Unstructured reverie on the answer to this Blog…

A friend said last week that the person who has taken my job is “doing better than me”. I got to thinking about this throw away remark yesterday.

The Nepali who took my job is new to the country. Does not have the educational background, the cultural acceptance or even the language of myself - a white middle class male and yet got the keys to a house last week. He has a job, a car, a wife and children and now a 3 bedroom house. My friend’s point was that I have none of these, and as my father would have reminded me, given the money spent on my education and the advantages I have in the UK being a direct descendant of aristocracy, I “should” have these.

Long ago I rejected all these things – too much hard work for uncertain benefit.

What occurred to me was my friend’s use of “better” – we talk talk a lot about these things there was no hidden criticism for me to understand in what he said. It is true that he now owns a big house and I live only in a rented garage. This is a material fact apparent to anyone. What is fascinating tho is that idea of one being “better” than the other.

I’m not naive I know exactly what they are talking about – it is fundamental to my culture (indeed all human societies). But when you look at it it is absurd. A material fact that his house is “larger” than my living space means that he has done “better”. Same applies to cars, or wives or children or anything. A man with 3 children has actually done better than one with none – or 1, or 2! A man with 100 cows has done better than one with none, or 1, or 2 etc. It is so simple, but also so abstract and bizarre.

There is some logic. If you have more children then your family line is going to progress further (probably), if you have a bigger house you have more to sell in times of trouble etc but more importantly these things are hard to come by so represent a level of “fitness” which is attractive to mates (see point 1) and which acts as a signal to others of your rightful place in the social pecking order (social structure)… which is back into the social hierarchy analysis already completed…

But, in actual real terms everything in the previous paragraph is not self-explanatory… why even do we care about survival? A version of the anthropogenic explains that if we didn’t we would not be here to reflect on survival… but apart from this only self-consistent restriction (that all other possibilities are inconsistent) we are not the wiser.

I realise that this is the first moment in this on going blog where some new understanding is waiting to enter… I wonder how long its exposition is going to take! After some work this week I realise it will take me a long time to come up to scratch with logic and information/computer science to really make in significant roads on the self-reference thing – there really has been a lot of wonderful work done in this area already and I suspect the SRH will be only me understanding what already exists than contributing anything.

The new understanding tho is a consistent idea that there is no need for a “foundation” on which things must be built. That the choice of axioms, or ontology is not a fundamental “starting” point and that as Hofstadter realises things on different levels of a structure both found and imply other things in all directions – in strange loops. This combined with the idea that complex structures (like the Mandelbrot set) really can arise from the simplest constraints applied to self-feeding systems.

My colleague has done better than me when measured along the lines present in our societies. How else could we measure it? But at the same time standing up alongside the many rulers that are present in the world of meaning that are Life does lead us to ask what is the ruler that rules the rulers? What standard brings us to measure ourselves thus? What rule enforces us to buy bigger houses and strive for more beautiful partners and more kids and bigger bank accounts? Jesus calls that rule Mammon (old Chaldee word apparently). What rule holds it true that my colleague has done “better” than me by measure of his house and attainments? That such a rule exists is not in doubt, but it is not a rule that I follow. Does this make me wrong, or is that rule not universal?

Ontologists will say that this rule has some place in ontology, but I’d like to ask is this rule a construction that arises only in a particular context (a la Buddhist dependent origination)? Does it owe its existence to other things, and they in turn owe their existence to other things – not necessarily in a line of causation from future to past, or top to bottom, but in a hall of hazy mirrors from which no-one can determine which is reflection and which is source? This a la Hofstadter.

Are the structures that we are familiar with in our Life, and which measure us and which we measure by; those things which by association magically produce a window on how big, how good, how rich each thing is, are these naturally emergent from the maelstrom of the world as much as the things that we measure are?

Is this the vague outline of the answer to my long standing question, hatched as a child, as to why there was no manual on how to live Life, and what such a manual would look like?

There is no foundation to the world. There are no founding rules upon which it is built. The roof of the world supports the foundations as much as the foundations support the roof. We really do live in a castle in the sky, the magic of which obscured because there is no ground and no sky from which to marvel at this oddity. Where ever we stand, our axioms, our ontology, we find is just another room in this miraculous castle. The structures that ask us to find their sources, are as much the source themselves through reflections and strange loops as the things outside, that is the ¬selves (not-selves), from which we seek to construct them.

This is the outset of a rigorous description of that idea that the world “just is” which is known instinctively by those who know God at all, but escapes the thoughts every time.

What remains to be expanded using hopefully logic and computer science (especially Turing computability) is some description of systems to show that they are forever dependent upon what is not present in the system itself. This is so close to Godel’s un-decidable propositions, or Turing’s un-computability that I can’t believe it isn’t already in the literature. I know Godel was working on something like this – that he failed => uh oh!!!!! is it really that hard? This is the source of the SRH also (i.e. self-reference [SR] hypothesis i.e. SR is impossible consistently): that while self-reference is everywhere it is fake because were something to “actually” (to be defined = this is the hard bit) refer to ITSELF it would have the ability to construct itself within itself and so be independent of an external system – and that - remains to be proven - is inconsistent with the system itself.

Raymond Smullyan has come to my help extremely – eternal thanks. I have his 1957 paper on languages which allow self-reference. He introduces the idea of the normalisation function (written norm or N). This is identical to the Quines that I have mentioned before. The “norm” function applied to a statement simply generates the statement and the repeats it with quotes around it. His examples:

(1) John is reading.

This is a simple sentence. If John were reading this it would be true. When I read this as I am called Alva it is false. Truth isn’t the point here however. Apply the norm to this sentence and one gets:

(2) John is reading “John is reading”.

Were John to read this it makes a statement about what John is doing. It is true that John is reading the sentence “John is reading” (which is sentence 1 above). But it is not self-referential because sentence 2 says that John is reading sentence 1.

However if we take the sentence:

(3) John is reading the norm of

When we apply the norm function to that we get:

(4) John is reading the norm of “John is reading the norm of”

This states that John is reading the norm of sentence 3. If we remember what the norm function is, it simply generates the original statement and then the same sentence again in quotes. The norm of sentence 3 is actually sentence 4. So sentence 4 says on the one hand that John is reading the norm of sentence 3, but the norm of sentence 3 is actually sentence 4. So sentence 4 also says by implication that John is reading sentence 4. Sentence 4 thus tells John that he is reading sentence 4 but way of applying a function to sentence 3.

If John is being slow (as indeed I was while reading this part of Smullyan’s paper) that “implication” may not be apparent. But when it comes it is exactly the same as moments of enlightenment. The light of awareness suddenly falls upon oneself and we are bathed in the light of truth. It is interesting how being drawn into the field of observation by self reference is so literally “illuminating”. No wonder religions use light so liberally to speak of truth and Heideggar speaks of the “lighting up” process. Our eyes and vision are very linked to our mental processes – we say “I see” what you mean. In Avatar they say “I see” you, and mean by it not with the eyes but with the mind. Light and Mind are metaphorically linked. When John realises the he is reading a sentence that tells him - not in words, but with his mind and with implication – that he is reading that sentence there is a flash of intellect that illuminates the blank words on the page and brings them to life in a higher way. That shift to a higher level is what the intellectual life is all about. Is why Plato worshipped the mental realm of forms in favour of the poor images on the wall of the world. Is why spirituality illuminates us in a purer way than the light of the sun. Why souls become alive and why souls can die whether there is material food or not. Why the reader can sit engrossed in words, that to the non reader are just marks on a page. The mind, interpretation, is what texts need to live, indeed what all material things need to live. It is not the material world which makes us live, it is why a brain is not a scientist…. and so the AI debate starts which I don’t want here (at least Turing seems to have got that wrong?).

So i don’t know whether any reader of this will ever exist or if they do exist are called John, and regardless will have grasped what Smullyan means and what I have tried to render in more verbose fashion. But, for me the point is that sentence 4 is not actually self referential!

It provides the road map of self-reference but it requires a “computer” (in the sense of someone to do the computing). If I am wrong the question is -what function exists to test that something is self-referential? What proof is there. Does it always rely upon the logician to make some meta-judgement to the effect that WOW that is self-referential. So I’ll turn to computers now and think about an algorithm which will test the self-referentiality of a statement.

OK that didn’t take long. A SR() function that takes a statement s and sees whether it can compute s from the instructions in s. Well that is nothing other than our friend the Quine. But it doesn’t completely pass the test because the function that determines self-reference is a meta-statement of the system s. What I realise I am asking is that a self-referential statement must “know” that it is self-referential. Obvious really because if it refers to itself, and itself is self-referential, then it must refer to a self-referential statement and that is a statement which makes some reference not only to itself but also to its self-reference.

So the SR() function must produce the boolean result 1 only for itself. That is the challenge.

===

The above was all cut into an existing passage which continued like this…

The proof is probably just 2 lines and one day when I have the energy this lazy pointless brain of mine has to compute the problem once and for all!! unless I can find it in the literature or someone can offer me that very same proof.

I have a wedding to be best man of in 12 weeks, a stag do to organise and that girl mentioned before in this blog to link up with and the students exams in a few weeks… my energies are being dissipated in this hall of broken mirrors… help!

Awoke from dream! Why?

24/2/2010

Last night I was awoken from my deep sleep by a rustling sound. I came around and heard the rustling and got thinking about what it was. I concluded it was a mouse – I had a mouse in my room last week. I decided it wasn’t a problem and would deal with it in the morning and went back to sleep. Then I got to remembering what had just happened…. why did I need to wake up to decide to go back to sleep again? What is the purpose of wakefulness?

