What is Wrong with Capitalism? (again)

Not a subject you can over do. As the dominant economic model of the last 300 years in the West and one being spread around the world, problems with Capitalism have quickly become problems for the world.

Definition
What is Capitalism? Problems begin even defining Capitalism. It is often associated with "free market" economics FME.  But what has "capital" got to do with FME. I can trade any time, any place, either swapping things with friends or using agreed currency. There is always FME. This is not Capitalism. For me Capitalism is the economic system which rewards Capital. It is the system where individuals seek to accumulate capital and to invest it so as to generate a return on investment ROI. Capitalism is then a continuation of the system of Aristocracy. In Aristocracy all land has tenants who pay 50% of productivity to the land owner. The Crown (who usually gained the land through conquest) then hands this land out in Dukedoms to those they want to favour and reward. The "landed gentry" thus have a steady income from the lands they own which is much sort after by the women in Jane Austen stories! Capitalism is the same, but instead of Aristocratic inheritance and The Crown lands are bought and sold in the free market. Since those days stocks and a variety of other investment options have been invented. But all with the same purpose: the rich with surplus money can get even more money.

Todo:
1) Video of software illustrating how Capitalism creates inequality.

A second video showing that without capitalism there is no increasing inequality. I should have added a group of people with 2x wealth so there were two wealth peaks, but since everyone earns the same amount there would be no change over time. Only with capitalism and returns on investment does that 2x wealth inequality grow.

Source code (c#)
https://github.com/riswey/SimplyCapitalism



2)  A criticism of "free market."

So the situation often arises where people have no "choice" in a market. For example supermarket till staff being told to work unpaid overtime of face being sacked. The most important one is people without food being paid in food for work done. And the food withheld of they do not comply. (This is actually the situation in the Capitalist world - in contrast to pre-Capitalist countries where people own traditional family lands). They have no choice. Another example is people buying life saving treatment. They must pay whatever they are charged else they will die. They have no choice. Much of Capitalism is based upon "prices" and "wages" that are not freely given. How then can we say that the "prices" accurately reflect anything. Adam Smith makes it clear his system ONLY works in a free market. Yet there is no such thing. The "invisible hand of the market" thus never operates correctly.

Making universal statements about people requires logical care!

While waiting for yet another delayed train yesterday (I've not had a train on time for weeks - what a kick in the teeth for Labour who were going to kick the cowboys out)... has this thought about Adam Smith:

So AS key theory is : "agents acting on self interest in a free market produce the optimum equilibrium between supply and demand" (I think there is considerable evidence that this is true).

But its only part of the story and that is the problem. Consider this. The theory can be written in logic for clarity:

Ax | x is an agent in a free market && x operates on self interest && supply and demand is optimum

In other words for every agent in a free market, working on self interest and there being optimum supply and demand is true. Right/Left can agree on this. (Note: in a non-free market like we have this is not true.)

If we assume that the "agents" we are talking about are also people things get interesting. People can make True/False evaluations and making True/False statements about yourself causes problems e.g. "This is false" (see Tarski)

So my new problem with Adam Smith is that when we make logical statements about people (x above) we are including elements that make True/False judgements (if humans can't who can? God?). So each x is ALSO a function which generates True/False.

So we can say: x("Ax | x is an agent in a free market && x operates on self interest && supply and demand is optimum") and now we are in trouble.

In plain English: on one hand Adam Smith makes a statement about people operating on self-interest, while on the other hand shows that people have the ability to understand universal laws that apply to everyone. If we ever do chose to operate on self-interest it is a choice made from the perspective of the universal: humans are neither limited to individual or universal: they can chose. Indeed the whole moral/political/social debate stems from the fact that humans can understand and make valid statements about the "whole", and if we are self-interested it is just a choice from that perspective.

Finally SRH break through

So I was looking at this the wrong way it seems.

The concept of interest is "closure."

In the figure are 3 regions A,B,C. B is enclosed by the red circle, but importantly it is still within the domain of A. Any point within B can be referenced on the same co-ordinate system as A. This is how we define B in fact as the locus of points within A that are within the area bounded by the circle.

Region C is different. While it exists in the same plane as regions A and B, I've deliberately removed the co-ordinate grid from around it to suggest that in fact the points within C cannot be referenced relative to A or B. I'm using the word "closure" here to mean that the points within C are relative to C and nothing else. Closure here means to separate like a Monad or Solipsism.

In computer programming we might illustrate the same thing with these 3 programs.

A
10 Print "hello"
20 Goto 10

B
10 Input a$
20 Print a$
30 Goto 10

C
10 a$ = "hello"
20 Goto 10

Program A has an output. We can run it and observe as it interacts with the world "outside" it. Program B interacts even more as it take an input, during which time it halts, and then it supplies an output. The system is very open. Program C however has no output and no input, it does nothing.

We can write the programs in many ways. Program A might be written like D:

10 Print "h"
20 Print "e"
30 Print "l"
40 Print "l"
50 Print "o"
60 Goto 10

D is a much longer program but as far as the outside world goes it is the same as A. We can in fact say that programs A and D are functionally equivalent. They may work differently but as far as the outside world is concerned they perform the same function.

Program C is interesting however. It is a special type of program that does nothing. As a result we can say that all such programs are equivalent. There is only one type of program that takes no input and produces no output.

We can say that Type C programs are "closed." They exist entirely within their own "world." We don't know what a particular Type C program is doing, it might be extraordinarily complex. But because it is closed it is the same as all other type C programs.

This was my first experience of SRH in fact. Pursuing artificial "consciousness" I wanted a program that was aware of itself. So I first made a program that could discover patterns in a matrix and then planned to map (isomorphically) the state of the machine to a matrix. This way input was the system state itself. In terms of this blog I realised that once the syste, had "closure" and the input was entirely limited to the system itself then the resulting patterns whatever they might be would be meaningless. Having no relationship or point of reference with the outside world would make the operation of this solipsistic world entirely meaningless. I realised since that there would actually be patterns meaningful to an observer, as such systems produce fractal output, with the system structure being formed around fixed-points. Fixed points as hypothesised in this Blog are a metric that breaks closure, and cannot be expressed within the system. The reason they cannot be expressed within the system is that the system does not operate on them, and you need to be outside a system to generate such meta-data that the function made no change to a given input. To put that another way a fixed-point is unchanged by a system, yet for the system needs to change somewhere to identify a fixed point, so isomorphically there isn't room in the system to perform its function AND comment on when it does nothing. Suppose there is a program that finds a fixed points of given function F(f) -> fp such that f(fp) = fp. If we apply the function to itself and it finds a fixed-point then F(F) -> F. Then like Godel and Turing we would be able to construct a contradctory function who secretly knows the truth and breaks it ... todo)

In the geometric example above we can say that all regions that cannot be referenced from a particular co-ordinate system, or space are also equivalent. There is only one such space.

So this is the SRH point. There is only one type of entity that does not interact with a particular system, there is only one type of "closure."

What the original formulation of the SRH was driving at was that any system which had a particular nature must have an outside. In the new formulation, to be something distinct we can't be closed.

So that means that the "totality of knowledge" or the "totality of existence" (i.e. the Universe) cannot be closed.

