28/29 May 2009 - self (important)

Last night and this morning a couple of clearer insights...

I realised that my observation ages ago of only being able to see other mountains from atop a mountain, but not being able to see ones own mountain as is also poigned out by Pigmalion that - eyes need some distance for us to see things, is a good analogy of the non-existence of self.

The same observation occurs in Heideggar where he observes that Being hides itself in the presencing of things. The back light so to speak shining through the screen of the world yet hiding itself totally in the things.

We can only see things so the "back light" does not register directly in our minds as a thing only the vaguest sense.

Hui-Neng goes further when he says that the world can only be there because the mind is empty. He avoids any suggestion of the mind or Self being something by analogising it to an empty space into which the world is projected. This is the famous over-flowing cup in Zen - how can it take more tea if it is already full?

In Hinduism the same is expressed in the Upanishads as Atma (soul/self) being identical with Bramhan (the world). This has an interesting further implication that what each of us think of as ourself and have a different name to is actually the same as the "outer" world and also the same as opne another!

None of these are quite right because the self is not a thing and not being a thing it can't be separate from anything either. Yet as pointers to where to look for the self they are excellent.

Waking this morning and touching the oak tree in my sanctuary on the flood plain I came to think about the sense of such rituals. It is only me and an oak tree I thought. What is the use of saying thank you to a piece of wood?

But here is the problem. I can see an oak tree and I assume I am there, but what exactly am I? In the panic that arises from not being able to see ourselves - like a child who realises looking around that he has lost sight of his parents - we cling and identify with things to satisfy that desire to have something solid to call "me". Thus when I think it is only me and the tree it is wrong to think that there is a tree solid and secure and next to the tree is "me" solid and secure because this is not what is there! Actually there is only me-and-the-tree as a single complex of interactions, inter-dependence and relativity. I can't be separated from the tree anymore than I can step down from my mountain and still have the view of other mountains. In this sense "the tree" is proof of me; but not me as a separate thing like the tree but "me" whose only evidence is the tree. It is not that "I am the tree" but that the presence of the tree is because of me, in its purest form is me.

Such freedom to see the self as entirely without characteristics to be entirely the creator of events and the world around us is heady stuff and only for spiritual adults. I am yet a child and still grasp for self as a solid secure thing. Without a solid self questions like "what am I?" and "what am I going to do?" seem to panic and fall into disarray. We think erroneously that I can be anybody, or I can do anything: our imaginations drift without anything to fixate upon. The single story we have built of ourself becomes vague and we feel we lose security, solidity, grounding, peace and happiness. This all happens because we are not ready to accept emptiness or non-self. We still seek solid answer to perpetual questions like "who am I?". Freedom is not being ourself, or anybody - it is not being responsible for this action or that action - it is freedom from such thinking. It is not however being no-one and irresponsible - these are juvenile rejections of the normal concepts. Freedom is freedom from the concepts both positively and negatively.

Rituals enable us to calm the free-mind by getting it to fixate on solid things again. Ironically only when it is calm and secure is it ready to approach understanding of its own freedom from these rituals! Peace is the foundation and if we seek security then we must be given that to find peace - altho it will be an impure temporary peace until "we" gain liberation from ourselves.

Now in objective thinking we think that while we presence things by observing them they continue to "exist" when we are not present. So the mountains are "real" mountains that we are simply seeing by being there.

This is correct and incorrect. The insight is that any thoughts we have are being presenced themselves by "us" having them. Any arguments we have and any learning or memories or theories are all further mountains that we can see from our mountain. If we walk away and still claim the mountains are there actually we have simply walked onto another mountain where pictures of the mountains are visible. This is a very hard thing to argue and I'm out of time. But as Buddha would say this particular enquiry does not lead to freedom anyway.

SRH (self-reference hypothesis)

Was thinking about a surgeon performing an operation on themselves. A minor operation they could do with a mirror. But an operation that involved fixing something "essential" would require writing a list of instructions for a student or a robot and then go under anaestetic. The brave surgeon may even do open heart surgery upon themselves giving instructions on what was happening from a VT screen.

But what if it was an operation on the mouth or nervous system or eyes. Operations on features of the information or communication system compromise the surgeons role as instructor. Then it starts to become an "essential" operation because they cannot effect it upon themselves.

What if it was a deep neurological operation to fix fault with central brain functions say for example judgement itself? Could a surgeon with a faulty brain perform an operation to fix themselves? This is the essence of the SRH.

Hegel argues similarly when he put paid to Kant and says what use is there in investigating the validity of Reason? If Reason is valid then we may as well just use it and if it is faulty then our Reasoning would be faulty anyway so it is pointless investigating the validity of Reason. Thus sprung up Phenomenology (well I recon anyway). He likened it to a man with a telescope trying to use the telescope to see if the telescope was faulty. If using a mirror the images were faulty then how would he be able to see the telescope clearly to diagnose things?

So maybe the proof lies in the notion of "faults" or "problems" in a system. Rather than a system trying to express itself or refer to itself, how can a system refer to a fault, error in inaccuracy in itself?

Now if it can't detect fault then it is reasonable to argue that it can't detect correct either. This is what I recognised during primative AI experiments - an AI machine with 100% feedback processes only meaningless signals. This is not a cause of cosciousness as has been speculated both by professionals and amateurs like friends and myself. If feed back occurs it is non-miraculous processing of information encoded from sources that are both the machine and the environment with no inherent distinction between self and other.

Meaning as has been discovered and rediscovered the world over depends upon context and inter-dependence with the environment. How can there be self and other in an inter-dependent relationship?

When we talk of a "problem" we are a priori comparing the state with an external state. This highlights more clearly what happens when we consider a "normal" state - which involves the same process.

A self-reference involves comparing something with something else but never "itself".

So to identify a problem a system must have an long term recorded state of what is "correct" and a current recorded state of "what is". Differences between these trigger the new state "problem". (This is crude and Platonic but we are talking machines here).

Now how would such a machine identify problems in this mechanism?

What is Life?

Sure I've mentioned this before but back to reexamine obvious points about life...

We take a cell from the body of multicellular organism and keep it in a petri-dish. Is this cell alive?

It seems to be accepted that "Life" involves the following 7 things: respire, feed, excrete, grow, move, sensitivity, reproduce.

Well unless it is an extremely specialised cell then it probably still has the capability to do these 7 things.

But if each cell is "alive" then is the organism living that is made from them? i.e. a repeating point in this blog: is the organism anything other than the cells that comprise it?

The note I made to myself when a student inspired this was: is life within the cells or between the cells?

They do not classify viruses as living because they don't fulfill the characteristics: that is viruses taken separate from the machinary of a cell. But in association with a cell they become involved with these essential characteristics albeit temporarily. So what of commensal organisms that co-exist like lichens or interdependent organisms like predator and prey or parasitoids? By themselves they perform the characteristics only in so far as they have items upon which to feed. A propensity to feed is nothing without food. So to fulfill feeding organisms depend upon environment and community. Can a "living thing" be isolated on the petri dish and the "Life" studied as somehow being "contained" within its cell walls or epithelium. Can any of these characteristics arise within the membrane? Or is it between the membrane and the environment that it occurs?

This is a perennial problem in thought being applied to "Life".

Answers from a monk

Was extremely lucky to be invited to have lunch with a renown Theravada monk in London on Saturday. Had the opportunity to get answers to a number of questions... here is the gist...

Asked about the issue of desire he replies that holding is not the same as grasping. I've read this many times and admitted to him that I still don't get it. His illustration however does give a clear way of seeing the difference: that to hold something and to grip it are quite different activities.

