longer exist.

Taking my old favourite the T = {T} the argument runs as follows.

With non-self-referential sets consider.

E = {a,b,c}

We can define a set A = {a,b}

Now A is meaningful because we could have defined A = {b,c} or anything else. Most importantly we could have assigned it to the complement of the set A = {a,b}' which means A = {c}. By choosing from amongst the possibilities in the context we are adding structure and meaning.

Now let us define a new set T = {T}. I'll jump to the chase we can't define T = {T}' - it is meaningless. Infact T is now bound intrinsically to the definition - it depends upon itself. If T fails then the whole definition fails. It is necessary for T must be valid for the definition to be valid. The definition is thus on very artificial legs - it can't fail. My argument is that it can't then suceed in a meaningful way either!

Lets turn to Russel and Whitehead quickly. The set of all sets that contain themselves. We would naturally want to add the set to itself. All appears fine.

But led by that appearance they end up considering the "set of all sets that do not contain themselves". It's the classic problem. If we do not contain the set itself then it belongs to itself, and if we do then it doesn't belong to itself. So it becomes meaningless. Where did the problem begin?

Well my suggestion is that the problem began with the construction of the concept of a "set that contained itself". Being dependent upon itself it can't fail. It becomes a priori, lacking content at best and worse - meaningless. Self-reference leads to errors - avoid.

Yet we apply self-reference all the time. "I think that ...". "I want that...". Now these could be simple statements about the state of our bodies and minds. But this is not what we mean is it? We mean that in some unjustifiable way these thoughts and wants come from nowhere and are justified simply in coming from us. That "I" want something is justification in itself of its value. The fact that we may have been persuaded by an advert or a friend is always over looked. That "I" want it, becomes a reason in itself. I begets I. But the problem as argued above is that such a situation is relying upon meaninglessness. For who really says that "I want what you want"? Only those who have escaped self-reference can say this.

Now I'm not saying that human existence isn't entirely free and every permutation is possible and escaping self-reference is a common event - I'm just refering to that particular state that some humans get stuck in which begins the process of evil. In Hindu mythology the devils all issued from Brahma when he mistook his role as the vessel of existence as the grander (an impossible) creator of all existence. How could something both be existing and create existence? Likewise when humans come to think that they are both judge, jury and executioner they fall into self-justification, self-reference and meaningless - this way lies evil.

On more theoretical territory the same problem plagues Western thought and academia- and via these the concept of economy used in the West and which is trying to be deployed globally. In self-referential terms their exists a point where human knowledge will reign supreme with theories that completely explain reality, where economic systems are tamed and everyone is rich and technology has risen to give humans every freedom they want. But such a dream rests upon something being Absolute - be it the imagined True Universal Reality or Ultimate Economic Goal or even something abstract like Perfect Human Happiness (TUR, UEG, PHH three nice new TLAs)- and that Absolute will either remain Mysteriously-God-Given (MGG) or will require its own explanation. This will either lead us into further investigations (ad infinitum) or will eventually end up completing the circle and explaining itself (my old Ouroboros). It is the Ouroboros that I'm defeating here: if it does end up explaining itself then we have explained nothing and our theory stands next to meaningless as its closest ally.

What humans don't like about the MGG aspect of the universe is that this is where we began our enquiries all those millenia ago - the Universe is an extraordinary place appealing to our understanding but also always suprising and holding hidden depths. More troubling it means that we won't be able to explain ourselves and gain freedom from our place in the world. The world birthed us and where the world goes so we go. A modern eco message in there. However not all is lost because realising this 100% dependence on our circumstances and our inability to escape this is actually the door to freedom that the sages have taught us. These teachings have often been handed down in organised groups called religions which suffer all the problems of status and membership discussed in the blog. But the teachings themselves are free.