It is apparent that consciousness does serve some purpose. I have to agree with D.Dennett here. What was completely startling was the realisation that possibly I had to wake up to decide not only what to do, but also what it ”was”!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Do we actually know what things are in our dreams? This has got me puzzled. Is it only when we wake up and remember a dream that we know what it was? To be decided. Got me thinking that maybe the Chinese philosopher who woke up from a dream thinking he was a butterfly could not now be a butterfly dreaming he was a man!

One way or the other however it seems that consciousness may have a role in the higher level functions of essential judgement… i.e. judgements based on what something is.

A friend once awoke from a dream to see his alarm clock as a big buzzing wasp. He had been smoking a lot of grass which would have helped the hallucination. Did his brain confuse the alarm buzzing with a wasp, but only when consciousness kicked in did he identify it as a wasp? OR did his unconscious mind think it was a “wasp” before he become aware of it. I siding with the former now, the latter is philosophically problematic because it leaves consciousness like a watcher in the cinema with no involvement - an epiphenomenon which is where I already have been stuck for many years.

10/8/23

Okay so finally got an answer to this from within Mahayana Buddhist theory. This version courtesy of Thich Nhat Hanh.

So basically the only consciousness that sleeps is the Mind. While asleep the 5 Sense consciousnesses and Store House consciousness are still operating as usual. It means that we can hear a sound and do some basic processing on it while asleep. But if it is interesting it will stimulate the Mind consciousness to activate and that is waking up. I am unsure where the Self-Consciousness fits into this, whether it sleep too. But when we wake we are not self-conscious it can take quite a while to start all the narratives about who we are and what we think about our self. So empirically I'd say the Self-Consciousness sleeps too. This is actually handy given that meditation is very much about getting free from these two consciousnesses (Mind and Self) to see them for what they are. But anyway in 2010 I was seeing the mind as a unified thing and the self to be an integral part of that. It was not "me" that awoke, at least not initially. My senses and Storehouse were not even asleep. What I noticed was the coming into existence of the Mind consciousness. And that is a complex thing to say. "I" was not already in a cinema waiting for the film to start. "I" was asleep. What happened is that Mind consciousness started and that is all that we need to experience things. Mind consciousness by definition has everything needed to be aware. Once it starts there is awareness. Later Self Consciousness may start and usually it then owns Mind consciousness and creates the awareness of "what I am seeing" or "that I am seeing" but this is a separate consciousness from the seeing things. And that a separate consciousness from the seeing itself. That is 3 layers of consciousness involved in our daily experience of seeing. So its quite interesting using the Mahayana schema to explore the subtleties of what seems at first look to be simple and unified. But sleep is a definite way in to break up this apparent simplicity.

Zeitgeists

Just sitting in the university union listening to the student radio Snow Patrol’s “Open your eyes” is on. It has this effect that I was struggling to understand and produce myself in the late 90’s – a sense of yearning – it is interesting (and not the first time) that something I felt within has found its way into the outside world without me doing anything :-) As a kid i used to love that feeling as something broke the need to develop after the 4th bar repeat, that surprise that something doesn’t want to change and is staying on track… a joyous feeling quite alien to the intellectual need for music to evolve and develop… this has become the mainstay of modern dance music… and yet aged 8 before it all really changed I was hammering out repeating 5ths and 4th on the keyboard at home…

I wonder if this thing I search for in logic will emerge of its own accord without me doing anything?

This harks back to reading the History of Western Philosophy by B.Russell the point of which seems to be the question is it individuals who come up with ideas or are they a product of society changing? What has been called since the zeitgeist. My feeling is that it is the zeitgeist which creates new things, but it needs to be expressed by people (like emergent properties need their particles on which to be expressed). Thus we rather erroneously strive to get our names on new discoveries when if it’s not us it will be someone else… because we are only the canvas on which the zeitgeist is painting.

Can we get Something out of Nothing?

I have realised that I have held two confused beliefs in this blog.

1) That you cannot get something out of nothing.

2) That the apparent world “just is”, which has been tied into accepting emergent properties.

When we bake a cake the resulting cake IS magic. It cannot be explained in terms of the ingredients. If you saw and tasted cake mix and was told that after cooking it would be very tasty you would not believe it. A “cake” is a magical emergent property.

Thus it is easy to see that actually all entities are magical emergent properties and cannot be reduced to their components – while at the same time being composed only of their components. They are as the ancient philosophers called them “illusions” which arise and decay into the Void. The idea that they somehow are “made” of their components, while true, doesn’t actually tell us much about them.

In chemistry a knowledge of the atoms will enable us to classify things. To know a substances period and group will enable us to predict with some certainty what the emergent properties of that element will be… but this is where is gets really subtle and I find myself remarkably going back through the opening philosophical investigations that I made as a teenager… everything really is coming together and “my muse” has been a deviation from a much bigger process…

The issue I see now in hindsight was “where does form come from?”. My conclusions as a teenager were not so absurd after all, although trying to navigate this sea as a novice is a profoundly difficult process.

To have experiences we have a brain. The processes in that brain correspond (are isomorphic) with our experiences. It is not unreasonable to see the connection BUT there is a problem. Such a theorem is unpredicative (this I have discovered is THE word for the SRH). This means that the theorem is creating definitions based upon those definitions. For some reason almost everyone - from school biology syllabus to MIT lecturers - misses this … to say that the processes in the brain are isomorphic with our mental activity iff it implies (=>) that our thinking and understanding are isomorphic with the brain, then => that the brain’s machinery is required to understand the brain’s machinery … the problem in the theory being the implication that it is really the “brain’s machinery” understanding what the brain’s machinery is. Ontologically our mental activity can’t be the result of the brain’s machinery since it is that mental activity that is apprehending the concept of the “brain’s machinery”.

Somehow, despite all appearances, such brain science hasn’t actually said anything new and constructive! This way by chasing ones own tail madness lies. This is why after years of struggling with this - stalking my own shadow - I broke through and realised that “things just are” you can’t atomise our experiences and “mental” processes – they are axioms that we normatively begin with. If we try to underpin them with scientific knowledge we run into problems because science requires these normative constructions even just to get started! This has been said many times in this blog before but I’m getting a new language for, and familiarity with, these concepts. If religions have a problem with science I suggest it is this; God is the ancient term that reminds Man to keep his place. When Science encroaches on the territory of God it is because Science starts to try to under pin its own construction – it starts to make unpredicative statement – in the words of Latiffe in the MIT lectures “when you start to talk about yourself you start to talk nonsense.”

The research into emergent properties I feel also may also be heading into a labyrinth of mirrors. If you could ever construct an emergent property in terms of its components then it wouldn’t be an emergent property anymore. It is has become an axiom. And how does this happen? The lecturer in the MIT lectures (referenced in this blog) seems to think that a: record washed up on a alien shore’ is too improbably to be an accident and the order and symmetry of the record will suggest to the aliens that this is somehow constructed and has some meaning. This seems a sensible proposition… BUT I was reminded of my thoughts as a teenager… this depends upon the brain’s machinery! We construct our world in edges, lines, sequences, space, time etc because we have the brain to do this. This is very Kantian but I’m not saying these are transcendental in any real fixed way. The point is simply to realise – as the Eastern religions do – that we see things depending not only on the “things” but also on “ourselves” as well. Experience occurs in the dialectic between subject and object. To say ‘aliens on a distant shore’ is to actually avoid the issue of what “we” bring to the table. When “we” are factored into suddenly nothing becomes stable – there is no absolute resting place from where we might move the Earth. This is very difficult to approach and thankfully I had the opportunity to do it in comfort and security of my parent home – like Descartes in his meditation stove. But thankfully there is nothing “absolutely” unstable about it either :-) It simply smashes any grasping we might have had for a fixed objective truth – something which is nice when it protects us from our fears, but would be very nasty if our fears became fixed objective truths! Things still “just are” and always will be.

After saying all that it is still an intriguing thought that there is some objective way to describe and record the “things” in the world. That the information in the record on the beach might have some eternal meaning that will survive the human race, Earth and the Solar system. The problem I feel, like the splattered paint in the last blog, is that it all depends on some normative axiomatic starting point which is just an emergent property of the world. You can’t fix it for all time because as Buddha reminds us all existence is conditioned and as conditions change the existences in the “universe” change also…

and my problem with that (when I first read Buddhism) was that such a statement in unpredicative because if everything is conditioned and changes then so does the Universe … but Buddha is not talking in simple terms – yes there is no fixed bounded Universe, nor even a fixed doctrine of dependent origination. The Enlightenment really is an acceptance and freedom of all possible illusory emergent properties.

On Gaining (+ example of faith)

If we gain something then we have been without it in the past and we will be without it in the future.

It means that at the time of acquiring it other people will not have it.

We have 2 options here.

1) Either it is needed by us at this “moment” and we didn’t need it before and we won’t need it in the future – a conditional requirement.

OR

2) We must accept that not only is it possible to live without it, but people are doing so as we acquire it.

If it is 2 then why do we acquire it? This has been my instinctive problem with acquiring things and I remember feeling it very strongly lying in bed with my first girlfriend and listening to someone outside at the university crying. Why I thought do I need this happiness when I have been without it before and there are people right now who do not have it. It can’t be very important.