From this he distinguished Desire from Thirst (Tanha). Desire is by itself innocuous. It is when the Ego becomes involved that it become "me desiring" and "me having" and "me not-having". This is when desire becomes Tanha.

The issue of Ego raised its head again and again. It is very clear to me now that indeed this is the central issue. He confirmed the idea that when we are no longer viewing things through ego then no-one gains and no-one loses: this is the key to liberation.

He introduced another idea from Vipassana meditation. When we experience something normally we get involved with that thing directly - this is happening (to me). He suggested tempering this response with a step back so that we identify not with the experience directly but with somebody who has started having the experience and will ride through the experience and see the experience decay - this gives us a greater firmness in the face of disturbances. This way we get the space and freedom from experience needed to develop liberation.

It is good to experience the "intensification" of taking precepts. I questioned this because I feel enormous pressure when I have taken precepts.

He very graciously confirmed that I was on the right track so that was encouraging. You're in the desert stage to borrow from Christianity he said. Apparently my 40days will end at some stage but I need to continue and double efforts.

The issue of women was the other big discussion. Unwise life is suffering he reiterated although most cannot face this fact of life. Even he admitted that he never suspected the nature of truth - it really is quite different from what we are brought up to believe. Furnished with the "wrong" ideas we make the wrong decisions in life and so we suffer.

I'm almost there on this subject. He used exactly the words I have used in this blog - that of coming of the addictions and drugs. The rational mind can easily see that physical and even emotional and spiritual fixation on a "sexual being" is a myth yet itis extremely habitual and intoxicating. Beliefs like "mutuality", "companionship" and "love" only help to obfuscate what is in reality only a heady mix of drugs and illusions.

Studying Romeo and Juliet for GCSE tutoring I have been brought into the centre of the debate on whether it is a tragedy or not. I immediately side with the traditional view and even see the story of "my muse" in this because there is the belief that we were ment to be together - even her sister subscribes to this view. Yet some argue that the story is simply an unfortunate sequence of events with no destiny or inevitability. I still wonder how I knew that things with "my muse" were going to end in tragedy the moment I saw her - like I was reliving something from the past. I guess maybe we relive lives again and again until we take the choice which leads out of the bottle. Also knowing that she was in mortal danger I now know is not so rare - a girl at old work knew a friend had a suspect heart attack last week and was trying to get in contact with him through me: such psychic connections are common and don't mean a lot in reality.

So the key is this issue of ego. If I'm honest I can see this now. The suffering in "my muse" was the belief that "I deserved her" and worse that "other didn't" (ok so they cheated on her and treated her with little respect but this casualness is what she actually wanted!) - that is not the problem : the problem is "my" ego and the sense that there was substance to all this beyond the sequence of events and phenomena that I experienced. Desires I had and have, but whether these get satisfied has no bearing on reality. It is not like "loving" her was like food or water. The venerable confirms this obvious truth. What hurts and what sends people to their graves in absurd myths like portrayed in a "Thousand and One Nights" is Ego and the "grasping" so hard that we end up exhaused and unable to live. The holding and the not-holding are harmless.

This links now with a discussion with another very wise venerable years ago. I questioned the difference between having and not-having and what "real" difference there was. There is no element or substance called having or not-having so what is the real difference? Can we tell what we have and what we don't have by any tests or experimentation? No it is simply an idea and a belief. The venerable was extremely impressed by the questioning but what he didn't know was that I was gonna have to struggle with the practice of the theory for so long... and that because of the delusions of drugs and habitual emotions and thoughts that surround the issue of possessing a partner.

The difference between having and not-having is simply ego. It is not a real material thing at all. Those who think they have a lot are the same as those who think they have nothing - it is only the fairy-tale that they are thinking that makes them different. This is what it is so tragic to see a person defending "their" property with their life and another trying to take someones property with their "life" - they can only clash horns because the other person has horns to clash - without their mutual relationship and behaviour there is no fight and no struggle.

This is the conditional nature of the world; that we are each caught up in "dramas" (to use the monastics word) that bring people together in a million different stories and roles and which create the bussle and turmoil of the world when at root there is really very few things to do and to spend time on.

Why are we so busy? we speculated that it was to escape the suffering of the last cycle of errors. This is how it perpetuates. Sooner of later we must just stop and takle stock of the situation and plot a new and orrect path. So will I? He recommends a 7day retreat... am I ready? That has been the question since the start!

On-going status of zoological taxonomy...

http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/42569/181/

Meditation on Shaykh 'Abd al-Qurnah

"Shaykh 'Abd al-Qurnah: Egyptian dance." Online Photograph. Britannica Student Encyclopædia. <http://student.britannica.com/ebi/art-1427>.

This mural is dated to c1400BC (about 100 years before Tutankhamun). Now I'm no scholar of Egyptian art but the clarinet player looks distinctly "modern" in her portrayal ... not like the stylised images we are used to. The main figures at the wedding (not in shot here) are all stylised. So is it that we see the impact of The Tradition on ancient egyptian art rather than "primitavism".

What I mean is that we might interpret Egyptian Artists as not having been brought up on still-lifes and realism. It might be that they were unequipped to paint things according to modern conceptions of space and perspective. We know it wasn't until the Renaissance that perspective worked its way into painting in Europe. So we might dismiss it as primitive painting. But here in this painting the artist demonstrates another technique with the face and body painted obliquely - altho the legs are within the usual style.

Is it that rather than ability, painter's expectations of what they were to paint was dictated by the expectations of their audience and by style and 'tradition'? Painting has a cultural utility and exists within a culture rather than being some sterile objective representation of a reality - the naive view.

It was the Greeks who began to seek "realism" and this fits with other intellectual pursuits of the time and what came to be called science: the aligning of the mind with apparent reality. In the minds of Hippocrates and others the Truth lay not in social conformity but in eternal rules like maths. Ironically of course he creates a cult and a dogma of reality which leads to the death of one of his students. Society still remained supreme.

Certainly the meaning of artifacts can only be understood within the culture for which and by which they are created. One doesn't need to be a genius to see that this medaeval map of the world isn't very interested in the Longitude and Latitude of places or even the distances between them. These concepts hadn't even been invented. It is far more interested in a view of the world with Christ as over seer and centre of the world. Jerusalem is undoubtedly at the centre and everything else surrounds this centre of the world showing its relative significance. Who cares how far it is or even what direction it is as long as we know we are not forgotten by God!

So when people find artifacts from the current world what will they think of us? Will they say ah ha here were a people who knew the True Way of Life. Look at their art and their science! Look how they understand the facts of reality and the pure unillusioned vision they have of Life.

This is the question I have pursued for a very long time. It is hard to answer because I am from this culture and this time. Of course I think we are right and we are true and of course what we do makes sense and what other people do or have done is mysterious and odd. It is exactly this coincidence that I find what we do so sensible that immediately makes me doubt its validity! Exactly as I cannot believe that the UK has somehow always fought on the side of Good!

Can I make a bold step forward here. The sense that things "makes sense" arises only when we are members of the culture and the society that finds utility in them.

But quick SRH check. Such a statement must be independent of all society. So there are further territories to explore here!

Travellers and the Law

Just caught the lead story in the Reading Chronicle yesterday about the successful eviction of travellers from all Reading public land. The article was really shocking (to me at least) in its one-eyed fascism. I can vaguely understand success at the extermination of rats from one's house, but the same mentality is being adopted by the council and the paper is supporting it. It was not so long ago when articles likes this reported the exclusion of Jews from society and the people supported that also!

