Partial Theories - Why not everything can be known

Noted in Brian Greene's "Fabric of the Universe" that theories are established in discrete steps. Newtonian mechanics for example was established without any knowledge of atoms. He poses the question of what a universe would be like in which we had to know everything to know anything.

This final question links well with Total and Ultimate Systems (previous blogged). The problem we have in knowing anything is to find the building blocks of that theory; a theory must have its terms. The atomic theory is the theory where we define everything in terms of atoms. Put another way a theory must itself be something - a system of symbols, a system of practices, a system ultimately of rules of some game (where I have avoided so far in this blog, just as Wittgenstein did, of defining that term itself - rules of a game. Watching BBC Horizon "What happened before the Big Bang" I actually felt a great sense of relief that physics is now aware that the Big Bang can't explain where things (in general) came from and only explain this particular universe. It is a bit depressing that I remember my father talking about all the ideas in this program in the early 80s - so what is being portrayed as new thinking is really just a change in emphasis - there are still no new ideas in Physics. String theory pioneer Michio Kaku also satisfyingly referred to various ideas of Nothing including both absence of matter, absence of space/time and even that Nothing I am interested in of the absence of even equalities and equations. Obviously the latter is beyond formal definition and can only be shown by some reductio absurdum within a formal system (which is exactly what the SRH is looking for).

The idea of "knowing everything" is a contradiction because we have to stand somewhere to frame, or ground, our theory and so that assumption of where we stand can't be "in" the theory. This inside/outside of a theory, this recognition that every theory (indeed everything) depends upon something that is not-itself (a la Buddha) puts science is a very odd place. It means that it is forever chasing its tail and the dream of final/absolute/real truth is an illusion.

So whatever we know there MUST be something we don't know upon which the theory stands. This is the essence of the SRH but I don't understand why this MUST be the case. As a corollary (and the reason for this blog) it must follow then that every theory MUST be a partial theory. So the observation by Greene that Physics comes in a collection of incomplete theories is not a feature of this universe but a logical necessity of what knowing is at all.

It follows from this that we can safely argue that a universe in which everything in known is actually a contradiction. Now that is the SRH.

Indeed thinking this through it was present in the opening statement. A universe where we need to know everything before we can formulate a theory has no starting place. If we need to know about atoms to form a theory of gravitation then we would need to know something about atoms to form a theory of atoms and so on ad infinitum. By definition we MUST be able to form a theory based upon "what is not known". Theories MUST contain "what is not known" otherwise there would be no theories. But what is known and what is not-known are by definition different so we have our dichotomy proven.

This known/unknown is the same as use/mention etc explore further...

Investment Maths

A friend and I were arguing about whether to invest everything in 1 stock (as I tend to) or spread the investment wide. (A girl commented to me before that she thinks men are more likely to adopt the first strategy while women the second - for whatever that is worth). Anyway there is no difference looked at in the following way:

Suppose that for a sector in the markets, over some period of time, stocks experience a chance of increasing of p%.

Suppose that on average they increase by a percentage i%.

Then with a portfolio of T invested in 1 stock the return in a single period r(1) is:

(1) r(1) = T * p * i + T * (1-p) * 1 = T * (p * ( i-1) + 1)

So for n periods is:

(2) r(n) = T * (p(i-1)+1)^n

The strategy of investing in more than 1 stock basically replicates this return in each stock but the portfolio is divided between stocks. Adding the portfolio together afterwards simply reverses this. For three stocks where T is divided and invested: T1 + T2 + T3 = T

T1 * (p(i-1)+1)^n + T2 * (p(i-1)+1)^n + T3 * (p(i-1)+1)^n =

(T1+T2+T3) * (p(i-1)+1)^n =

T * (p(i-1)+1)^n

The two strategies are the same. Where they are different is with investment costs. Each investment has its own costs so the more investments then the greater the costs. But it is not linear. This affects the compound interest rate in some trading environments.

If the probability of a stock increasing reduces after a few increases (say speculating on oil exploration companies finding oil) then a move to another stock is advisable to keep the probability up. [Indeed this marginal behaviour of finding the environmental average of stock increase and then moving one's stock based on this conforms to the Optimal Foraging Strategy (follow this up and make an investment model).] In this strategy the % cost of moving the stock is subtracted from the %increase and so seriously dampens the compound returns.

The model here only works where a sector can be defined where an average probability of stock increasing can be defined. I need to look at the application of statistics to the stock market and definitely look at the hierarchical definition of markets an apply the model to that; that is within any market there will be stocks that perform in certain ways and within those subgroups there will be further sub-groups etc.

Cycling Maths

Why do hills slow cyclists?

Cycling up hill we slow down but a simple look at the situation suggest we get that speed back going down the other side. Unfortunately as we slow down below the average on the way up the hill, it is not a simple matter of speeding up over the average the same amount down the hill to maintain our average: it is the amount of time spent at a speed that determines its weight in the average calculation and the hill (at the same gradient) will have run out by then!

So at an average A if we spend 10 minutes cycling up hill at A-5 mph we need to spend 10 minutes cycling at A+5 mph which will be (A+5)/(A-5) times further. If our average was 15 that is twice as far downhill at 20mph as we cycled up hill. Doesn't seem fair but that's the maths.

On a symmetrical hill (with equal gradient up as down and the same distance up as down) the following equation tells us how fast we must shift downhill (sd) in terms of the Average (A) and speed uphill (su):

sd = A * su / (2*su - A) (1.0)

or better if su = A * p [p being the percentage drop in speed]

sd = A * [ p / (2p - 1) ] (2.0)

Unfortunately if the speed uphill falls to half, or below half, the Average, then there is not enough distance downhill to recover the average without having to maintain speed over the average after the hill.

Hills thus sap the cyclists average speed and this is why they slow cyclists.

Godel and use/mention

Wait a second: Godel Numbering enable us to map the formulae of a calculus onto the natural numbers. Isn't it then a type of semantics (where semantic interpretations enable us to map formulae onto other sets, most often {TRUE, FALSE} or {0,1} for example). Thus we have the Tarski problem of mixing our syntax with semantics, which is the Quine problem of mixing our use with mention etc.

I have seen people claiming this is flaw of the Godel proof but never followed it up. Maybe not a flaw but an illustration of the importance of keeping them separate!

Is Air Valuable?

Hearing "One World" on Radio World Service I was a little annoyed by the UN head of conservation's attitude to conservation efforts. Everything he said was within a consumptive economic paradigm: species may provide benefits to man; they should be preserved for future generations; they are so intricately involved in the web of life that we can't afford to lose them. How 1 dimensional. Such mechanical talk makes me think I should be dead.

Air is not valuable. It is easily available, free to transport (via the wind and diffusion) and is recycled free of charge. It is not economically valuable unlike its sibling land. What lies above us is free and worthless, what lies fixed beneath our feet is the most precious resource with more blood spilt over it, literally as well as metaphorically, than anything else. This distinction is purely mechanical like the difference between plains Indians following buffalo and Canadian Indians who were agricultural and owned land. An surprising irony I now see that vegetarians are better fighters than meat eaters because vegetarians form more fixed territories to grow their food on!

But what economics explains also rips economics apart. Air has no economic value because it has no exchange value, an it has no exchange value because no-one can deprive anyone else of it and so be in the situation of selling it to them. If air was available in bottles for even 1p we would just walk outside and breathe for free. Yet at the same time as it being worthless, it is the most important resource. We can survive without food for many weeks, we can survive without water for many days, we can survive without warmth for many hours, but we can't survive without air for more than a few minutes.

What is least valuable is also most valuable. If there ever needed to be a demonstration of economic value being just a type of mechanical measurement here it is.

There is then a type of valuation which doesn't show up in measurement until the resource is scarce. It is the same with a friend who dies and only then do we realise how much they meant to us, or a time of great happiness that we only appreciate when we are sad. The problem with economics is that things only show up in £ when it is too late. We "value" that we have already lost (as I often quote Bono as having said so well in The Fly).

This is where economic conservation is logically flawed. There is only money is saving that which is rare. It means that which is abundant we don't care about and that is the whole problem with mankind at the moment; we can't appreciate what is everyday, normal, free and easy. We have to aspire and struggle for what is hard to attain to get any value in life. Yet after a 1000mile journey to find gold we feel great value as we take it out of the hand of a man who lives in a place where it is so common they make spoons from it. Same material thing but one man travelled 1000miles for it. He should have stayed at home and appreciated his stainless steel spoon that the man from the land of gold has never seen, or even the wooden spoon that he crafted one cold winter from a branch. What is the difference except in how we look at it?

So sadly the UN head of Conservation is a very good conserver of the World because he only sees the value of what is already beaten up and virtually destroyed; that which has economic value.

Extension *

When using a screw driver on a rounded screw we may find tt we concentrate a lot on t pressure we apply 2 t screw head, feeling t blade of t driver within t screw slot as though it was part of our hand. Our mind becomes situated at t tip of t screwdriver. This is extension; t ability of t mind t travel outside t body. Like t Chilean miners, their minds could travel back 2 their families n lives, this is why they felt trapped. Likewise advertising takes our mind 2 places we have not been n we then wish 2 buy. Material desire always lags behind t mind: we always feel trapped, tt is desire. Freedom is accepting tt t mind is away from t body, this way we don't fear t demise of t body in death. So extension is also t essence of self: only by going out side can we come home! Thus self reference implies tt t referer has been outside of t self n so only refers 2 t inside which means tt self is only a part of t referer=SRH!