Now we might think that an ant living in space C is living within a closed system. But the ant can never know the limits of space C without reference to something outside space C. An ant living within space C might walk to one boundary and then measure across to the other boundary. And they would discover the size of space C. But at exactly the same time they would have created a co-ordinate system that extends outside space C and they would know the limits of space C at the same time they knew that there must be something outside space C.

And this is where the Self-Reference part of the Hypothesis came from. When you refer to yourself, you must be an open system first. A closed system cannot define itself. From which we can infer that anything with self-reference is open.

The original formulation said that "true" self-reference was impossible. The intuition here was that trying to refer to ones "totality" was impossible as it implied openness, and so self-reference must also come at the cost stepping outside the boundaries of what is referenced. And since we must step "outside" the boundary, it isn't "true" self-reference. Like the ant living in space C, to define the boundaries the ant much create a metric that extends outside space C. When Godel defined the Godel Statement within Principia Mathematic he created a Diagonalisation metric that was able to number sentences that were outside the system. When Cantor extended the numbers into boundless infinities he created the idea of set Cardinalities that stepped outside the limits of numbers. In each case a particular metric is the vehicle by which we first define and reference what we have, but then at the same time can extend beyond the limits that we have.

And this is true of the human ego. It is a metric that firstly defines ourselves. But in the very moment that we are defined as an ego we have a way to define other people, and we instantly occupy the space of a community.

SRH was also called the God principle. Because it means that any system that becomes "self-aware", or self-referencing does so by virtue of the fact that it is open. God being that constant awareness that there is no boundary to existence and knowledge, that we are always embedded in a mystery that both illuminates the known and obscures the unknown at the same time.

Returning to a few side shoots to see if they work. The issue of a box containing itself. Initially it was the show the absurdity of "true" self-reference. A box can contain a representation or reference to itself, but never its actual self. But formally why is that? Well if we want to reference ourselves in entirety we can't be closed, which contradicts the idea of enclosing!

Another important example of SRH is the data/code distinction in the use/mention example. And also the concet of "meta", usually attributed to Douglas Hofstadtler. So the sentence "The word 'word' is 4 letters long" uses the symbol "word" in two ways. One is part of the sentence to indicate a word, and the other is a mention or reference to a particular word namely "word." In a reverse use of "closure" the two uses of the symbol "word" are in closure to each other. The metric (context in this case) of dictionary words is an entirely different space to that of words in use. There is closure as you cannot move from one to the other. This is how Russell and Whitehead would have liked to keep it with their theory of types, because when a metric is found that spans these worlds you get contradictions (Godel Numbering/Diagonalisation in Godels theorems). So SRH is actually turned around here and here is a todo.

Few other notes:

ExEy | x is closed & y is closed
Shouldn't this strictly be a contradiction since how can x and y be different if they are indistinguishable. And if they are distinguishable then they are expressing something unique (an essence?) and so are not closed.

y = set of x
Ax-Ex | x == y

The "closed" set cannot be a member of itself, because "closed" here means non-literally "self-contained" and if it really did contain itself them it would have to be open by the new SRH.

Some more thought to make this rigorous but this seems to be the correct way to think about it now.

What is Racism?

This is a subject that has been gaining ground over the last few decades. Everyone thinks they know what it is, but the more I think about it the more I realise no-one knows what it is.

Google Ngram for "racism"

In a nutshell the problem can be summarised by this question: what does an American look like? There are 2 pictures below. Have a think.

Figure A

Figure B

Now it appears to me the possible answers illustrates everything about the issue of race and racism.

Someone who says they are both American is following what you might call the "National" concept of race. Our national background determines our identity. In America this may appear to make sense. But anyone who travels to the Old World will quickly realise that in each part of the Old World people look a certain way. If you go to Europe you will find mostly whites. If you go to Africa you will find mostly Blacks. If you go to China mostly Chinese, India mostly Indians and so on. Now we might argue that this is an old fashioned way of thinking and anyone can go and live anywhere. But people in the Old World don't think like this. In the UK you have people who call themselves British-Chinese and British-Asian. This means while they are born in Britain they are descended from people who came from China and India. But in fact that may be quite a few generations ago and what it really means is that they look like people from China and India, speak the language and share the culture with these places.

Unlike this Old World view, it is only in the New World where you get this pure "National" concept of race. I may look like a Chinese but I am American, I may look like a European (Figure B) but I am American. However Figure A presents a problem. Figure A doesn't look like a European, nor a Chinese nor an Indian nor an African. Figure A actually looks like an American! But if Figure A looks like an American and Figure A does not look like Figure B then Figure B who calls himself an American does not look like an American. This is the situation you have if I go and live in Iraq and take citizenship. I may become Iraqi but I do not look Iraqi. So we are uncovering an uncomfortable truth that the person in Figure B is actually an immigrant.

Now this uncomfortable truth hides a very important unavoidable point about the history of the New World. The European colonists (both white and Hispanic) invaded various parts of the world and annihilated the local populations. They were aided by the spread of diseases to which the majority of local people died, but the rest were hunted down and killed. It was unquestionably a genocide that occurred in the Americas North and South, Canada, Australia and to a lesser extend New Zealand. The measure of the scale of the genocide is measured by how large the remaining populations of locals is now. I have a friend who is Peruvian and his family looks like the Inca, he is not a European. But I have no friends who are True American, just one girl I know who is distantly a part Cherokee. I fear the truth we don't want to face up to is we call Figure B an American because we killed off all the True American to make room for him, and they are today an extremely rare race. In fact the 2019 population figure for True American is 4.4 million while for Jews it is 5.7 million so there are 30% more immigrant Jews than native Americans - this is a crude statistic but since both groups experienced Holocaust we get some idea how massive the Native holocaust was. This is why in the New World we carefully avoid the question about what people look like and where they belong because to do so reminds us that we don't really belong in America.

What is particularly ironic about this is that history is rather bulldozed over by that most infamous of events that rather colours everything else: the Holocaust. The reason we are told we don't like to think in terms of "where people belong" is because the German people started to do this in the 1930s and it lead to the conclusion that Jews did not belong in Germany, so they were put in concentration camps and killed. In fact Wikipedia used to have an interesting quote from Hitler on this:

Once, when passing through the inner City, I suddenly encountered a phenomenon in a long caftan and wearing black side-locks. My first thought was: Is this a Jew? They certainly did not have this appearance in Linz. I watched the man stealthily and cautiously; but the longer I gazed at the strange countenance and examined it feature by feature, the more the question shaped itself in my brain: Is this a German?

Now we are not allowed to think about these things today because of this fear that the next stop in our thinking will be agreeing with the gas chambers. On the other hand, once we stop being allowed to think about things we also get the gas chambers too as people suspend critical thought and follow mass movements like the Nazis. Can't win unfortunately. It seems obvious to me you can consider any of these questions without suddenly becoming a mass murder. Such an idea is as crazy as thinking that through watching a horror movie we will become mad. So yes Hitler wrote that quote, and he is most hated in humanity, but he was human and had a point of view, and I found it interesting that he poses a very valid question. A question in fact that most people want an answer to today.