Social exclusion

"Some of the chemical pathways for physical pain and pain from social exclusion overlap (MacDonald and Leary, 2005). The physical pain system may have been co-opted to motivate social animals to respond to threats to their inclusion in the group." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exaptation

I would argue it evolved to counter the intrinsic cost of social existence which is the struggle for resources. In the short term social living should be impossible due to the negative effects of status (the "pecking order" that exists to distibute limited resources - lower status individuals die first in times of shortage). But in the long term orgainised groups are highly efficient and evolutionarily beneficial. So it is a genetic advantage to have a mentality which will suffer the struggle for status and

Occurs to me also that a second reason for the "cost" of social inclusion is a test against cheats. If joining and leaving groups was easy then an individual might join a group, cheat, and then leave again to join the next group. This positions the whole CV fiasco as a continuation of the more ancient evolutionary process. To prove "loyalty" a group might demand that a new recruit undergo a test which is so costly that having gained membership it is not worth leaving and joining another group. That test in the business world is the life long process of promotions. However if you leave a company you don't start again at the bottom of the new company so it doesn't quite work. However having gained so many years of skill and experience in a particular field it becomes increasingly costly to change and reskill. Anyway one might justify the behaviour of people around capital as being a test of new recruits to their loyalty of that capital.

If this is true then it would follow in a stable system however that the cost of gaining access to the capital would be of a similar order as the gain from being in control of that capital. One might envisage an individual working their way to the top of a bank. It might take them 15 years if they were very lucky. After this they have the freedom to set themselves any salary they want, fiddle the books however they want, rub shoulders on equal footing with the top of the business class, and be assured that they have the support of the system in everything except maybe the most serious crimes. Now the question is: was the 15 wasted years worth it?

You see there is an easier way to social inclusion. It is not the single-eyed approach of actually gaining social inclusion. This is a very imperfect inclusion because the other side of being included in one group is being excluded from another - what is the meaning of inclusion without exclusion? When we are born we are already included in a very important group, that of existence and within that the inclusion of living things and within that the inclusion of human beings and within that of family (genetically). These are real inclusions that have real meaning and are inescapable - that arise as a matter of being born at all. If we add further inclusions to the list they are only trivial and quite ironically only go to divide the previous memberships that we have. Unhappy with being a member of the human race we seek to divide the human race into subgroups to which we can become included and excluded from. A lot of work, a lot of time, a lot of status struggles and at the end of the day we are worse off than if we had done nothing!

This has been a motto of mine since the beginning of my life but I've been taught to view it as a weakness. I'm beginning to realise its the truth. Do Nothing (NULL) and be happy with that.

Diversity, University and Information

When storing information you can either have a distinct character for every eventuality, or you can limit the characters and instead store information in their spatial orientation. A graph or mono-chrome screen is an excellent example of the latter where monotonous binary points (on or off) can represent vast amounts of information simply by their relative position. A text like I write here is a mixture of 26 characters {A-Z,a-z} and a few punctuation marks e.g. {space,."()}... and on a aside it's interesting in a text how to grammatically produce a list of grammatical marks... actually I think its impossible (a Quine requires another approach to work)... these characters are orientated in 1 dimension to produce a line of text (which is wrapped but that doesn't change the meaning). Then we could have a sentence of Chinese where a greater diversity of characters doesn't even require place order.

So here we see that "essence" and "where and when" are actually inter-changeable!!! When we decide that something is a unicorn we are locating at a certain space and time a "thing" which is different from a "horse".

But exactly the same information is present in such a construction as we would have by limiting the types of thing but increasing the complexity of space and arrangement. Isn't this exactly what science does. We don't need to think of the multi-million number of species that might be in a particular space (unicorns, horses etc) we can think of the 100 or so types of atoms in hugely complex arrangements and "systems". "Arrangement" in then an abstraction of space into time so that states can preceed or postceed one another. This is necessary because without time... well that is a mystery... why do we need "now"? It is something to do with self-reference but can't quite see it.

We can then simplify further into subatomic particles, fields, strings whatever at each stage of simplification the "spatial" arrangement gaining a more sophisticated description. The information is thus preserved.

So very crudely "what", "where" and "when" provide a constant of information and these three components can be transformed one into the other without loss. Nice to see substance blend with location and age. Isn't this what Buddha does also when he says that there is no self or soul or substance unique to things only whetever is caused at a given time and place by prevailing causes and conditions.