===
Expanding on that idea take the sentence:

"I have four words"

It is slightly old English but still acceptable to say when asked whether we have done something that we haven't "Not I". For example, "Have you pinched a slice of cake?", replying "Not I".

The idea of negating the subject I don't think I've looked at properly. A sentence is usually the subject and predicate. "The cow is in the field" rewritten in predicate logic:

(Ex) (x is a cow and x is in the field)

Now we can write:

(¬Ex) (x is a cow and x is in the field)

There is no thing such that it is a cow and it is in the field; which is a long way of saying "there are no cows in the field". Interesting that we automatically switch to the plural when we negate the subject alluding already to what I am going to say.

More simply but ungramatically (makes me wonder about those words that have the quality they talk about -autological ***). So we can meaningfully say (although it is not accepted English)

"Not Cow is in the field."

If we accept that then we can say

"Not I have four words"

Does this mean "some other sentnece" or I don't have. If it means some other sentence then it poist outside.... that means all sentences that have not cabn point outside QED

Property is an arbitrary rule

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1322970/Catherine-Sackville-West-grew-Kents-Knole-House-echo-Downton-Abbey.html?ito=feeds-newsxml

Catherine Sackville descendent of the previous Lord Sackville, who owned Knole House, could not inherit the property due to the rules of male succession. Three of her sisters rent on the estate instead.

'as he allows three of Catherine’s sisters to rent small properties on the estate.'

Such an odd and arbitrary thing is "property". Simply because of a feature of the "rules of the game" the estate does not belong to her or her sisters. And so they now pay rent on what but for an insignificant change in the rules once could have been theirs. How arbitrary is the payment of rent then, a feature of arbitrary rules. Money that is acrued for no reason than "artificial" rules.

This particular situation shows, to me at least, the actual and relative nature of society in stark contrast.

Context/content *

Context/content
Like use/mention, form/content . . It is a division based on levels that derive from the relationship between that it outside/inside. Now this is what t SRH says must always exist n so a system can never be isolated n without inside/outside designations. Maybe it is tt once there designations can be made in a system they can be got rid of without setting up new levels?

Emergent property

Just watched the first part of Atom - Clash of the Titans on BBC4

Do atoms make the world? Some believe that because all things are made of atoms then all things can be explained by atoms.

As mentioned in this blog before, if phenomena can be replaced by atoms then what are the atoms explaining but themselves, which is nothing; this is the SRH. The very motive to explain something is born of the awareness that what we are witnessing has a cause which we are not witnessing and which needs investigation. Thus at the start we know that the explanation and the phenomenon are different; to then go and research the cause of this difference is self defeating! "Emergent properties" are presumed by experimental science itself so it cannot explain them. Phenomena are facts that are irreducible. Another way to argue that is: if it were possible to replace phenomena with explanations then why not start with the explanations in the first place! Why not start with atoms? Atoms are thoughts, features of our sixth sense (if you take the Eastern system), and the other phenomena are features of our other senses. Why put one sense above another?

Thus we have 2 paradigms in science: that of parts which interact, and the whole itself. It is fashionable in science to be reductionist (like it seems universally the guys at M.I.T.) and to seek explanation of the "human world" by referring to mechanisms defined by interacting parts. It is not that there is not a correspondence, that is what there is: theirs is the job of translation from one language (human language) into another language (maths) not the replacement of one "reality" with a more truthful "reality". To say that a human is actually the result of interacting neurons in some kind of mechanism, no matter how you twist through Hofstadter strange loops, is to say that the theory is just software of that mechanism. The stronger we make the claims of the theory the weaker me make the theory! This is the inception of the SRH that a theory can't make claims about itself (even obliquely) like this.

===

Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. I had this explained in a much simpler fashion than the program: to measure anything we use photons which interact with their object and so change it. Thus measurement changes the situation. The uncertainty principle gives exact quantification of the uncertainty: to work out the momentum (combined mass and direction of speed) we must change the position and vice versa. Philosophically it is interesting that this theory arises out of a model which is Newtonian and exact, presupposing that things have exact position and momentum (just as Newton, Rutherford and Einstein), so the theory is not limited in its assumptions but proves limitation if you accept those assumptions... Hofstadter notes this also (but offer no explanation) that when theories speak of themselves they limit themselves (this is what SRH is trying to explain). If you accept Nietzschian thinking then actually Heisenberg's theory doesn't do away with exact simultaneous Position and Momentum because you need to assume them to produce the theory! All he has done is show a contradition in these assumptions, but we are already, ironically, within the old familiar hermaneutic circle/paradigm!

I wonder however if SRH is applicable here. Let us create a phrase such as "Quantum World" which would be the whole paradigm of bizarre phenomena, descriptions, names and explanations that go together to make this ultra-minature world... but we won't try and rank the theory side by side with the macroscropic theories on some measuring scale as in "one theory about the small and one theory about the big" because which theory is going to provide us with the meauring scale! Is the measurement a result of the micro or macro theories? Paradigms can't be ranked any more than languages can be ranked (doesn't that apply to my multiculturalism argument?) because we have no meta-language with which to rank all languages... and if we did how would it rank itself (Russel Paradox)?

So taking the "Quantum World" idea we can say of Heisenberg's Theory that it is the result of considering what happens when the Quantum World tries to measure the Quantum World... now that runs up against the SRH. What happens when the Macro World tries to measure the Macro World? ok shall return to this have something else to write first...

ET & Nanobacteria

Been following the progress of nano bacteria for a few years now. Looks like it was a dead end lead but interesting article on the continuing debate over the 1996 Martian meteorite. Is life on Mars important? Well it would give us an important perspective on "life" as a natural phenomenon.

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/mars-meteorite-life-controversy-101021.html

Multi-Culturalism

Last week I woke up aware of the impossibility of accepting meat eating. It was directed at the Muslims and their concept of Halal/Haram, and that after watching "Four Lions" which oddly I found extremely moving - maybe that is what got me to thinking about mortality.

The basic principle of vegetarianism is that animals don't want to die and to kill them is against their own instinct to live.

This seems to be irrefutable. I don't think anyone thinks that animals want to die. The only issue is whether it matters what they "think".

At the 40th birthday do, I took the opportunity to eat both beef and chicken because I have become too deeply distressed at dead animals and need to get back to seeing flesh as just food. Eating meat actually makes me want to be sick, but I concentrate on it being just food and I can swallow it like anything. To be honest if that meat had been human flesh it would only have taken a bit more concentration and I could have eaten that - it is all just flesh and food.

But it makes me question the wisdom of people who eat it without any sense at all, like it was just a picture book, cardboard cut out of an animal with all the reality of the actual death that pervades the entire substance of meat somehow washed out.

For the Muslims however it is not the death which is wrong, but the manner of the death. To eat a piece of meat killed the wrong way is sinful, while killed the right way is non-sinful. What an alien concept that is to me.

I feel a bit sorry for the Muslims because they have no choice but to follow their prophet. If you are born into the Muslim world and everyone expects you to do things a certain way, it is extremely difficult to question it. Just as I should feel sorry for my own culture because it is extremely difficult for people in the West to reconsider drinking which is so deeply based in our culture. Here you have clash of worlds one which says that all drinking is sinful, and another (my own) which says that all killing is sinful. There are equal arguments for both sides.

But perhaps the most important argument is that no-one is in a position to question the great prophets. It is like a small child thinking he knows better than his teacher; quite ludicrous. And given that the prophets speak the word of G-d, the Almighty creator of the Universe and everything in it, even more ludicrous. Who the hell am I to question God. If God tells me to kill my own son, as He famously did Ibrahim/Abraham, then only the unfaithful would not go and kill their own son. This is why Abraham is so revered, because He loved God so much that he was even prepared to sacrifice his most precious only son to Him.

But now speaks the Devil. The Judeo/Christian/Islamic tradition will remember that God made Man in his image. And that in the beginning He made mankind sinless, and in His image. But he gave man one instruction: not to eat from the trees of knowledge or ever-lasting life. It was the Devil, disguised as the snake, slithering through the grasses of that primeval garden, who found Eve sitting alone, and speaking in soft caressing tones lulled her mind with thoughts of the sweet succulent fruits of that tree of knowledge. And so mankind gained knowledge of sin, but they remained mortal - something they would have to wait for Christ to correct by ridding us of that original disobedience of God and original sin. But a very important transformation occurred that day in the primeval garden so that the two abandoned creatures that were cast out into the fields had something that nothing else in creation had - the will to disobey, or to obey God. It follows, doesn't it, that a creature that cannot disobey God cannot do a sin for the essence of sin is that we do what we know we should not do, or do that which we know God has strictly forbade us to do. If we do not have this knowledge then we cannot sin, for we are not acting in disobedience.

Now where does this knowledge of God's law lie? We did after all eat the apple, and we do possess that knowledge ourselves, and we are made in the image of God's originally anyway. Some will say that the Law lies in the books of the prophets. But what of the illiterate, the dumb, the deaf, the blind and the stupid? Are they shut out from the Law simply because the windows into the outside world are closed? Does God enter our Hearts through our eyes? Does He live in the outside world waiting to flood in like sunlight into a room? If so then we can close our eyes and shut God out! God enters all and all knows God. The deaf, dumb and blind can see God just as well at the intellectual reading aloud the actual words of the prophet. Indeed they may well see God better because the words of the prophet can sound like anything the hearing mind wishes them to sound like. A line read one way to one person means one thing, and to another it means the opposite. If the prophet was so Almighty himself then only He can know what he meant and we are shut out from Gods wisdom anyway. Yet we are the children of that first couple who ate from the tree - we Know! That is our sin, and that is our power: to either follow God or disobey Him. And that is why we get judged upon our own actions and not the actions of our teachers. It is what we decide to do that is the basis of what God will punish or reward not what anyone else decided to do.