What I particularly like about this subject are the number of ironies. Not only does the Jewish Holocaust neatly divert attention away from the American Holocaust. Nazi Germany was actually only looking for lebensraum which comprised reclaiming the lands that Germans felt historically were theirs. What the European settlers did was start colonising lands that had never belonged to them; they went far further than the Nazis ever even thought about. And the genocide that followed in the New World was the pure removal of local people to make room for them. The Nazis never even dreamed of that level of expansion. But it remains that the Nazi Holocaust is why we don't like to think about these things. And yet the spill out from the Holocaust was the Jews trying to secure the historical lands where they belonged. The Jews did a lebensraum of their own immediately in the foot prints of the Germans and like Hitler had to ask this question "what is a Jew", because you needed to be a Jew in order to qualify for relocation to Israel. I think the Jews have a clear idea of what a Jew is (I imagine they could have told Hitler had he asked). But I think the Germans are still trying to answer this question, and they are not being allowed to. Indeed much of the West isn't being allowed to, while the rest of the World know already. Interestingly it is the European Americans who are stopping the debate, as suggested I suspect because it leads straight to the door of their own illegitimacy as Americans.

Just in the news recently we have the Kurds being attacked in Syria by the Turks. The Kurds are one of the groups left out of the partitioning of Arabia by the European League of Nations. They want a homeland for their people. I imagine a Kurd, like a Jew, or a Roma, knows what a Kurd is, and knows what type of people they want to live in their wished for Kurdistan. And the international community, like with Israel, sympathises with this venture more of less (although they will never change the borders now). Yet when Germans ask or the same thing there is no sympathy because they are "racists." This illustrates how this word doesn't mean anything. If the Germans are racists then so are the Kurds and Israelis racists. I must note of course that not all Jews agree with the country Israel, for most Jews "Israel" is an abstract place that a nomadic people like the Jews carries with them, plus lots of detailed scripture and history that says they no longer belong to that land. But abstract or not the Jews still need to answer that question of Hitlers "what is a Jew?" in order to know who is a part of Israel and who is not.

So its a mess. Returning to the two pictures. If someone says that Figure A is a True American and Figure B is an immigrant then they think like the Old World, and the people of the Old World, who even after 5 generations in a foreign country still believe they are from their homeland and look to the people of that homeland as their closest friends. They carry the language, the culture and the physical look of that peoples, and the songs they sing are still of that land. This is why there is nothing racist in a Chinese person born in Britain calling themselves Chinese, because they still look like they are from China and still carry much of the culture and feel this place as their true origin and home. And similarly there is nothing racist in a person saying I am German meaning I am white and look to the land of Germany as my home. And of course our Chief Sitting-Bull above is not racist when he says I am a True American and all these other people are immigrants. The evidence he is right is everywhere: even after 400 years the immigrants still speak the European languages English or Spanish of their homelands!

Of course this leads to the "Problem of Modernity" that the Nazis so spectacularly failed to answer. People I meet who would be called "Racist" believe that the positive idea of feeling that a place is my home, must imply that anyone who is not from here shouldn't be allowed in. Then you get the idea of Jews having to leave Germany and Blacks having to leave England (and no-one says this but it means Germans and Whites must return home also). Practically Jews would have had to leave Germany because the Nazis wanted to bring Germans home (also against their will), but apart from that why should we kick people out of a land? In Tibet the Dalai Lama has seen the effects of aggressive immigration by a foreign power and of course the Lakotan Chief in Figure A saw the absolute decimation of his land and people by aggressive immigration. There is a very real fear in allowing foreigners to take over a country. Most alien movies have Earth defend itself from invasion - it is a very real thing to keep the foreigner out. But at the other extreme it is the rather paranoid not allowing anyone to come and go across borders. This is a real problem, wholly unresolved and wholly undiscussed thanks to the brain numbing effect of the idea of "racism" and other unhelpful memes.

In my mind its all very simple. Remove all Hatred. What is racism without hatred? It is nothing, so in fact there is no such thing as racism, there is only hatred. So ignore racism, its a waste of time, just focus on removing hatred from your culture. Then set to work on the very real problem of preserving your land and culture from the modern world and the influx of new ideas, products, and people. While not going completely Amish and meditating progress and development. Its a matter of balance and avoiding the extremes (as one very famous teacher once taught who was not British or White but which most British and White would probably benefit from listening to).

So what actually does mindfulness achieve?

Here is a trivial example that was quite illuminating. I was cycling down a long straight country lane in the dark. At the end of the lane it joined a lit dual carriage way but the trees over hung the road in such a way that the light of the road ahead appeared as just a distant door or light at the end of a tunnel far ahead. As I cycled the road I was actually questioning the rate at which the circle of lightwas growing, was it reciprocal? To my surpise I found I never actually ended up cycling through the tunnel of overhanging trees into light, but instead the trees parted and there never was a tunnel.

Trivial as this is, it really demonstrated the difference between our expectation of the future and the unpredicatble complexity of what actually happens. What actually happens is an experience that occurs in a more fundamental way than our thoughts which are only ever superimposed. When people have an emotional relationship with the future, perhaps they are anxious about something that will happen, they are clearly not having a response to the actual event because it hasn't happened. Instead they have a relationship with the thoughts. Our emotions and derivative mental processes are always derived from what we think about a situation. About whether we see something as fearful or pleasant, etc.

Now meditation is the practice of placing oneself in the "present moment" for long periods of time. In Vipassana we spend time noting thoughts and when we are thinking to encourage ourselves to see this difference between the arising of a temporary impermanent thought that enters our mind like a film voice over, and the content of that thought which can be literally anything. The arising of a thought is real. what it contains is invented however. Eventually we can see the "present moment" at will, and ultimatly we never lose touch with what is really going on. Our thoughts don't go away, but we never make the mistake again of confusing what we think with what is there. We can always think of something else, or think positive rather than negative thoughts, and in so doing change our perception of the world. But we can never change what is actually happening.

Quantum Entanglement - A Solution?

OK I don't yet understand the full nature of what is called "Quantum Entanglement" beyond the following observation.

When a quantum system is separated into parts and these are moved apart then each part of the system remains in one big quantum uncertainty. This means that when only one part of the system is observed the whole system collapses in unity. Thus you have such extraordinary results as this. Two electrons in the same orbital must have opposite spin. If they are separated then when we discover the spin of one, we know instantly the spin of the other.

Einstein had the obvious thought that really their spin was determined at the start and the "wave collapse" didn't change anything. But ingenious experiments since (which are what I need to explore) demonstrate that the electrons really do remain undecided until after separation, and indeed the wave collapse does occur and the state of the entangled electron--even if millions of miles away--does occur instantly.

However I can't see reference to this idea.

While the entangled pair (EP) represent one quantum system so does the observer (O). When the EP interacts with the O they become one system.

Let us say the entangled system is electron 1 (e1) and electron 2 (e2). When O interacts with e1 the wave collapses and e1 say adopts state UP. O now knows that e2 is DOWN. But for O to confirm this O must interact with e2. So actually Einstein is not wrong since O cannot interact with e2 faster than the speed of light. And when O interacts with e2 they are "carrying information" in their own state from e1. So does interaction with e1 put O into a state such that when O interacts with e2 it sets the state of e2 DOWN.

We can say that after interaction with e1 then O enters a new state Oe1. And it is Oe1 that interacts with e2 and not O. It is impossible for O to interact with part of an entangled pair without interacting with the other half AT THE SAME TIME.

OK I phrased that oddly, but the point is that if the state of the Observer is changed by interaction with a measurement, then they are no longer able to interact with the other half in the same state, and carry the time of that first interaction with them.

