Fibbonaci: Little Evidence

Well finally got around to looking for evidence of Fibbonaci retracement in stock markets... which would have been the logical place to start this investigation ;-)

BP (LSE) data from 2003 to 2011 was used.

Data was transformed into a simple stochastic oscillator STO: price as a percentage of High/Low range for the preceding period (p).

1) Method: The number of days in at each percentage point was summed.

Result: With p=10,20 the graph has 3 noticeable points.

i) Price spends most of its time just below the High >80% (about 1.2% of the time for each STO percentage point). This is near a subtracted Fib point.

ii) Price spends the next longest duration (0,.75% time / STO point) at about 20% of the range. This is near one of the Fib points.

iii) Price spends the least time (about 0.6%) in the middle of its range.

Conclusion: This crude measure would expect movement to Fib levels to show up as longer time at these levels with the price moving fast through other levels. This is not in the data. However bouncing off these levels would not show up in this measure.

2) Method: The Gradient was calculated as the regression slope between the preceding week and the subsequent week.

Result: Gradients are negative and fastest near the Low and positive and fastest near the High. They oscillate in the middle band. A moving average smooth of the curve shows that they are flat at 60%. This is a Fib level.

Conclusion: The flat level at 60% is as expected. The data is not fine enough to conlcude anything however. It also suggests that movements out of the range occur at high speed, while there is fluctuation within the range. Little peak at 70% suggests that prices travel fast through here to the 60% range and 80% range.

3) Method: Same but with average volume.

Result: Volumes decline as the price moves up through the range, with a peak before 20%. Thus suggests that people trade based on ranges like this with buyers buying in expecting the price to rise again into the range and sellers afraid that it will fall below the last low.

4) Same with Volume x Gradient

Result: Movement into stock positions increases as the price rises and accelerates upward as it approaches tops. Peaks at 35% and 70% of range.

Conclusion: No evidence of Fib here. It suggests that it is safe to add into high volume upward trends even near the local high because the gradient down is less. Conversely it is dangerous to add to low volume downward trends... as I discovered in gas last year where I threw away 20% of my portfolio!

Now there are two ways to do Fib. Time to examine the other one.

===

Taking the trend into account with High/Low calculated from the previous 40day period gives these results. It was calculated on actual prices of the BP graph not on LN - that was a mistake above. After a falling trend the SSTO was calculated normally, but after a rising trend the 100-SSTO was calculated since Fib retracement is calculated from the most recent reversal point back in time.

Fib retracement means that prices bounce off the retracement lines which means that days with this closing price ought to be rarer than random.

Instead the below trend is found which is essentially a probability distribution as this measure actually captures the volatility!

Rather than days at each level the average absolute gradient (calculated as regression through each point and week either side). This measures the rate at which the price was changing (either going up or down) at each point. At Fib levels, if they do resist movement, the gradient ought to slow down.

The 3 middle black bars are the main Fib levels (38.2,50,61.8) with 78.6 an official additional and 23.6 a logical 5th.

With some imagination there are periodic sudden increases in gradient (sudden acceleration) before Fib levels but certainly no indication of a slowing down.

Next up would be a distribution of turning points... but given that the stock market is fractal and turning points occur ever second, minute, hour, day... what scale do we chose? and how do we approach the issue of scale?... it is not exactly a 3rd dimension since scales are discrete (we choose maybe a 9day, 20 day, 50day moving average) but which scale would be best and why? .... to come back on this one.

SRH more

There are 2 sources of work. Old jobs not completed and new jobs.

Now the formulation of this system creates a new job and problem: how to improve the processing of jobs. So it adds a new problem to the stack.

Now since the consideration of jobs and problems is itself a job and a problem it means that we can never revolutionise this level of reality. It is a normative given that we must accept within the paradigm of problem/solution.

So any model of something (a diagram so to speak of the component parts) can only be about itself if it agrees entirely with itself. A tautology in other words.

A statement can be about itself positively or negatively. If the statement is always positive then there is no problem, but there is no truth either as it is a tautology. If at any point it is negative about itself them there is the liar paradox. Now the liar paradox is famously odd. I suggest for now that its nature is the opposite of a Tautology which if it is Always True or False is Always neither True nor False. This is a non-logical statement with no truth content but so is a tautology in this argument since Always True or False has no truth content either! The only non-value in Logic is the contradiction which forces re-examination of assumptions, so maybe Tautologies and Paradoxes work like contradictions also.

I realise there is a confusion here between types of Truth. Deductive Truth works by tautology e.g. "¬(A & B) === ¬A v ¬B" (equivalent). While Inductive truth depends upon the possibility of falsehood. "Ducks === Ducks" has no information value.

OK need to think that thru...

So the SRH suggestion is that any existence of self-reference forces us to abandon Truth Content leaving the statement/system vacuous.

Meme Theory - the proof (finally)

[Response to Facebook].

Agreed as long as we stick to truth. I personally agree with Meme Theory (think he based it on mimesis) it explains why Mozart never wrote Schoenberg ;-) It is demonstrably "right" (I had the same idea at school so it's pretty obvious). But I also think that God is "right" (ironically for exactly the reasons involved in this argument!) Now the problem with RD here, it seems to me, is that he has slipped into dismissing some ideas as popular simply because of Meme Theory (e.g. God) and doesn't regard their truth value any more. They do the same thing with Terrorism: it is spread by Radicalisation; but I have never heard anyone discuss it rationally. All all Terrorists just sheep? 'Personally I think suicide bombers are as clueless as the people who are trained to shoot at each other by governments' - at least that is a clear discussable point of view unlike the Meme Theory approach. With Meme theory so clarified it can then be seen as a sophisticated marketing tool which can be (and is! see MIT research) used to engineer society which for a Libertarian principled society is quite sinister; it is what the Nazis started - but that contradiction is a different debate.

Anyway with this abuse of Meme Theory in sight then follows the argument above. Religion may go extinct in people's minds but that doesn't make it wrong so why is RD using Meme Theory in his arguments then? That's how we know he is a fascist bigot :-)

Thought of a purer reformulation of the problem. Meme Theory, if taken as a measure of validity (e.g. 'God' idea is only around because the idea spreads well), makes claims about its own truth value. Then we have the liar paradox. If we model the conditions for the extinction of Darwinism and Meme Theory (maybe a rise in Religious Fundamentalism) then on one hand we are taking the model to be true (the model results), but on the other hand the results say that the model is invalid because it is extinct. Contradiction so ergo we can't say that Meme Theory can ever make claims about something's validity. So the prevalence of Religion tells us nothing about whether it is right or not... (which proves Meme Theory's fascist roots also) QED.