Sadly this is the true nature of most Homo sapiens. We are primarily an ectosocial species. People who do not "fit" are excluded, incarcerated - or more humanely executed.

Two things to deduce from this.

Firstly it means that the primary reason for conforming is not because society is correct, but because of the cost of being excluded. Exclusion of that which does not fit means that in reality we live in a society that is born of fear and is extremely fragile and open to disintegration. This is a far cry from the myth that we have of our society being free and progressive. In the West - at least - we still live in medaeval times!

Secondly their must be the belief that those who have "bought" land are the ones who truly "belong" there. Thus we open the door to anyone buying a house in Reading and immediately having the same status as those whose families have lived in Reading for centuries. It also means that people whose family has lived in Reading for centuries who have family and friends here, whose memories are furnished with the sights, sounds and landmarks of Reading - whose grandparents recall stories of Reading - the moment they do not "possess" territory here immediately cease to belong here!

So the Travellers only need to purchase some land to 100% belong to Reading, that is all the council are interested in. While the people of Reading who are reported to have complained about the travellers are probably just being Xenophobic. Yet the people of Reading don't see that they only officially "belong" here simply because they "possess" a territory. They can experience compulsory purchase from the same authority any time and suddenly over night no longer belong to Reading. They will say that they have been brought up here and so are true Readingers, but council paperwork isn't designed to understand or protect humanity. It follows equally then that maybe a traveller has family and friends in Reading so why do they not belong here?

Its a very mixed up and ill thought out situation.

I argued this briefly with the grandmother of a tutee. She said the problem was travellers causing a disturbance and a mess. This is a problem if anyone does it, and something for which each person traveller or otherwise gets fined and punished. She then said that the problem was that the travellers were beyond the law since the law required an address.

So the real problem is that councils can't bill people or hold them accountable if they do not have an address. That is why travellers are so hated by the establishment it seems.

Given that the establishment has a particular ideological issue with travellers we can assume that much of the bad press is actually propaganda - exactly as the Nazis created propaganda against the Jews (famously a nomadic people also). The parallels are not just rhetoric of my own but frighteningly close.

The solution seems to require a deep piece of rethinking of Anglo-Saxon law, and this was done and stupidly rejected by the travellers themselves.

The Poll Tax does seem to be a fair and reasonable system. Why shouldn't each person be accountable and contribute to the council in which they live? This combined with an identity card system means that each person can be accountable as themselves. We vote as individuals, we shop as individuals, we are obsessed with living as individuals. Why then do Anglo-Saxon individuals reel so much from being held up as individuals?

Much of the conspiracy theory material that exists - the stuff that is afraid of the New World Order - is clearly counter-rhetoric against the idea of society. We in the individually obsessed West interpret Society as simply another set of individuals seeking to limit our own individuality. What such thinking lacks is an understanding of human beings as first and foremost an inter-connected, inter-dependent Society.

So if anglo-saxon law treated individuals as such then we would gain freedom from "property" and the physical objects that surround us. The "the people" could have what they want which is true belonging. A man from Reading can be easily known - he speaks like the people of Reading; he has long memories of Reading; he has family and friends in Reading; he has a deep affection for Reading (in that he has been affected by Reading), altho maybe expressed through a hatred if his experience is bad; he feels at home when he comes back to Reading. A man from Reading may live in a caravan, a street corner, a semi-detached; a palace - these adornments however do not make him either from Reading nor a Man.

A small change this may seem but it drives to the root of the ironic lack of freedom that we experience in our society.

One tutee I teach expressed the illness of our society. Everything that happens leads to eBay or the shops in search of new things. The clothes he wears, the haircut, the toys; everything around him must be attended to because it is upon these that he judges himself. If his hair is too long he thinks this makes a difference to himself. To me however I can see that hair or no hair: what difference does it make. Altho it makes one big difference: we can tell that the people who care about their hair are either: intelligently attentive to and creative with the social norms; or lost so that they must find themselves in externalia. It is not always clear which people are - but the latter is so dangerous that it is worth messing up the former to ensure we know ourselves. Many monks importantly shave their heads - this is for exactly this reason.

So it seems to me that the UK law must change urgently to save this nation and allow people to be themselves rather than surround themselves with material features of the economy that they are required to hold simply to be allowed to be themselves!

Another point from the article is the council's self imposed responsibility to "protect" public spaces. But protect from who? The public! The travellers are automatically excluded from being members of the public - what are they then? It seems I don't understand the concept of "public". Public is a controlled concept that is designated by the council. As indeed Private is a controlled state designated by the Law. When people call something private they misunderstand that this is only Private because the Law (someone else) says so!

I always thought in all this that the Planet was here long before people and will be here long after we are extinct and all of us are together equally responsible for what happens. Whether we join together in councils are not, and draw up rules and regulations or not - none of these temporary rules distract from the funadmental Law that we live together on this planet and what each of us does effects everyone - councils or no councils.

Autoself

Looking in a latin dictionary I see that "auto" means self. Ah ha I think now I see more clearly the fascination I have had with automatic mechanisms and computers ... it is the dream of the ghost in the machine!

An automatic mechanism , a robot, a computer program that runs itself is a very exciting idea: it alludes to the existence of "self" as a discrete entity. It is the soul made almost tangible in metal and silicon. This was the goal of a lot of my time as a child: making intelligent machines - or working out how to do it at least. I failed, but not without realising that it was impossible. Understanding why it is impossible is more subtle.

The problem lies in this notion of "self". It is impossible to make a self. Even a mother's biology doesn't make a self. Buddha explains very clearly and unequivocally that such an entity does not exist. So what does exist?

The problem is that we like to imagine "self" as discrete and self-contained - separate from the surrounding world and environment. An intelligent machine is not just a machine that responds to its environment - that is simply the processing of inputs into outputs. We imagine that one day we will build a personality whereby the machine will have gained something that is separate from the stream of inputs and separate - most importantly - from "us" the makers.

It is not the machine that we are building but really an extension of ourselves - a negation of ourselves, another person... and that is where the project fails. We can't build an entity that is distinct from us in "personality" and "self" because even we don't possess such a thing! The machine will always be an entity intricately involved with its surroundings like we ourselves are.

If machines ever get personalities it will be because they take part in the "human world" so completely that they can take part in the myths and stories that populate life and in so doing will gain the myth of self, personality and soul.

Using Python, Microsoft Speech and the AIML module I linked the speechbot Alice to the input from the recognition engine and had a crude (an inaccurate) buddy to talk to. The illusion was incredibly powerful having a voice return meaningul responses to my own speech. It is a simple game (altho a bit more complex than football) but one that almost allows me to believe that there is a person there. It is dreams that we speak of when we speak of me and you.

Knitting

My mother teaches me knitting this weekend. Once a legal requirement of all Englishmen. So I'm onto my 9th line and I'm meditating on the work...

Time was when people throughout the land would have been involved in this slow and time consuming activity. Having just watched the first part of the new BBC series 'The Incredible Human Journey' (which is skirting around the edges of profound Occidentalism - she refers to "us" as the non-African peoples and also as "us" being Modern Humans - obviously the tribes that weathered the 100,000 years in what is now Africa are just as Modern as the diaspora that developed "outside" Africa - what is in a location anyway?) I'm thinking about where what we call loosely "life" began. "Get a life", Americans say but their notion of "life" has evolved over a very long time. Once "life" involved knitting...