I suppose, and this is pure space brained bull-shit, but is there some kind of relativism here so there is some kind of "frame of reference" that unifies observation of entanglement pairs. O enters that same frame of reference as e1 when they observe e1 and when they observe e2 they bring e2 into that frame of reference.

Now I don't know enough about the experiments to see if that works. The question tho is over the "time" of collapse. When we say e2 collapses at the "same time" as e1 is observed this is time measured from which perspective? And how do we know, since e2 must be measured to confirm what it is.

Just thinking aloud. So we have two scientists O1 and O2. We send O1 out to observe e1 and O2 out to observe e2. They get their results and come home. Up to this point they do not know what the other person will say. The suggestion here is that actually e1O1 is in a new quantum entangled state and e2O2 is also in a new quantum entangled state. It is when they meet that the collapse happens and e1O1e2O2 is the final state with UP/DOWN or DOWN/UP state.

Now the problem here is that O1 and O2 have a memory. Suppose O1 and O2 had to go in a space craft to observe e1 and e2 and then return home with their results. After they meet and e1O1e2O2 state is formed they will both have memories of that journey off to get the results and what they discovered.

So here is the key implication then: the memories they recall will be set at the moment of wave ncollapse also!

When we recall a memory its an active brain process in the present. Like loading up a video onto our phone. It is not in the Past but in the Present. If it was in the Past it would just be called the Present. The Past by definition is a context we give to present events that we understand represent something from the Past. So we have no idea whether the things we recall represent the Past or not. How could we tell. What we do is ask other people what they remember and if we agree the only way we could agree is if we were both present. I ask you what happened on my 21st birthday and if you recall what I recall more or less then we are happy it happened and we were both there. We look for consistency. And there are enough movies about memory implants to illustrate that the process is not flawless. Unlike the Present which cannot be faked, the Past is very fakeable.

So since O1 and O2 are the only people in this system they have only themselves to confirm what happened. When they meet if O1 writes down on the paper UP, and O2 writes down UP actually they are indeterminate until the papers are read. Then they collapse and say the result is O1 UP and O2 DOWN. When O2 tries to remember what happened their memory which was indeterminate will have been fixed at DOWN also.

So this isn't quite Copenhagen Interpretation. We aren't saying that both possibilities exist. We are saying that Systems have reference points, and are determinate relative to systems they are not-bound to, and indeterminate to systems that they are bound to. O2 flying home with a piece of paper saying UP and O1 flying home with a piece of paper also saying UP is impossible from the reference of the combined system. Pauli Exclusion principle (I think) says that spin cannot be the same. But the combined system hasn't collapsed yet, it is still indeterminate. A third observe waiting for the result doesn't know either result yet. When they meet the system collapses and miraculously O1 and O2 find that their papers indeed have opposite things written on them and their memories collapse to confirm this result.

I suppose this breaks the common view that consciousness passes through time, and memory confirms this. Actually consciousness exists just Now, and our memories are created in the present also.

Self-Explaining Universe (SRH)

More on SRH I will get here one day.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle

There is definitely a strong connection between the Mind and the Universe. With enough examination we can convince ourselves of this. The idea of the universe existing independent of some intelligence does not make sense.

This is definitely the ancient religious sense that the world was not that old, and Humans had been a critical part of it from the start, and before humans there was the intelligence of God.

Today we have the alternative idea that really the Universe has had almost all its existence with no sentient life at all. It is as though sentience has no place it the world, a side effect of the processes of universe history.

In this view there is no need for sentience and we must explain the world without reference to sentience at all. But isn't there a contradiction there. Sentient beings are trying to understand a universe in which sentience is not a real part, and yet it is a part of it.

We have to resolve this issue before we can make any more progress. Is sentience a fundamental part of the universe or is it not. If it is not, then one has to wonder how the universe can be fundamentally  understood by something that is only superficial. And if sentience is fundamental then we have the SRH problem of eventually we will need to understand Sentience itself.

We can't escape the fact that eventually we need to understand our place in the universe. So far Science has just kicked the tin can down the alley. And of course Science itself will have to change. The scientific method began with the clear distinction between Subject and Object, and the method is designed so that the Subject is as best as possible removed from the experiment. Various levels of "blind" can be used to ensure that the data is not effected by "sentient" responses. But obviously any experiment that requires sentience has a subjective component. The very meaning of the results is a bias introduced and the hypothesis that is being tested is pure subjectivity. If the Universe really was Objective we wouldn't need sentient beings and science at all. As our enquiring of the universe develop we will eventually have to face this contradiction in science, that it tries to remove from the picture the very foundations of its process, and the Universe we try to study we try to see from teh perspective that we never existed. What is the sound of a a tree falling in a universe with no-one to hear? What are the laws of physics in a Universe with no-one to discover them? The answer is that you cannot have one without the other. To already be talking of Laws of Physics is to imply an ontology of sentience: we are assuming that sentient beings exist.

And so the Anthropic principle is an important one. Its not so much a physical principle stating that no eyes will ever look out over a universe unsuitable for light. It is more general stating that the very conception of a Universe implies sentience.

We are back to the beginning again as though no science had ever happened. And this will always happen because science begins in data. And we knew the universe existed from the start, when we first asked the questions that began investigation. The seeds of science were always already there, and science can only grow from that root. When Adam first opened his eyes he already had the root deeply embedded in the soil of the universe from which everything we have learned has come. That inspiration and spark was always there, that sentience, was a bright now as it was with cavemen sitting around a fire telling stories on a dark Ice Age winter night. We always already understood the fundamentals, we just needed to flesh them out. The universe and sentience are intimately connected. That is clear, and always has been, with each photon that we see.

What is the value of nature?

Nature is that which determines whether Science is true or false. A scientific idea is tested against Nature to see whether it fits or not.

This has led to Technology where Human Nature has determined which things to make or not. So while Nature determined whether something can be made or not, Human Nature determines whether it will be made or not. The Nature of Capitalism is exploitation of Human Nature, so that to express Human Nature, humans must drive the mechanism of Capitalism and make things they would not otherwise make. Essentially people are forced to get a job and to spend by paying taxes. As argued Adam Smith missed out that people are not in a market freely but are politically pushed by the Nature of ruling elites to buy and sell against their own Nature. Without Capitalism when machines would replaced labour people would have been free from labour. As we saw before Capitalism, there was a different world with far less work and consumption.

Living within a Capitalist world then we actually live reflecting not Grand Nature but the Nature of ruling elites. Our daily existence reflects the dynamics of an artificial machine. The economic news, the politics news, the concerns over costs and fashions these are all the Nature of an artificial machine. There is a critical mistake here to suggest that this reflects reality as is often done. The biggest myth of Capitalism is that it reflects human nature. It exploits Human Nature.

So Nature does not just determine whether Science is true or false, but all knowledge. And looking at Nature can show us how artificial the Modern World is. If a walk in Nature is more beneficial and has a long lasting effect on mental well being than any drug it is because it enables us to see Reality again and so gain a perspective on the Fiction of Capitalism and Politics that battles for our time.

Looking from the outside we can see animals vying for political position every day. Squabbling over pecking orders and access to resources like food and mating rights. This is Nature. Politicians fighting for power, and Capitalists fighting to own companies is all quite Natural. But the problem is that from the inside Politics and Capitalism appear to be world of their own. You can spend your whole life shopping and working and never realise what you are doing. You can spend your whole life supporting a political party and think it so important that your candidate wins, and never see what you are doing.