SRH - is this it?

SRH:

A statement that refers to itself is either a tautology TT or a contradiction TF.

The most famous example is the liar paradox.

TT: "This statement is True."

TF: "This statement is False."

My favourite object of contemplation from a few years ago doesn't actually refer to itself!

T = {T}

Makes an equality between T and the set containing T which are different objects.

So SRH is not about Impredicativity. To define something in terms of itself is to enter a "temporal" version of the SRH which is a loop. One is then left with a different question of starts and ends which is not an immediate problem. Loops are the root of the Halting Problem, and I have speculated isomorphic with contradictions. Induction is maths famously has survived this problem.

I'm busy on other stuff so this will have to wait for further thought...

Memes

On Dawkin's again, after Facebook discussion...

Darwin first introduced the world to a natural selection based evolution theory (NEST - apt since it's the home of species creation ;-) in his explanation of the diversity of species. From this huge revolution in thinking the idea has found application in everything. I have just built a model of the solar system which evolves by NEST from dust (to look at the emergence of Phi in dynamic systems). It is everywhere. It was the biggest shift in thinking since Renaissance clockwork universe Mechanics and before that the idea of Divine Order. It is that massive an idea.

Now Dawkins has taken Darwins idea and revamped it for the Capitalist Free-market 80's generation telling the tale of individual successful in free competing genes. Then he observed the process in ideas also and dubbed them memes.

At which point the SRH kicks in because Meme Theory (MT) is an idea and a meme itself. I have struggled to turn this into a fully fledges problem however (as with the SRH also). It is more revealing however to take NEST as a Meme also. Now if NEST fails then MT (as a subset of evolutionary theory) must fail also. Now there are many theories about the origin of diversity in the world not least the idea that things are immutable, don't evolve, and have a design or blueprint, an essence, imparted to them by The Creator. Now it is quite reasonable that NEST, which was unknown to the world for many millennia might once again fall into obscurity. It is this threat which has made Dawkins so animated. This in written into the rules of MT. Now if MT can envisage the extinction of NEST from the human mind then it envisages its own extinction from the human mind.

Now a theory is true when it can provide an answer under certain known conditions. There is no Universal theory yet (I have pages in this blog trying to argue that it is a fundamental contradiction - an argument which must be as close to a universal theory that there is). An incomplete theory has a problem because it must be able to define when it is not applicable. Quantum Theory is not applicable for gravity (as I very crudely understand it) and Relativity fails on the small scale and the other 3 forces. Each theory is incomplete, but that incompleteness is unknown to the theory. Relativity doesn't predict that it can't apply to the small scale we just know that it doesn't. Being complete and incomplete are meta statements about a theory. A Universal Theory, being Universal, must account for all its own meta statements... that is the root problem captured by the SRH but I can't quite see it yet. Now MT predicts a possible future when NEST will no longer be a meme of sufficient frequency to really be used in constructing the world... Dawkins' huge effort is proof of this possibility. The world will be thought about in different ways. This means that MT will no longer be relevant and applicable. Yet this contradicts the assumption by MT that it is relevant and still explaining this event! So if MT goes extinct which is it: is it still relevant but in hiding, or is it no longer relevant.

What this argument reveals is the dogmatism behind Dawkins position that fundamentally he believes that he is right and the NEST is true. I don't disgaree with him (I have a model right here of the solar system evolving by natural selection) but I do have a problem in the theory making claims about its own validity!

Boundaries

I asked someone over Xmas, a manager for Bechtel, whether they thought that management was necessary, or whether things could manage themselves. Her answer, obviously, was that management is essential; quite rightly also because certainly things wouldn't function without some level of management. But looking deeper no-one manages the course of history or human development, or love or wars, and more fundamentally no-one manages nature; and, yet these things have their own passage and logic; something sufficiently benevolent and orderly because we somehow "manage" to survive. This I have commented on before as being the "wheel of the world", it is one of the fundamental ideas that Mankind would seek to forget in His drive to supremacy. Mankind is at best obedient to Nature and at his most foolish ignorant of Nature. More importantly this illustrates the breadth of influence of whatever lies at the heart of the SRH. It is obvious that "management" can never be a complete world view because what manages management? So last night and this morning in bed I transform the problem (once again) into topology and the notion of regions enclosing one another.

In this diagram there are 3 regions. Region A, region B and the black ring. Region A is separated from region B by the black ring through which any path from a point in A to B must pass. The ring encloses region A and "excludes" or "excloses" region B.

Region B depends upon the context. In this case we are in the real plane R2 so we know that B is simply the rest of this plane. If we were to define "swan" then it is harder to say what not-swan is, because the field is not clearly defined. For example if someone was to produce the skull of a swan, is that swan or not? It is true that it is not "a" swan because we assume here that we are talking about actual animals. But in a physiology class where skulls were the topic we might agree that this was swan rather than goose.

Exclude/Exclose: Region B is defined in terms of the ring just as is region A, but the ring is enclosed by region B. Exclude illustrates that region B is subject to the ring, and it gives the ring the active part of the sentence.

Now two issues arise from this. Firstly the "Dual Nature" of definition and secondly the question of whether something can define itself.

Dual Nature

The ring performs a dual function. By enclosing the region A it automatically excludes the region B. This has been commented on before in this blog in connection with the dual nature of "false societies" that exist by including some and excluding others; any structure with a name, description or definition has this dual, false character. I say false because true Society is about people, but if it exists by excluding some people then it is self-contradictory. Regions of space are not so elevated and self-contradictory. That space within A is separated from that space in B. Without the process of separation of A from B then we cannot define A, so to define A we have to define B. B is often termed its negation, ¬A or not-A.

Now it is because anything we wish to define and name equally defines its negation that we have problems if we try to define something in terms of itself (the problem flagged by the SRH).

If something could define itself then it could define what was not-itself also. So we might have a function that defined a family of functions, for trivial example y= a*x where a is an integer. So the function y = 2*x is defined by this rule and y = 3 + x is not defined.

…

Other point is that about boundaries. If we say ¬A then we include B and we include the ring. So the ring seems to be included in the negation of what it defines. Let us assume to begin with that this is a real world example and the ring is a wedding ring. Region A is the space through which a finger can pass and the ring begins with the gold atoms whose structure holds the ring on the finger. Region A is thus clearly defined with gold atoms on one side and something else on the other. An imaginary line exists between the various atoms. Now in which region is this line? It is actually between the atoms. We shift now to maths.