(Just self-reflecting I'm probably rehashing in my own stream of thinking insights from relativity that I gained from that audio-book)

Youths n Violence UK

Had a complex situation with one of my tutees. He was asked to a fight yesterday. The fight went ahead I don't know what came of it. Complex because there are two sides to this issue (which is a meta-conflict itself!).

On the one hand there are the straight forward answers that fighting is illegal and the spiritual answer that violence only breeds violence and it achieves nothing.

However the argument put forward by the kids was that unless this guy "gets banged out" he will do it again. He is a known trouble maker and a situation has arisen where he can be sorted out. There is racist stuff involved too so it's an opportunity for the asian lads to make a stand.

I pointed out that this is a racist way of thinking as only racists see the difference between "asian lads" or "white lads". There is no such thing as racism when all people are equal. Unfortunately this argument falls on deaf ears because the establishment in UK is racist in exactly its recognition of racism! Kids have been taught to think in these terms of races and racial equality by the establishment. No progress here.

I also pointed out that it is simpler to ignore the threats and jibes. It takes two to fight so if you back down then there is no fight. I also quoted Lao-Tze that if you stay ordinary you avoid trouble. The answer was that if this guy isn't dealt with things will only get worse and if you back down you look weak you encourage more trouble. Again it is hard to argue with this since the first argument was used by the government in Afghanistan and Iraq and the second in the standard government response to terrorism. No progress here.

One solution offered was to involve the police with this trouble maker. This answer is the most revealing. The kids said that if the police would actually do something they would not fight. But the police won't so they need to do something. I've seen exactly the same thing when I questioned a lad who stole my bike. I asked him to think how he would feel if someone stole his. He said "it hurts" speaking in the present about numerous actual events at school. The main reason for youth gangs and disturbance in UK it seems is that we have a class of people who are outside the law - the children. They therefore feel the need to arm themselves and take care of things themselves. How ironic that the idea of kids not being responsible for their actions has led to kids having to be responsible for justice. You can't argiue with this either.

There are three failures in the thinking of British institutions here which I can't argue with. I had no choice but to let the fight happen.

It also follows from my analysis of "groups" in this blog that a fight is actually a very logical and essential part of the process of group membership and status. These kids are not very smart - they use their fists - smarter people use money, big houses and cars etc, qualifications, property law and general law to exactly the same effect. The institutional violence that exists in the workplace and in the class systems and inequalities of society (the "negative happiness" as I believe it is called) is beyond measure but it is normalised because this is what human society is all about. Again I cannot argue. I can only hope to show them the value of peace and non-violence as a solution in the future.

Ghandi btw I don't believe found the solution of non-violence. Civil disobedience is violence just a passive form. Jesus teaches us to turn the other cheek and forgive. He died without hatred a criminals death. That is the level of tolerance, patience and forgiveness that is required of shanti and ahimsa. We can't see injustice against ourselves if we are to see compassion for others. The moment we start to seek self-preservation and justice for ourself is the moment we lose the battle to peace and non-violence. The very concepts of justice and injustice - the very separating of actors into victims and perpetrators - is born of violence and ill will. I have put the point to the kids and will continue to put the point of which is the bigger man? - the man who takes a hundred punches with indifference or the man who gets angry and protects himself and others from even the first punch?

=== Update 17/10/09

I should trust nature more. Exactly as we would expect in animals the competitors compare each other and only risk engagement if they consider the chance and benefits of winning to outweigh the chance and cost of losing. Battles only occur between equal competitors. The "asian lads" provided a greater show of strength and no fight ever occurred. I often do wonder why we need a law when nature provides its own tried and tested Law. Am I right to consider the "establishment" as just a bunch of gangsters who have a protection racket going (rent/taxes) whose "law" is simply a means of control? These kids/hooligans conducted themselves in a perfectly rational and sensible fashion along the same lines as the governments do... yet one group is working illegally while the other is justified?

