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 !