If I was to say that point (2,0) was in region A and (3,0) was in region B what would we know? If I was to add that this was integer space then we know that the two regions are side by side at these points. The points could be defined/selected by the rule for the circle of radius 2 centred at (0,0) in integer space:

{ (x,y) | x,y are integers & Sqrt(x^2 + y^2) <= 2 }

(0,-2)

(-1,-1), (0,-1), (1,-1)

(-2,0), (-1,0), (0,0), (1,0), (2,0) …. (3,0)

(-1,1), (0,1), (1,1)

(0,2)

What is not clear here is the notion of a boundary. We simply have a set of points A and a set of points B with nothing in between and nothing relating them. However we have defined region A to be those points at a distance from the centre with a limit of 2. This is clear in the definition but not in the areas. The areas do not contain the definition.

In the ring above the black region is supposed to be the definition of region A. Negating region A then creates the region including Region B and the ring! The ring seems to define itself!

...unfinished...

Colour Cube

Saw this on a BBC documentary last night but with a single explanatory line that gave much greater insight than I have heard before.
The question is to determine whether the blue squares in the left picture are the same colour of different from the yellow squares in the right picture.

Now it would seem an easy question to answer, after all the question has given away that they are different by referring to them as blue and yellow squares. But not everything is at it seems.

The thing to notice for the discerning aesthete is the setting, or the context, of the two pictures. The left picture is apparently under yellow light, while the right is under blue light.

As a result of this seeming triviality our brain is forced to make some rather deeper than usual decisions. Yellow light (a mixture of red and green) lacks any blue light and so nothing will look blue under yellow light: it will simply be a shade of grey. As a result there is ambiguity and the brain cannot tell whether in thi context there is a blue or a grey square. It could be either. Faced with this problem and presumably because of the other bright colours, and also because it is comparing with blue squares in the right picture, it it reasonable to decide it is a blue square.

The blue illusion is not so good because we know that there is red and green light present because we can see the red and the green squares, it is quite possible that yellow is present. However in blue light (lacking in red and green) it will be a much duller tone more similar to grey. It is easier to bust the illusion in this picture which is why we look at it second.

Now here is the point. With the context removed this is the actual colour of those squares. The Blue on the left are actually the same as the yellow on the right. With two piece of paper held close together to create a slit over the picture above this can be verified.

What was so good about the casual comment in this BBC documentary was the recognition that it was the context that fooled the brain into making the logical deduction.

In a sense the squares on the left (if they were real squares under yellow light) would indeed "be" blue. The grey squares on the right most likely would be yellow and not grey.

This goes to show however that what we "see" is not early in our visual processing but actually after a good deal of assumptions have been made by the brain.

Here I agree with the science. Where I rapidly fall out with the science is this. It has taken a good deal of study beyond the visual system for mankind to deduce this feature of his own visual processing system. That is to say that where the visual system does some study to work out what it is "really" seeing, mankind has now done a lot more processing to show up the visual system as not always consistent. Thus we can fill gaps (with considerable time and difficulty) where the primitive system fails. We now claim to know "reality" better than the visual system, and this I have a problem with.

It is correct that we have shown that what we are conscious of is not reality. An easier way is to wonder what a dream was "of". We were certainly conscious of something: we can tell people what happened and we can sometimes even describe colours, smells, touch, sound and tastes. I once dreamt of eating a banana and the unripe texture and taste was so bad I was put off eating them for years! But what was the "reality". We seem fine about dismissing this as make believe. Now in this illusion we are seeing/dreaming colours that are not there - that are created so it seems not by "reality" but by our personal "brain". Yet to prove the illusion we turn to another picture where we see "grey". Now are we dreaming that also? Why scientifically are we allowed to consider the "grey" in this experiment as reality and the dreamed colours before as illusions.

It is only because of logical inconsistency. Our thinking mind is referring to memory and within the framework of language, culture and history. As if to prove that point see this entry in the online etymological dictionary for blue [http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=blue]:

c.1300, bleu, blwe, etc., from O.Fr. blo "pale, pallid, wan, light-colored; blond; discolored; blue, blue-gray," from Frankish *blao, from P.Gmc. *blæwaz (cf. O.E. blaw, O.S., O.H.G. blao, Dan. blaa, Swed. blå, O.Fris. blau, M.Du. bla, Du. blauw, Ger. blau "blue"), from PIE*bhle-was "light-colored, blue, blond, yellow."

Blue comes from the root word for pallid, light coloured, blond and even yellow. Our thinking mind claims this knowledge that the visual system is inconsistent as proof that colours are not reality, and that it is closer to reality. A scientist will pull out a spectrum analyser and measure the bend of electromagnetic radiation to find our exactly what wavelength it is. That is reality he will claim, "I can tell you more about this light that even your own eyes". And this is fine he can. But can he claim that he could do without his useless error strewn eyes then and just use his spectrum analyser? After all, the eyes, it has been proven, don't show us reality at all only colours that we have made up with our brains. This is the problem because in fact he can lose all his senses because they are all prone to errors but what else has he got? Maybe he can invent some new senses that are more accurate; Terminator or Robocop senses; but they will still be imperfect. And exactly what are we to make of the "consciousness" of these new dreams through new senses: are they just made up also? It is a mess.

The point is that consciousness is about sensing. But sensing is not some useless telescope that lies between our pure thinking minds and some pure reality. And our pure thinking minds can somehow exist free of this telescope and can even examine it quite objectively to discover that really the "blue" and the "yellow" in the telescope don't "really" exist... but somehow the "grey" does "really" exist... and then discard the telescope. It was with the telescope that they ever "saw" anything in the first place. All the thinking that surrounds colours, spaces, dimensions and the language of all this exists inside the telescope... you can't escape it. And what we are looking at is not outside the telescope either... if it was then how would we ever know what it "was" apart from just light. A man limited to looking at the stars with only a telescope will never be able to tell if they are just holes through the cosmos letting light in or whether they are actual material things. What was the illusion for our eyes above, of deciding between grey or blue, becomes the equally intractable illusion of deciding whether the stars are just pin holes or material things. Thus matter and reality itself becomes an illusion of our mind just as colour was an illusion of our eyes. There is no outside the telescope.

So when we discover that indeed we are tricked, we do indeed discover something about our visual systems... namely that they can be tricked and we can learn the ambiguous circumstances. Just as an illusionist will make us "think" that the ball is in one hand when really it is in the other. The mind is as trickable as the eye. But while scientists don't like to dismiss the "ideas" as dreams when they are caught out, they are happy to dismiss the colours as dreams when they are caught out. And worse the scientists will say that colours are created by the brain, and not realise that the "brain" (which is just an idea) must therefore be created by the brain also which is an absurdity (a la SRH).