A walk in Nature gives us the Absolute perspective from which all other things are judged true and false.

Another problem with Conservation and the solution to the whole problem

The mentality of conservation is that we need to do more the protect wildlife. Yet the problem is clearly rather that we are doing something wrong. Conservation is not about doing anything, but about stopping or changing something that we are doing.

Now the problem is really a problem of the last 50 years. It is true that over the last half a million years humans have created many extinctions from Wholly Mammoths to Dodos but the problem has never been systemic before. Now the whole planet is threatened.

Many targets have been selected and picked up by the media and politics.

Invasive species is one. Rodents and cats on islands have decimated native populations around the world. Some funding can bring in a Rentokill company to eradicate them and problem solved.

Habitat loss is mentioned, and the solution is the power of politics and the law to protect land in reserves. (capitalism)

Plastics have recently been mentioned and the solution is for consumers to reduce our use of plastics and push industry to use it less.

Climate Change is the big one and the solution is again the power of politics (but not the law this time) to force industry to reduce CO2 emissions.

Acid rain was one and the solution there was the power of politics to reduce sulphur emissions. This has allowed forests and wildlife to recover.

Ozone hole was another and again power of politics over industry limited the release of chemicals that were seen to damage the ozone. There is evidence of a recovery here and harmful radiation levels are reducing.

In all these programs the solution has been government enforcing change in industry. Or it has been governments using its power of property to force protection areas. In almost no situation ever has industry led to conservation efforts. One possible exception is wildlife tourism which is the great hope of conservation. Yet it is usually government bans on the actions of industry that create a space where the conservation industry can get a foot hold.

So it appears that the problem is industry itself. And why should industry be a problem? Industry is a machine with a goal of wealth creation. In particular since the 1980s the single goal of industry and business graduates has been financial profit. Thus left to its own devices the result of industry will be financial wealth. Yet conservation has a different goal: natural wealth. As a result industry and conservation are working towards different goals.

Now the industry theorists will say that the two goals are the same. Adam Smith argued that in a free market with every agent working towards their own selfish interests the market will act to arbitrate supply and demand in an optimal way. Its works by setting the price so that high demand goods have an upward price pressure, and high supply goods have a downward price pressure. The result is that goods find their way to where they are needed. Industry will argue that conservation concerns will be expressed in the market as buying and selling actions that benefit the natural world. So for example concern for the welfare of the Tiger will result in money finding its way to tiger conservation and out weighting the income from hunters working either for trade or to protect live stock.

But it is clearly not working. Does this mean that people simply do not care about the environment and so market choices are not being made in favour of it? The recent concern over plastics has shown that people action in markets can work and changes of behaviour can effect conservation. The BBC, as a service provider rather than profit driven, is in a central position across the Common Wealth to educate people of the impacts they are having on the planet and the extraordinary and invaluable work of people like David Attenborough and Chris Packham are central to this. But not again it is not industry here but publicly funded, government run, media that is leading the way. Industry somehow is opposed to conservation. Industry is not working.

Markets are considerably more complex that Adam Smith could have ever known in the 18th Century. They are fractal for example with complex feedback loops, they suffer from all kinds of network problems. But the main problem is that they are not free. Obviously this is true in that it is in financial interest to fix markets: like all gambling halls the outcome is rigged. But more intrinsically people must make a living. We do not have a choice to buy and sell in a market: we have to buy and sell to live. The unemployed, without a government social system, are dead. This is because we live in a system of property where by law things are owned. It means that you cannot gain access to anything without ownership, and to own we need money. And you get money, by selling the things you own, or critically renting the things you own. That latter option is the essence of Capitalism which we will see is a essence of the problem for conservation. If you find anything physical it will be owned by the land owner, so you if you don't own any land you cannot gain possession of anything. The only place that property does not exist is in inventions and ideas. So unless you are lucky enough to think of something valuable and original and you can get property rights to your idea, or exploit it quick enough before others copy you then you can only gain income from "employment." That means accepting labour from someone who owns. This is the first principle of Capitalism that those who do not own, must gain employment from those that do. Without ownership starting up a company is difficult because you cannot even borrow money without collateral. In Capitalism how much you can make, depends a lot on how much you already own. So there is a whole class of people who have no choice in life but to work for a living. They do not care what they do, they just want an income so that they can buy the bare essentials upon which to live.

This would work fine from a conservation perspective but for machines. Economies are never static. Changes in technology quickly make people redundant and they need to reskill and exploit new markets. One might think that when combine harvesters made 120 people unemployed for each harvester these people would be able to finally sit down and enjoy the productivity of those machines. Indeed where is the John Steinbeck story of itinerant workers saving their income to buy a combine harvester and then lazing the summer away while it did their work for them. Of course no such thing. The land owner makes them redundant and buys the machine himself. These unemployed people then need to find new work and so economies are always been driven forward. This is not a free market, there is no choice but to keep producing for its own sake and this endless engine is at odds with the natural world which exists untouched and unimproved by industry.

The second principle of capitalism is that ownership can provide returns on investment if we invest it: that is give it up for rent. This means that capitalists have a vested interest in growth. So as a result in capitalist countries government is lobbied to encourage growth. This policy is sold to the public as job creation, but no one ever asks where the jobs went in the first place so that new jobs needed to be created. As just explained those jobs were swallowed up by machines and improving efficiency, but the benefits of which are never seen by the wider economy obnly the owners of capital. The beneficiaries of growth are actually mainly the owners of industry and with a simple equation that greater growth means greater returns on investment the endless machine of industry forever expanding and using natural resources is assured.

Capitalism is often argued to be the "natural" state of humans. It mirrors the natural world. But this is not true. Capitalism is based upon property and that is enforced by government. Capitalism is a government decision and the maintenance of capitalism is government policy. This is why government reforms in the 80s caused the current hyper expansion of economies. If capitalism was natural it would have happened by itself.

What is natural however is mafias, or the wild west. What naturally happens in a power vacuum like post war Iraq is a battle for power. Gangs form both opportunistically to exploit people, but also defensively to protect one from other gangs. This logic drives a system of conflict until large gang leaders exist like in the maffia. In British history this process of endless warfare and uncertainty eventually led to a "social contract" where the Barons agreed to all support one leader, in UK history that was the King. This is a Nash Equilibrium. The king was leader, but with extremely restricted powers. And the rest of the gang leaders agreed to support him and so defer their own powers in return for peace with the other gang members. And so you end up with government as the final process of succession in the struggle for power. This is the natural process. Capitalism is not natural and was invented in the 18th Century at the advent of the Industrial Revolution to organise the transitions in economy to ward mechanised mass production and huge profits generated by factories.

So with government both behind Capitalism and behind Conservation efforts actually the problem lies in government balance of decisions. Industry has a disproportionate lobby group in parliament. There are probably less that 5,000 significant capitalists in the UK but their voice is heard much louder than the 66 million other people. This makes Capitalists lords with voices 13000 times greater than the common man. And within them are a few whose voice is absurdly loud: the kings so to speak of the modern system. The problem for conservation is that Chris Packham and Michaela Strachan only have limited mandate given to them by government, while the heads of the bank of England for example have a voice in parliament thousands of times greater than these two. But these two do have the ears of the population and perhaps with 66 million people listening to the concerns of Spring Watch, even if they do not watch it, government can be persuaded not to listened to the Capitalists so much. What a nonsense Adam Smith would make of the system today, with his free market being abused by a handful of incredibly powerful people lobbying government decisions on economic policy.