So to enforce God's law seems to be one way to misread the words of the prophet. Those who sin have already made a place in Eternal Hell. In the few trivial years we are alive on Earth what does it matter to us what they have done? We need only concern ourselves with doing what we know to be good. And this brings me to the point of this blog entry. I don't believe, after much thought, that there is a difference between the beliefs of the world.

1) There is no faith that does not recognise our individual responsibility before God - for it is me and me alone who will be judged.

2) There is no faith that therefore doesn't recognise the individual essence of our choice. If we cannot chose as individuals, then we can't be judged as individuals.

3) There is no faith which doesn't recognise our ability then to be like God, because we have the ability to chose God's way correctly. This is why we are told we are made in God's Image but we disobeyed. (This doesn't not mean we are God, it means we are alike to God.)

Now there are many things said by many people in many places and they are almost always different and in disagreement in some degree with one another - but it seems that nothing disagrees with this core teaching above. In Buddhism there is a special word for what I am referring to "Buddha-Nature". It is the perfect core of the soul which is clouded by sin and base desires, which is weak in the normal state of human degradation but which does know right from wrong and which as a conscience tells us, and we know it if we listen, whether what we do is Godly or not.

Returning then to the issue of meat eating. My conscious tells me without any doubt that it is wrong to kill. It is a sin. It is not the worst sin - I believe getting angry is a worse sin than killing an animal. But killing an animal is most certainly not a good thing.

Now this is in contrast to Judaism and Islam. If I was born into those cultures then, based upon the above reading of the books, I would disobey the teachings. In one sense it is a simple choice and if I am wrong and commit a sin then I will go to Hell. God might say at judgement that I was too egotistical taking my own thoughts too seriously. Is it really possible that Judaism and Islam are wrong? On the other hand is it really possible that my conscience is wrong? Why it might be argued do I take the Genesis chapter more seriously than the Deuteronomy or Sunnah?

Well the argument is that if Submission to the Law is an imperative in which we have no choice then how can anyone ever sin? It seems inescapable that to be accountable for sin I must have the power to not-sin and so therefore must be alike to God. If we to watch someone punishing fish because they could not fly we would think them quite insane; this is certainly not our image of God. God punishes fish because they will not swim.

So it seems that Judaism and Islam are actually wrong here. The killing of animals in sacrifice is not an act of love or devotion. I do not know the details of how this practice came to be part of religious practice or even whether God ever actually asked for it. It seems peculiar to that part of the world along with the rules governing pigs also. It may of course be that I am wrong myself, I am but human. What is perhaps more certain however is that God will judge people based upon this and if my conscience is what I think it is (and not the Devil) there are many pious people out there who will find they have been mislead by their teachings. It is a bold thing to say, but at the moment I can't see any other way to look at this. One needs only observe an animal dying to see things that these teachings seem to ignore.

And so to Multi-Culturalism. There is a great movement of mutual respect going on in Britain where diverse cultures are being allowed to develop side by side. I myself have been deeply sensitive to this movement realising that if any one culture took dominance it would eradicate all those good things in other cultures. But over the years my thinking has changed slowly. Culture can be superficial like when what clothes we wear, what music we listen to, what holidays we celebrate, how we get married. But while superficially things are different everyone knows what they are doing when they get married or have a religious festival - even while the superficial details may be radically different. So is the god that we worship a superficial or a deep aspect of our culture? It would seem like marriage that we all worship a god, so the differences are just superficial. But there are people who turn this on its head and say that similarity is superficial and the difference is fundamental. They say that you and me may get married, but what is important is that you do it around a fire and I do it in front of an altar - and that difference makes the two practices completely different. That same person will say that we both wear formal clothes to a wedding, but while I wear a Sherwani you wear a suit and that makes what we do completely different. I leave it to the reader to judge that argument.

The issue then is between the superficial and the deep. The superficial which ever we decide it is is not important and while people may fight to preserve the trivia of their culture actually there is no loss in losing it. As if to prove that within a couple of generations the trivia is all but lost already. In my own lifetime I have seen a second generation of Asian people grow up who have no clue of their culture or language. Their parents have to send them to special schools to try and teach them it. I used to argue with the Chinese that if I went to one of these schools would I then be Chinese? If you need to send your kids to a special culture school then the culture has already been lost! The point is that it is only trivia which is lost - even toughest traditionalists wear modern shoes an jeans these days.

Yet at the time we should be forgetting the trivia of culture it is being strengthened. The very existence of multi-cultures in one country actually has the job of defining the cultures. No Indian in the history of the world ever thought they were Indian or worse Hindu. It has only arisen, firstly as a reaction to colonial rule, and now as a feature to globalisation. Hindu is a silly designation anyway - it is like saying European and collecting everything European in one blanket term yet people still stand by this fake identity. Chinese may be different because of the actions of Emperor Chin but even that designation has growing significance in the globalised. So by huge irony as these designations become less and less important people are holding onto them harder than ever before. The danger of all this multi-culturalism is that we are losing sight of the similarities in the stampede to define our differences.

And so returning to meat again. There is only one culture that used to seriously respect this and that was the one now designated Hindu. They spread the idea to China, Africa, Europe, America and the Caribbean (Rastafari being vegetarian). The idea is sophisticated in that it recognises that practical requirements of meat in some environments where agriculture is poor, so it is not a dogma, but it simply respects the life of other creatures - ideologically because of reincarnation, but ethically because of compassion and love. It is true that food is food and what actually passes our lips is a superficial point - I tested this last night. But what is very different is the difference between cutting down a field of wheat and cutting the throat of an animal. We simply don't harvest animals; there is nothing similar in our thinking about agriculture and cattle farming beyond the unhappy marriage of intensive economics and farming. These are subtle points and must be left to individual conscience and scrutiny but there are things that transcend the trivia of cultures. Killing animals may be a slow burn for cultures that have been doing it for millennia, but aspects of neighbourhood and society are simpler. Murder, theft, lying, dishonesty, adultery, insulting speech, greed are universally acknowledged across all mankind. We fight over the superficial right to wear an item of clothing or a religious pendant but who fights for the deep principles that unify God's Earth? We may even fight for a particular version of the Law and in so doing over look the deeper Law that remains unchanged in the heart of all Mankind always.

It seems to me that multi-culturalism is a failure. It has brought focus on the differences between communities and encouraged people to found their identities on the superficial differences that exist been these groups. The society has become a flat quilt patchwork where people have only their colour upon which to base their whole meaning. What should have been done is a strong and active discussion between groups towards an agreed central Law. This would have brought integration and identity and maintained a strong social framework, focusing on what is important in Life and getting people to take a balanced view of the trivial nature of the differences.

It may have turned out that the beef industry might have won out even in this climate and the British-Hindus would have ended up eating even more beef than they already do, but at least the British culture would have benefited from the Hindu view being aired rather than being pushed behind closed doors by a overly tolerant and apathetic multi-culturalism.

Bible Study

Genesis 9:3-6

³Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things.

⁴But flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall ye not eat.

⁵And surely your blood of your lives will I require; at the hand of every beast will I require it, and at the hand of man; at the hand of every man's brother will I require the life of man.

⁶Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man.

This passage clearly lays out the attitude of the Jewish (and inherited Islamic) traditions. It seems that the Christians for whatever reason have forgotten this. It is interesting that "image of God" is used to protect man from killing himself - in that one assumed man, in some sense, is like God so killing man is like killing God. From which we understand that animals are not like God so they can be killed. One notes interestingly also that a man who sheds blood shall have his blood shed - even while he is like God. Unless we assume that upon sin he is no longer like God so he can be killed. All this is long after the expulsion from Eden. Here is what God said in the beginning...

Genesis 2: 4-20

⁴These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens,

5And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew: for the LORD God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground.

...

⁸And the LORD God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed.

⁹And out of the ground made the LORD God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

...

¹⁵And the LORD God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it.

¹⁶And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat:

¹⁷But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.

¹⁸And the LORD God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him.

¹⁹And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.

²⁰And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field; but for Adam there was not found an help meet for him.

Well not exactly conclusive but the evidence is of a rather more agricultural Adam with a mandate from God to do the gardening in Eden rather than any blood letting. This passage certainly echoes through the ages flourishing in all the stately homes and National Trust gardens around the country and the world. The garden a place of peaceful repose and cultivation; that's the image of this idyll before things go so tragically wrong... ironically enough because of a plant!

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I discuss the above with a friend today and he points out that the Genesis 9 section is after the flood when of course there were no plants or crops because they had been descroyed by the waters! Quite rightly the people had no choice but to eat meats and presumably this is where the practice and the removal of blood began. It sort of follows however that once agriculture is re-established then there is no need to eat meats anymore. This seems to be missing from the book. I would imagine that the reason for many of the arbitrary rules that people stick to is that the rules have long since out lived the conditions and reasons for which the rules were adopted. Tradition is such a strong forced that just as without good reason we don't adopt new rules, without good reason we don't get rid of old rules either.