The conclusion is that either everything is an illusion and a dream (which I used to believe) or nothing is. They amount to the same thing! because if everything is an illusion then what does the dreamer who dreams the colour experiment above think is happening when he makes up the colours blue and yellow?

Humpty-Dumpty

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less."

Lewis Carroll -- Through the Looking Glass, Chapter 6

Excellent and laterally this is the problem with "internal" self-reference.

Finally the Phi answer

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/week203.html


ebook
http://ebook30.com/science/mathematics/305483/introduction-to-the-perturbation-theory-of-hamiltonian-systems.html


Back to more my type of analysis of stock markets ...
http://finance.martinsewell.com/stylized-facts/distribution/Gabaix-etal2003.pdf

esp. "Such a theory
where large individual participants move the market is consistent
with the evidence that stock market movements are dif®cult to
explain with changes in fundamental values." [Cutler,D., Poterba, J. M.& Summers, L. H.What moves stock prices? J. Portfolio Management 15, 4±12 (1989).]

Excellent something workable really seems to be building here.

It gets deeper...

This Phi thing is extra-ordinary. Self-relationship at the heart of the universe... I still maintain the SRH but there is a lot more to Self!!!

http://icanseefar.tripod.com/phitheoryweb.htm

and just as I accept Caitin's argument I'm beginning to see Wolfram's and this is before I've even read the book! Amazing, and probably stupid, that I assume so much about things I've never read... but I guess if you hear someone calling from over the hill you go over there even before they've come to fetch you!

===

ok this guy might be talking a load of rubbish the sqrt(10) thing is a tautology... shall examine later

Now we're talking...

Brilliant discussion of this feature here...

http://scienceforums.com/topic/13548-do-a-spiral-galaxy-and-a-hurricane-share-a-similar-formation-mechanism/

Virtually every aspect of fractal geometry and type of dynamical system can be expressed by variations upon the simple quadratic iterator: X = X**2 + c which expresses the particular type of feedback being examined, Phi can be expressed by a related but more archetypal variation to derive the Fibonacci series: X[n+1] = X[n] + X[n-1] which incrementally gravitates towards a particular ratio which possesses unique qualities. Numerically, it can be derived from the relation: (1 + sqrt(5))/2. For example, if one diminishes Phi by Unity you derive its reciprocal. Additionally, Phi is the unique ratio that fulfils: 1/Ø + 1/Ø**2 = 1 in other words, Phi is also the only possible geometric and arithmetic, expansion and partitioning of One.This leads us to the other cardinal feature of Phi. There is only one proportional division of One possible using two terms, with the third being One itself. From Euclid's ELEMENTS Book Five, Theorem Three (Alexandria, 3rd century B.C.):"A straight line is said to have been cut in extreme and mean ratio when, as the whole line is to the greater segment, so is the greater to the less."The Golden Mean then, is an archetypal fractal in that it preserves its relationship with itself (its inherent similarities under scaling are conformal symmetries - with topological consequences, that are invariant about themselves), in the most mathematically robust, economical but also elegant, way. It is analogia exemplified.As we shall see, this reciprocal, squaring behaviour about One, or Unity, as it is more properly termed, is far from being mathematically trivial.All feedback loops deterministically involve the passage of time. The quadratic iterator is derived from Newton's differential calculus, and from a period when nature was seen as a mechanistic and time-reversible automaton. Recent science demonstrates that in fact it consists of both the above and irreversible processes, known as the entropy barrier, or the arrow of time. The Golden Mean can also be seen as mathematically (because of the above) the simplest and most stable way of communing or mediating between the two, as we shall see.Nigel Reading
Quote
You may assume.But it is never safe
Quote
According to the Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine, these far from equilibrium dissipative systems locally minimise their entropy production by being open to their environments --- they export it in fact, back into their environments, whilst importing low entropy. Globally, overall entropy increase is nevertheless preserved, with the important caveat that the dissipative system concerned often experiences a transient increase (or optimisation) of its own complexity, or internal sophistication, before it eventually subsides back into the flux.This is known as the region of alternatively, Emergence, Maximum Complexity, Self-organised Criticality, Autopoiesis, or the Edge of Chaos. (Nascent science debates nomenclature routinely - and appropriately, in this case, the crucial point being that they are all different terms for essentially the same phenomena.)Lifeforms, ecosystems, global climate, plate tectonics, celestial mechanics, human economies, history and societies, even consciousness itself - all manifest this feedback-led, reflexive behaviour; they maximise their adaptive capacities by entering this region of (maximum) complexity on the edge of Chaos, whenever they are pushed far from their equilibrium states, thereby incrementally increasing their internal complexity, between occasional catastrophes.Remarkably, this transition zone is mathematically occupied by The Golden Mean. This ratio acts as an optimised probability operator, (a differential equation like an oscillating binary switch), whenever we observe the quasi-periodic evolution of a dynamical system. It appears in fact, to be the optimal, energy-minimising route to the region of maximum algorithmic complexity, and to be a basin of attraction for the edge of Chaos.

[credit Nigel Reading]

worth a read

http://www.foundalis.com/phi/WhyTimeFlows.htm

Name

How do we know our own name?

We know someone else's based on some character. This is most evident with identical twins where physical characteristics are so similar that it is hard to tell them apart. What we may need to do is talk to them to see their personality. If this is also the same we can check for information they remember which links them to a place and a time. For example if they can't remember what they ate when you last had a meal together.

If the twins were never apart however then this is hard. It would be like a Turing test where we had a fixed period of time to determine who was who and if we couldn't then we could conclude, not that they were "a conscious person", but rather there was no difference between these two persons. We would then have to rely on what each of then told us, in other words what they called themselves. No good one saying "i'm me and not them" and the other saying exactly the same. We need them to uniquely identify themselves.

Now how can we tell whether they are telling the truth? We have to be able to mark them with a constant characteristic and compare what they say relative to that mark - measure them so to speak. Suppose we could put them in different cells then ask them their name, write it on the door and ask them each day. They need to always say the same thing AFTER isolation. What was said before is not important!