This is where the contradictions observed above occur. The establishment follows the Natural Law (of war, state violence etc) while its subjects are supposed to follow an artificial law imposed on them through war/state violence etc (consider modern Iraq was built from a war). The kids it seems do have every "right" in Natural Law to war and violence even if that contradicts the artificial law. The apparent civilised "peace" is then just the result of an "establishment" that is considered so strong that no-one ever squares up to it in fight. We always run away from the "establishment". This would be the process occuring in Iraq where factions are still fighting it out to find who is the strongest establishment. The one the people become most "afraid" of will be the "government". Altho "afraid" is a two edged weapon and we often feel "safe" due to "our" government's fearfulness. This is why governments need enemies so that their intrinsic violence can be seen as a force for good.

Yet as argued at length the establishment doesn't exist! It is an illusion that we create for ourselves with ourselves (since we are the very people who work in the police, army, legal system etc)! The true Law (the Law of God and NULL) is quite above all this for those who would see. I'll see if the kids ever understand that...

Relativity, Self, wave function & Quanta

Pure speculation and I have no foundation in physics but after listening to the opening of the "Fabric of the Cosmos" on audio book I was possessed on waking this morning by this thought:

I admit I got relativity from physics and simply saw its universality beyond motion. Thus rather than velocities being relative, it follows that all things are relative and cease to "be" in an empty universe.

Thus we arrive at the problem of self because Self suggests a self-reference or self-relativity. We don't classically look to other people to find ourself (altho in more sophisticated views we necessarily do). There is a contraiction in self if all things are relative. What is self relative to?

So I came to think of quanta. Relativity doesn't postulate an ontology of discrete entities rather the general rules of space-time manifolds relative to masses.

In Quantum physics there is the general field described by the wave equation, but there is also the collapse and the discrete "entity". In a relative world what is this entity relative to? That is exactly what an "observation" is: a relativising of the wave equation to a particular frame of reference and thus a discrete "self" - which is not really self since it only occurs under relative conditions.

Is that meaninful? Is that the problem? ... he asked so incredibly naively

===

Reading/Listening further it seems Physics always postulates Absolutism. Space-time is Absolute. Apparently Einstein and others didn't like the term relativity because it ain't relativity.

There is something interesting in the relationship between relativity and absolutism. Am I right to postulate that "all things are relative"? Isn't it that relativity itself is relative to absolutism? If you relativise the relative you get the absolute so to speak. And if you seek the absolute truth of the absolute itself you get the relative. Self reference becomes the coin whose sides are relative and absolute.

NULL of course is neither relative nor absolute - isn't it the coin, or the space "between" the two?

Old physics coming back here. Article in Metro still to finish reading but raises the issue of gravitational energy being negative and possibly equal to the positive energy of the universe. Thus the universe adds up to Nothing. I was aware of this as long ago as school so it's not new. Was very recptive to that idea as it mirrored an idea of my own at the time that the universe might arise from the separation of matter and anti-matter - naively not understanding that their sum is still the potential energy required to separate them.

What kind of Nothing is this? It is Zero. Well unfortunately Zero is positioned on the number line, and arises in relation to other numbers and therefore exists within a "theory". While the sum of energy in the universe may indeed be Zero this is kind of like a "coincidence" because it could be otherwise. A theory by definition selects certain values from the infinite possibilities - that is what gives it meaning. For example a theory of how a ball travels through space describes only a locus of points within an infinite solution space. If the solution was all of space it's not a very good theory! But what is evident is that we needed to know the "solution space" (literal "space" in the example) to create a theory. My question always is how do we construct the solution space? This is why Zero is never an absolute answer because it is Zero within a solution space... and the solution space aint Zero - that would be meaningless. So quickly the search for Absolute arrives at the meaningless and that is where NULL comes in. The Mind is large enough to encompass the meaningless. Thus to push the boundaries we have to leave meaning behind. The particular values that we arrive at within solution spaces may have remarkable symmetry and beauty** and may suggest hidden truths to the universe that we simply can't grasp within the theory - but why to an information processing device is Zero any different from Ninety-Nine? The only answer I have seen to that is Occam's: the best theory is also the simplest. If you can predict the motion of a ball with an 20byte algorithm you have a better theory than a 30byte algorithm. Zero is nice because it is 1 bit. But a theory with an answer of 1 is equally nice. But I've just made a new problem because why does size matter... ad infinitum.