The most famous twisting of government policy incidentally was the phase of market liberalisation under the Republican and Labour tenures. The first thing Labour did when they took office in 1997 was hand interest rates to the Bank Of England. That is the decisions for the whole economy started to be made by a private company with no democratic mandate or responsibility! Unsurprisingly interest rates were kept low and the markets were over heated. They were able to do this by not including housing prices in the inflation figures. Thus they reported low inflation, when in fact it was run away and a bubble was forming. Mervyn King went on radio to explain that they couldn't include houses in the inflation figures because it was impossible to do in a standard way that would make inflation figures comparable across Europe. What a standard "legalese" "paperwork" way of avoiding the point. It's not the inflation figures that matter, but rather setting inflation figures to stop the markets overheating. And this guy was left in charge of the Bank Of England. This episode with years of the hand over of control to the city demonstrates to my mind what a collection of klutzes work in that sector and why democratic government should never trust them with the keys to the economy. Needless to say the markets over heated and then government was then twisted to bail them out, with tax payers money paid by people whose control of the economy had been handed away in the first place. A perfect example of absolute power corrupts and our financial centres have too much power. A real sceptic would say the whole thing was centrally planned to inject wealth into the economy to protect it from the aftermath of the DotCom bust. But all this policy is designed to do one thing: maintain growth and protect the assets of capitalists. And that mentality is against even Adam Smith  and certainly is the root of the Conservation problem.

So there is something fundamentally wrong is the way we do things, and there is no fix other than stopping doing things this way. The key bastion of contemporary economics that must go is Growth. Economies must be driven for stability or even reduction in size. How ludicrous it is to have conservationists calling for Reuse, Reduce and Recycle while at the other lobby group is asking for Increase, Increase, Increase. Reduce means Economic Reduction as a whole.

This is the stuff of revolution. We sit on the edge of a paradigm where the mentality and fabric of class system and Owners and Non-Owners, or Haves and Have-Nots is under threat. And there is no other way. We either lose the Planet and spin it all up in products to generate profit. And when this planet is exploited we move someone else to exploit that. Or we stop. These are the clear battle lines. Conservation and Have-Nots say stop. Industry and Capitalists says accelerate.

Now the Capitalists own the media and they spend a lot of time printing certain ideas in the hope of fooling the public. One such idea is that economic growth is needed to create jobs and that benefits the have-nots. What a coincidence that the thing the Capitalists most need which is returns on investment is not sold as personal gain to the owners of industry, but is rather sold as the benefit of the common people.

To bring the economy to a stand still there needs to be another way to redistribute wealth other than labour. Working for a living is a rather new concept that arose originally around 7000 years ago with the start of farming. Before that hunter gathers did not work, they rather reaped the benefits of a rich natural world. Work done on the lifestyles of existing hunter gatherers estimates that they need to do been 2 and 6 hours of searching per day to get the resources they need to live. Polynesian Islanders have it easiest with just 2 hours fishing and gathering shell fish on the shore. But they don't see it as creation or labour and there is nothing to own except perhaps a boat. They are simply going to Nature's Store and taking whatever they need, and there is no rush because on the next tide all the shelves are restocked. I have a video of a tribes person from South America having seen the white Mans world puzzling over the use of money. He cannot understand why you need money to get things from a shop when he can just go into the jungle and take everything he needs. Hunter Gathering is not based on exchange value, Nature is the generous provider and she is loved deeply for that as much as a mother. This is the mentality of Mother Earth. This is the mentality of Conservation also: that Nature is the generous provider and something to be deeply loved as it is unimproved before industry owns it, does any value added and attaches a price to it. I have another video of Kalahari Bushmen having been relocated to purpose built housing and given jobs complaining how hard and boring this new life is. It is quite a far cry from the Capitalist propaganda that life before the rise of factories and industry was "nasty, brutish and short." Ironically it is the rather the rise of Capitalism that is the cause of most of the world's hardships and woes. when we think of abject poverty we are thinking of displaced unemployed people from the Victorian or Colonial periods when capitalists owned all the land, and people were left starving with no means of sustenance. Indeed one of the worst genocides in history was caused by the British in Bengal exporting food for their war effort and leaving millions to perish instead. How ironic that we celebrate liberating the Nazi Work camps and saving millions, while the cost was millions dying in the work camp of Bengal: a whole country turned in a work camp by Capitalism where the local people of that country had no access to food because it was all owned by the British. That is the power of Capitalism to deprive people. And this is the power that drive industry endlessly forward and which ultimately causes the current Holocaust of Nature.

So how can we distribute wealth? Reading any Jane Austin or contemporary novel it can be seen that Capitalism famously enabled the landed gentry to have an "income." This is actually the same as the feudal system where ownership of land came with an income paid by the tenants of that land (the people whose home it was!). Throughout history the wealthy have always enjoyed a free income, that they are deserved by virtue of their status. The problem in fact with free handouts in that the poor are still not considered worth it. This part of the class system is still strong. When Thatcher called for an end to the class system I'm not sure she quite knew what she was asking for. She was asking for the right of anyone to gain a free income not just the wealthy land and share owners. In a genuinely free society the right to income must be uncoupled from labour. For the working class to be finally buried in history means that workers and owners both should be able to gain free income. Its interesting that the word Business is derived from the word "busy", and the word lazy and laziness is still seen as the opposite of busy. The busy shall be afforded income, but the lazy shall perish I can imagine the Bible saying for this is certainly a biblical way of thinking. Remembering the hunter gatherers: treat nature well and she will provide for you. There is no need for business. This is a creation of capitalism to encourage growth and returns on investment for the owners of industry.

There are calls for Universal Credit at the moment. I have not read the arguments but in this post exist plenty of arguments. Free income has been an established feature of economies since the start of property ownership. We don't need to argue for that, we simply need to argue that it is extended from the rich to also the poor. This has one immediate economic benefit as it will remove the need for labour in acquiring money and so will actually increase the money velocity and grow the economy. But at the same time will remove the necessity of people to work for their basic survival. People will finally return to a state of near freedom like they had 7000 years ago. What we do with our life will not be driven by the fear of starvation like it is today, a problem first created by property. Look at the Bible for the stories of famines in Egypt and elsewhere in the Bronze age. This was never a problem before. All humans will be able to enjoy the life style of the aristocracy and we can see that some wasted their lives in drugs and parties these were a minority that were frowned upon. It is from the aristocracy that came have all the advances in science and art. Humans are creative, it is not something that needs to be forced from them like a performing animal. And following on from the previous post this belief in the Nature both human and non-human and valuing it just as it is is the essence of a happiness and fulfilled life. Indeed Capitalism creates unhappiness, because only unhappy people are busy struggling endlessly to make themselves happy. This is not quite true: compassionate people can be busy too as they try their best to help the people around them: but their goal is not exhaustion but just to use their time well.