But what if they are called the same name? Lots of people have the same name. What we tend to do in that situation is give them a nick name. Two Marks renovating my cousins place gained the names Mark-the-floor and Mark-the-plasterer for obvious reasons just as people gained the names Margaret Thatcher or Adam Smith in days of yore. And usually people come t accept their monikers. But it is not satisfying if our two twins keep calling themselves say John. It is as though 'inside' they still don't accept their difference. Outside however we can test their memories and gradually their different histories will show up; for example if we give them different meals and then ask them to remember their meals. This is what Buddhism calls streams of consciousness which I believe is the way that we pass through time for Buddhist theory (but i am unsatisfied by this explanation: it doesn't really get to the heart of the illusion of "self" because we can just replace the idea of self with "my stream of consciousness").

Now is this how we know our own name? Do we look for a character in order to know that it is us? That is the problem for a speculative philosophical moment. In reality however we don't think like like this. Our name is a part of our learned behaviour. From a young age we know what to do when addressed. Almost like a dog who can tell when he is being called because his master is looking at him and saying this word in that high pitched way. Our name becomes part of the language game that surrounds us and in which we have grown up. In this way our name is unique to the social context in which each of us finds ourselves. It is not about naming some object but rather 'being' part of a team and social reality. So how do we know our name? It is because we are part of a social reality in which our name gets used. What is my name? Is a question we are a fool if we can't answer just as I felt very childish not to be able to spell my middle name when I was 11. In the same way we learn to address other people in this culture for a variety of purposes. So it is not so much a case of directly refering to a 'self' when we use a name - a thing called 'Alva' that is naming that thing (any self-reference) - but rather being part of a society that uses this word in particular situations and "Alva" becomes just a social context rather than an object . . Just as a "goal keeper" is a context in a game of football so "Alva" is a context in the game of English Western society. So our twins above are perplexing because they seem to be able to cheat at something that is so fundamental to this society. Just as a man the size of a goal mouth would 'cheat' at goal keeping!

On reference & Custom

When someone is called "John" in human culture it means that the word "John" is taken by speakers to replace the actual person John (who may be short and dark haired with a light hearted attitude) in verbal structures. When John hears his name he knows that he is involved in the conversation.

But this is only convention. John could just as easily refer to the person who is also called Mike. Now we enter the problem of identity loved by Elizabethan playwrites. Quite when we use the name John and Mike can only be determined by custom, context and circumstance. In an alien culture there may be complex formal rules governing when to use particular names that will seem random and of no sense to a human guest. Imagine explaining the old use of you and thou to an alien who doesn't have a concept of intimacy or informality!

Now isn't the same true of sentence themselves. It is customary to interpret a sentence that described the previous sentence as having eight words as meaning the sentence before this one. Were the customs of English different it might mean this sentence itself. Likewise a sentence that says that it has nineteen words might be customarily interpreted to mean the previous sentence.

What is true however is that to create a current point of reference we need some level of identifying the here and now. A sentence which says "the first sentence of this blog entry" must still make reference to the here and now even while not envoking itself. This shows however that "this sentence" is actually referring to itself only by use of an external here and now reference which is customarily accepted for the English language. It is certainly external self reference and so of little interest.

I need also be careful here of use/mention. A sentence can't actually refer to itself so easily because "this sentence" is just a quote and marks on a page. While this sentence is an actual sentence. Or is it because it doesn't quote itself so it is actually non gramatical within the rules of English.

Intrinsic/Extrinsic Self-Reference

Almost certainly blogged this before but its clear at the moment:

One type of self reference (extrinsic self-reference) involves a system being able to select itself from amongst others. This sentence has five words. The previous sentence has selected itself from the rest of the text and in particular distinguishes itself from the next sentence. This sentence has five words. It is as though the system looks out into the world, identifies itself and then looks back in again. In reality it is using us, the reader, to do the looking and the thinking and we lie outside the system - or at least we are not the sentence. However I am unimpressed with external self reference because what is the real difference between the second and third sentences of this paragraph, or even this sentence here. The second sentence refers to itself and the third also refers to it. Both sentences are selecting one of the sentences on this page, in that they are the same. So the fact that the second sentence "happens" to select the sentence that is also itself is quite unmiraculous and is just a trivial feature. There is no "self" here other than that which a reader may infer when (or if) they realise that the sentence is referring to the same sentence they are reading.

The other type of self-reference, and the one which I'm saying is logically impossible in the SRH, is intrinsic self-reference where the entity refers to itself within itself. Now this is non trivial and quite miraculous if it exists. It is the situation monists believe is true within humans where somehow we have a secret mirror in which we can see ourselves, and know our own thoughts and wishes. This they believe would be true even on a desert island or in a world where nothing else existed but them. I used to hold this view and it is through failure to actually find consciousness or a self and after being given a push by Buddha that I changed view.

The idea that somehow self-refernece and recursive feedback in the brain causes consciousness just doesn't go anywhere. Recursion does indeed creates a many leveled intersecting fractal structure (which is Hoffstadter's brilliant view) but that anything would be mysteriously "created" is untenable. What "I" am would be just be phantoms in the swirling mix of data (the hall of mirrors as it is called in this blog). What I am careful to avoid however is the suggestion that the "world" is any less a phantom. The belief in material entities like brains that somehow mysteriously underly the "self" or consciousness implies some special knowledge of "reality" which I am yet to see myself! After all if it was so easy to escape the hall of mirrors why hasn't everyone other than Hoffstadter and Dennett!

Intrinsic self-reference involves not having to identify oneself from other things by "external" features but involves having an almost tautologically connection to oneself - and inner bond to oneself. The "I think: I am" bound into ones existence. I'm not taking sides and saying that outside is better than inside (though the Western Materialists side totally with the outside while Buddha said that inside/outside is just part of the illusion) , just looking for an immanent problem with holding the inside view.

The power of the blank

Quote from 'Black Books' comedy sitcom.

Was thinking again about an acquaintance who has decided for mysterious reasons yet to explain to lose me from his friend group. It came after the death of his mother last year and I wonder if connected.

Anyway was watching my own mind in relation to this. It is interesting how the first line of defence is to decide that he was not a good freind anyway and to look for faults in him. Needless to say I gave up on this whole line of thought and just gave him the freedom to do whatever he was doing. I myself have blanked two people before (one being "my muse") and it is only fair I expetrience "not being liked".