I realise that it is very hard to express ideas which are alien to the culture and language that you are brought up in. Watching the MIT lectures has given me confidence and brought together a whole net of ideas which I have struggled with in the darkness since my youth.

The lesson here is to keep going even when everyone doubts you and you even doubt yourself!

Godel Esher Bach – Final lecture – mega-summary of a my own interests from 1990 onwards

 

Referring to Lecture 6 of this series: http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/hs/geb/VideoLectures/index.htm

A load of notes here about different related things.

 

 

First: The Sierpinski Triangle has an area of 0: that is the limit of 3/4^n as n->inf. But this means that within each pixel in the normal rendering (like above) there is another complete Sierpinski Triangle with an empty triangle (1/4 of the area) in the middle. The blank area is 1/4 * (0.75^n – 1)/(n-1) which approaches 1 as n->inf. There are no pixels in the true triangle!! It has no area. So what does the Sierpinski triangle look like if it has no area? And the approximation that is rendered approximates to a shape of 0 area how?

The MIT course is excellent and has refocused my eyes on some important concepts. Isomorphism was previously present in what I knew as Hermaneutics – the idea in text interpretation that a text has many layers of interpretation. My favourite film ‘Betty Blue’ is of interest because of an interpretation that I have of it. Isomorphism simply being a word for things having parallel structures that can be superimposed like football and rugby, or music and poetry.

What I question however is to what extent the structures that are recreated in the isomorphism are “really” present in the original? Does my interpretation of the film really represent something “in” the structure of the film? If we say that there is an underlying structure in the film then apart from the film itself which isomorphic interpretation shall we use to represent that structure. Another way to see that question is to ask what links isomorphisms, or what makes analogous things similar? What makes things different or the same. There is some dialectic involved in thinghood itself which gives a mixture of similarity and difference between things.

How is the rendering of the Sierpinski triangle then isomorphic with the real triangle? Mystery! In fact this is the age old problem which leads very fast to the Third Man Fallacy if we are not careful. That is to say we create a new entity to represent isomorphism (an arrow for example). But then we have a new problem how this arrow relates to the two isomorphic parts. It forms an infinite regress and a chain of infinite number of entities each relying on the next to explain isomorphism. Sooner or later we just have to accept some form of relation as an axiom… and why? Isn’t this the SRH that to explain a relation in terms of a relation creates an infinite regress…

The other big issue from the course is Emergent Property. Up until today I didn’t believe in it. I have played around on the computer for decades and been hopelessly disappointed by the uninspiring creativity of my ants or genetic algorithms. If anything such agent simulations have turned me off the subject and made we realise how remarkable the diversity of the real world and even make me doubt evolution! I am always left with the unremarkable “so what” of a magician who knows how the trick is done. Alan Turing getting excited about his self organising black and white splodges or even Kieran’s computer simulations on the computer screen are “so what” – you are getting out what you put in: a load of rules which effectively transform (in a lose interpretation of the word) the Euclidian plane to create the shapes. Put those ants in a line and suddenly their creativity is less etc etc. The “plane” while featureless and boring enables remarkable transformations to occur – that is what amazes us most I have thought. Odd also that the lecturer should have been put off Biology by realising that it was all the logical implication of Evolution and not been put of everything else by the same thought! This is what puts me off automata.

However, that said, I do understand now what they are going on about. The point is that whatever shapes are created they are not “explicitly” coded into the computer at start time. The same occurs to a pot of paint being spilled. There final splatter is not explicitly encoded into the pot of uniform paint before the accident – it emerges from the complex interaction of paint under gravity, the air moving into chaotic vortexes as the paint falls through and catastrophic release of energy through the paint as it hits the floor. That final “splatter” is an emergent property of a paint spill.

That doesn’t explain the issue of Emergent Property though. The most important thing is to realise that Emergent Property points to “levels of description”: that is what I have missed. It is true that a “splatter” is a short hand way of describing the unimaginably complex interaction of lower order things that creates the splatter. There are 2 levels of description. Now I understand at last why people (especially in MIT that has championed this Revolution since the 1960s) get so excited by this idea. This I believe is the revolution that gives us writers like Fritjof Kapra. This links with the fractal work that it creates “levels of description”. While fractals repeat in a simple way they illustrate the issue of Scale and Level of description that is a profound feature of the world. Which comes first: Scale or Fractal? Does the universe have scale BECAUSE of its self-creating iterative nature or is it the other way around? That was the interesting message I took home in a recent previous post.

Finally in this post the questions that were being discussed at the end are exactly what this blog has ended up focussing on. It is mentioned a few times that such questions are not good for our “survival” but this blog is a question about Life in is broadest understanding of which survival has proven to be a rather trivial aspect. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (which appears in the lecture) seems more and more inadequate every times I see it now. Does he really mean that the more you eat then the more security you will be able to get and the more self-realised you will get? Self-realisation starts even while you are building the pyramid as does esteem, love, friendship, etc. In economics you even get paid and food for building the pyramid so its hopelessly confused. I think I’ve completed a more realistic understanding of "needs” in this blog so won’t revisit.

The one issue that occurs again and again in the lectures and which makes me cringe is also quite strange because we are all talking about Holism and trying to get away from Reductionism but in a Reductionism mind set. I even realised I was doing the same. Here are my thoughts…

I disagree with Emergent Properties because you can’t get something from nothing. But I had to agree that the emergent property level of description couldn’t be described within the terms of the simple agent rules – a new term had to be introduced to describe what was going on. The problem to solve is how to describe the properties of a simple system – how much more complex is the new system. That was my quest since 1995 and I’m back on course altho its low down on the 2do list. The idea then is that self-consciousness is a very high level new-term to explain what is going on as a system becomes more able to refer to itself. (Altho I reject this now that is the idea that i reject). But from my Buddhism training I am aware that all “things” are nothing but their components. So I suddenly realised that I have been holding two completely opposed positions. When Buddha says that “things” are illusions what he is saying is isomorphic with saying that higher levels of description are Emergent from lower levels. That is to say that a “chair” is an emergent property of its components – this I have examined at length in this blog many, many, many times before. So why am I against emergent properties then? They are the same concept I already hold!!!

What emerges from this is my issue with the whole class and the lecturers: none of them realises that everything is an emergent property of something else. When the lecture says again and again atoms/brains/neurons etc as the building blocks of the body and the mind he doesn’t seem to show awareness that these are just emergent from lower levels (quarks etc). But worse than that it is a strange loop and the lower things are affected by the higher levels of description. The point is that you can start anywhere, take that level of description as your axiom and then see higher levels as emergent properties of that level. Computer science is one place to start but it is no more “fundamental” than politics or anything else. This links with logic because we can chose any axioms we like – that choice lies outside the system.

The error made by everyone is to hold onto the idea that for something “exist” it must have some “existing” thing inside it – some homunculus like thing that renders it “existing” in isomorphism with the error in thinking that there is a person inside our heads looking at the world through our sense… how does this explain “looking” since it uses “looking” in the definition. This is the problem of self-reference again and worth investigating…

Reductionism thinks that this “emergent property” emerges from real agents that underlie the emergent property. The discussion of how software runs on a computer assumes that the computer is somehow more real than the software. But the computer is an emergent property itself as are the atoms and the quarks etc. Every”thing" is an illusion as Buddha discovered a miraculous emergence from suitable conditions (suitable being circularly defined - tautological): just levels of description. Interesting that no-one in that lecture seems to even suspect this – this is the problem of Materialist doctrine and Self which plagues the West. The existince of reductionist and hollistic thinking in the West is the result of this error in our thinking and this is why I personally dislike Fritjof Kapra’s books because as far as I know they don’t acknowledge that they themselves are only a product of the sickness that they seek to reflect upon. As I suppose is Zen and the Art of Motor Cycle Maintenance and their ilk.

Returning to the the Sierpinski triangle quickly we have to chose to stop out of the recursion and create a pixel otherwise it would never render anything since its area is zero. Isn’t this the problems of axioms. We have to chose some fixed level of description as a starting place else we can’t see anything at all. Maybe this is how something comes from nothing – it’s in the fixing of a level of description.  An “attachment” is ignorance that things only look this way because of the fixed level of description we have got. Now I must be careful not to get too stuck in this way of thinking, but have a long way to go until I get some satisfactory proof that self-reference is impossible. Some useful quotes from the lecture:

>A book “Programming the Universe” is mentioned. The universe needs another universe to model itself. One direction I was looking at lat year was using Turing machines to show that there are limits to self-computation: need to pick up this.

(Student) Latiffe - “I am the one being observed” - [my thought, yes so I can't be the observer in SRH]
”When you start talking about yourself you are talking nonsense” … “Self reference is not a well formed thought.” END.1.22

[basically how does reference work? What level of description is necessary for reference? This is the new approach to the SRH]

(Assistant) Kieran: "This structure cannot introspect upon what it is made from because then it wouldn't be itself anymore". 1:31:31
That is the essence of the proof I’m looking for. However I do accept now that a stable situation may arise through iteration – and may have some fractal structure.

A.I.M.E.

 

Watching the 4th part of the Godel, Escher, Bach M.I.T. lectures (http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/hs/geb/VideoLectures/index.htm) I realised how similar my own interests are to the main stream researchers. The issue of Algorithmic Complexity was mentioned – this is exactly one line of what I’ve been questioning. It made me think that I should have continued with the A.I.M.E. project in 1996.