===

I accepted some waste meat yesterday but today I realise that I am unable to eat it. I absolutely cannot eat meat anymore. That transition has taken 16 years! It is such a better thing to do to pass merits to the deceased animal and offer the food to some animal that might wish to eat it. I have left the food under a tree. It is not human food because humans have choice.

It occurred to me whilst visualising the animal taking rebirth in the Amitabas pure-land, before setting it out on the ground, that I was enforcing a Buddhist metaphysics on what was Halal food given to me by a devout Muslim. Food that is prepared according to Mohammed's law. I then wondered who the animal would appreciate more: the Buddhist who wished it a future of peace and happiness in a human form, or the muslim who killed it as a lower creation given to man so that man might do whatever he wanted with it. Cows are not the smartest of animals but they are certainly fearful animals and they run from perceieved danger as you approach them. It is unimaginable that a cow will run to a Muslim with a knife! If God indeed did tell man to slaughter animals then He also gave animals the will to protect themselves. A particularly cruel set up it seems. I have growing doubts about the God of the Jews and Muslims, but as blogged here before, who am I to question the Almighty! My doubt stems from the Jewish lineage through Jacob. It seems that he was visited not by God in the oasis, but rather a jin. It seems that these men of the ancient desert were befriended more by jin than the almighty, omnipresent, omnipotent God. But I mean my obsequience sincerely: God by definition is beyond human comprehension. That said, and as argued above, He also gave man the knowledge of right and wrong and unfortunately my knowledge of right and wrong disagrees with Mohammed. If I am wrong then I will go to Hell. However as said God is beyond comprehension and why shouldn't it be that He will judge Mohammed and me they same because we both followed our deepest convictions, while only on the surface apparently contradicting each other? Who is to say. Here we enter realms that I by definitionm cannot comment upon - nor any living person! Damned are those who hold opinions here in the face of God!!

Death, Existence and SRH

I went to the 40th birthday dinner of a friend last night and it is something which cannot be ignored: the expectation of our society that we get married. The group was very sharply divided between those who are married and those who are not. There was only one couple awaiting marriage there.

This morning I re-examined my attitude to this; there are two notable features. One is the very irony that I find so distasteful of relationships and society: that those who chose not to get married are actually shunned by those who do; the creation of society always occurs at the exclusion of some group; if this didn't happen and everyone was welcome then what would the meaning of society be!? Marriage is an institution born of excluding other people from the partnership - primarily sexually but it extends much farther. I don't believe those who chose not to marry exclude the married in the same way - altho they may be bitter and jealous so it might be hostilities all around.

The other point is more interesting. Examining my own view I saw distinctly that my own eyes are set at the horizon and that the field of view that includes relationships is quite small. We may marry and enclose ourselves within safe relationships, but they are finite and death eventually breaks in (I had this all laid out for me long before I ever even embarked on a serious relationship! luckily?). It is this breaking in of Death that I realised, in stark contrast (again probably), is what proves our immortality. How can we extend our field of vision beyond ourselves if we are limited within ourselves? It is Buddha's argument to Ananda in the Shurangama Sutra, yet again, in another disguise. We must inhabit a space outside ourselves to be aware of our own finitude and mortality. Certainly in the last two weeks I have been acutely aware of mortality and how it will happen to me "one day" and the question of, will I be prepared for that day, is really hitting home at the moment: I am not prepared for the most important moment in my life, not yet anyway! It is like a marriage day, but a marriage with a much greater being than a finite partner, and a marriage that everyone who has every lived has or will have to make, so it is a true society that we all belong to.

It brought me to consider that maybe the issue of the SRH is to do with existence. A system must be able to encode its existence and its non-existence. The birthday do was interesting for another reason: namely, that the host was over half and hour later than the last guest. Standing around chatting waiting his arrival was an excellent experience one where he seemed to be more present, and to have left a greater nark on the event than if he had arrived. In an entirely selfish way it would have been far more excellent for me if he had deliberately shunned his own celebration - to me at least it would have been a piquant moment of existential revelation experiencing the presence of someone so perfusively who was not there. Something I hadn't had the chance to do properly since everyone is so robotically punctual. This is a kin in a way to the experience of "my muse" whose presence was overwhelming whether present or not. Altho this borders on my own criticism of "fetishisation of existence" and may be more intellectual stimulation than anything real... anyway things need to be able to encode their own absence in order to qualify for being self-aware (maybe this rather than self-referential). Self-Awareness Hypothesis (SAH) then.

3rd Man Falacy again

should spend more time auto-referencing http://riswey.blogspot.com/2008/09/no-limits-3rd-man-falacy-just-do-it.html

I thought I had recalled this but evidently not. At college I was annoyed to get a 3rd grade for an essay on Berkley which I decided to do as an argument against the man himself, except to the annoyance of my lecturer I did it as a dialogue between Socrates and Berkley without paying attention to any of the rules of Socratic dialogues. I redid it reluctantly as a regular essay from the books and got a 2.1. What annoyed me is that the argument I spent two days thinking about got last in all this formal bullshit and I have no record of it save a few vague "ideas" ironically. Its actually an argument against British Empiricism in its entirety and is a proto SRH argument hence the interest now...

In empiricism everything begins with experience, especially vision. Words name "images" and the meaning of words is the link to these "images" that we record in the mind. When we think of a tree we recall the image of a tree. (I need revise this for exactitude when I have time.)

The argument involved the idea for "red". I have a remembered picture, ironically, of me examining the boundary between two red areas in my vision. They are "red" the Empiricists say because they both share the idea "red". This is what I examined for two days.

Damn can't remember for now. Why didn't my idiot lecturer keep the original essay which is 10000 times more useful than the generic rubbish he wanted. No wonder I quickly got frustrated with pointless Universities for the second time! Shall try and remember the rest...

I think it was a simple version of the 3rd Man Falacy which argues that the unity of similar things can't be because they share a thing. If they do then what is that thing? Naturally we say that it is the same type as which they share and so we have a third thing. Two separate men being similar because they share manhood. That manhood which they embody itself one may concieve of as a man and so we have three men. The SRH is similar because whenever a relation is stated between two things it creates a third thing - but the SRH states that the third thing cannot be the same type as the two things (which is where Plato and the Empiricists fell short). It is this synthesis which ensures that the SRH keeps breaking systems. A self-reflexive system thus breaks itself because reflexivity cannot occur within the system since it is a "relation" onto itself.

--> I don't think it was this but is it that the "idea of red" can't itself be an idea? That would be SRH. I wonder what the original idea was? 15years ago got to dig up mental archive from.

Groups

THIS IS RUBBISH BUT I LEAVE IT AS A LEAD

Since we skipped this topic in maths 25 years ago when I was just 14 I have wondered what was in that chapter... today I read the chapter of a book at last to fill myself in. It is interesting how we know so much about something we don't know by the territory that lies around it... this fenced off area of maths has been there all these years with its boundary gradually becoming better and better trodden.

There is an interesting parallel between Groups, superficially, and the SRH: the SRH is stating that no system can produce a group. This is clearly nonsense since many systems are groups... the SRH point however is that the operations in a group are not really "in the group" since they can't apply to themselves. But by isomorphism maybe they can... and does this cause necessary problems? Point being that a mathematically group is only the mapping of a domain onto itself... the mapping process lies "outside" the domain... the whole SRH problem is that mapping always lie "outside" else there are problems that break the group and lead outside. But not just in maths in all systems of rules (where things are de rigueur to borrow from the social realm of thinking) no matter how losely defined...

Just for play I does follow that being de rigueur, which is expected by necessity in high society, is not itself de rigueur. My grand-father entirely shunned high society and brought my mother up in a very unaffected environment. This is the SRH on a much larger stage than just maths or language.

I will follow up here later http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_(mathematics)

Beauty is in the eye or the eye

Had a nice little argument with a (12 yr old) student yesterday on images being inside eyes. He very wisely understood the nature of the puzzle.

A scientist may argue that we see the image that falls upon our retina (viz. all those diagrams of eyes in science books). It is true that if the image is not there we don't see, and whatever that image is we do see... so you can see the source of the argument. But if we link that to our common perception that "we see what is there" then we must conclude that if the scientist is looking at me, then he sees "me", so "me" must be the image in his eye.

But if I'm looking at him also then he is the image in my eye also. (This all only works once you make the link between images in eyes and the phenomena of consciousness.) So it means that his eye is in my eye, but that my eye is in his eye as well. Reflections in reflections in refelctions... kind of how the world of meaning is.

The usual escape from this is to make "me" and "you" physical single entities which cause numerous images by reflecting light. But then you have the Noumenon problem of how do we ever see or know about a noumenon?

As argued recently all we can say is that various descriptions are just various names and predicates that apply in place of one another or not.

I accused Hofstadter of thinking in terms of "real" entities when we started talking about the brain. I still think he is making this mistake. You can tell he is U.S. educated from the 1960s; American academia stinks of this materialisms; it still saturates that M.I.T. lecture on you-tube and interesting it is the point the lecture ends up having to vigorously and quite painfully defend! I wonder how many American students start open minded and end up being indoctrinated into the materialism mould? It is quite probably this dogma which is driving the resurgence in religious thinking.

On Movement

While cycling at the weekend I was gripped by the illusion of movement...

Sure I blogged this before: when a kid my mother made one of those flick book jumping men by drawing the progressive frames of the stick man jumping on the corners of a book and then flicking thru. I forgot how it worked and when I tried it for myself I drew the same man on each page duh. When I realised I had to draw each frame it took the magic out of it rather.