So when the government finally wakes up the problem their are truly radical changes to be eased in to society and the vision we have of human life. It will not be without its opponents however as the whole ruling class of the globe are opposed to this as they currently enjoy enormous power and wealth from the current system. They may need to be publically named and shamed like in Ancient Greece where the aristos constantly felt a need to be popular with the demos not least because they faced ostracism. A system of ostracism for the likes of Mervyn King and others who have shamelessly protected the interests of a select few is a fanciful possibility. Perhaps the internet is enough to provide a voice to the people and free from the editorial controls of the Capitalism owned media, a free space to actually criticise the real problems of the oligarchy the control policy in the country and abroad.

Conservation then like the last post is not a trivial add on the status quo. It is a fundmental uprooting of a tree that does not work. A revoicing of mentalities that have been taken a back seat for 7000 years or more, and a look toward a world that appreciates itself as it is, appreciates everyone in it, and asks us each to appreciate ourselves and the world just as it is.

Why should we protect the environment

The most recent BBC SpringWatch series was excellent as it went a lot further into the urgent need for and the reasons for conservation. But I always feel that modern conservation makes it sound like a luxury rather than a necessity. And when conservation is made a necessity it is done in terms of its benefit to humans. It appears that there this no argument for Life itself. And that was the original purpose of this blog (more of less). What is the point?

SpringWatch has always, since the days of Bill Oddie and his depression, referred to the benefits of Nature on mental health. Now there seems to be more evidence that nature provides health benefits far exceeding any medicine. But no one ever asks why? Chris Packham argues that we evolved in a natural environment and so this is why we have the connection. But it suggests had we evolved in a city we wouldn't need nature: it makes it rather conditional.

All this misses the point that Nature IS essential. But why?

Watching nature does one absolutely fundamental thing, more fundamental than anything else that humans can do. Nature asks us to see things the way they are. That is the reason it is the core of good mental health and a happy life. All unhappiness and mental illness comes from seeing the world in an artificial unrealistic way. Think of the worse mental illnesses where people have delusions and lose touch with reality. Psychiatry says that this is due to chemical imbalances in the brain, or genetics. But why are the chemical imbalances there, and why did the genes gets switched on? It is to do with not looking at the world the way it is in the first place. You can take drugs to treat the symptoms but to cure mental health problems requires rebuilding the habit of seeing the world as it is. That means not the way we want it, but just as it is. And appreciating Nature is exactly that, learning to see Life as it is.

Seeing a bird come to rest on a branch, study the ground for food and then drop down to feed may seem like an interest for an ornithologist or ecologist. But it requires exactly the same mind that we would use to observe ourselves. If we are not feeling well we will observe our own coming to rest, and look closely at how we feel. The mind that watches nature is exactly the mind seated in reality from which perspective we can see how not just the world is, but also how we are, that is our own Nature. This is the true mind. It is a mind very different from the argumentative mind that jumps between perspective, trying to justify one or the other. It is very different from the fantasy mind that dreams of the future, or recalls the past, or day dreams about the things that are of interest to us. The mind that watches nature must see what is there, that is its only subject matter, and that is its only goal. Meditation is a practice developed thousands of years ago across the globe to strengthen this "seeing things as they are" mind, this mind of reality. This is the true mind, and straying from it, is straying from ourselves. we become fake, we become gradually more unwell.

Now this is all no trivial thing. The whole Western World is built upon this mistake. We live in a world that is essentially mentally ill because it has ceased to be interested in the world as it is. we are more interested in how the world could be, its possibility, its fantasy rather than its reality. And our view of reality has been altered. We have replaced the "world as it is" with Science or more precisely "knowing" how the world is. I used to dream as a child that eventually the day would come when I knew everything and I could close my eyes and bury myself in a darkened cell and within my mind I would know the world. This is Science with its vast database storing everything there is to know, and then destroying the world because it is no longer needed. We see this mentality in the idea of conservation DNA databases where it doesn't matter if the animal goes extinct because we have its DNA and we can recreate its type any time we like. But all this is not "things as they are" it is the "fantasy mind" filled with potential and the blue prints of the world, but without an actual world. This is the mind of illness and unhappiness and non-reality. In more biblical metaphor this is the trap that the Devil is luring mankind into. His fantasy mind is the witches house made of sweets that looks so enticing but when we are inside we realise it was a trap and only death awaits us.

One result of this fantasy mind is the idea of "improvement" or "progress.," We take a glance at the world as it is, but then immediately start dreaming about what we can do to improve it. We conjure up fantastical possibilities of happy worlds where no one is ill and no one dies, where every need is met by machines and government is liberal and grants us every freedom. Caught up in our fantasies we start working toward a better world. we come to hate "the world as it is" because it is so unlike what we dreamed of. And maybe we will be successful in achieving our dream or maybe we won't, but there is a fundamental problem: our children will not care for our labours and our dreams! Why is this? Because all we taught them to do was take a glance at the world and then dream of something better, and so before long they will hate the world we created as much as we hated the world we inherited from the previous generation. And as the generations tick past, no one will ever be happy. Each generation just teaches the next to ignore the world and chase after fantasy instead. This is the tread mill of progress upon which mankind has been walking and then running for many centuries now.

But why would mankind have got trapped in chasing after "improvements"? It is the same reason that individuals get caught up in improvements: they do not want to see things as they are, they do not want to look at Nature. Sometimes it is hard to see things as they are. It requires facing reality, and seeing both the good and the bad. Our bird jumping down onto the ground to feed may catch a mouse and start to bite its head, or another bird may swoop down and piece the flesh of our bird with its talons. The way things are is not guaranteed to be a fairy tale and so it is often easier to fly off into fantasy and imagine how we want things. But this way unhappiness and eventually madness lies. In reality the mind that is honest and fixed in reality is not that troubled by the difficult to watch things; after all unlike the fantasy mind it does not have a blue print of how things should be. It is instead able to see how they are, how things operate together, what the reality is. And it loves this reality more deeply than anything.

The maker of a violin does not buy wood and then look at it with loathing, hurrying to make it into a violin that he can then look at with love. The maker of a violin loves the wood as much as the work to make the violin, as much as the finished product, as much as the music that is sounded through that wooden box. Sitting in the forest from which the wood came, the violinist can play the song of the dead tree to its companions, not to say that the violin is better than the tree from which it came, or the music better than the labours of the violin craftsman but to love the world that gives us trees, and crafts and violins and music and ears to hear, and minds that can appreciate music. To say thank you. As we listen to that fantasy scene, if we were truly there, we would be able to see everything just as it is: tree become violin become music.

The West has gotten stuck in a terrible loop since Plato and perhaps before. The fantasy world of The Forms: the world of perfect moulds from which all the world is mass produced copies is very much a vision of Mechanised Industry. No longer are we interested in the raw materials, we quite possibly loathe the raw materials if we see the meat being pureed in giant machines or the hectares of monoculture stretching to the horizon. We are no longer interested in the work, paying workers the bare minimum to get them to turn up for employment, spending as little as possible on their training to ensure they know just enough to do the job. Sacking them if they don't maintain productivity. The final product is all that matters and the customer is only interested in getting this home. But the love is shallow. The have no invested love in the product, the affection is likely only skin deep. And as fashion changes, or the novelty wears off the item is on eBay or down the rubbish tip and customer is out buying something new. The problem is that minds no longer look at how things are, but instead are more interested in how they could be, in the chasing of their fantasies, or worse the fantasies implanted in us by marketing divisions seeking to entice and control the population to buy their products.