Artificial Intelligence Mechanism Emulation – was a development on a much older and more naive project in 1986 which sort to create a speech engine. It simply looked up each word and if it didn’t know it asked you to select what type of word it was (noun, verb etc). It was then programmed to know how sentences were organised and so it could deconstruct input sentences and reconstruct sentences based on grammar. I never got very far and have never got very far because I have always sort to avoid solutions which require more inbuilt programming than one gets out of the system. There is no glory in my mind in getting out of a machine what you programmed in. The Mandelbrot is fascinating because it seems to provide a lot more than is programmed in. This in the realm of A.I. is the goal…. and I decided along time ago it was impossible – you get out what you put in.

A.I.M.E. was to solve a different problem… an engine that could generate what I can now call algorithmic compression.

An example of the problem:

A computer is given data structures and functions to deal with points i.e. (x,y) pairs of data.

Given a series of points the problem was to generate an algorithm which could generate a data structures to deal with lines i.e. y = mx + c, with start and end point. Thus all the points could be approximated to special cases of a single line structure. That is true compression.

Recursively performing the algorithm to reduce the complexity of the mind and reduce its entropy was the model for thought and I hoped for consciousness also.

What I thought would such an algorithm do when it had its own output fed into its input? It would try to abstract the data into simpler more general forms and this would lead it to an ultimate form which would correspond to the nature of the loop itself and this self-consciousness.

Intriguing idea. I set out to program A.I.M.E. It would have a 2D grid of binary cells onto which the system’s state was to be mapped (somehow). The system in turn had a minimum set of transformation matrixes to use which were instructed by sequences of code. These sequences of code were stored in a hierarchy to recreate structures seen on the screen. These sub-programs strings were then stored in a library and used where possible to simplify recording of the patterns in the binary cells. I was testing it on a simple starting circle to see how it would simplify the circle.

This didn’t actually solve the intelligence problem and I realised it wouldn’t generate self-consciousness either because the system would just enter a meaningless loop and becoming progressively less and less accessible to any outside observer. I shelved the project.

But I may resurrect A.I.M.E.now in search of algorithmic compression (I don’t believe anymore that consciousness resides “in” brains or any machines so its the wrong place to look for it).

SRH – A proof of God – 11/12/2002

In complete Mr Harris style what about this precocious little number...definitely sending this to Mr Dawkins what a dangerous cock he his http://www.bee.net/debrien/archives/2002_10_01_TParchives.html

Assumptions

1.0 Human knowledge must be expressible in symbols or words to be considered knowledge, and must therefore be storable on a computer.

2.0 For a body of knowledge to be complete there must be no factors external to it that are not at least codified and represented within it.

3.0 God I am defining as an entity that is necessarily external to knowledge, but is not irrelevant to knowledge as knowledge depends on it.

Assertion

A complete body of knowledge must codify God.

The proof.

If we have two objects represented by symbols {a, b} we need 2 bytes of memory to store them.

Thus the original "separation of the symbols", has not been codified "within" memory it has just been replaced by "separate bytes."

If we combine the memory into a single 2 byte word, we then need a second memory location to hold the expression that enables us to split the 2 byte word and retrieve the original symbols.

Thus any n symbols in computer memory require at least n+1 memory locations to be completely represented (where n>1 since a single byte represents itself perfectly)

A complete system can only be achieved if the last expression uniting the symbols describes its own extraction.

So here we might have a 3byte word 000001000110000101100010 (In ascii with an 8bit boundary this is 8ab.)

However there is more to codify now. We need an expression to represent the fact that 00000100 must be interpreted at the boundary, and 0110000101100010 as the data.

At root the proble arising is that Data and Code are fundamentally different types in computer systems because the Arithmetic and Logic Unit (ALU) is hardwired to treat data from the instruction register differently from that of the data register. There is the clock cycle which is external to the whole system.

To summarise: in any symbolic information system

(i)Simple representation of knowledge does not codify the separation of that knowledge.

(ii)Any system which seeks to store data as one undifferentiated unit, and then self extract runs into the problem of the distinction between data and code. Self-Extraction cannot be coded as just data, because then we are back at situation (i)

Conclusion.

Any symbolic information system must codify factors that are external to it in order to be complete, i.e. God.

To assert that God does not exist is to also reject that human knowledge is a symbolic information system. But if human knowledge is not a symbolic information system, then it is also not expressible, not fixed and so not objective.

Note

also that the goal of information is to seek One undifferentiated unit, that codes its own differentiation. This is exactly the nature of God given by Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita, it also fits God of the New Testament who is in all things, but is still the One and only God. (This is my gripe with Christians and Muslims that they fail to understand their own God). It is also Buddha who transcends all distinctions in Zen.

Other attempts at SRH – 11/09/07 + 30/09/07

Let us define thinghood for a thing x.

1. There is an operator ¬ (not) such that x È ¬x is x (the universal set) for all x
2. x can be replaced existentially by another thing y. (Each thing can be thus be named or represented e.g y = John)
3. x can be essentially replaced by another thing z. (Each thing can thus be referred to by its qualities e.g. z = man)
4. For each x: ¬x is non empty

Explanation of the axioms.

1. Let us take a common “pen”. This pen defines two sets. The set which members itself and the set which members everything else which is not this pen. There is no thing which is neither this pen, nor not this pen; and there is no thing which is both this pen and not this pen.
2. The existence of any thing can substituted by any other thing so that a stone may represent a sheep so that a shepherd may keep a bag of stones to represent his flock. Alternatively we may create a symbol sequence like “PEN” where this thing can be used in place of a pen.
3. The essences of any thing can substituted by any other thing so that a stone may represent a farmer’s wheat and another stone his barley. This way a farmer has a record of crops according to their essence. Alternatively a symbol sequence like “wheat” may be created to replace all the things whose quality is wheat where ¬wheat covers everything else.
4. For any thing the set of things which are not it cannot be empty. Consider: if either the set of pens, or the set of John contained everything we wouldn't know either what a pen was or who John was.

Now is the universal set x a thing itself?

Obviously axiom 4 contradicts such a proposition because ¬x is by definition an empty set.

Let us ignore axiom 4 and phrase another way: is the set of all things a member of itself?

For the purpose of writing and obeying axiom 3 let us refer to the “set of all things” by the symbol x which is also a thing.

x is a non empty set containing all the discrete entities in the universe.

If x is a discrete member of itself then ¬x refers to everything else within x.

Yet for x to be the set of all things ¬x must by definition be empty.

x cannot thus be a member of itself. And x cannot be counted amongst the things.

So what is x?

================

There is also this one emailed: 30/9/07 and blogged here

http://riswey.blogspot.com/2007/09/full-outline-of-suggestion-minds-things.html

SRH – Proof of God even simpler... 28/12/2002

After a lengthy email to Richard it seems even simpler. The doctrine would be this

"That which we can name is not the whole truth."

Why? If the whole world was green then we would not be able to distinguish green from any other colour, there would be no colours. If we could not distinguish any colours then never would the occasion occur when we said "that is green". (This is what I failed to completely get my head around at school so its taken 16years! to confirm it in my own mind). What is single and undifferentiated we cannot distinguish or have a name for.

The corollary which is the new proof of God, is that, that which we have a name for must also have an Other, or must have been distinguished from something else. Thus a named thing can never be the whole truth because it must have a dependent other. Knowledge and Science which depends upon names and identities must always be limited to a plurality of distinguished objects, it can never seek the unnamed One. Plus it also follows that Knowledge and Science by very virtue of having names must exist in relation to some Non-Science and Non-Knowledge a distinction they depend upon for their very identity and existence. It is the persistence of ignorance that keeps knowledge so knowing. A named thing can never be complete.

So we have Mike Myers in Waynes World supposedly quoting Kierkegaard saying to Tia Carrere "If I name thee I negate thee" (I haven't read this), but this is the point, to name something is to distinguish if from other things, and therefore to define it negatively - probably the most romantic thing ever said in a hollywood film, and it only raised a laugh, whose mocking who (viz. Beavis and Buthead Movie, scene in the desert). So those like America, who claim any unique identity automatically define themselves negatively in relation to the world around them, then by appropriating this "we are Not the other Nations of the World" as their own identity, they have to reinforce the distinction again and again just like homosexuals (we are Not Women Likers), just like Christians (we reject the Un-Saved Non-Christian World) to confirm their own identity. This search for named identity is obviously a great sickness of the West.

Returning to God. Many "primative" religions have no name for God, and the Muslims refuse any images of him (and since man is in Gods image logically they ban images of people to). However if we are careful we can refer to complete systems as Q (as in the first proof), or God. If there is a named world call if Humanity, then there is in distinction a non-named world from which the human world gets its distinction, identity and meaning. This non-named world by (transcendent) inference only, not by actual mental distinction, is God. Those who confuse the name of God, with the named Human world are making the first mistake of religion, the mistake that has already given way to the death of God.

SRH – … ongoing thoughts

 

It is plain that something cannot be defined in terms of itself – but the proof is the quest.

An article on the fallacy of Gödel's  incompleteness theorems by Ferdinand Romero and Ardeshir Mehta quotes ;-) Quine’s distinction between ‘use’ and ‘mention’ of terms. This is exactly the problem of writing a Quine that the code both has to ‘use’ and ‘mention’ itself. The solution (to recall) is to make sure that at no point does the code ‘use’ AND ‘mention’ itself at the same time. The block of code is ‘mentioned’ to memory in the code (so that it is not used in the code) e.g. a$ = “ …%s… “, and then that quoted section is ‘used’ again within itself e.g. sprintf(a$,a$). This way the problem of "’quoting the quotes’ is avoided that is the ambiguity of whether “ ‘ “ is to be used to signify quoting or just a character.