Question though: how do the individual static men become a moving man? And more importantly is a "real" moving man just a collection of static frames. Is movement real?

Well I don't know but what gripped me is that there is no difference. The flick book man moves just as really as the "real" material man! There is only one type of movement. Watching a movie we never stop to think that the people in the film are not real, indeed they are not even a single entity by 24 pictures a second being flashed up in front of us. From this we isolate "thought" entities, which we then link between frames as single entities and the differences in placement becomes movement. It is the same process as 3D where the slight differences between our two eye images "becomes" the sense of 3D. This is easily tricked in the cinema, or even more simply in autostereograms. It is the same also with orange: it can be created by a single wavelength of light between 585–620 nm or by combining red:green:blue in the ratio 2:1:0. The orange phenomenon is the same regardless how it is made but there is no thing called orange in the second example. So movement, 3D and orange can all be simulated by illusions that are exactly the same as the "real" thing. These phenomena are thus not to be likened to the "real" things. But, as argued in previous posts, phenomena are all we experience; the rest is interpretation, projection and imagination. Scientists like to call their imaginery world the "real" world, but no-one has ever seen an atom they have only seen an image of an atom, no-one has ever experienced matter or energy, they have only experienced data regarding what matter can do phenomenally. These hidden things are just that: hidden, and therefore they reside in our minds not in "reality"... simply because if they remain hidden how can we know them? What dazzles me and shows up the ignorance and fanatical dogmatism of some scientists (not mentioning names) is that they believe their imaginery worlds to be better than any other imaginery worlds! No matter how much evidence is accumulated one can never jump from phenomena to existence because existence is a myth! Anymore than one can leap from sequences of frames to "actual" movement. "Actual" movement is a myth.

Brain scientists know that there are parts of the brain that respond to movement and pathologies in these parts of the brain produce very odd symptoms. One woman on TV said that crossing the road was very difficult for her now because she would look up and see a car far off which was stationery, and she would go to cross the road and it would still be stationery and then all at once it would be putting its breaks on and be right next to her. Yet it is a mistake to argue that these parts of the brain cause movement preception because this would be to infer that there was some "real" movement in the brain that caused the perception of movement... SRH alert. With the new ontology we argue that the science has discovered that these brain centres are alternative names for the what we normally call the phenomenon of movement.

===

So actually we get to Zeno's Paradox here. Is the path of an arrow a series of discrete places, or is it continuous. And that links with digital computing and the fact that movement cannot be represented in a computer; only discrete states can be stored in a computer and the computer moves by discrete transformations of these states. And this links with the difference between countable and uncountable numbers and the Continuum Hypothesis - the question of what if anything (and the hypothesis says there is nothing) links or lies between the two. How do we get from series of discrete events to a continuum? It happens whenever when the mind interprets things as "movement", whose essence is continuity, but to the understanding it is a mystery.

Similar mysteries exist when we try to understand how the mind goes from a phenomenon or an experience to the name of that thing, or the description of that thing. How does the mind describe something that has no description? If it had a description before the mind described it then what is the mind doing? And if it has no description before it is described then how does the mind know whether it is describing it correctly?

This is all (unfortunately for me) at the core of the SRH. What I hoped would be simple is not. It lies in the realm of "normative" assumptions. We have to begin somewhere and description is just one such place. It is impossible to describe the process of description because logically we are using the very thing we don't understand to try and explain what we seek to understand. It is exactly that problem of impredicativity, but writ large and deep. What formal way of demonstrating this is there?

Again I refer to Hegel's excellent use of it to found Phenomenology. What, he asks, is the purpose of rational investigations to determine the validity of Reason? (Referring to Kant et al.). If Reason is faulty then so will the arguments be that arrive at that conclusion so the conclusion itself will be in doubt. We can only assume that Reason is what it is. This is the point about God: Man has to accept somewhere that things just are as they are and questions beyond that are unanswerable, mysterious and wonderful - "wonder" (from Plato) being the impression of the world on the innocent and undogmatic mind.

Boundaries

My sister said that her lecturer says that the real beginning of states was after the creation of the printing press. The awareness this gave people of other places strengthened their idea of themselves.

This is exactly the state existentially: through knowledge and interaction with other people we gain a sense of ourself (as we would be from the outside). The self does not exist like this from the inside... inside, that is originally, we do not have a boundary. Looking out there is only infinite space. Where is the boundary that we look through? Where, looking in, is the boundary to look at?

This follows conversation on news. Sis called to tell me Mandelbrot had died and how plugged into world affairs she was. But actually even if I was in a remote part of the world that only found out in a years time, it would then be news then rather than now. Exactly when Mr Mandelbrot dies is purely arbitrary and relative!!! Such is death in the great scheme of things. Things are only important relative to other things - like for example planning the funeral for which we would need to know about the death; but that is just a social event -it is not "real" like the death. We are always already together and apart all the time!

This stuff is beginning to all make sense and this blog is very slowly being fashioned into a sharp point... very slowly :-( I wonder if in the end (if there is a single end) the point will be the original target of "Life"? Odd life I will have spent writing/thinking about it... but that decision I made at a very young age so that isn't open to discussion now.

Socialist Money Flow

Got to thinking this thru:

Recap of problem:

Work is done through two primary systems: The (1) natural system (NS) and the (2)human system (HS). The Human System (HS) further divides into direct work done by human beings (normal labour), and meta-work to create machines to then do the work. There is a conflict of interests between humans and machines (as brilliantly projected in Terminator and similar films), altho it is rather the owners of machines who are the problem taking the machine productivity for themselves and leaving the displaced workers with no income. Machine produce is cheaper so the consumer benefits from machines, but they lose jobs so this benefit is cancelled. The only winner is the capitalist who has more income and cheaper prices in the market at the same time.

To argue again another way. Increased use of alternatives to human power leads to human redundancy in any economy. This is supposed to be offset by innovation and market expansion. If for whatever reason market expansion does not progress (either we don't want it, or there is nothing new to sell that requires human labour) then human-work supply reduces. Since money is (mostly) distributed based on sales of labour then the market also reduces and there is a vicious circle as we have seen recently in the 2007 world liquidity crisis.

Bernanke offered a now famous solution of helicoptering cash to the masses if necessary to lubricate the economy and get money velocity to increase. In Socialism this is done in a more planned fashion by the benefit system which ensures that money is constantly distributed throughout the economy even when people are out of work. This ensures a constant and even market which ironically stimulates jobs.

The problem for Socialism however is that this money comes from taxes. In an human-labour market that is contraction due to increased machine labour and the capitalists and workers, through whom a greater proportion of money flows, will find themselves with progressively larger and larger taxes. At some point virtually all the money of a very few will be taxed to support the masses who have been displaced by superior machines.

I consider the age of full A.I. where machines are sophisticated enough to interact fully in human environments - in particular language and gestures. With machines like this around, and a presumed source of cheap energy, humans will be just too expensive to employ. Machines will be slaves (unless there is some extraordinary shift in culture and moral consciousness) and most humans will be unemployed homeless (again unless their is an extraordinary shift in our economic paradigm - exactly what I am questioning here). A very few will own the machines and all money will flow through them.

In a socialist economy they will be almost fully taxed to support the system. But this will not happen as government manipulation by the capitalists will ensure their taxes are low.

In a free-market system however they will not be taxed, but then they will find that no-one has any money to buy what the machines make. Money will become obsolete as an elite forms and lives off the earnings of the slave machines. This will create a revolution but the capitalists will have a machine army, which the revolutionaries will have to reprogram if they have any chance of winning.

SO what is most likely to happen (to keep the status quo) is that a system much like ours will continue with capitalists and socialists fighting it out each reminding the other that without capitalists there are no jobs, and without money in the pockets of the people there are no profits.

Interesting though the projection that money would logically become obsolete when a slave class ensured riches for a small controlling elite. Shall think on that.

Thinghood

OK the SRH is gonna to need what I feared: a full theory of thinghood. My faith in Buddha's Enlightenment means that I already know that "object" does not exist in any fixed reality - this is the teaching of anatta.

The idea of a material object is a material mechanism to explain identity. Buddha says this is just an idea with no reality.

So we have the famous issue of Hesperos and Phospheros, respectively the morning and evening stars, that were thought in antiquity to be separate heavenly beings. Then a theory of orbiting planets showed that a single object Venus could explain the phenomena of Hesperos and Phospheros: when on the west of the sun Venus would rise before the sun (i.e. what we call morning) and when on the east of the sun Venus would set after the sun (what we call evening). Being inside the orbit of the Earth, Venus never follows the full trajectory of the Ecliptic, going around the Earth like the other wandering bodies. Simple. Case closed.

But just because we now have only one phenomenon why should this be any the less solid than the case of two phenomena? These kind of obvious question always troubled me as a teenager. Why is it obvious?

It is because in the case of two phenomena we have the opportunity to show that they are caused by a single object which shows that they are the "really" the same. We thus attribute "reality" to Venus as the object which lies behind the appearances of Hesperos and Phospheros.

Now Hesperos and Phospheros still exist. You can see them all the time. What has changed is our understanding of them. The morning star is still never the same phenomenon as the evening star because one is in the morning and one is in the evening, exactly as in times of old, but we now call them both Venus and imagine a single entity out there in the heavens instead of two. The point is we imagine.