This is an interesting illustration of the dynamics of human relations. We give people recognition when they give us recognition, and devalue them when they don't. It is all Hegel. We cannot give someone the authority to judge us, and then have them judge against us; that is tantamount to judging against ourself. Except it isn't if we can give them freedom; but it is hard to do this because we also have to give ourselves freedom and that means we weren't looking for the recognition in the first place. But we can only gain freedom if we know what freedom looks like (after Hegel) and we begin this process by giving people power over us: and that is the slave mentality. Ironic that we are gaining knowledge of freedom by actually losing freedom ourselves. But like the monk looking critically at the prostitute and the prostitute looking respectfully at the monk: it is the prostitute whose mind is clean! Or as noted here in this blog, if we want to see a mountain we climb its neighbour! And Pygmalion says the same quoted in this blog elsewhere.

So there is very much in the coming, but also the going of relations; and one can't really point at either as being more important or better.

Why do humans need to do things?

This appears to be one of those big unanswered questions. Indeed even asking questions is one of those things that huamns 'do'.

It seems that Life entails doing things. I don't think it matters what we do, we just seek to be doing things. Even people with money enough not to work will try and find ways to do things, even if it is only parlour games and activities of light amusement. I am entertained looking at teh world around me and trying to explain it, I keep this blog, I do reading and lot of instinctive thinking: yet what is in common is that I am always trying to do things. Even my search to do less (since doing things I have seen before is the cause of most of our problems today) has ended up in an active search and so is doing something.

What is the root of "doing" - that seems to lie at the root of Life itself. It seems to be perhaps more than just part of our economic paradigm, tho I know of tribes in other paradigms where they would rather go hungry than do anything. They have the lowest working hours of any primate at just 2.5 hours a day.

Worth looking at the "optimum" hours of work. After a while we make more work for ourselves by working. For example with everyone in the construction industry for example there is more competition, pulling down otherwise fine building, and negotiation and selling to be done than if just a few people worked in it. Certainly the rise in marketing is an excellent example of where people work to get other people to buy things they would never have bought otherwise, do they need to work more to pay for them and the wheel turns a little faster - but for no other reason that we were trying to do more!

I meditation doing something? What is actually doing "nothing"? If we don't know what doing nothing is like, then do we really know what doing something is like?

=== Update 27/1/2011

I must never forget what the Master of Fo Guang Shan temple says: pure action is compassion. It is the corollary of: pure mind is wisdom. These are the two parts of enlightenment; there is not one without the other.

This morning I also saw a parallel between inaction and the problem of singularities in physics. Models are excellent until they crunch into a singularity which squeezes all the information out and the compass fails. The Big Bang is one such famous singularity. Once the Universe is compressed into an infinitely small point the theory becomes useless. Just as f(x) = x/2x is a straight line for its entire length at y=0.5 with the momentary exception of x=0 where we can assume it has a value of y=0.5 but can't define it as such. If we did say that 0/(2*0) = 0.5 then do we say that 0/(4*0) = 0.25. Yet the denominator of both are the same 2*0 = 4*0 so we have an inconsistency so we can't decide what the value is.

This same problem occurred to me when we "think" and model action. It is fine to muse on the motivations of people in history or in law courts and even our motivations as we struggle to understand who we are, but that thinking runs into a singularity in the present as we cannot predict what we will do Now. It is undefined. This is the origin of the concept of freedom which Existentialists amongst others find so terrifying; the staggering vastness of the possibilities that face us now make most shy into inaction. This Hamlet mentality troubled with contradictions and resolutions (myself as well) led Sartre to dump essence all together and start with existence. Don't decide between "possible" worlds of whether or not to marry the girl, he said to a hesitating student, make the future... let history write the essence in books afterwards. I've never been so sure; that seems to me simply follow social pressure or ones desires without questioning type of behaviour: carpe diem. If I have learned one thing from my walking it is that the two most crucial stages of a long walk of many hundreds of miles are the first and last few hours. Errors you make at the start are the most costly, travelling large distances in the right direction is then very easy, what then poses a problem is the small scale again where we try to locate a specific place. I imagine the same with Life. If we head off in the wrong direction we will waste a very long time getting it right. But then what is the right direction? That is the whole question since the dawn of antiquity! If there is no right direction then there can't be a wrong direction and then it doesn't matter what we do... this is blatantly not our experience as we discover regrets and disappointments in Life. But what then "ought" we do, or have done to live better Life? I am wondering here if even "doing" is the right way to look at this. What if I really did nothing for my whole life ... and I'm half way through having done nothing. I have to respond to an old friend of Facebook sometime soon explaining my life. I have to honest I have done nothing: no career, family, property, responsibilities, titles, achievements, even wonderful experiences: the lack of all this bumph just says simple peace and happiness to me. Yet this seems fine to me, just sounds a bit boring in the retelling, so am I so wrong?

Planets, Fractal, Phi and Stockmarkets

Following up on the Ouroboros stuff from ages ago, which is related to the SRH thread, and through an article on Alchemy I came upon the presence of Phi in the planetary orbits. Odd I think and am trying to explain that becauise it is also used in charting stock markets. It is commented already that stock markets show fractal geometry, and Phi is the limit of the relationship between adjacent numbers in the Fibonnaci Sequence - a sequence that is gained by recursion i.e. fractal! Consider two systems A and B which proceed by adding the value of the other system - this is the Fib sequence. A and B can start at any value (as long at they are different).

A 10 24 etc
B 14 38

They will come into Phi relationship ... why? Algebraically it is obvious:

B(n) / A(n) = [ B(n-1) + A(n) ] / A(n) = B(n-1)/A(n) + 1 (ok not quite I've got this in notes will update)

Anyway looking further this is interesting and I note it for reading later:
http://www.cyberalley.com/G-Home/R&D/R&D5/FofL12.html

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http://www.ermanometry.com/

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Funny how everything appears to fit together ... or is this an illusion because I want it so? Actually I don't want it so because if Phi is this fundamantal then it will end up explaining things rather than being explained!

http://www.miqel.com/fractals_math_patterns/visual-math-phi-golden.html

So it seems that in iterative processes the repeating units come into Phi relationship *for some reason*. This link describes it as "self-reference" - I don't call it self reference because it isn't. A large structure being composed of structures "similar" at many scales is only "self" in the sense of "similar". Altho I must conceed that a set which is made of copies of that set at a smaller scale is more extraordinary than one that is made from dissimilar material. This really questions what we mean by "self". What we don't mean (a la Buddha) is a material existing thing called self. Fractals actually illustrate this "self" that is built from "copies" of "itself", and so not self and self at the same time.

But why Phi?