So imagine the scene by a fire under an animal hide tent of a woman separating goat flax and spinning it onto a bobbing and a man taking thread and knitting, children playing with sticks in the dirt: all "living" out the "traditional" ways that have been handed down by "ancestors": both doing what is called "living". They sing songs maybe about knitting, imagine the time when they were children living in the midst of this traditional practice.

Is wealth being created? Is the knitted fabric wealth? Is the shell of a snail wealth? It is excreted by metabolism, but the same metabolism that moves the snail and responds to stimulii and feeds and reproduces: why separate the shell as wealth from the reflex reaction to avoid falling off a leaf? Likewise is the fabric excreted from this organism called man any more wealthy than the songs and the time spent meditating and sharing in an ancient tradition. Is a fish drawn from the sea more wealthy than a fish swimming free? The man separated from his surroundings and his traditions is like the fish on the fishmonger's slab ready for sale. So imagine the group "living" out their existence: it itself is wealthy, and while the coming of the winter may hasten their knitting and make fools of those who do not obey The Tradition, it is The Tradition that is life as much as the water that the fish swims in, without which it would die from collapse of its gill surfaces.

Come the upper class capitalist and his machine to "save labour". What of the knitters? They have their Tradition evaporated and their "life" ends. For the better says the capitalist for now they are free from laborious labour and the machines can make 20 times the volume of fabric. That argues the capitalist will make clothes so plentiful and cheap and thereby multiply the wealth of the people. So we sit around the fire as before and continuously change our clothes for there is nothing left to do. The Tradition becomes a tradition of changing our clothes. We'll have this colour or that colour etc etc.

Is this change of any benefit to anyone? I don't see it. It is just change.

Maybe they argue we have more time for "other" things. But what is there in "life" but Tradition?

But the real problem is that the extra wools that are made by machines "belong" to the capitalist not the people of the Tradition. They lose their tradition, and they lose the raw product.

The snail no longer has to travel for food, it no longer has to make its shell, it no longer has to breed: it is all done by machine. But, it doesn't own any of the things that the machine makes! A wedge is forced between the snail and its "means of living".

"Means of Living" now becomes a profoundly important concept. Once upon a time The Tradition meant that everything flowed smoothly - Life was Tradition and Tradition was survival and survival was Life. Now survival is precarious and "means of living" becomes separated from Life itself. Jesus says of the birds - look how their father feeds them... so too once did the Tradition feed us. But The Tradition got broken and it only feeds the half now.

"Means of Living" means "Work" and we have the birth of the modern concept and the confused incomplete idea of life as it stands for people today.

How can "Work" afford us any sense of existence or Life? How can wearing the products of machines enable us to exist? How can we construct a Tradition from the physical matter that we can buy? Sub-cultures and fashions pop up and whither like seeds on barren soil because on this substrate nothing can grow and people cannot Live. We are fish who removed from the river who lie in the desert surviving on water purified by machines and sold by the litre.

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Looked up knitting it's actually quite recent only C2-3 A.D. And this points to another feature of The Tradition things never changed. Its amazing that a particular way of making flint tools will have been concerved for thousands of years. We can't even remain satisfied with a form of communication for more than a decade these days. Maybe we're in a transition stage in human evolution and we'll stabalise in the technology and soceity we are heading - the intermediate stages we call progress now never making it into the fossil record. Or maybe it really was conservatism - people were happy, the tools did the "job" (expectations set by The Tradition) so why change it? Or what we call conservative was massive difference to people who made do with so little. When all you have is sticks, stones and bones maybe diversity looks quite small to those who are used to mobile phones, laptops, palmtops, desktops, blackberrys (where actually there isn't much difference either).

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In the 2nd part of the series the Occidentalism continues where she asks why the "orientals" look so different. Different from what? The dominant race of Homo sapiens sapiens is actually the Mongoloid - the question is why do the rest of us look so different! Caucasoid is the other prevalent race (majority of those in America and Eurasia). The program also skimmed on the answer to this. Sexual selection was the answer that I got convinced by when I studied this at school. Since then and knowing human beings better I think racism is the real answer. Population bottlenecks will result in dramatic selection of genes resulting in distinct changes to the gene pool. Humans being violently territorial and endo-social (I use this to refer to social behaviour that is reserved for kinsmen as opposed to ectosocial where we welcome strangers) will use these differences of appearance to segregate upon. You can imagine people with blond hair for example being viewed as strangers and killed or thrown out of communities. When tribes enslave one another these differences of appearance will then become status symbols as is seen today with Indians trying to look like the enslaving Western members of their own broad-race! Its less romantic than sexual selection but seems to fit better the bloody and agressive terratorial history of Homo sapiens sapiens.

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Part 3 had me thinking. The rise of Erectus over Neanderthals was put down to greater community and places art as a key feature in this.

It also traces argiculture to Göbekli Tepe in Turkey. It is without doubt an important step in mankinds evolution to have turned away from hunter gathering. It opens up the way of life that we have today of sedentary settlement; of fixed property, houses and trading. The creation of fixed stone temples as far back at 10,000BC is evidence of the beginning of this way of life as is the astonishing fact that DNA markers in all modern wheat can be traced to populations of grasses in this area.

What I was left thinking was the contemporary modern mind set of this being "progress" and the triumphant start of the party that we are all invited to.

Certainly modern populations are only possible because of this change of lifestyle. 6 billion people set into hunter gatherer life styles would decimate the planet and starve in the process. We are stuck down this road now.

But what I have had to work to recover is the point of this blog that while this may have been a very ancient way of life that has been developed and adopted it is not "progress" anymore than the peregrin with its sharp beak, sharp vision and speedy flight has progressed over the modest finch with its stout beak, poorer eye sight and ambling flight. They are adapted to different environments.

Western man has entered into something of a feedback loop since taking charge of his own environment so dramatically. It is not that we are free from environment only that we command more obviously our environment. And why do we do that? it is because of pressure from within ourselves and from greater environmental pressures outside. So nothing has changed absolutely.

Much to write but I've run out of time.

Of Bridging the gulf of Sexuality

So my celebacy is in disarray. It seems that the next period will be exploring allez instead of arretez as I have called it before.

The problem to recap. Sex is great there is no doubt in this. But it doesn't cum without its drawbacks ... phnar phnar etc etc (why does oblique reference to sex bring such endless amusement?). Sex costs... a lot! Actually it costs us our lives; and reverse also, our eventual loss of life drives us to reproduction and sex. If we can measure the size of the force to reproduce we can think about it having been set to ensure, with enough certainty, that we will propagate. If we never did there would be no people here today (anthropic principal). Obviously the force is not infinite - we have to eat and attend other matters also which condition the possibility of reproduction. Reproduction being the meaning of life was the conclusion I came to at school. But I have begun to question the ultimate wisdom of reproduction in this blog ... what, for example, happens if we all reproduce too much? The right-wing answer is that the richest will survive and the poorest will die. But what if the damage to the environment is irreversable? This 'bacteria-in-a-petri dish' view of Life is clearly highly ignorant. For cellular automata and genes yes maybe this is how things are, but for dialectical beings like humans who can empathise, sacrifice and celebrate the success of the "Other" its an ill fitting jacket - albeit a jacket that we seem to be forcing ourselves to wear today.