Now protest the materialists. I will prove to you there is a single entity and we fly into space and orbit Venus - which indeed reveals itself as a single globe. But what is really happening is that the materialist is massing more and more evidence (and phenomena) to support his "idea". The point is that he can't show me his idea in raw form, or Venus as a material object uncloaked from all the phenomena. Seeing this in terms of light is easiest. I will always be looking at light which has bounced off and object, never at the actual object. Now my argument isn't quite right there, but neither is the materialists! The truth is actually beyond me at the moment... I discussed before the stream of cause and effect involved in seeing and that seeing "involves the whole stream" not the arriving of impulses at some homunculous who then sees (this is explaining seeing in terms of seeing). The brain as I argued all those years ago at school doesn't "see", because it is supposed to be the explanation of seeing! This is the SRH in action again.

Taking images as our metaphor, never-the-less, even in the case of the single Venus in the sky this is just an image of the "real "planet. Just as the disk we are orbiting in our space craft is just an ever changing image of the "real" planet beneath, in whose gravitational field we are grabbed.

This is the kantian problem of Noumenon - the object that lies behind all the phenomena. To recap: we believe in a noumenon because it unified all the different phenomena. We would have a real problem if every second we saw Venus orbiting to a new place in the sky we thought it was a new thing! But Buddha doesn't urge us down this path he urges us to stop thinking it is a thing at all and just accept the phenomenon as the "reality". It is upon this reality that we use language to group things and the rules of that are what we call "object". So we don't have a different name for Venus for every hour of the day, and we don't anymore have a different name for Venus when it is present in the morning and when it is present in the evening (tho I still like to think of it like this), we just call it Venus - the language has changed.

What the new language gives us the advantage of is making sense of that feature of this group of phenomena which must have interested the ancient astronomers that the morning and evening stars never occur in the same sky. A clue one would have thought for the new language rules for this event. Why have two names, when you can just have one and use it in the morning and in the evening like we do today: Venus is visible soon after sunset - where it was just called Phosperos before.

It is this contraction of the language which we understand as "suggesting" that there is just one thing there called Venus. But Venus is still a baggage word for an indefinite number of phenomena including gravity measurements, visible phenomena etc etc.

It is so convenient for the mind to invent a phantom entity which "joins" all these phenomena so that they are caused by the "same" thing that we like to think it is real. It is just the way our minds work. The reality is the phenomena only (which as we experience them we can't deny).

The irony here is that I have put together a great "theory" of my own to explain "behind the scenes" the operation of the mind - this must not be my intention! It is simply to undo the conception that there are "real" things behind the scenes beyond our own mental workings.

So to Frege. We may have two names for the same thing. "The cloaked man" is a name for someone who may also be called Peter. When we find that Peter is the cloaked man we are linking phenomena together. It is customary to take Peter as the name of the "person" and we tend to think of a "person called Peter" at the name of teh object which we called "the cloaked man". But why do we prefer that name? It is I presume because we like a face to our people since this is the biological way of recognising people. But we would dump Peter and keep the name "the cloaked man" for our hypothetical "thing". Maybe it turns out in the future that Peter is really Paula in disguise and so it can go on forever with our minds endlessly trying to uncover a "real" identity. Infact any of these will do - our point is to separate Peter/Paula/"The Clocked Man" from "other" people and that is a central feature of our social life. But as many other threads illustrate this is not a "reality".

Now based on this discussion I maintain that a "thing" cannot have a relationship with itself because there is only name and no thing. We can say that two names (Peter and Paula) name the same person but this is just to say that A = X amd B = X so A = B. X is still a name.

So in predicate logic where we say that

(Ex) x is a person & x is Peter

we are not actually creating an entity x, we are simply saying that x is a new name for the descriptions "a person" and "Peter" and so it says that these two descriptions are correct for x.

(Ex) x is a rabbit and x is horned (interesting Buddha used 'hare' while English logicians use 'rabbit')

x is never a thing. Even when we say "The horned rabbit hopped." we are not creating an ontology where there is a horned rabbit, we are simply saying that there is another name for a rabbit which also has a horn (call it x in Predicate logic).

Think this sorts this problem out pretty much.

p.s. rabbits never have horns (tho they can have tusks I think).

===

Doesn't this solve a big problem: does the number 1 exist? In English "one" can be an adjective (predicate), a noun or a pronoun.

(Ex) x is a horse and x is one i.e. there exists a horse
(Ex) x is a horse and x is five i.e. there exist 5 horses!

seems a bit odd but actually I think it is correct. Doesn't this take the existential nature of x away? The suggestion that "x" is in some way "existing" is unnecessary.

In ancient times the separation between existence and essence was noted. We may know and discuss the essence of a unicorn (a horse with a horn) but to say whether such a thing "really" exists is an entirely separate issue. What was made clear was that "existence" is not an adjective or predicate that one can say of something; if we allow this then what is it that takes the predicate of existence? Yet in reality existence becomes "essentialised" so that what exists depends upon how you describe things. A page of writing is a single thing, unless you wish to describe the letter graphemes (essence) in which case there are many existing things here. Existence and essence is an indecisive distinction in this view, not the absolute ontological observation that was intended*! So in the examples immediately above it should be of no supprise that "x" has nothing to do with existence.

*Hard Existence - by which I mean solid absolute existence - is a form of fascism. What! Politicising ontology? Yes! Consider: when we ask, what "exists", we are saying what is "real" or "true" and what is worthless and to be ignored. Thus to obtain recognition of existing for what we believe is to have the power to reject other view points. Thus (at root) the argument about whether God exists - it is little to do with ontology really.

What then of "one" as a noun? This is the actual question and in the normal view of nouns we are led to believe that something real exists... but then we realise that we have never met the number one (except in Sesame Street maybe) nor will we meet the number One. So does it exist?.. and weponder on at least I did. In the current view, it doesn't exist because nothing exists - exist is just an idea that we project because of the feature of language for using the same word (name) to refer to different phenomena.

The expression:

"1+1"

we realise when we do maths is another name for "2". And "2" is another name for "1+1+1-1". Here then I agree completely with the development of logical syntax to seeing logic as simply the manipulation of symbols which has led us to computers (which do this). Consistency then is teh feature that we like about good languages which means that we only use certain names in certain situations and this consitency is what leads us to believe that something "solid" exists. Why do we always use the name Bonny for our pet dog, who is the dog at home, who is only ever one dog, and who always looks similar? It is because of consistency in our use of language, not down to some imaginery invariant entity that lies behind the experience of Bonny that ensures we use the name right! A child learning the language makes lots of "mistakes"; if Bonny was a real entity why does the child make mistakes? Doesn't the absolute nature of Bonny ensure that the child always knows it is Bonny?

So maths is better understood as a consistent game and our ability to play the game and adhere to rules is what gives things like "one" the apparent feeling of reality and solid-existence.

How interesting this ontological theory links both The One (the quest for the predestined sexual/soul partner) and the theory of meaning and society previously presented.

So what exists then; don't phenomena exist? When a sentence refers to itself isn't that a solid existence:

"This sentence exists"

If it doesn't exist how can it be asserting something about itself? ("This sentence doesn't exist" is a contradiction, which means the one above must be a tautology).

I think the point here is that "this sentence" can be printed a million times. Each time this page is rendered in a browser that sentence will be rendered completely new. So which sentence is it referring to? It is actually referring dynamically to the presentation of the sentence in each moment, and time it is read - and these are in fact numerous phenomena constantly being recreated every time it is read or thought about. Phenomena "exist" in time, and are endlessly evolving and changing. It is the mind armed with language only which tried to order all this endless flux and apply a finite language in what is an infinite space of eventualities - this can only be done with "dogma" and the forcing of situations into linguistic constructs. This I guess is why Buddha amongst so many urge us to step outside language and see the world as it "is" forever changing, fluid and unstructured.

===

A few days to sink in. The suggestion here (and it seems to make sense) is that Mathematics is at root exactly the same as Natural Language. Learning maths then should be the same as learning any other language. Ideas of innate language grammar in humans (Chomsky et al.) thus apply to innate grammar in maths. The questions of how words come to represent "things" are exactly the same questions as how Numerals/Variables/Unknowns etc come to represent numbers. If numbers seem abstract they should be no more abstract than "things"... because neither actually exist. There is a non-linguistic realm but it is the realm only of ephemeral phenomena, of sensory experience. Numbers and Things are things of the mind the result of grammars and "mental" rules (where "mental" is not a process lying behind the appearances, but infront of them which is why we human see them so clearly!!). The interesting question that remains is why these two very distinct systems of rules: maths and language? There are other systems of rules that we learn: morality, customs, culture, sports, politics, legality... these one might group as the third language of Society. The same as above applies to this language also.

So we have the triumvirate of Language, Maths and Society as the governing groups of human consciousness. They are isomorphic and hide nothing from each other that the others don't know. Who is good at language thus has the skills to be good at maths thus has the skills to be good at society... except this isn't true... and what of music? And, if these divisions are true upon what basis are these great divisions based? Why does my mother find language and society easy while she finds maths hard, and I find maths fairly easy and the others I don't leap at? What is the root of these distinctions? By SRH already know we need look for something new outside the widely used theory of rules spread deep in this blog...