**The Symmetry and beauty - the qualities of good theories (especially in physics and mathematics) - would have to be explained by a theory which lacked neither symmetry/non-symettry nor beauty/non-beauty. Clearly this is in the realm of the meaningless. But it illustrates some of the qualities of the "space" we call meaning.

p.s. was intrigued by the "absolute" nature of space-time and of the speed of light. Where does this "absolute" quality come from. It seems to be a implication of the concept of "reality". That things "are" and are "facts" and have discrete values suggests that they have an absolute nature. While that may be relative to something else we just push the boundary of absolute a stage back. The value is relative but exists within an absolute framework. Quantum physics is interesting in this regard... i really need better maths :-(

Of Nothing, Uselessness and Pointlessness

Looking up the Painted Lady life cycle I thought about something unusual...

http://www.ukbutterflies.co.uk/species.php?vernacular_name=Painted%20Lady

No Painted Ladies survive the winter is UK and apparently few return to the continent... it is a one way ticket for most...

In biological terms this is quite logical they escape densely populated continental ecosystems to exploit the free system here in UK; the winter having wiped out the population...

But in terms of "meaning of life" do we say that the Painted Ladies are a failure or a waste of space in biological terms? They won't breed successfully and will pass no genes onto the future... yet their "time" spent in the UK is not a non entity... it is certainly a highlight of the summer here for butterfly lovers.

IF ever I needed a demonstration that human life (at least) escapes the confines of biological determinism here it is. There is no fundamental imperative to breed, or be successful or even to live when it comes to Humans. We have at our finger tips an absolutely incomprehensible freedom which we try to indoctrinate and enforce a shape upon so that we don't have to grasp the meaning of NULL.

It appears more and more with each passing day that the answer to everything is ... . We may fill that space with anything and nothing... it actually makes no difference because if it did then our freedom to determine what filled that space would be limited. If Life has one characteristic it is this indefinable freedom (both empty and full at the same time, both everything and nothing: because if it was otherwise it would be definable; how else can we speak of the indefinable?).

In our current capitalist system built upon a protestant work ethic in which the universe was "made" and time divided into work and rest, we have ample definition of what Life is about. Yet it is relative and arbitrary. There is no rule which says we must live, there is no rule which says we must die. Some people chose life, some commit suicide, but most just let it happen without overly defining what is what. It is Ego which becomes self empowered to chose life or death, but this is not actually life or death which it choses. Life and Death as they truly are, neither come nor go, are neither made nor unmade and there are no rules upon which they are built either. Our existential dread only arises through our persistence in defining ourselves as something made or unmade. Sartre is a name on a book - if he had existential dread it is because he wanted to be famous and so thought of himself as a name on a book: how ironic ;-)

It is certainly a new step for me to synthesise all this recent "work" like this. Looking back: the contemplation in the shower of the relative wealth of receiving a swift death compared with a painful one is the turning point: that even upto death all things are relative pulls to rug completely from any vestiges of absolutism remaining.

A similarly important step was the realisation that production and consumption are exactly the same thing in reality, we only provide these labels relative to our desires. Thus what is production for one person is consumption for another. The example given was building a house. It is consumption because of the use of raw materials. It is production because a house is made. If you built a house for enjoyment - like building a model kit - then we term it consumption and we need to pay for the pleasure. If we did it to produce a house it is production and we would be paid for someone elses pleasure. Thus a foundation stone of capitalism turns out to be a phantasm. What is really going on is that social structures of class etc are informing our view of Human Life to produce a more clinical image of workers and non-workers.

So for those who are ready, it seems the sky of the mind is the limit and for those who are not ready the office or house roof is the limit.

Love & Child

From my enquires, but not experience, the greatest love is reserved for our children. Buddha certainly noted this about his son Rahula.

Obviously this makes sense genetically. We have no genetic relationship with our partner (for genetics requires mixing) so we have nothing to gain from their survival. However our children is the real purpose because they survive our own death and continue this behaviour onwards.

So does it then follow that the "love" we experience for our partner is actually the seeing the partner as the necessary condition for our children? I need this person, we instinctively think, before I can reproduce so they are the missing factor in our producing children, they are thus imbued with the nature of our children and thus we love them.