The article goes on to use this as an axiom of reasoning which Godel doesn’t use. What the Ferdinand Romero and Ardeshir Mehta article doesn’t do however is to offer any reason for why things are like this. This is the SRH quest. Why does reality come with 2 side? be they the object/subject divide or the self/other divide and more importantly why can the one only be founded in the other? Why can’t something found itself? Why can’t a box enclose itself etc.

There is a good discussion of Paradoxes and the observation that in reality they do not exist so they must be the product of language and logical mistakes. Does this implication apply then to Time paradoxes where travel into the Past would allow oneself to undo the possibility of travelling into the past.

The line of enquiry at the moment of writing goes like this:

A system by definition has only 1 state at any point in time. If it has 2 states it would be two systems. Thus in-itself (intrinsically) it has no information since the probability of being it its current state is 1!

For a system to have information it must be “relative” to another extrinsic system so that the state of one system is uncoupled from that of the other system. Then information is present.

In the same way how can a system make a mistake? A sentence is not intrinsically un-provable or ungrammatical because it is just a sequence of marks. It only becomes “wrong” when it breaks extrinsic rules. A computer for example could never fully determine its own malfunctioning because what if the malfunction affected the error checking system? In the extreme case what if the malfunction caused the system to cut out; there wouldn’t even be a system to process the error!

What if two computers were set to check each other? Even in this case it doesn’t eliminate the possibility of errors that affect the ability of the systems to detect those errors - all though the number of errors that can do this is a small subset of the errors that can affect a single machine. By adding more machines to the error checking system the number of states of the combined system where an error is not detected are reduced (I imagine?)

What is personally disappointing for me is that this takes me right back to day 1 when I first offered an email “proof” to friends on the 11/12/2002. This awareness that systems are split into 2 is not new!!! It just lacks a solid proof. I’ll post that email next…

The SRH also links with the notion of compression that I was looking at in 2007 as well. Every file is really just a number (a long sequence of 0 or 1s). Compression simply requires a method of mapping selected numbers onto smaller numbers that aren’t useful. It is how we select what is useful and which isn’t that is the problem for compression.

The link to the SRH is the question of an optimum compression algorithm. There is no optimum compression algorithm: that is to say there is no 1 algorithm which will compress all files to their information content. Different algorithms will work best in different situations! In other words we can’t consider compression independent of the external system, or context! Information is present that will determine which algorithm to chose which is external to the algorithm itself. The proof involves consideration of a function and its argument… I need to reread this but it results in the familiar infinite loop which is the problem with self-reference.

A compression method in my mind requires consideration of not only the resulting compressed file, but also the compression algorithm and any libraries also. Obviously I could write a special compression algorithm that recognised the Windows installation disk and replaced it with a 1 bit file. On decompression it would magically create the windows installation files. Unsurprisingly include the algorithm and the library to the compressed file and the weakness of this method is shown up: the combined files are larger than the original file to be compressed.

It is also to consider a compression algorithm compressing itself. Suppose some new compression algorithm WinRAR2 was only distributed in *.rar2 format. Despite us all believing that it was a wonderful compression algorithm no-one would be able to use it because they would need to have a decompressed version in order to decompress the downloaded version. Suppose we found that code on a tablet left by an alien civilisation long since perished. To decompress it would require discovering the algorithm ourselves – the code would then act only as a test of whether we had succeeded because it would decompress to be functionally identical to the algorithm we were using… but that assumes that we know how the code would “function” in an alien computer chip. That code would have to be broken.. is that the end of the recursion? My head hurts - will have to return to this…

Book Seven Stories VI

VI.

One day while musing around his palace quarters, at the bottom of a large trunk, Riswey found a dusty satchel. He recognised it as the satchel he had brought with him and remembered the book inside that the storyteller had given him. He pulled the leather bundle out and unwrapped the book. He took it to a window to examine it and remembered the storyteller telling him that not all the pages had been torn out. It still contained the seventh story. He carefully opened the cover and there still in its binding was a single page mottled with age. It was blank, there was nothing on it at all. Looking out of the window at the rolling fields and ornamental laked gardens of the palace Riswey realised that today was his last day, the books spell was at an end. He went to the quarters of the court storyteller and when the storyteller saw the book in his hand he looked down and said “I know, I was expecting this one day. It has been good to know you Riswey, farewell my friend.” And they shook hands.

“Farewell story-teller. Now I must break the unhappy news to the royal family. I wish I could explain to the princess that we will always be together.”

As Riswey kissed the princess goodbye, slung the satchel over his shoulder, and walked down the slopes from the palace to the forest he suddenly saw behind a tree a familiar dancing point of light and he knew that soon he would be home. The light led a different way to that which he had come, around a village and down to a gorge crossed by a rope bridge. He crossed the bridge and on the other side he saw an old woman carrying a bundle of sticks. He sat down to rest watching her, studying the stories in the deep lines in her face. She stopped before the bridge and with a smile said to Riswey “Well aren’t you going to give me a hand then”. Riswey jumped up and took the bundle across for her. “That has made my life easier” she said “Thank you”. The light led back through the forest for a long while and eventually tired, Riswey took a rest. When he came to his feet the light was far ahead and he jogged to catch up. Gradually more and more lights appeared and then Riswey saw a sunlit break in the trees. This was the edge of the forest and he could just see a figure in the sun looking for something on the ground. Running out of the shadows he saw his close friend Imia. “Imia”, he shouted.

“Riswey! Riswey! Its you! Where have you been?” she celebrated hugging him “We all thought you were dead.”

“Well thank you! No I’m still here. How long have I been gone?”

“A year and six days. It’s the spring festival tomorrow.”

“I can’t believe it I’m so sorry. How are Mum and Pa?”

“They’ve not been the same since you didn’t come back. I can’t believe at last its you. Where have you been? I thought you might have got some grand job and would come back to the village rich to rescue me!”

“Not quite. It’s a long story. What were you looking for?”

“Oh it’s silly. Last year I bought you for the spring festival, a friendship amulet from Miou. Unfortunately it broke in half on the way home. I suddenly remembered again this year and thought I’d have a look for it.”

“You mean”, Riswey fished into his pocket “you mean you were looking for this?” He produced the amulet.

“Yes. Where did you get it?”

“I found it here last year. That’s why I went into the forest - looking for the other half”

“Oh Riswey you idiot, you always were a dreamer. Only you would think to look for it in the forest. I had it all the time. Oh well a year late, here’s your Spring Festival present. Sorry it’s broken.”

“It doesn’t matter. I don’t think it’s broken.”, he looked at it cherishingly.

“And for my present! Riswey! Huh?”

“Do you have a pen Imia”

“Yes. Here.”

Riswey pulled out the storybook opened it and went to write something but changed his mind. “Here this is for you. Open it tomorrow.” He hugged Imia again “I must go and see my parents now. Are you doing anything later?”

Book Seven Stories V

 

V.

Deep in the forest there meditated a spiritual man who people called Balu. He was the object of many stories and the object of some ridicule. He sat before a pile of diamonds his only possessions but they were safe: Balu was supposed to be in a challenge from Death that if he could resist taking the diamonds for Ever then they would be his in Eternity.

Through sun, wind and rain the man sat motionless under the birdsong tree. Indeed he had forgotten what it was to move, and he had not spoken for so long that he no longer rehearsed lines in silence, his thoughts were free as the wind, and before him always, forever so long as he did not move, lay the diamonds.

One day a large drab bird, rare in those parts, descended into the glade. It wandered up to the pile of diamonds, tilted its head at Balu and watched his reaction as it picked off one of the stones; there it stayed playing with the diamond unable to work out what to do until it died. Staring deep into the shiny mirror world of the diamond Balu saw the bird shattered into a hundred, and in the bird’s two eyes the diamond twice. Balu was so struck at how senseless the bird had been that he began to think and then he began to remember. There had once been a man called Elrus who had lost a loved one in a glade very much like this, and as she departed her tears fell as diamonds. Her sorrow was immortal like the diamond for she had been an immortal. Elrus had not realised this; his sorrow had been mortal and he too had been mortal. But as the story went he had not tasted the Demon’s temptation, for he knew the demon well. A man by the name of Waylan a great warrior had been on the same quest as Elrus for he had learned to trust himself in the face of illusion but he had been no match for the Lord Demon, Death. And Waylan himself had been on the run from a great foolishness, like a man before him Boren who having won a princess’s hand in marriage had forgotten that the ring she wore meant nothing without her having won him too.

And before them came a stranger, a great story teller who saved a kingdom from the spell of a book of seven stories. The man sitting in that glade began to realise as he remembered that he might be each and all of these men separated as they were in their own stories and lives, for he was a part of their great wisdom. But the great-story was not complete the five horned beast was still unbeaten and Elrus’ sorrow was now his own.

Without warning Death, the Lord Demon, landed in the glade like an earthquake. Balu remained unperturbed and kept meditating on the diamonds.

“Balu!!! If you do not stand and fight, I will strike you down” the Demon roared tearing away trees

with his enraged voice.

“You are indeed free to chose the end of the characters in stories but you cannot stop storytelling Diablo”.

“But this will not save YOU Balu”, and Death stomped around shaking the mountains and the skies,

“See I am the destroyer of worlds. Who are you?”