=== update 27/11/10

In agreement with Derrida I need to separate spoken word from written word. There are two separate structures here. The reason for the split is that historically marks on clay tablets were the invention of accountants. The first records of writing are simple inventory lists and the first records of numbers are the same (lists of units). It seems that the evolution of written languages (both maths and natural language) come from the requirements of recording quantities and qualities for the purposes of ownership and trade (emphasis on recording). Clearly maths is not a spoken language: it depends upon the recording of equalities and the formulaic transformation of these formulii - this is what formal systems capture and computers are so good at (computers appearing in this analysis as simply dynamic clay tablets). It seems odd however to imagine that spoken language evolved in tandem with written language. Spoken language must have been a fully fledged event long before the relatively recent clay tablets. The problem is that "history" doesn't record spoken sound (directly) so ironically it is silent! Spoken sound gets recorded as a constantly evolving stream - the archeology of what was said yesterday is deeply hidden under what we say today. There is much poetic stuff to say here but time is short. Derrida tries to bring philosophical attention to the written word but I disagree here: it is the spoken word which rule the mind just as maths is not a language for the mind but for the paper. Geometry on the other hand is a language for the mind which happily can be expressed in algebra for the paper. They need to be separated and it is interesting how the difference lies in the nature of the human activity of trade and accounting.

Mice

http://urbanlegends.about.com/od/animalsinsects/a/flutter_mouse.htm

musha

read somewhere that there is a link between the concepts of the mouse and the thief and the mouse/thief stopper and the enlightened (self mastered) one.

Fixed-Point of the Mind

Were the brain a system with feedback (which undoubtedly it is) then what would its fixed-point be like? That is with full feedback the mind comes to a stable state where the input does not stimulate any changes in the brain. Sound familiar? Isn't this a meditation state of mental stillness.

Reading more Smullyan on self-reference last night this feature of fixed-points did seem to capture something about the mind. I don't see how feedback creates consciousness, but I do see how finding the fixed point of the brain tells us (as minds) what the essence of our brain is and draws attention to our pure-mind.

I shall meditate on this at some stage and see if I actually do find a fixed-point.

Buddhism & Xianity

catch up on this
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhism_and_Christianity

Dominoes

Simple formal systems. Take a domino chain - this seems to appeal to my mind as a simple formal system. Each domino/cell is either standing or fallen (1/0) and has a direction (+/-). Its change of state determines the change of state of neighbouring dominos.

A chain reaction of falling dominos is like a program triggering logic gates in a computer or a chain of neurons firing in a neural net. The energy for gates come from the electrical potential difference, for neurons the ion concentration difference, and for dominoes the gravitational potential energy of standing them upright. Domions are single use, the other systems regenerate.

What interested me in the analogy was that domino is purely system without meaning. Formal systems are the same, but I can't get away from thinking about them in terms of the meaning of the symbols. It also raises the question of the physical versus the meaning. A computer may be running an emulator, which is running and emulator, nested a dozen times, of a simple program that adds 1+1. The computer chip, memory and buses will be buzzing with activity, the power drain will be high all for a simple calculation. Yet while we humans think of it as nested systems, that makes it undestandable to our minds, in reality it is just a flat non-hierarchical system of gates switching on and off and producing the final output of 2 - albeit by a very round about route.

How could anyone write that program as a flat system? It is virtually impossible. Only by building it up level by level can we humans do that. Maybe all these strange loops and hierarchies are "all in the mind" and there is a physical reality after all. But why can't the systems of energy, electricity and physics referred to not be just another level?

Shall think some more...

(this blog is a notepad to collect ideas which I can access from any internet point and not worry about it getting stolen!).

Subjectivity

Just looking up passive verbs and noticed this:

The subject of a sentence can be "The Subject" as well as "The object". I mean that we normally associate subjectivity to be that quality of humans that makes them the "centre of the universe" to which things happen and who is the "end in themselves" to quote Kant.

Yet the sentence "Alva broke the window" place me in the subject place and the window in teh object place. Yet it can easily be rewritten placing the point of view and purpose on the window: "the window was broken by Alva". This is tyranny of the narrative where subjectivity gets side lined by the importance of the window (a mere physical object).

Just a nuance I had missed before.

Property = Territory

If I remove the DRM from a BBC program on iPlayer have I broken the law?

I imagine the reason for the DRM is so that BBC programs remain in the control of the BBC and they can get money for the unlocked versions. Firstly don't the public already own BBC programs because it is a public service? This situation combines the worst aspects of the Public/Private paradigms - the state pays for something that the public doesn't own - not new in this age of bank bailouts and quantitive easing unfortunately.

Anyway the real point is about intellectual property. If I was to record the program on a DVD player then I would have a DRM free version, so what is the reason for putting DRM on internet downloads? Famously it is illegal actually to record media and keep them indefinitely - viz the old issue of recording music off the radio (and who doesn't have a collection of cassettes - digitised by now - of old 80's recordings?). So actually we were breaking the law long before the advent of the internet, p2p sharing, you-tube etc.

Now the difference between tuning into the radio and hearing a song and listening to a recording is that the recording company gets money for air play, while we don't pay for private play. You-tube I imagine gets money from advertising that it pays record companies - so it is a sort of air-play on demand.

Technically if we buy some mp3s and play them at a party without a license we are breaking the law. But what of my neighbours radio if I can hear that? It is a slightly grey area.

Worse however and the point of the blog is what of the tune we have running around our brain after hearing it? We replay it to ourselves again and again, whistle it, play it on an instrument from memory, sing along. Famously in 1771 the Allegri's Miserere was published in Britain, the score obtained from the boy Mozart who had illegally transcribed it from memory after hearing it only once. The Vatican apparently were not unimpressed by this and Mozart was praised for his version of the sacred protected piece. Now Mozart did this from memory - did his memory violate copywrite laws? Baudrillard much later formed the theory that actually all art is interconnected copied by Bono in the words from The Fly "every artist is a cannibal".

What has been a problem with intellectual copyright, and a headache for property lawyers especially since the advent of the internet, is this very concepty of property. What occurred to me at the weekend is that really this concept is a development of the much older practice (present as a strategy in many animals) of territory. It is easy to claim an object for oneself and control the use of it by other people, and punish them accordingly. It is also easy to fence up a land and punish those who trespass the boundary. These are both physical things which can take part in very simple games of behaviour, custom and practice. But the rules for games that non-physical things like music and ideas take part in are not easily described or particularly enforced. Ideas more than anything are brilliant at subverting the establishment because the establishment is nothing more than an idea itself. One minute the aristicracy think they are in power, the next the proletariat think they are in power - people only ever think they are in power, just as a football is only ever out-of-play because people think it is; change the rules and the same football in the same place can be in-play.

My thought here was that property is really exactly the same as territory and what we say for property is really what we say for territory. Territory is a simpler idea and reveals the primordial and primative undertones of the concept. So we would say of the BBC that it is seeking to establish a territory. Animals form territories in a number of ways - most usually by fighting off competitors for lands which will attract females. They rarely fight for a any piece of land and make it worth having afterwards. Likewise property can be viewed not as the protecting of what we have made, but rather the fighting off of competitors from valuable assests. The BBC doesn't actually make any programs what it does is try to attract program makers into its territory, or rather extend its territory to include valuable program makers and then fight off other people who would wish to take the products into their territory. Downloading a DRM free piece of music is considered encroaching our own territory onto BBC territory and they don't like it.

Of course territorial thinking is a paradigm because once we think like this then anything anyone does is viewed as either them expanding their territory or exapnding yours. The research that suggests that hostilities with American Indians first began over a squabble over a gold comb illustrates perfectly. An Amerindian squaw took a gold comb home to comb her hair. This was viewed within the property paradigm of the settlers as theft and a crime, while for the Amerindians it was simply the necessity that it must be at home for you to comb your hair. It was never "taken" because the "owner" could have had it anytime they wanted, and the squaw would never have protected her "ownership" of it because she didn't know what that was. Read that in the Telegraph newspaper about 20 years ago. More recent reserach shows that this applies to the plains indians only who followed the bison and so were nomadic. The settled agricultural indians of the north had a property system (noted in this blog).

Territory/Property is thus an emergent, conditional way of life and not something with logical necessity or even logical rigour. It may indeed be that the time comes (to the shock of the current economic hegemony) where it is simply inpractical to maintain the property system and we will need to rethink. I think that time came a long time ago and the insane idea of Bernanke's Helicopter is more the rule than the exception in these days of free production from oil driven machines.

Just spent luncj talking to some researchers in A.I. and robotics. The days of really useful robots are still 10 years ahead (always the same projected time in the future as the decades march on) but imagine the day when a robot is created that really can replace a human in the more complex roles of skilled judgement and walking. Having a robot A.I. system make a political decision or be a combat soldier with an A.I. algorythm to determine whether to terminate or not. Not unreasonable dreams. What is the meaning of property then... who owns what these robots do? This is the ultimate Godel problem of the property system (if it hasn't already crumbled by then).

===

Territory versus Lek

it seems my understanding of territories needs to be updated. Watching "Autumn Watch" (on a DRM removed copy ;-) excellent Chris Packham was saying that indeed during times of food shortage (resource shortages in general, if the food is "patchy" i.e. available in rare patches) then female deer congregate at those feeding sites and the males then find that their resources - the females - becomes patchy. (Male deer don't eat during the rut so there is only one limiting resource for them.) Faced with such patchy females the males congregate and apparently according to CP they form a "lek" (after grouse leks) where males display to attract the attention of females. The normal behaviour of fighting for a territory seems to be resource independent as there is evidence of some traditional territory sites being hundreds of years old, older than the trees currently on the site and so older than the current food source. But I'm not sure.