This is not the true love which is a duty, but that feeling of attraction and unity with. We do both metaphorically and literally bond with our partner since they offer half the genes and in the case of the woman the egg.

Love is different then between men and women. In women who need only the small ingredient of the sperm to kick start the process which otherwise occurs within them love for the man is more shallow but longer lasting since the female will need some support during gestation. The male on the other hand has only a short involvement with the process but therefore owes more to the female for his children - his experience of love ought to be greater I would hypothesise.

Noumenon, NULL, Difference

The previous post is actually really basic... How rich am I? If I look at other people then I can say whether I am more or less rich than them and I can place myself in the pecking order. If I look at myself however then I am as rich as I am - there is nothing else to say. This sounds informative but actually it disguises the NULLness of answer. It is also always true that I am as rich as I am no matter how much wealth I have by comparison with other. So based upon myself I can never feel wealthy or poor... so if I do it is because I am comparing and that is something that wealth or poverty can't cure because no matter how much we have or how much we don't have there is always someone above and below us.... ergo poverty can only be solved in the mind... and this is true for all other things as well!

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This goes for shopping as well. We have a conception of ourself. We place ourself in the ranking. Depending upon our state we may wish to rise or sink on tha ranking so we have desire. Yet having moved we are still in the ranking so the desire hasn't been satisfied. The experience of discovering underneath it all that we are still me.

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n linking to Western Philosophy the point is that noumenon neither exist or do not exist they are NULL to all attempts at knowledge. To my knowledge that counts everyone in the west from Plato to the 1800's out of the game!! Then Hegel (1804) figureheads the escape...

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So when Plato discusses the process of knowledge (via Socrates) he likens it to an impression in wax matching an object. In one way this is very revealing because it shows that knowledge is a negation of the "real" thing. But Plato's error in this analysis is to then match the object and the wax tablet to their own wax tablets and give us knowledge of them too! In his scenario we only have knowledge of the thing known, not the wax tablet and the "real" object as well ... these things are NULL in the event of knowledge. Thus we always escape the third man fallacy because, like Russel and Whitehead's theory of types in Principia, there is a strict control of what is in-context and what is out-of-context, and that which is out of context is NULL.

Its ok then to use the analogy of measurement of things because we are not implying a thing and a meter as separate entities from the measurement - if we try to measure the metre we get NULL.

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Modern philosophy in Structuralism and more recently Strawson has this ideas of difference being the founding force of things - a network without nodes. But I always found this difficult to comprehend because it doesn't address the foundation problem that we are instinctively looking for concrete ontology and noumena. We are told of a network and then that the nodes are secondary - so we just negate the nodes that we already imagined. It seems easier to consider the idea of measurement of things and then the impossibility of measuring the standards.

Relativity, Self-Reference, Subject/Object

So it's back (after a 25 absence) to the conviction that "All things are relative" (or conditional in Buddhist speak).

But we can measure things. Being relative we can say where things lie relative to one another. So it is true that we can say that one person is richer than another, or has a bigger house or car etc. However this alone is not logos. To become logos we need to mix in a "standard" against which all things become relative. So we have the "metre" as the standard of length. Now we can say how things are relative to the metre and we have the practice of measurement we are familar with. Now we feel we can get the "absolute" length of things. Blue whales have been measured at 30 metres long ... fact!

Two things from this: 1) What is the metre, for example, of wealth? 2) How long is a meter?

Taking Q2 first: Because measurement depends upon relativity and comparing, when asked how long is a metre we try and compare a metre with itself (this is both habitual and a logical implication of the practice of measurement). What does our mind come up with? It's a blank. Suddenly a metre loses its solidity - it becomes a blank space with disconnected ends. When we try to put a start and an end on that space we still don't understand how "far" we have travellend between those ends - what sort of answer could be give? What logos is this? This blank is the same blank we get when trying to think about ourselves. This blank is NULL.