“Death I am not a mortal now. If I were you would visit me as the grave, as the end of the story, but not as Death. I can see you. I can see that we are all suckers for your charms. I can see that you take us apart, separate us, bring friends, families and lovers to tears, end kingdoms and end stories. But if we were not apart in the beginning how could we ever be together, and for that we depend. I am Balu. And if you try and kill me, indeed because you kill me, I can be Elrus. I have been. You say impossible, you cast these stories into flames, and I am Riswey, the storyteller. I am but an incarnation of the universal immortal being and you depend upon that to play your games with my incarnations. Who do you wish to fight?”

The Demon stopped, leant over and touched Balu on the forehead. “The diamonds are yours”, he said smiling and then he turned and walked away.

In the silence Balu’s heart rejoiced; for Elrus in the incarnation of Balu was no longer separated from his goddess, indeed they had always been united and he had known this; Waylan in the incarnation of Balu had never been in danger from the Lord Demon; Boren in the incarnation of Balu, was married to all his women; and Riswey was the incarnation of Balu.

Relationships – the nature

Satisfying desire is conditional – it depends upon both the desire being present and its object being present. Human life in its most basic form is the manipulation of the environment to try and create the objects of desire.

This is in contrast to more basic “automata” that simply live and die depending upon the success of their strategy. Their strategy evolving thereby.

“Intelligent” life undergoes a similar process but it is the process of manipulating the environment to create the object of desire that undergoes mortality and so evolves.

In both cases as evolution occurs so to does the object of desire change – so it is a iterative process and as I’m exploring at the moment will have all the self-similar architecture of a fractal. I’m not sure yet whether I agree with Hofstadter that this architecture is sufficient to explain all forms but it is an alluring idea.

For a desire there are two options. It can either achieve its desire or it can not.

Where organisms desire the same finite thing this means that the sum of attainment of each desire remains the same in all outcomes. Thus two bacteria will share in the resource. If it is insufficient one may attain the “desire” and the other not.

In “intelligent” life where the object can be created there are 4 outcomes.

1 & 2) The object solution can be designed at the expense of the other – so that a “private” house may be constructed from raw materials. In a finite scenario one desire is met and the other is homeless.

3) The object solution can be designed to satisfy both desires – for example a couple of flats in this scenario. The logic of economy of scale and specialisation means that having both “intelligent” organisms co-operate on the project results in a better matched object and greater satisfaction for both organisms.

4) The object solution can be badly designed and fail to satisfy either organism.

This “intelligent” situation becomes particular important in human relationships where an object is created that involves both organisms. Both organisms are resources in the solution but the solution is also created for their satisfaction. This is clearly the most complex object of desire because it borders on self-reference.

When one says that they are in a “happy relationship” what they are effectively saying is that they are supplying a good object solution to their partner’s desires and vice-versa. This is iterative and as above becomes fractal. Human relationships are of many types but each involves the attempt to achieve a stable equilibrium in what is a dynamic system which responds to both “our own” and our partners moves.

In the The Seventh Story there is a good deal of self-reference. What I sort most in that relationship was an understanding of self – I’m beginning to see how this happens. My model at the time was that self would be united with that of the partner – this blog entry is teaching me something else. I’ve also seen that the relationship with “my muse” was never going to work. I’ve also in the last few weeks escaped the attraction of passionate relationships. I will never be able to have such a relationship again, even if my one shot at it was a failure; that one experience shattered the illusions and repelled me from that path. This week I’ve been working in the Reading University Union and watching the students going through the processes that, I so long ago now, sort entry into has taught me that this carries no weight with me anymore. It is a path I could have taken, but it is also a path that I was very unlikely to take in all honesty. Like Elrus in the The Seventh Story my battle takes me over a different landscape from the “norm” but with the same destination – I fear it’s a harder route; that I will never know!

What Buddhism teaches at the ultimate solution is the strengthening of “positive” thinking. This way whatever the “other” does in a relationship we behave in a positive way so that whatever we are experiencing is entirely from outside. If we ever behave in a “negative” way then we will begin the experience the feedback of that negatively. For example if a relationship goes bad and we make an enemy then that is one more person in the world who wishes to hurt us – that can only make things harder – it cannot make things better. Thus we treat our enemies positively! This is Jesus teaching also. If we fight back at an enemy (in the sense of wishing to hurt them) then they will only hate us more and so we get that hate back. It is an iterative process and we experience what we put out.

However this is not the only stable relationship. Consider two people who are

I realise here that my resistance to relationships more than anything is the sense that we will become bound into an iterative process that involves ourselves. It is fine to make other people happy. But when that involves a self-feeding process that becomes iterative and we start to live in a world that is created more and more by what has happened before. Meeting people we know is meeting ourselves in a way because the relationship involves the things that have happened before. Our relationship in each case becomes a realisation of history with ourself. Everyone must be aware of those relationships that we know could be so easily otherwise, but everytime we enter the reality of the relationship a “force” drags us in another way. “My Muse” actually was like that – I knew it would take nothing to get her into bed, to satisfy at least those desires and I’m sure that is all she was lacking, but there was a strong force of history that led the relationship from that day I found she had a boyfriend to the day we shook hands on our first date rather than hugged or kissed onwards. My mother is like that at the moment. Despite us both wanting the best we “kick off” very easily into old behaviour patterns that are generated not within us but within the history of the relationship. My old work was the same. It is the existence of these historical chains in relationships which create their architecture – this I imagine is straight from Godel, Esher, Bach (tho I’ve not read it yet). The desire to escape such controlling factors as history, is my resistance to such closed relationships.

Looking at the world stage we see the same thing. Israel and Palestine is a historical chain process. It would be easy to find peace you would think – but it must be done within an iterative process where the present simply gets fed back into the memory of the past. Tony Blair achieved the impossible in Northern Ireland. An ex-girlfriend had done a Masters dissertation on the situation and decided that the divisions first set up the invading William of Orange had become so engrained in the institutions and schools that it would be virtually impossible to change the direction. Yet it seems to have happened. The Americans think that the Middle East will take to Democracy over night. They had NeoCon think tanks churning out stuff which basically said that there was no reason why everyone in the Middle East shouldn’t just wake up the next day with a new mindset – as easily as one imagines the Americans waking up Islamic I thought ;-) Which is what the opposition think. So they both tried “shock and awe” (911 and Iraq) and it has really worked – tho with continued pressure Iraq has headed off in some new direction (not sure which yet) – and the West has also headed off in a new direction post 911 but I’m not sure what that is yet either. New events in a relationship feed into an iterative process and create a fractal architecture which is very hard to escape.

Meditation in Buddhism, a firm faith in Karma, and strong compassion and kindness are the only ways to break negative chains of history and turn them positive. Returning to the start a positive relationship is one where both organisms create object solutions which satisfy the other organisms in the system (relationship). Interestingly these simple things are called Good and have a whole history-chain of meaning in Christianity (and Buddhism) which is everything but Good. We believe for example in killing people in the name of goodness. The history of Goodness is littered with battles, torture and murder. We believe in Evil (and Good) as a distinct thing – as though a relationship were actually a “thing”. People feel drawn to Evil and Good without realising that what is “drawing” them is simply an architecture created my iterating past behaviours.

I argued against the concept of “habit” in Buddhism. But I realise here that what that simple word means is not the becoming an automatic being but rather the security of living in relationships with a “good” history which feeds back and creates an architecture that is conducive to our desires.

It was said that evolution occurs. One imagines that these history-chains also involve changes to our desires. So stable systems do not generate new desires that lie “outside” the architecture of the system. In a sexual relationship a degree of mastery of sexual desire must be cultivated otherwise sexual desire could feed back into the relationship and create desires that lie outside the finite resources offered by one’s partner. I’ve always thought this a problem in hypersexual relationships. You hear of all the bizarre relationships that are generated by sexual desire reaching beyond the boundaries of the relationship.

I’ve forgotten to add the other types of relationship. A win-win is the obvious goal of a relationship. This requires a firm understanding by both partners of the impact of themselves on the relationship. This is why my relationship with “my muse” failed. I did not have the strength of self-knowledge to overcome the history-chain that was triggered by the knowledge that she had a boyfriend. I was (and am) still learning about myself and what I want and who I am. Thus I fed very weak signals about myself into the system and so it failed. Other guys with a fraction of my desire fed very simple signals in which created a simple relationship very easily. She herself was unsure of herself and so she fed in even weaker signals. The result was that the chance events created an architecture that neither of us could escape. Call it Karma.

Many relationships involve a destructive element. A partner may get what they want, but at the expense of the partner (in sadistic relationships) or simply without fulfilling the partner’s desires. These can create history-chains as easily as good relationships and architectures that weak people cannot navigate around. I’ve forgotten the point now about the dynamics of non-mutual relationships.

Lunch :-)

Book Seven Stories IV

 

IV.

There came into the most peaceful glade in the whole forest a wise man in search of eternal happiness. His name was Elrus.

Leaving his horse to graze on the moist grass he went to sit under a birdsong tree to watch its leaves playing in the sunlight, sunbeams streaming through a hazy pollen breeze, awash within the sea of sweet fragrance that lapped his senses. So peaceful was he that a passing goddess thinking him an immortal graced his presence in human form. She came and sat beside him, her long slender legs drawn up in a loose embrace; her long hair cascading down her back and over her delicate shoulders and breasts. The world was eclipsed; as the moon ripples dark waters Elrus’ mind was filled with the spirits of the sultry night and as his head fatefully turned he fell into the illumination of her eternal gaze. Like the waterfall filled by its river the windows of his heart were flung open and he breathed as if for the first time, his whole life within that grasp, buoyant in that one moment. They were transfixed, inseparable, he in her eyes and she in his. The birds usually in tireless chatter and game stopped their play to watch and as the birdsong tree came into its glorious blossom the animals and spirits of the forest came to settle in the stillness of the couple. So unbreakable was their bond that soon even neglected old-man Time respectfully departed the glade.