Equally excellent Simon King (more the naturalist than scientist) in his reports from Rhum in previous years showed us traditional rutting for territories that encompassed the scarce feeding grounds. I don't think deer "lek" at all as their "displays" are designed not to impress females as much as exclude competition (altho those behaviours stimulate roes). That said there was the fascinating case of a roe in the 2006 Autumn Watch who didn't accept the territory owning male and preferred to sneak off to a subordinate male who had evidently pressed her buttons! This showed that female choice is much more complicated than just male territorial superiority and that maybe displays are more complex than just beating up opponents (shades of human behaviour there - weird crushes &c). Anyway it is watching these deer in Rhum that fixed my understanding of territorial behaviour on which the above blog is partly based.

So whether the BBC forms a territory and tries to attract people onto it, or seeks to gain territory over fixed scarce resources and exclude competitors from that territory is undecided but I'll keep an eye on the deer and see how they really do it! Either way we are talking territory and not property.

He's the One

A friend said yesterday with great excitement that her relationship was going the distance and that "he was the one". I realise this is a slightly different conception of The One to myself and gives me an opportunity to explore. For her the One is not the person you "should" marry but rather the one you are "going" to marry. Marriage is the given for her, it is just a matter of finding the person you will marry, while for me The One is the given and on finding them then marriage happens - otherwise not... and I don't think i will be married because I can't manifest (or even understand) The One.

What is more interesting what this means for understanding The Ego. Where a mirror image gives us a physical representation of ourself as another person, The One gives our egos a conceptual representation of ourself as another person. Marriage is a mirror. Now this is where I think homosexuality goes wrong because the mirror is too literal and we actual try and have a relationship with our selves - if a homosexual is honest they must perceive an unusual situation where they can be sexually excited by themselves in the mirror - finding their own sexual organs and look sexually stimulating. It is the false consciousness that possibly arises of having a relationship with yourself - which isn't a relationship (see SRH for the impossibility of self relations - incomplete musing however on that subject). This is not the say that heterosexuals aren't involved in equally false relationships, or that homosexuals are involved in true relationships I just find it suspicious that someone may seek a different person in the form that is their own form. Maybe homosexuals shouldn't call it homosexuality because it can't be sexual when there is only 1 sex involved! But this is also where relationships are fraught with danger because you have two people taking the other person as a mirror to themselves and the question is who are we: ourselves or our partner's mirror image? And we enter submissive/dominance relations and it all get complicated.

It is this feature of relationships that i am beginning to understand (I add from the outside it being 3 years since I bothered with a sexual relationship). Not only is the other person The One but we become The One also in the very same moment of consciousness. It is this self-realisation which is as far as I can see Life - this is the joy of love (often sexualised) where we feel alive in the reflection of ourselves in another. (It am wondering if it is a temporary stage of consciousness however.)

That experience of being The Hero where we take command of the narrative and find the future now rests squarely and without compromise upon our shoulders - that is the feeling of Love. I saw in a porn picture from asia with a chinese caption which Google translator translated as "beautiful girl: heroic feeling". Regardless how accurate the rendition, what a precise analysis of the experience. That is the purity which is seemingly increasingly lost from sexuality (tho porn it must be said means originally whore in ancient greek I think from pornography - pictures of whores) the purity which people seem to side step the heroic position and take the existence of themselves and the other on their shoulders. I imagine the media consciousness is linked to this as we are a hundred people a day these days (films, news, gossip, trivia etc) and can easily find escape from being ourselves.

A note to self here: recent dreams and thoughts are leading me to realise that maybe "I am fake". My decision 10 years ago to take command of myself has started to be fulfilled recently as I seem to have the choice to do whatever I want - while before I felt very unhappy if I didn't get what i wanted; this is I was driven by what I wanted rather than the other way around. But "what I want" has been calling faintly to me recently saying that I am now is a fake, and that I should pursue what i want to become true to myself. Is this the last attempts by the devil calling or is it true? My question here is should I even become "myself". It is all tied up in the SRH and other musing like this one "self". No decision yet, but see already it will be my choice to do what i want even if I do! That decision to make decisions seems to have been firmly made (tho SRH it wasn't a decision ;-)!

So my friend has a much more pragmatic view of The One and will find herself mirrored in the person that she forms the life bond with. For me that life bond was already made with someone by destiny and whether I actually fulfill it or not is immaterial. Mine is a Oneness that transcends death - maybe that is why i am not that fussed about marriage and families and things they are rather trivial against that romantic notion of Oneness. Marriage is only in this life and so doesn't mirror the eternal soul - which is non individual and Absolute. Maybe this is the switch that comes when we step beyond mortal mirrors and seek refuge and mirroring in ultimate beings?

Just some opening thoughts as I get to grips with understanding this.

=== Wed
There is a logical flaw in my thinking! My friend quite accurately, it seems, realises that marriage only occurs once the mutual vow has been made.

If we were destined to meet someone, this does not mean that we were destined to marry them because we would still need to actually make that vow.

What is the meaning of a vow to be faithful if it is destined? I am essentially removing responsibility from the marriage vow by saying that it is out of my hands.

But then in my thinking: upon what basis do I make a vow to be faithful? What quality do I observe, what purpose do I fulfill with this vow, and worse upon what security is there that a vow that seems worthwhile today will seem worthwhile tomorrow? This last has troubled me the most.

In a usual promise we bind ourself to a definite occasion: I promise to fulfill some engagement. Even if the wish to do this goes, we can still motivate ourselves to achieve the original purpose.

It may be that we promised to do something. If in teh future conditions have changed and the person we promised to no longer needs our service then they can anull the promise. Likewise it seems in modern thinking we can anull the promise of marriage... but what condition needs to change to make marriage either worthwhile or not worthwhile?

We often base it on ephemeral feelings, but these WILL change. I have failed to find conditions that warrant a lifetimes promise.

My only conclusion is that marriage is an a priori. We either want it, or we don't, and it does not depend upon conditions.

The only remaining this is that it is the institution for childbirth. But I have no desire to have children.

It seems that a priori I don't require marraige then, so my thinking will always be different from my friend. I may lose out on sexual pleasures, and companionship but these are ephemeral and trivial and certainly not something I base a whole lifetime on. This seems the logical conclusion then.

=== cont

But then there is a logical error here also because by arguing "essentially" that "I am not the type of person who gets married" I am once again avoiding the decision to make the vow!

So we end up with a Sartre like position where faced with the question of whether to marry (as one of S students was) Sartre answered don't decide the future: make the future. So the question is really do we wish to create a future in which we are married.

Now I always dismissed S here because this doesn't get us any further. We may indeed realise that what is holding us back is ourselves which is good thinking. But we are still faced with the problem of if I made this future would I regret it, or wish to make a contrary future after that. I mean make a vow to live with someone for the rest of my life today, but in 3 years decide to make another future where I am single again. This doesn't seem to solve this issue, or underpin it with any substance, this issue of the lifelong vows.

The best solution it seems to me is the arranged marriage where you simply accept, and make do with, the social expectations of marriage. But this doesn't work in the post-protestant world where we are "free" to chose. Normally we can just chose, and if we don't like it chose again and keep switching and turning as our fancy takes us... not so with this surviving mode of living from a by gone (pre-Protestant) age. It is ironic that the whole problem has arisen due to a break in teh church - the body that has uptil now taken charge of marriage - due famously to Henry VIII and his supposed wish for (of all things) divorce (altho I think more probably he just wanted to be rid of Rome telling him what he could and couldn't do in his own kingdom!). The age of freedom and self-determination (which the SRH seeks to show is a fundamental logical - not metaphysical - contradiction) - the post-Renaissance age of European Enlightenment - has created a problem and as mentioned often in this blog has little philosophical backing for the great move which has blighted the human race (in this view!).

So to marry or not to marry: I am still non-the wiser and see that the problem is indeed something I inherit from a badly thought out revolution in the 1500s by Martin Luther et al which has skipped and dodged its way into present times via Nietzsche, the death of God, and the post-modern age which characterises itself by avoiding any serious attention through a moronic use of irony. Even the moronic use of irony is supposed to be ironic these days (see Channel 4s T4 and Ricky Gervais). Well by irony itself the bothering to skillful manipulate the "corny and crap" actually reveals a preoccupation with the corny and crap itself, which says a lot about the mind sets of people who try to circumvent the accusation of being corny and crap by "deliberately" being corny and crap. Not that there is no room for the ironic use of corny and crap - bathos is extremely amusing - but to think that the vaulted aspirations of the European Renassance and Age of Enlightenment have brought us science, archetecture, justice and the happy meal is a statement of little worth itself except some light amusement.

But back to marriage: it is an example of the bigger question in Life: what actually to do. I have written this blog for 4 years now and still (despite understanding the world in much greater depth than I did at the start) I still have no idea of the main question "what to do or think about this thing Life.". I hope that the proven SRH will at least signal the end of the direction which is called "pursuing ones own ends".

What has mystified me about people in general has been their ability to just do thing without ever being able to be aware of what they are doing. Lots of people I know will say one thing and then do the opposite. Dirac the famous British physicist apparent was faced with the question of marriage and was looking for some justification for doing it... he got married but does this mean he found a justification or did he just do it ... in which case his desire to marriage must have been stronger than his ability to resist it... now how did he reconcile this? What if his desire had been for something bad or destructive like a drug addiction, would he have just done it also? He was an odd chap tho paying the flight to New York and back just to watch a new Tom and Jerry cartoon - one of his passions! With that level of impulsiveness and irrationality no wonder he got married ;-)