So I argue that self-reference is impossible but I realise that it is possible, just not measurable. When something refers to itself it lies outside/inside the relative, comparable world of symbols and logos. The first rule of self-reference club then is that you do not talk about self-reference club - indeed you can't because what symbols could you use to refer or compare oneself to oneself? This is why they say in matters of this kind that there is One because the self measures itself in a ratio of One:One - but this is actually inaccurate. There is not One God for the same reason that 0/0 is not 1 and NULL/NULL is not 1. Self does not measure self - you can't talk about it. It isn't a rule either actually since "rules" are measurements. That is why rulers measure distance and justice!

So what is the standard of Wealth? It can be chosen and become a custom and norm and a rule - the UN has done exactly this. We accept a standard of wealth, but it is no more real than a metre. It is simply a socially accepted way of doing things, a custom, a bit of culture - a rule in the game of measurement that we do.

And, what is Absolute then in this view? I spoke already of God and NULL. These are the Absolute Judges the measures of all things in antiquity. What of them today in the world of different standards like the metre? Well objectivity is the world of "external" measures where things are put side by side to see how they rank. Subjectivity is the name we give to the "inside" where something tries to relate to itself - subjectivity is then a nullification of objectivity.

While objectivity gives the sense of knowledge in that we can give a symbolic expression of something, I know that Blue-whales can grow to 30metres but I don't actuallty know how big this is. Someone usually says that this is the the length of 3 double-decker buses, not because we wanted to know that a double-decker bus is 10meters long, but because we have stood next to a double-decker bus and so we can compare the whale to ourselves. So how big then are we? Protagoras once said that "Man is the measure of all things"; I prefer "each man is the measure of all things"; when Man is asked to measure himself with himself, Man gets the answer NULL.

Yet NULL is not zero and it is not something. When they say we will become Nothing after death this is neither a ceasing to exist nor a beginning of some other existence - it is NULL, neither up nor down, neither full nor empty. I realise that the translation of sunyata in Buddhism which is usually emptiness is equally fullness cos really it means NULL. When NULL comes to play objective measurement is completely thrown into disarray. What was big when compared to small is now small against NULL and vice versa because NULL is both big and small objectively. I am both big and small - against a mountain I feel very small, but I look down at the ant following its intricate map and suddenly I am very big. How big am I? The best we can say (inaccurately) is that I am "me" sized but its better to leave it as NULL. What is perhaps a suprise then is that after death we are NULL sized and before death we are NULL sized - that is exactly the path to the deathless and ever lasting life which the religions speak of and which the objective world of metres and worldly laws mocks and crucifies. It is not that we are the same before and after death it is just there is no comparison - that too is NULL.

The Logos, the Dao, the Dharma etc are ironic then which I hadn't quite appreciated before. logos with a small letter and dharma with a small letter actually mean the opposite. I don't know about dao (it means path or way usually I think). logos are the things which are measured. dharma is sanskrit of "things". Its a deliberate irony then to use these words for the Absolute because it is quite the opposite. Logos is NULL against which all things have no measure and when you try to measure of compare with NULL you get the opposite of what you expected - it dumbfounds the comparing mind - the mind which is not at ease with itself and NULL. The Dharma is everything but a "thing" - I never understood the deliberate irony before. The middle-way to enlightenment and liberation requires everything but things and measurements (Buddha is meticulous in warning us away from extremes without posing any new "things" like limits etc to measure against).

Now where I got stuck all those years ago was in question like "green". How do we measure green? Doesn't green seem to occupy a place all by itself. It is certainly a lot different from simple distances. Yet there are standard colours (7 at last count) and some extras and we speak about all others using these measures - blue-green etc. It is when we compare green with itself that it becomes NULL and we are left dumbfounded about what green really is. Because green comes in areas rather than a distance I think this is what seems to give the problem its extra piquance. And so of emotions and feelings do we compare how we feel from day to day? Do we try and measure these things to find out if we are happy or not? Do we read magazines to try and find out how to be "happier". Yes we measure these against the standards also. But what is sadness compared to itself? and what is happiness compared to itself? NULL. Mahayana Buddhism (unlike Theravada) says that they are then the same - this is another comparison and not strictly accurate - but then they aren't different either - there are incomparable as is God.