Sex costs both socially and ecologically. Population pressures causing competition are highly destructive to wealth, standard of living and well-being. Old age, illness and death (Sakyamuni Buddha's three obersvations about Life) are all caused primarily by population pressure. Some cells, by way of example like amoeba, are immortal: death exists in others; it is not universal. This type of death I suppose must be contrasted with catastrophic death in a car accident or like. Buddha lamented the former more than the latter because it was the inevitability that shocked him - if we died only in "accidents" we have choice and freedom. While I digress there is the other type of death which all things exhibit that of ware and tear (and crying too) - the impermanence which was the main point He identified.

Individually sex costs because it binds us to childcare and capital. Few women I imagine are interested in males who lack territory enough to support children. Showing off and gesturing his abilities to accumulate and hold territories becomes the males main role in life. Nothing is fixed it seems as human females have taken to accumulating territory also - but I'm almost convinced this is a malappropriation of badly thought out democratic principles of equality which are absurd. How can a good doctor and a bad doctor be the "same"? Maybe the opportunity to be rid of dependence on males has been taken ... and the next step? rid of the dependence on other things all together... except we die without the plants making oxygen etc etc. So dialectical relationships between the male and the female seem to me to remain bar ill prepared attempts to irradicate the other half.*

My own quest has swayed far from the sexual dialectic also. The multiple loss of "my muse" - firstly in the failure of start a relationship and secondly more final in death - left me with little choice but to back off. I backed off from her, sexuality, beauty and relationships all together - the lot were intertwined. How long has it taken to marlin apart the separate threads of Life?!

I realise today as I have turning around that it was a mistake (and a long standing myth) to become hung up on a "single" individual. Marriage I believed in line with the myth was about the union of matching halves into the whole. And, while this is true - there is no essential existence to the parts! Male is made in its relationship with female and vice-versa. To be paired with someone yesterday does not entail that we will be paired today and tomorrow. To love "forever" is a well understood description of what the lover blindly and with irony only feels today. How can we know the future? That which is based upon today stays in today. I had rules with my muse to keep nothing. All poems and stories were written for the day and despatched by post never to be seen again. It is only weakness in the face of tomorrow that has seen me crawling back into the ashes of yesterday to try and resurrect what was. What I dreamed would be, I did yesterday, and what I hoped would be today, died yesterday also: why carry it with me today? Why carry this girl, these girls with me? Even were I married to any of them I wouldn't carry them so. Maybe this is the joy of being single - it affords us the possibility of carrying the memories of women. Being married we are free and carry no-one because they are walking with us.

So I argue for allez. Yet do I really stake the heart of arretez? Is sexuality something to be expressed in reproduction (of children and production) and its capital? Must yin seek the middle between these ways in the arms of my yang? OR is it still possible to rise above the limitations of mortal contact and be the embrace itself?

You and me,
When we touch:

Where?

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* A second genetically stable strategy existing in humans encourages EPCs (extra-pair copulations) as they are called in evolutionary biology. A female tied to a territorial male who can ensure capital for the welfare of her children loses nothing by breeding with other males. In fact bearing children by opportunistic males is a good strategy because it increases the mix of her genes in the next generation and children born to EPC are more likely to spread their genes by this strategy. The territorial male who actually loses by this strategy is therefore forced to take very strong action against males trying EPC and also the females who waste his resources through EPCs. Marriage is thus a very complex institution viewed from the standpoint of evolutionary genetics. It is essential for the female to find a territorial male for resources, but the male must have some assurance that the female will only sire his children. Feminism cuts at this establishment at its heart and questions why females can't form territories. In some animals they do, but it is determined by the availability of resources and the important factor that by definition it is the female who commits the greatest physiological resources to the off-spring leaving the male to accumulate environmental resources. It is a fact (that some would wish to ignore) that childbirth has a far greater impact on women than men and so does affect the material output of women more than men. Democratic fundamentalism blinds people to these simple facts. It is not discrimination that men are more reliable employees then women - simply logical. But it is true that with machines production is changing and this is creating the possibility of female territory.

Model of a True Society

OK I can start to put the last year's musings together.

We experience Life as an indescribable sea of social interactions. This includes our meetings with people, our conversations, our thoughts, our activities, our work, our families, our culture and ourselves. No one of these is dominant and they come and go as conditions dictate. Playing a game of football we are probably completely unaware of ourselves as we think about the position of players and wait for a ball to come in for a strike. Sitting at the coffee table telling a tale or listening to someone else, chances are, that we are unaware of ourself - instead enjoying existing as a social entity.

We consider ourself however when events run against desires. Desire leads to conflict between one side and another and this creates self and other and distances us from the "outer" society. In turn however we link forces with people who share our desires and then are allowed to experience that fluid indescribable society again. Often this is spoiled because we call this "membership" and "value" our social membership. It gains a name, as we do, and what was natural, fluid and indescribable becomes distinct and emprisoned.

So in Natural Society affiliations and "membership" come and go quite naturally. Desires create conflicts which colour society into fixed individuals and factions. However these are transient and the underlying fluid sea of interactions continues regardless. History, Culture, Nationality, Membership are temporary and simply reflect skin deep colours on a more universal Society.

In True Society people are Active as a feature of Life. People feed and reproduce and build and speak as a simple matter of existing. What happens when society becomes coloured into factions however is that this activity is seen as either supporting or opposing various desires and through them groups. "Activity" which is an indescribably feature of Society becomes fragmented and controlled by factions.

In reality "Activity" is spontaneous. It is governed by what I will call Tradition. This is from the Papua New Guinean concept of Time. Things happen when they are supposed to and what we call Time is determined by this Tradition. We harvest fields at Harvest Time - everyone knows this, it is engrained in the culture and way of Life. No-one enforces Christmas for example. Yule Time comes to us from our ancient ancestors. Even Christianity couldn't erradicate Yule Time - they just changed its name to Christmas Time. It isn't enforced - it is a spontaneous feature of Society. Modern Calendars call this time 25th December: but if our calendar was different it would still fall at Yule Time whatever date that was. Yule Time they tell us is based on the motion of the sun - I wonder now whether that is a modern interpretation: without astronomers I'm sure communities isolated from our society would still respect a Yule Time.

So "Activity" is deep and connected with Society. What happens tho is that confliciting desires lead to factions and allegiences which then command "activity". In particular the accumulation of material objects creates interests which distort True Society.

I think of the game we used to play as school with two flags. Each team tried to find and steal the other teams flag. Thus the two flags became the "Capital" around which two "false societies" were formed. You can imagine over the centuries if this game was allowed to continue that families would grow up in the society of the Red Flag or the Blue Flag and base their whole lives on the acquisition of the other flag. What was once a single society of people interacting in changing and fluid interactions would enter a period fossilisation where they were divided and their interactions would take a fixed form of hostility or competition. Only when the game eventually ended would the fixed period end and people interacting fluidly again would wonder what the past was all about!

So it is with Capital. Joining a society based around an accumulation of capital is called being "employed". Our activity is then strictly controlled by the society to ensure it benefits the capital. People on the Red Team must try to get the Blue Flag only - if they don't the game would end, so its a premise of the existance of the false society.

Work is this "owned" activity. We would hope that our interests were the same as the company and then we would experience free activity. But, too often our activity does not suit the company and we are required to change. This creates conflicts of desire and we call our activity "work". The very setup of compensation for this illustrates that the Capital we protect is not in our interest. Our family does not compensate us to be a member of it because the interests are our own. (Can't see in this interpretation how money fits in... yet).

In a small community the interests of the community are the same as the individual and society can be more true. People "go along" with what is happening because of Tradition and because of fluid association with the others. Individuals do not exist - instead they exist along side one another. There is no work because activity is a shared event. There is no Capital because consumption is a shared event. We all do well or we all do badly - there is no difference.