They would have remained for eternity but the great demon of the cosmos had become jealous, no mortal dare not fear him. The sky began to cloud and darken and a great chill wind began to blow in. As a thick fog rolled into the glade the animals of the forest fled terrified and the leaves of the trees turned and decayed and the white blossoms of the birdsong tree began to fall, showering upon the couple. A petal settled upon the goddess’s long eyelashes and disturbed Elrus. He could hear his horse braying terrified and it troubled him. Breaking his gaze the sky with split with a tremendous crack and the Lord Demon with five horns upon his head appeared in the glade. Elrus picked up the goddess and ran to his horse. They tried to escape but the demon was in front of them. The horse reared and they were dismounted. Taking his sword Elrus ran back into the glade with the goddess. “Stay close to me, we will be safe.” Elrus ordered. Elrus did not know she was immortal, and knowing it would make her mortal to disclose the fact, the goddess implored Elrus, “Please! I have a secret that I cannot tell you. You must believe me. I will be safe. You need only save yourself.” “I would gladly die for you my beauty, and I cannot conceive of living without you. If you should die I will die too.” A tear rolled down the goddess cheek as she looked at him pleadingly. “Please.”

Elrus turned to the Demon and launched an attack toward him but the Demon simply re-appeared behind him grabbing the goddess and standing between them. “Elrus your energies are wasted, give-in to me” taunted the Demon, “On the contrary Demon,”, replied Elrus defiantly “keep beauty and you are finished, save yourself and you lose her” and Elrus lunged at the Demon who reappeared behind him. “See we are together again” Elrus triumphed, “And you are vulnerable again” added the Demon “I am Death, fight or die you will never be together”.

As Elrus became more and more exhausted the goddess unable to bearing his torment anymore ran toward the Demon in surrender. In his clutches she looked back at Elrus tearful, shaking her head.

“You have only one chance Elrus”, the Demon argued impatiently, “I know you have never touched

her. Come! Give in to me and end your days in ecstasy.”

Torn, Elrus could not bear the sight of his beauty in the arms of the Demon, and he knew he could not bear to live without her, but he could not give into the Demon. He stood devoid of action, in anguish his sword lowered as he watched the Demon carry his beloved away upon the retreating mists. He stood staring at the point where she vanished until the moment was gone and with it her, and he collapsed lifeless.

Many days may have passed before Elrus awoke from his sleep. Before him where the goddess had stood crying, sparkled diamonds. He collected them into a pile and sat before them to mourn. He was more alone than he could ever remember, like a newborn child. He sat confused, no past and no future, there was only this one moment in which to think. So he sat in meditation and vowed not to move until be became like the trees, lost to the forest without sorrow.

Book Seven Stories III

III.

In the deep fearful forest of a distant land, asleep within an ancient building lay a young man, an adventurer come traveller in search of a quest that might fulfil him. His name was Waylan.

In his dream he was staring at his reflection in a serene pool and as he reached forward to touch the water the water stayed calm but it was him who rippled. He awoke suddenly in a cold sweat to the sound of his horse braying. A tall handsome man stood within the confines of the building. ‘Good morning to you.’ he said boldly ‘This is no place to be sleeping, where are you heading? ‘Nowhere in particular, I’m new to these parts. Is there a village near here where I may stay awhile?’ ‘It’s quite a journey but the people in Medon are good, you could stay there. Head in that direction’, he said pointing, ‘until you reach a river, follow it down stream. You’ll be there by late afternoon. It will be sun break soon I must be going. Farewell.’ And the man was gone. Waylan dozed off again.

Some while later Waylan awoke. The forest was strangely quiet not a bird sang or a creature moved and he remembered his encounter with a stranger. He mounted his horse and set off eager to arrive in Medon before nightfall. Along his route there were more ruins, many abandoned churches with overgrown graveyards. Whole villages seemed to have been deserted. He had been travelling for a while when he saw another man walking through the forest. He greeted the man and confirmed the way to Medon. ‘You’re heading in the wrong direction. It’s back up that way.’ Waylan set off on his new route. Again he met another man who told him a different direction, and then the same yet again. Finally he asked the next man he met if he could show him the way to Medon. He could but for a fee of ten gold pieces. The man sat back-saddled giving directions.

They eventually arrived at some ruins. ‘This is Medon.’ ‘I was told I could get lodging here’ protested Waylan. ‘Its been deserted for ages now’ ‘Where have all the inhabitants gone?’ Waylan asked, ‘Oh they now live in Medon.’ ‘This is Medon’ he said sarcastically, ‘No the other Medon’, ‘Look friend! I don’t care what the place is called, I just want to sleep somewhere tonight’ ‘I’ll take you to the other Medon but it will cost you another ten gold pieces’. The man’s directions were uncertain and when they eventually arrived at some more ruins he dismounted and scarpered into the undergrowth. Waylan gave chase drawing his sword, and riding along side, struck the man down. He turned his horse and rode back but the body and his money were gone. Infuriated Waylan stormed off vowing not to listen to another direction he was given and when he arrived at a signpost to Medon he ignored it.

Presently he arrived at a village. Looking out over the bustling market place Waylan saw a man steal a purse of money. His victim ran after him and they fell into an argument as a crowd formed around them. They were on the verge of blows when another man stood forward with a dagger. ‘I know’, he said ‘let us determine who needs this money more. The man who is prepared to die for it may have it. If you BOTH accept however, I shall toss a coin to see who wins the money and also who I shall kill’. The man holding the purse stood proud but the other man backed down and walked away. Waylan went after him, ‘That wasn’t justice you should have stood your ground. If you need my help…’ ‘Thank you stranger but that is the way things are in this town, you don’t want to get involved’. ‘No, please I want to know and anyway there is a mighty storm blowing up and I need somewhere to stay’. ‘You are welcome to stay at mine, my name is Yolas by the way’. Outside a run down shack Yolas suddenly lurched a blade at Waylan’s hand. Waylan instinctively drew his sword defensively and was about to attack when Yolas saw his hand bleeding and shouted apologies ‘I will explain Waylan, trust me! You can tether your horse in that shed.’

As the storm raged outside, sitting around a crackling fire while his wife prepared a simple meal, Yolas apologised again. “You see this land has been overrun by demons. They are exact reflections of mortals, indistinguishable, but theirs is not a living body. It does not bleed and they are always young, immortal because they cannot die. They have spread lies and confusion and life is now very hard. We have fled but they only follow. That man who stole my purse could have been a demon and so might you. I’m sorry to suspect. It will be night fall soon you must not go out.” His wife came in with some soup and some garlic and sprigs of mistletoe, “Wear these for safety”.

Through the howling wind came a knock at the door. Yolas answered it and said to the sheriff that Waylan was a relative come to stay, but he failed to discourage the inquisition. “Matia bring the sheriff some food”. The man seated himself and asked Waylan suspiciously his business while tucking into a bowl of soup. “Unhappy with the answer he asked to see Waylan’s identification”. Waylan looked at Yolas who looked back fearful. In the long anxious silence Waylan studied the sheriff waiting for his reaction and as he leaned over his bowl for another indulgent slurp Waylan was chilled to see dancing upon the soup candlelight but no reflection. He signalled to Yolas, then tipped up the table drawing his sword and striking hard at the sheriff. The chair splintered but the sheriff somehow escaped to stand sword drawn behind Waylan. Yolas ran to hold up the Sheriff’s aids at the door.

Waylan was outclassed he had never seen reactions like that. Again he struck at the sheriff who escaped to deliver a blow that Waylan only just defended. Thrashing around the room he could not understand how he had suddenly become such a bad sword fighter and how the sheriff was so unshakeable in his confidence. He was quickly reduced to desperate defence. As they fought Matia began to become hysterical. Screaming at the sheriff she pleaded that he take what he wanted and leave them alone. “There is nothing here of value but you” mocked the sheriff “and even you’re cheap”. Yolas gave the sheriff a grave look but remained silent. “Your ring” said the sheriff “today I’ll settle for the ring but your ‘friend’ must be gone by the morrow”. “No” shouted Yolas, but it was too late, Matia sobbing uncontrollably had thrown her ring at the sheriff – it lay on the floor. The sheriff proudly smirked.

Waylan defending another blow saw Matia throw the ring and look up at Yolas, and he suddenly realised that the ring-itself meant nothing to her, it was just a reflection, a symbol of their truth together. He had been an idiot, he was fighting reflections. He pulled back a little to let the sheriff nearer the ring and as the sheriff crouched down under a defending blow, Waylan went to attack and then spun around and slashed through his undefended rear flank. His sword powered into the sheriff’s side, and the sheriff appeared behind him again. Waylan thought to turn, paused for a second confused and struck out at the sheriff. He missed, the sheriff was beside him. He turned and thought to strike the sheriff in front of him but instinctively this time stabbed his sword behind him. The sword pierced the sheriff’s belly and he stumbled. Waylan went to the door, which Yolas was still holding closed, and offered to take over. Yolas nodded and with silent passion retired to claim his wife’s ring back. Letting the door fling open and presented with a man running at him, Waylan with complete trust in his new-found awareness swung a head high slice behind him and sent the head of the aid flying. His companion turned and fled into the thundering storm shouting for help with Waylan in pursuit.