Web site here were the writer seems a little carried away with the patterns. If there was no pattern that itself would be amazing. It is Wolfram versus Caitin on whether the universe is full of information or whether the apparent diversity has underlying rules. I part company on ths page and this statement "There is no natural explanation for these unusual relationships" [http://solargeometry.com/34power.htm]. I reckon there is a very good reason. 2 options. Either:

(1) the planets formed in this relationship and it is a feature of the fractal collison and amassing of dust in the emryonic nebula + the expulsion of massive rocks that were too excentric and out of phase with the system. OR

(2) over time the planets have evolved into this relationship. Evidence for this would be that the inner planets (with more revolutions and periods of evolution) have tighter relationships.

Some things to note. All the planets bar Earth are in a 2*Phi relationship. Mars is the most deviant. And there is a missing planet (from the pattern) between Mars and Jupiter, where instead is the asteroid belt.

Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus are massive and it seems likely to me that the planet that formed immediately inside jupiter's orbit suffered some catastrophe and either never formed properly, was broken up by the gravity of Jupiter or there was some massive early collision creating the asteroid belt. Mars, which is incredibly light, will be hugely affected by Jupiter and aided by early collisons from the drama in the asteroid belt has a distorted orbit.

However such speculation leads no closer to why Phi.

The inner planets are in almost circular orbits. This is most likely the influence of Jupiter which I understand would accentuate any eccentric orbits and eventually fling the planet from the system. By simple evolution only circular orbits exist. Given radius from the Sun, and assuming nearly circular orbits, the possible velocity and therefore orbit period are hugely constrained for the planets. I need develop my calculus a bit before describing that in detail.

Then it remains only to find out why only certain radiuses from the Sun are favoured for planet formation and stability.

I expect the iterative dynamics to be something of the form Sqrt(x+1) = x or x = 1/(x-1) both of which converge on Phi...

Then I have a demonstration of my hunch that a similar iteration exists in the Stock Market game mentioned a few posts ago. After all the stock price is what speculators base there trading on, and their trading affects the stock price so there is an iterative system and ergo it will show fractal geometry (with patterns feeding back through the system at scale) with stable points existing at solutions to these interations ... like Phi.

Do Big Caps Pay?

A revealing look at two large caps. Above is Tesco and below is BP for data between 2003 and end 2010. The Magenta line is the actual stock price.

The Blue line is data corrected for percentage change in the FTSE for that day:

C(n+1) = C(n) * S(n+1)/S(n) * F(n)/F(n+1)

= S(n+1) / F(n+1) * F(0)

C(x) = corrected price for day x
S(x) = stock price for day x
F(x) = FTSE price for day x

Assuming that the FTSE grabs the general economic data, including growth and inflation, then the remaining graph is the actual performance of the stock. What is surprising is the low return of only around 50% in 8 years or 5% per year. This is admittedly growth on top of inflation (which the FTSE data ought to remove) but it isn't impressive given that a careful trade can gain you 5% in a day. There was 9% just today on an oil stock in my portfolio (RRL) that I have held for only 6 months; that against the FTSE of only 2%. That's equivalent to 16 months investing in Tesco! I must thank a friend for alerting me to the potential of oil stocks at this time.

Essence of Trading

Just writing a very simple sampling program to test various trading strategies on actual stock data: this seems the most productive way forward at the moment - characterising the "nature" of stock movements is a bit to complex for me at the moment!!

Ideas stripped down look like this.

Trading is a game which involves stepping between two side-by-side conveyor belts, which constantly change their rate and direction.

It is simpler to consider one (money) as static and the other (stock) as moving (though this makes the difference a more complex function). We step from money into stock, travel a bit and then step back.

The object of the game is to get as far up the money escalator (to the right) as possible as this escalator is next to all the other escalators (can buy anything with it).

The optimum solution (to be tested) is to be in Cash as the stock escalator passes to the left and then to step onto the escalator as it changes direction and starts to move right. We leave a doughnut or something to mark where we were. We stay on the stock escalator until another hypothetical point H (the High) passes the doughnut and we step back onto cash escalator. This way we have travelled up the cash escalator.

Superficially I'm noting this is like a Turing machine. Turning machines have States which are like the stock and they travel up and down the data-tape or cash "register" ;-) Whether this similarity is of any use only time will tell.

It seems a game we can't lose on. However there is the problem that we have to pay to change escalator .. in other words we have to take a step down the cash escalator every time we step off or back to the cash escalator. It means that we have to be able to think head just a little bit to ensure that we will recover that initial step.

To ensure that we always move right we need to determine these H/L points and whether they are far enough apart to make shifting escalators worth while. That is all there is between being broke and making a fortune...

But the escalators do not move randomly. There are only so many people allowed on stock escalators and to get on someone must step off. We have to decide who to swap places with. If we think that someone is standing near a L then we are more likely to swap places with them so the escalator gets dragged up so we can cross over. They in turn get to step onto the cash escalator higher than where they were. The opposite happens also dragging the escalator down.

So the actual movement of the escalator is caused by these differences of trade. There is a strong feedback process where the response of players to previous movements is actually causing the current movement. This is most evidential in the fractal patterns in the market.

Fractal systems are iterative systems where a simple input data is fed through a system repeatedly. It means that the basic "motif" or pattern is very simple but by repeating it at different scales a very complex structure of repeating units is created. This is the stock price trace (SPT - my term) the price plotted against time. IN essence it is simple but the simple patterns are repeated in complex structures. I have lost it now but I had a wonderful plot of the gold price I think at 5 day, 3 month and 1 year and the three plots could be virtually over laid. There is certainly no way of telling from an SPT what the duration is... except perhaps the macroeconomic features like inflation and economic growth.

Boxes

To try and characterise SPTs I'm using an idea of Boxes. They are essentially the standard "candles". A box contains the SPT between two dates. How the stock gets from the entry point to the exit point is irrelevant (a black box). We only know its max and min prices (top and bottom of the box) .

The problem then is to replace an SPT with a succession of boxes the only variable between the width of each box. We want each box to not contain too much information about the SPT preferable a straight line between entrance and exit is best, but most importantly a box should start and end at an extreme or turning point. This way each box represents an optimal trading window or period, and that is all we are interested in.

Now because the charts are fractal we have to chose a scale, or trading scale. Apparently short trades are traditionally of period of months to a year and long trades many years. Day traders trade between days and weeks. From experience as a private investor with access to delayed chart data and high costs of entry and exit to the market I've only succeeded a few times in day trading. The advantage is however that through compound interest a small percentage each day compounds to huge gains a year. IgIndex and the like is perhaps a better type of gambling for this scale. Really I'm aiming at the short scale: months.

Anyway that is progress so far and now back to coding... end of Xmas holiday tonight so this may get stuck for a while...