The idea of selfishness so applauded by Richard Dawkins and taken up by the Neo-Darwinist camp is not so funademntal I'm inclinded to think.

"The Origin of Species" is not the pertinent question for Life actually. It certainly was a question how the variety of life was created and Darwin showed how variation might be selected to create hugely different forms of life but really this only illustrates the mechanism for the branching of Life. It does not tell us why these particular forms rather than others and more importantly it doesn't tell us about Life itself.

There are features of the world which are extremely important and these provide the arena in which Life is selected. Life for example needs energy and fish gain this from oxygen based respiration - thus any fish without this stops being a fish and becomes something else by itself being ingested. The matter may become part of another fish after being eaten. And we call this a fish because it has passed the selection test.

Under the bonnet however the interflow of matter and energy that is global Life is not discretely packaged. One animal dying is another animals food. What is loss in one place is gain in another. That energy and matter may become incorporated and unincorporate from mammals today is no different from it being incorporated and unincorporated from bacteria a billion years ago. It is Life. That the forms have changed is rather irrelevant.

It might be said that I essentialise Life here. That "Life" cannot be separated from the forms. Certainly I think Creationists makes this mistake. As Kierkegaard once challenged - separate the dancer from the dance! Can we separate Life from the forms? Obviously not. But the existence of many forms of dance does lend itself to a more abstract investigation of dance itself...

A digression here is the evolution of language, music, dance, fashion and culture in general. We are all parts of an ever evolving world. Even in our own lifetime music will evolve many times showing exactly the punctuated evolution that the fossil record shows but writ much smaller. It is an entertainment for me to think back and select those songs where new ideas had their inception. I remember Donna Summers' 'I feel Love' at the horizon of my experience making an impact as something new. S-Express with 'S-Express', Zig Zig Sputnik 'Shoot It Up', New Order 'Blue Monday', Happy Mondays 'Step On', Prodigy 'Out of Space' to name a few stick out as seminal tunes. Once a hurdle is jumped in music however a long period of copying and rehashing occurs until something reduces out of the mixture. Music is a way of life, a characteristic of human society, it is fluid, ever changing, ever evolving: it represents the Life that is society itself. Where people are short sighted however is that they themselves evolve and change and we find ourselves in a club listening to music with people that we "identify" with. This is the death-knell of True Society. I hear talk everywhere of "identity" as though it were some kind of food that humans need. Africans looking for their "roots", British looking for a "Britain": myths and legends abound to try and stake out some kind of "territory" in the mythical "human space" where we can be ourselves and secure from others. It is like a rock fan saying that indie music is rubbish - and trying to mean it - yeah obviously they like rock and not indie - but music is music, life is life. To hate any music, to hate anyone, to hate any life is to injure the very thing we love which has momentarily disguised itself in a new form.

Back to selfishness. In ecology and society the idea of an individual is lose. Viewed one way it is brick looked another it is wall. What is gain to the individual is loss from another view, and vice versa. So when ecology talks of competition between organisms this is only true when you take the organism view: which we are habituated to because we live in "false society" where we see alliegence and membership as fundamentals. Actually society and ecological community are continuous fluid entities.

The enormous loss of life at each generation as "competition" eliminates less fit (on average), and less lucky individuals, is not a "loss". We might limit population by simply having less offspring - this would confer great benefit to the parent who would have to invest less in egg material. But it turns out evidently that most forms are "fitter" as a result of this great "loss" - they provide better and more offspring by wasting so many individuals than if they were conservative. As Darwin noted it is the survival of the species not the individual that counts. Yet this is erroneous because there is no mechanism for species selection and the ultra-reductionist gene theory has gained prevalence. It is the relative merits of bearing genes which is the real battle field. And yet again the "battle field" cannot be genetically constructed (SRH) - this battlefield is Life.

So still in confusion on these points I'll end for now. The mechanism by which Life operates is from an individual point of view what we call competition, life and death. But the "battles" between individuals and factions fit together to create a liquid and non-divided organism called Life and Society. Standing as I was yesterday in the misty morning forest, with young sunbeams striking lines through the haze, it was as though I had never seen the forest before so startling was its beauty. How? I thought is beauty created from what is so fraught and tense beneath the surface. An parasitoid wasp flies past on its way to impregnate some larvae and have her young grow and eat the youth from the inside out saving the essential organs till last. How can such difficulty create such beauty?

There is a pattern to be explored here that homogenity and essence are nonsense. Each thing is made from opposites in dynamic conflict. We want something then we want its opposite also because without one there is no other. This is the foolishness of desire. We want life we should study death. What I am calling Life is this play of life and death.

I was in great peace as I realised that in accepting the opposites and the sway of things lies a deep catharsis in which the world is even and pure. At last I see what the master says when he teaches that the wise value peace over pleasure. Pleasure is beautiful, but it is not stable and it goes leading to an unbeautiful struggle for more pleasure. Peace is constant and like water dripping against the canyon floor it accumulates greater pleasure in time. The problem however is to convince the desires of this who are always gunned up in search of heroic struggles and opportunistic pleasures.

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What we deride as primitavism like ancestor worship is a by-product of The Tradition. We understand the society in which we live, whose interactions magically gives us our wealth and which absorbtion into gives us our language our culture and our Life as The Tradition. Where does the Tradition come from? What maintains The Tradition? It comes from the Past and it ensures the future - handed down safely from generation to generation. We owe our Ancestors for the Tradition which gives us everything we are today.

Now in Western society where The Tradition still exists - for example the ancient Yule Time which currently is absorbed into Christian culture in the West as Christmas - it has been distorted by Capital. Now managers and people of power try to dictate "a tradition" from the standpoint of capital. Wealth is no longer seen in the value of a functioning society - at best it is seen as a functioning business. Business Culture replaces social culture - The Tradition. How ironic that as the Globe comes together societies are broken into ever smaller sub-cultures located around pots of capital. The Tradition will always survive - it brings us our language, our imagination and our dreams - it is through The Tradition that we even "think" about the activities of capital. The only problem is that many people lose sight of The Tradition and really start to identify with such transient entities as family and worse company. Our Mortality increases everytime we identify with something of greater transience.

Fear & Greed

Quick lesson from the stockmarket - we hold stocks until they fall out of greed, and we sell stocks as they bottom out of fear. In both cases the weak mind leads to loss.

OK I knew this and I thought I had learned the lesson last year - but no, still made critical mistakes in the recent rally and lost to tune of £600 - so that is my earnings from last year lost. I'm still quits after all my trading.

The Evening Standard cat has been picking stocks apparently and is up 14% which is better than the professionals who played along side. If the market is random then a dice will do better than a human who is swayed by imagination and desire.

Stock Market Models
Regarding stock markets the price change of any stock is towards its perceived future price. "Fundamentals" don't actually set price they only weigh upon the minds of investors influencing the "perceived" future price. Rallys do the same regardless of fundamentals.

Predicting the "news events" is a good way to predict the price. If we can guess what news will occur then we can see how the future "perceptions" will be changed, and through this the future price.

So actually perceptions about future news events will impact prices also. So if enough people believe that good news will be reported then the price will rise. Therefore we don't need to predict the news, only predict that people will believe that there is good news coming... etc etc

In the stock market we are part of a huge game of mirrors each trying to outbluff the other. Inexperienced traders(like myself) often complain of buying at tops and selling at bottoms. This is a feature of the market being populated by traders playing a higher order game. They know how people behave - holding through greed and selling through fear - so to beat the masses they sell when people are greedy and buy when people are afraid.