Sliding around a corner in the mud Waylan was faced with an angry group of ten. He stopped and stood dignified with his back to them his sword pointing upwards in front of his eyes so that he could see the reflections of his assailants, but there were only five. Nervously he listened, resisting turning. The five approached and then they themselves stopped and four turned around and fled. Waylan sneaked a look behind him and the demons were running with four of the mortals. The remaining man, frightened, shouted out ‘What are you?’ ‘Mortal’ Waylan replied, “mortal friend”. “Why did those men flee?” “Five of them were demons and they saw I knew, your friends are fools. Where have they fled?” “This path leads into the mountains.” Waylan ran along the dark muddy path his way lit by explosive flashes from the torrential storm, following it high into the mountains until he rose onto the edge of a vast natural amphitheatre; a flat plate of smooth shiny black rock commanding the valleys and plains below. Everything smelt of oil. In tiers all around sat hundreds of small black demons and on a grand throne on the far side a tall black monster with five horns upon its head. “At last”, the lord demon boomed “we have some sport from the realm of the mortals, I am very impressed. You are welcome to stay and compete.”

As Waylan stepped into the arena, over a neat moat of oil, lightening struck all around sparking the oil and trapping him in a massive ring of flames. Demons then began to enter the arena and Waylan took his place at their centre. At the next lightening strike Waylan charged the demons striking and slicing always instinctively and contrary to what his sight was showing him, but he was growing tired and his foes out numbered him too many fold. Overwhelmed he retreated to the centre of the ring exhausted. Staring at the advancing masses he felt like a giant, being so superior a warrior but he was also frightened seeing his imminent demise. But it struck him: what was he afraid of if it was not what he could see? It must be what he could feel. He closed his eyes and sat down in the ring searching for salvation from his tormentors.

So intently did he search that he forgot about the battle, and when, full of peace, he opened his eyes the arena and the stands were empty only the lord demon remained, and he was filled with fear. Again he tried to find serenity but his fear was too great. He leapt to his feet, ran at the demon and struck out instinctively but his sword passed through thin air. Then he struck out at the demon and the demon appeared behind him. Then he was filled with terror and turned and ran for his life without even a look back. You may run but we will meet again Waylan.”, the Demon said, “Give in.”. But Waylan did not hear.

It was daybreak as Waylan arrived in the village. News of his exploits had spread far and he was received like a hero, rewarded with money from the hoard found in the county hall. He stayed for a season to teach the people of the land his new fighting code and his suggestion that all money should carry the motto “But for ‘ell, Gold’s World is Gods Word.” was duly received, but the words of the king demon wore heavy on his mind. One summer’s morning as the dew was rising into the cool air he hugged a tearful Matia farewell and shook his fond friend Yolas’ hand for a final time. Mounting his horse he slowly took the fateful path out of town down which he had come.

SRH – and Hermetic Self-Reference is impossible - progress?

Was thinking last night about Gödel Numbers.

I’m sure I’m making a naive error but it occurred to me that for a Gödel number to map uniquely onto a Statement they must both have the same information.

Whatever that means when it been made it rigorous doesn’t it imply that a statement can’t refer to itself directly since it cannot encode its own number without increasing its information content and entering an infinite loop?

This implies that in this understanding of Gödel a “reference” is established when a direct relationship is shown between two structures. They occup the same position in the parallel calculus and so have the same information content!

So it leads me to a better analysis of reference. What was termed Strong Reference and Weak Reference is better termed Hermetic and Non-Hermetic Self-Reference.

Hermetic Self-Reference (previously Strong Self-Reference) is what the SRH says can’t exist. Non-Hermetic SR is fine.

Hermetic self-reference exists when a structure fully maps onto itself without information being implied by the context.

A Godel Number would be Hermetically Self-Referential if Godel Numbering has a Godel Number itself that could be encoded within Godel Numbering. But as suggested above this is impossible. I still need to find the original paper – I studied it at college but fell short of understanding the approach directly … something about using ‘’’’’’’’’ (primes) to determine Godel Numbers. Can it really work?

This also opens up a new lead. The idea of information entering a reference from “outside” the system. This is what I’ve looked to show since the beginning.

So my reasoning began today at lunch.

In a 1D universe of 3 static objects the total information is easy to measure: n! = information of 6. I’ll take information as the total number of posible states (ignoring proper information theory).

However in this system of 3 things it cannot encode its own information because it can only ever have 1 state. To encode its own information at 6 requires the whole system again and so an infinite recursion is set up.

This is like creating a Quine that doesn’t output its own code by rather represents its own information content?

It’s a paradox. A system can only have 1 state. To say it holds “information” is to compare it with another system so that there are multiple possibilities.

So to say “I” meaningfully and encode information is always to put “I” in reference to other things – so it isn’t self-reference.

“This sentence…” acknowledges other sentences to make itself meaningful so its self-reference is not hermetic.

I’ve made this point before but it is getting more rigorous at last.

Book Seven Stories II

II.

Once in a rich city, high in a splendid palace, their lived a King and his daughter and his son in law, Boren. Boren was a stranger who had defeated a dragon to win the princesses hand a year ago to the day, and tomorrow was their first anniversary. Tonight, his adopted birthday, he was celebrating with an elaborate banquet in his quarters of the palace. He did not invite his wife, the princess, in preparation for tomorrow.

After the meal Boren sat upon his thrown and gave a short slurred speech to his boisterous drunken company, ‘A year to this day I was poor, but now I am rich, rich because I told a dragon to give tomorrow a chance. I think a toast to the dragon. And may the last man standing get more wine.’ His chief hunting partner Patrio then stood and dedicated the evening’s entertainment to him. The doors of the room opened and a troop of ten beautiful dancing girls entered followed by a band of drummers and musicians. Boren was transfixed. One girl in particular caught his lascivious attention and she with tightened and prouder dancing, attentive smile and obedient eyes exasperated his yearning. When the dance had ended Boren took to his feet intoxicated and asked the girl to come forward. “Clear the floor”, he said plucking a huge gem from breast plate, “To this girl I give this diamond if she will dance for me”. A single base drum began to beat.

With eyes engaged on Boren’s she began to sing an ancient and beautiful love song telling of dynasties torn apart by untamed passions and she began a spectacular dance to the single slowly quickening beat of the drum. Her spinning possessed body enslaved to the rhythm hypnotised the room to silence. Faster she turned, jumping clockwise, counter-clockwise, faster, faster, still singing the song through her growing exhaustion. From frenzy the drum sounded a final beat and she was released breathless to the floor, still looking at Boren. Boren was transfixed his life draining as a fish on a harpoon, a helpless slave to his passions. Without trying to break his stare he threw her the diamond and the assembled crowd erupted in frenzied excitement. To the sound of more music fed by the summer’s wine the group enjoyed each other long into the night.

The next morning the princess was unhappy to be faced with a less than alert husband. “I hear you had quite a party last night!”, “Oh yes?”, “The palace was awake until the early hours.”, “We had a good party my enchantress, I’m sorry.”, “There is no need to apologise you know I trust you.” Boren felt awful but could not forget. He had little spirit for the party that he held in honour of their marriage and the next night was in disguise drinking in the city with Patrio. “Patrio I am possessed I can’t sleep, I must see that dancing girl again tonight.” “Boren you’re supposed to be happily married”, “I am, she still wears my ring! Come on, I’m a prince, grant me this simple freedom.” That night Boren let the dancing girl wearing his jewel through a window into his quarters.

“What is your name my divine temptress?”

“My name, my lord”, she replied bashfully, “is Kalima.”

“Where do you live.”

“I live with my boyfriend, he is a sheep herd.”

Boren was suddenly gripped with envy, “How much can I pay you to stay here in my palace with me?”

“I don’t know, I’ll ask my boyfriend he deals with our money.”

“No, No, with ME, Kalima. Do you think of him when we are joined?”

“I don’t know, I don’t always think of anything, does that matter?”

Dance for me for a while, I need to think.

A few months later Boren was out hunting with Patrio.

“Patrio the royal family are away next week and I want to hold the most decadent party ever held – exclusive guest list of course, and try and find me unattached girls, I can’t deal with boyfriends and husbands.”

At that moment the prize bow fell from Boren’s horse and before he could turn around to fetch it a large drab bird descended and took it into a nearby tree. “I have never seen one of those”, Patrio said firing off an arrow swiftly through the bird. “It’s a Watugot”, Boren stopped horrified, “I am such an idiot. I’m a husband myself. I must get back to the palace.”

Meanwhile the princess who had been growingly saddened by Boren’s coldness toward her had received a letter from a stranger and the news she had dreaded. Boren arrived at the palace and ran to her bedchamber where he found her crying. “I have been the fool”, he began,

‘I do not care, my father trusted you, thought you worthy to be my husband and instead I have been married to a dream, and you to YOURSELF, take YOUR ring and leave. GO.’, and she threw her ring at him.

Fearful of her father’s wrath Boren left taking his only possession, a satchel. He mounted his horse and fled into the forest confused. He no longer knew where he was or what he was doing. He rode for along time until the forest grew dark and his eyes filled with tears. Seeing a ruined building he dismounted, tethered his horse, and hid within to weep.

It began to rain. The gentle crackle on the leaves above and on the forests leafy floor outside was comforting. Boren began to feel at home again, and curling up under a poncho he drifted off to sleep.