Smart Dog Chaser

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/12/23/worlds-smartest-dog-knows-words/

It seems, and I'll assume, that there is a cognitive ability here and the dog isn't simply mapping a sound (sentence) to an action Pavlovian style. In which case are we to think that dogs in their natural social groups have this level of communication being able to code 1000s of different individual things?

We it seems obvious that to interact in the world (putting a bone here, picking up some meat etc) a dog must have this level of complexity in their world. Being able to link this complexity with an audio world (of command sounds) seems not so extraordinary. Why should decoding the audio world be any more important that decoding the physical world? A stone marking the place where a bone is, or a coloured button, or a researcher saying "go to bone" which both give the desired outcome. I'm impressed by the dog but not so much by the remarkableness of the skills which seem essential to any creature that can live "in" the world. That world becomes a human world and the creature simply adapts to human details rather than wild details and then we suddenly applaud their cognisance which was always there. Am I missing something here? I blog this so I am reminded to think about it again...

Being a node in the system.

AN idea that has emerged in this blog and my life is the realisation that most of the work we do is caused by other people.

The most important example is that of war. Imagine how simple this life would be if we weren't constantly beating people up, and then having them beat us up also. At the end of it nothing ever changes and after people give up hitting each other over the head then life continues as before. The biological reason for this is "competition for resources" and there is an unfortunate bi-product of reproduction that population growth leads to increased competition which affects individuals differently and so selects (to some extent) their transferable characters which leads to drift in population character. It is however a drift in "character" and not in "identity". Tomorrows population may have 100 people in it of which none are "my" children, or of which some are my children. There is actually no difference because "my" children don't inherit any of the "myness" they only inherit my characteristics but they are no more "me" than your children...

That is unless I wish to define my "identity" in terms of my characteristics in which case an identical copy of me is the same identity as me. Now in Dawkins terms this is true. If we were to make a genetically identical copy of Richard Dawkins and him and his copy in a crashing plane with only one parachute then they would have to toss a coin to find out who lived because it makes no difference to them. For normal people however we have a problem because it is not the facts of our character we are trying to preserve but "ourselves". If I die and my copy lives that is a very different event, to if my copy dies and I live. Most importantly I get to parachute to safety, mourn the loss of my copy, get home and tell everyone what happened; if I die with the plane that is it - game over.

SO this is the crux of life, death, reproduction, personality, self and existence. We have the teaching that actually but Richard Dawkins and I are wrong (and me more so) because the truth is that it makes no difference who takes the parachute: even if we were completely different people. Given that it makes no difference the standard solution is to offer the parachute to the other person this way the person who lives knows without doubt that the person who died wanted that. It also proves that the person who died understood that it didn't matter. This could be taken to undermine the value of life (as some pointless suicide) so it is important to understand that this choice only makes sense in the situation where only one can live. If we take the parachute for ourselves then we never know whether the person who died accepted their fate, but it also means that we didn't accept the situation. We have simply avoided the situation by taking the parachute and continuing as if everything was all right. For such a person the only situation where they can approach death is where there are no parachutes (either their opponent took it or there never was one). Such a person thus rejects choice and therefore freedom!

Returning to the main thread at the top: much of the struggles of life are created by an unfortunate by product of reproduction. Without competition for resources we would have a very much easier life. Another example apart from war was my last job where I made a coating for medical equipment used in heart operations. Most of these operations arise because of unhealthy life styles created by the very food and motor industries that people spend their time working for. It is depressing to realise that the work you get paid for is simply pasting over the cracks of the work someone else has been paid for. It really is no better than the hamster running in its wheel.

But to take this argument to its final conclusion, what about a planet of bare rock. There is no work to do here at all. Work only ever arises because of people. All the work we do is because of people. It is therefore slightly erroneous to seek work that has an absolute meaning. We may work in the Red-Cross and heal people who have only been injured by the actions of other people that we are fighting. We may work in hospitals healing people who are only unwell because of the food or drink they have been sold by someone else. Yet we are always only ever addressing the issues made by other people.

My life has been organised about the principle that I am as least work for myself as possible. This is where Buddhism is so important. To be happy with little makes life very much easier. If a single apple makes me satisfied then I don't need to deal with the complex problem of getting hold of truffles or caviar. But it is a double blessing because I don't need to involve other people in the problem of getting hold of truffles or caviar. So well mastered individuals not only make their own lives easy but they make the lives of those around them easy.

But this doesn't work in reality because most people cannot be easy. In particular I have noticed (and blogger recently) women can't be easy. Women are always scheming, changing and working towards things. I suggest it is part of the "nesting instinct" where they feel the impulse to create homes that the maternal instinct will then want to fill with children. It means that they are never easy having these very strong, and poorly understood, impulses. These impulses are also extremely complicated and difficult to satisfy. In men I suggest it is a bit simpler - we have impulses for sex, and dominance. Desiring women and dominance (which is implied by having women) is enough to enslave us to their impulses. As a result people are never easy and this means they can certainly never be happy.

But I must (and this is the point of this blog) never take this argument too far because without people at all then everything goes. If people didn't reproduce then in one generation there would be no problems for anyone, but then there would be no people to be easy either. Like the equation 0/0 we have eliminated both the numerator and the denominator at the same time and so have no answer still!

The equation for peace is much more sophisticated and Dialectical than simply eliminating difficulty. I need to eat, sleep and various other "troubles" that I make myself... and in so doing I make them for other people because I can't eat that apple unless someone drives it to me, someone picks it, and someone plants it and keeps it free from predators and thieves until I eat it. So inevitably I make troubles for other people, and I am engaged in working for their troubles also.

The middle ground must be in "harmony". The war industry is probably the second largest in the world after the health industry. War is not a complete waste of time. There are times when certain groups simply refuse to be harmonious or dialectical and inevitably an escalation of power will occur. My personal view is to walk way and let the ignorant fight, but I must understand that where a lot has been invested (say in a hospital or government) it is not so easy to walk away and conflict will occur. This will make work for both the war industry and the health industry. The point for me to contemplate this year is not so much how to stop causing trouble for other people (mastering desires and minimising life's requirements), but instead to find a way to assist as many people in their goals as I can thus choosing to become a node in the place where my own actions and existence is "harmonised" with the environment I find myself.

This seems to be a step above the simple view of minimising ones needs and in so doing reducing the load on other people. Rather it is the seeking modes of behaviour which link my activities with those around me to maximise their effectiveness. So it is not a matter of stopping the war machine and the health machine, but rather find a mode of action for myself where I improve the goals of both.