But (and Buffet etc don't say this) the stock market starts to become populated by savvy investors. We can now expect a sizable population of traders to do this - which cancels the old Japanese insight of greed and fear. So the next level is to understand that the majority buy when they feal safe and sell in fear. Then a large population do the opposite: buying in fear and selling in safety - which will promote prices after dips and shorten peaks. So a new level of conscious is needed to play this game ... and that is where I head next (tho maybe should get my first stage sorted after playing a dumb game in the recent rally - can you believe I bought into the rally and sold as it collapsed - school boy error).

Another feature tho which weighs on me is the morality of it. I resisted buying banks and dumped them asap because I don't want to be an owner of such predatory and evil business. I don't want to hold construction shares either because I don't beleve in construction. I don't want to hold essential commodities because I don't want to see the price hiked for things people actually need. In actual fact I'm left with a heavy conscience wherever I lay my money because I don't really believe in capitalism - tho at least I'm not collecting dividends and I'm just gambling.

So I've decided on CRUD and LOIL. If oil prices rise it can only be good because it stops economic growth and pollution and it increases the value of human labour. Plus at the current levels there is a hell of a lot of upside available!

What is Work? (notes)

It doesn't "work" anymore... has two interesting meanings... it is unemployed or it is broken.

On the dialectical spot this weekend at the Buddha Birthday celebrations of the temple I had to explain why I thought the view that working for a living was right wing and what came out was convincing at last...

All human activity is "work" - in that it requires effort. Breathing is work, talking, shopping, batheing all these are work.

Work becomes "labour" when it is done for money and this occurs when it is done in relation to "capital". Supporting a capital accumulation is what is called labour.

I used the example of the temple volunteering to show that this is only a type of working - and an unnatural one as well.

The "work" that the venerables do in services and teaching is not work because they follow a "tradition".

Tradition as documented by anthropologists is equivalent to Time in some cultures. In UK we start and end work accoring to Time. In other cultures it is tradition which determines what and when to work.

It is community that determines work not personal capital.

Money supply = inflation = speculation = crash

http://brookesnews.com/090604financialcrisis.html

Malthus and Compassion

So a big problem. In a world where a "loser" is simply an individual living on the "margins" what place is there for compassion and mercy?

In any population there will be so much resources to go around. Some will be fortunate, or strong, or both and some will be less. Those that fail to provide for themselves will die and above that cut off there will be poverty. Variance in the supply of resources will create a larger marginal zone as monopoly individuals become stressed and marginal individuals get a break.

This is a simple game.

So what attitude to marginal individuals? If we help them then we are spreading stress into the system for other individuals! A problem.

No matter what u do as long as u become a better person.

In a world of empty games and no substance I realised that this is a pretty good motto:

It matters not what you do as long as you become a better person for it.

This works because like is an endless stream of success and failure with no core, centre or distinct direction and purpose. We each become embroiled in our own streams and games and play along until we get bored and want to change the game... yet it is still just parts of bigger and bigger, more complex games.

So with no clear vision or direction in life what should we do? That has been my issue for day #1. Well it matters not as long as we become better for it!

Hover-fly Illusions

Lying in the sun yesterday morning with my knee raised it became the object of a hoverfly game. It seems that Hoverflys like many insects protect a territory and this fellow had taken claim of the airspace above my knee using it as a watchout post. Either that or he was protecting the knee itself. With lighting speed and agility he would launch himself into the air and dog-fight with anything that came within a yard all done within the blink of a lazy human eye.

Obviously territory is a critical issue given the cost of all this time and activity. Most likely it is linked to mating success.

What the hoverfly didn't know, maybe, was how transitory his territory was. I was going to move in a few minutes and all that territory would vapourise.

I realised that it is not just humans who get involved in transient and vapid status struggles. Not just humans can become trapped by the illusion of territory. This illusion seems to be a central part of Life itself! Certainly a hoverfly does not have the mental apparatus to become "illusioned" he is simply playing out a game. Yet it is a game fo some persistence and standing in Life given that Humans of infinitely greater capacity spend their days accumulating territories and possessions that like my knee will evaporate one day.

Work to Live: Shop for Fun

This is a core inequality which I can't believe hasn't distilled out purely before in these musings.

For all the triviality of shopping - what colour shall our car be? shall we have blinds or curtains? what about a wooden floor in the kitchen? etc etc - the message seems to get lost by the time the workers are queing in the job centre. Anyone would have thought there was a war on the urgency and importants that the economists and government give to having a job.

If you don't work you will get no benefit and you will starve. It is a tough world and our economy must be prosperous.

Cut to the shopping center and the couple deciding whether to replace the toilet rug!

There is very little "important" in our lives and jobs anymore. This is another critical point that is missed in post-industrial economics.

Fake & True Society and Fake & True Self

Society as it is usually used is an incredibly dull, conceited and artificial conception. The bland idea of "type" of people, and fixed lifeless institutions with staid regiemes and protocols. It is a museum piece, dead and stuffed for the satisfaction of the perusing public.

Of course in reality Society is a dynamic changing things which has taken on endless convoluted indefinable forms in its history and has been composed from an endlessly changing sea of people.

An indefinable sea of people is a more authentic conception of society but it is not favoured because it diminishes our conception of our individual power. If we consider society ruled by a monarch for example and then consider ourselves in favour with the monarch then we have a conception of security. Likewise if we consider financial wealth as the backbone of society then we need only accumulate some money to be able to hold the secure conception of ourselves as "in" society.

It is all lies and self-deception. As if society were so simple as to be controlled and wrapped around such entities as "monarchs" or "gold".

The bedrock of society is more vast than any one of us and any one of our "conceptions". This is the authentic Society which simply couldn't be mapped as there are too many people, holding too many conversations and doing too many things to even begin to model or understand.

But one day in our blissful childhood we experience rejection. Maybe we can over look this. But if it happens a lot and seems to be to do with "us" then we have a very dangerous conception to form... it is the idea that people do not like "me". "ME" is an idea that never forms on its own, but we do form the idea of other people. Jane is taller than John and is better at climbing trees so I will ask her around not John. John will probably survive that rejection, he can rationalise that he can't climb trees well so it makes sense. But Jane is funnier than John so she can come to my party. John will find this harder to explain and it starts to become personal. I get on better with Jane than John so she is my friend. Now it is really personal. John has no option but to understand that I favour Jane over him, that "he" is not my friend. He experiences this as rejection not of his qualities; but of "himself".

Oh Dear! So begins the life time of ignorance and suffering for John that we all know. So where was the error.

John should have continued on the path of rationalising the qualities. The "ego" is formed because we crudely and carelessly package a whole load of qualities together as a distinct entity. We call humour, gaity, energy, intelligence, spontenaity, mood, opinions, like/dislikes, memories, intention, will, motivation etc all these we crudely stick together as personality and imagine that "someone" has these qualities. So we characterise John and make our crude decisions based upon this prasy of his "being".

That is our mistake. John's mistake is to accept this crude basket of qualities as "himself". Or while he may disagree with the qualities that are placed in the basket, to at least accept that there is a basket. He may be inspired therefore to improve his qualities - which is a good thing - but no matter how good his qualities become he is still burdened with the concrete basket - the illusion of a solid self, upon which the ornaments of personality are hung. A solid self tying together the qualities of personality into one discrete concenient person to take his place on the waxworks display of the world alongside all the other waxwork people.

It is no wonder that psychopaths exist who really do see people as waxworks. We are all psychopaths of varying degrees having our routine, fixed views of other people - the stuffed museum pieces, the lifeless waxworks that fill our scheming imaginations as we decide who this and who that. Only family and very close friend are allowed to gain true life and live more freely of the judgements and personality and fixed boundaries of self. Friends can occupy the same room in a loose and liquid affiliation; mixing conversations, laughter, touches, jokes, ideas with no recourse to distinct personalities or selves - until a name is mentioned in gossip and one is outcast and feels the walls of self close around them becoming objectified and alienated. And, we struggle to get back into the melay and that is where we are inauthentic fighting for our own existence in the group, our own status: we are fighting to be freed from the prison of objectification, fighting to have other people accept us as friends rather than waxworks in the psychopathic imaginations of other people - other people who we accept without thinking to have personalities and identities.

How ironic!!! So this is the whole mistake of fake society and status. We accept without thinking the label of self, as we use it against other people. And being isolated as a self we fight to free ourselves from the label in the eyes of the very people who we objectify and think do have a self themselves. The cult of celebrity is born as we view some people to be mroe solid and real than others, and seek to associate in false society with these Egos so that we might gain solidity to our Ego and at the same time paradoxically be freed from the alienated Self that comes from being rejected and "out of the loop".

Odd isn't is that we feel most distinctly ourself when we gain entrance to the exclusive night club AND when we get refused from the exclusive night club. In both cases we gain a "self" but in the former we like having that self and in the latter we don't like it. Since being in prison is an unpleasant experience something very odd must be happening to those people who get access to the exclusive world because they like the fakeness and the feel of their false ego! They like the prison!
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I'm expanding from notes made on my phone under the tree I've been sleeping the last 3 days. The note goes: Tue soc then ego = false soc then competition then status. Competition and Status in society are products of Ego.

=== adding notes 5/4/10 - (found the original note from which above was written)

> Slow disintegration of "society" - being a "member" compensatory mechanism for lack of recognition of "true" society - article on "loneliness" measuring social contact and structure as though "society" can be measured. We are never apart from other people, we are never with other people. Fighting to be "with" other people as though physical proximinity actual means anything. Maybe the "intention" of a touch, or sexual encounter, or speech, or look provides "proof" of being "with". Yes if someone is talking to you then u feel recognised and included. But this depends upon them identifying you as someone - how do they do this? By how u look etc. Thus such thinking binds us to a conception of outrselves and our society as based on "physical identity".

More on Games...

We satisfy ourselves playing the various games of life be they relationships, money, social status etc. We are like people stuck in a cosmic chess game who spend so much time working out the next move that they forget to look around and decide whether they even wanted to even play chess in the first place! But how many people ask themselves whether they want to play these games? We accept that we are in games of economics or sex for example but why don't we question the games themselves? Can we chose the games that we play and is it possible to escape from games.

The kids today (like in my day) are stuck within incredibly defined boundaries. The media hypes kids as rebellious and a danger to society but after several months of GCSE tuition I can say that the lives' of the youth are even more hijacked by the games of the establishment today than ever before. Maybe kids think it cool to carry knives etc but at the same time they have got to support the right trainers, or mobile phone or listen to the right "under ground" music. All this is commercial, strictly controlled marketing - unawares they are playing within the rules of society. Being kids they never realise because kids have small unworldly brains - that is a feature they will always have. The question is how many people ever grow out of being a kid however. I am lucky I never understood what the establishment was trying to say to me - so by default I rebelled - I simply couldn't/can't understand how the clothes we wear make any difference. Maybe I'm mildly autistic, but its a blindness which we need if we are to have any choice about the games we play. On the other hand people pretend to understand but can anyone really explain how the fabric that we surround ourselves with makes any difference to anything (apart from being dry and warm)? So if we can't explain it, have we really chosen to play the fashion game? And if we can explain it we have done so "outside" the fashion game (self-reference hypothesis) so what reasons for fashion are their that are not fashion themselves? tricky waters!

What is Life?

This question was going to have to asked sooner or later in this blog - but it has been avoided because exactly where do you start? Well I'm ready to start ...

We think we know what Life is. This is why we pay it little attention. I'm reminded of Heideggar's opening of "Being and Time" however: 'Those of us who thought we knew what Being was have since become perplexed' (based apparently on a line from Plato I forget).

Those of us who thought we knew what Life was have since become perplexed.

I'll cut to the chase. If we can live Life without knowing what it is, then we don't need to know what it is! Or at least knowing what it is, is not important to living!

So there is the key that crystalised this morning as I awoke under a tree (taken to sleeping out again) watching the birds and the insects busying themselves: Life is actually nothing - it is the unjudgemental canvas or soil upon which we paint or grow our lives. This is why (upon realising this) we are able to accept whatever life throws a us without concern. Lose everything in the stock market, have our house burned down, have our whole family killed in a car accident, contract terminal cancer, even become faced with a gun in a bank hold up and lose one's life; or more positively win the lottery, get the job promotion, find the perfect job, get married, have a child, find ourselves famous and successful - whatever Life throws at us comes without judgement - for the canvas upon which it is painted cares not what pattern the colours make and the soil cares not whether the plants flourish or die. In the words of Kipling we really should be able to:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;

For in the grand scheme of life what is loss in one place is a win in another. Not literally - but to illustrate that it depends upon your franme of reference to see something as a win or lose. There are win-win, lose-lose, and win-lose outcomes for games - but the issue in Life is who chooses the games? A lose-lose game may be win-win in the larger game. Two armies may decimate each other in a battle, but find that the mutual defeat leads to a strong alliance and economic domination in another "theatre".

All the world's a stage and we merely actors. It occurred also during this investigation that my favourite questioning of "role" took a further development. We act out our roles not because of what we thinkwe are: but the acting out of roles determines what we think we are. In theory sleeping under the trees at night could make me into the role of a vagrant, vagabond or tramp. On the other hand it could make me into a romantic visionary. On the other hand it could just be plain "Tom Sawyer" type fun... to name only three "roles". I have a palette of narratives to chose from. It takes only a few people to chose one of those narratives for me and I may start to play that role. Once I am reading from the script then I start to believe I "am" that person - this is the origin of inauthenticity. Life has no definition and the script is fluid and changeable. But the mind cannot grasp at water for there is nothing to hold on to. So in confusion it grasps at the jug with water in it and believes that the jug is water. Of course in time the water in the jug goes stale and Life loses its edge.

So Life by definition escapes definition. Whatever game we think it is, whatever system of rules or descriptions we think it is, whatever role with set and stage directions we think it is: we forget that our definition belongs to a larger world from whose perspective the definition becomes quite inappropriate.

Politics is fashion. Why? because what seems so apt and sensible for a community at a moment in its history will seem quite idiotic and futile at another moment in its history. Take extra-ordinary moments in Britains history like the Crusades. It seems nonsensical to modern heads why people would waste so much effort on possessing a city: plain football in modern thinking. Stock-markets are fashion also hence "bubbles".

Life is a grander entity than anything that the mind can harness to grasp it... except the mind itself.

Returning to less lofty speculations on Life some challenges to the common held view of life. It seems easy to say when something is alive or dead. So surely we know what life is. Yet when an animal has many offspring and then dies itself we are left with more entities than we had before. Has Life multipled? What then is the unit of life? We say the individual but consider a sponge which can be broken down into separate cells. What of a sperm and egg fusing? Life is neither single or multiple... tbc