Interestingly the conservation world is noting how this wasteful consumption is partly responsible for the ecological problems. The plastics problem arises from the mass wasting of single use plastics. But at root it is nothing to do with this, but the deeper problem of people harbouring fantasy minds and not minds involved with the way the world is: Mind that are not involved with Nature.

The wars that we see ravaging the world these days are driven by a desire to make the world a better place. If we just depose one more dictator, or bring one more country out of socialism then things will be better. We hate the world as it is, and dream of this better world. The kind rooted in Nature doesn't see this: the mind rooted in nature sees the world as it is. And this mind loves the world as it is. As said above there is no point changing the world, if we don't already love it, because our children will just be taught to hate it and try and change it themselves. We must love the world as it is, and teach our children to love it as it is. We must show them to love themselves as they already are, not in need of improvement at all. How odd is it that in relationships people dream of a partner who loves them for who they are, loves all their flaws. How odd when if we ourselves already did that then we wouldn't need to dream of such a partner, we would just love ourselves right now, and love the life we live and love the world we are a part of: we would quiet simply love nature.

Now I had this discussion with my sister and she said this is hard for people who have for example been abused in some form. How can someone who as experienced years of abuse, never been shown love, been taught to hate themselves, is filled with anger, guilt, revenge, loathing, disgust, hopelessness, emptiness, sadness, depression, darkness, self-destruction, feelings tearing the soul apart... where there is nothing to hold on to, a quick-sand of spiralling unstable emotions that never stops: where is the love?

Love is not a nice feeling, or a sleep by a warm fire. It is not the loving hug of our mother, or the company of friends. It is much more. It is watching nature. When we watch nature we may see warm feelings, we may watch joyful emotions rise, or great clarity of mind, peace and tranquillity. But in some ways these are the unlucky people because they may come to see these experiences as Nature itself. Watching their beloved scarlet macaws feeding on fruits in the canopy of a tranquil forest: how oblivious they are to the true scale of nature. A hawk dives from the air and in a puff of feather our beautiful scarlet macaw is snatched from the branch and from the clutches of the hungry shadow soaring away, it now hangs lifeless with a broken neck. The watcher of nature must watch it all and deeply appreciate the world as it unfolds, as it is. And so it is for the abused. I am not particular abused, I come from a standard dysfunctional family so in most ways I am not in a position to speak. The path away from abject desolation and despair is potentially long and difficult, but we should not fantasise about a time when we feel as want, this is not the nature mind. Instead if this is where we find ourselves then this is reality, and it is the road we are travelling, there is no other. It is of course much more compelling to enter into fantasy when the road is this bad, and perhaps it is too hard not to reside in fantasy for a while. And indeed if we must we need rest there. But eventually step by step it is the road of reality, seeing things as they are, that we must take: the natural road. Whatever resides in our memories, is the Past. If we see reality as it is, we will see that the past is just the past and exist only in our memory : just a part of our fantasy. And whatever we desire is just in our imaginations : which is also just our fantasy. The reality is here and now, it is outside our fantasy, outside the past and the future and if we learn to see what is happening now as it is, as Nature, then we are actually free from almost everything. Even right now if we watch Nature carefully we will see that most of what is going on is actually that common species of animal called the "thought." Thoughts are also a type of fantasy. These animals like birds fly into our consciousness constantly like voice-overs or subtitles, and it is very easy to get distracted from what is going on and start watching them instead. This can be alright, but thoughts like birds fly off and take us on a journey into fantasy and sometimes this fantasy is story that we don't like and is very unhelpful. It might be a fantasy about how we hate ourselves, or how we are a bad person, or how we are a failure, or it may be one about how amazing we are and how worthy we are. All these stories are not real and distract us from watching what is going on which is always much more subtle and honest than these fake fantasy thoughts. If we watch them carefully, then like we watch birds, we let them come when they come and we let them fly off when they go, then we are becoming very good nature watchers. This is the essence of a perfect and true mind.

Watching carefully we will notice something very important especially about thoughts: their attractiveness and why we are so keen to follow them more than reality is because we believe they belong to "us." Being a part of "me" we feel compelled to get hooked on them and get distracted from reality. But this is a trap. Thoughts are no more "us" than birds in the tree. They are just a part of reality and nature. As Hindu writers often point out, this physical arm that seems so intrinsic to me and seems so "mine" can very easily be lost and amputated making us puzzle as to whose it really was. Now there is a great comfort and peace in residing in the "mine" and I have not resolved this entirely myself, but certainly this issue of Nature required the greatest careful observation as it is the most confusing.

Finally what has been written here suggests that our life just comes to a stop when we watch nature. We are already perfect, there is nothing to do. The world is already completely lovable and appreciated so why change it. And this is true. But it also doesn't stop us from doing things. We can certainly build violins from trees. Its not that we don't like trees, and its not like violins are the only things that matter. But the difference between this and the unhealthy mind and world of fantasy and improvement, is that we don't need to, we just think it might be worth while. Humans are after all creative and active beings. It is our nature to do things like this and enjoy music, and if we watch that nature in ourselves we will see how humans come to do these amazing things that no animal does. And if we watch that carefully we will probably see that the truest actions that humans do are probably those centre around other people. The violin craftsman for all their love of wood and craft must also love other people to whom they will eventually give their violins. But its all part of the process of the world, part of the unfolding of time and the way things are that some people make violins and some play them. But there is no before or after, no start and end, and no better or worse in this unfolding of nature. We loved the world at the start, and we will love it at the end no matter what.

So protecting the environment is not a choice, it is not a value added, it will happen when humans become happy and start watching and appreciating their lives, the world and nature as it already is, when they step out from their fantasy minds into the bright sunshine of Nature, or as Plato put it when they leave the cave.

Back on to SRH - coin flip contradictions

Quickly first: what has SRH got to do with poverty? (if I'm going to try and unify the topic of this blog). SRH was the name given to an insight that self cannot support self, and that "self" implies "other". This was to contradict and suggest there was a contradiction in the belief of a "self contained" self. At least in human mind, "self" appears to imply a "unit self" that can be unplugged from "other" and exist by itself. This flavour of "self" conception infect science and logic in the belief that there is a "truth" or "axiom" that can exist independently, upon which everything else is based but which itself is not based. In essence this is the same idea as God, that there is a single, irreducible entity which is the source of all things, but itself has no source. SRH was just a much needed name "Self Reference Hypothesis" for this insight that ultimately nothing exists by itself. Now the relationship with poverty, is that poverty can only exist if things can be isolated. But since everything depends upon everything else there is no poverty.

Back to blog.

Create a coin toss scenario:

Heads: decide the meaning of this coin toss by coin toss.

It comes down heads. We apply the rule, and it says apply the rule.
It comes down tails. We look at the rule to see what this means, and it says don't use the rule. Problem is we already did, and if we didn't then we can't resolve the coin toss.

Simple liar paradox in coin flips.

Interesting to explore tho, because the problem arises because we are already committed to the meaning before we read the contradiction. These are temporal SRH where we commit to one state, only to find it asks us to uncomit.

--- Addendum 26 May

Another version is:

Heads: should I use coin flips to make decisions?

Result heads: I should use coin flips to make decisions.
Result tails: I should not be using coin flips to make decisions.

Normatively we'd just stop using coins from this moment on. But logically you could say we've run into a problem because we just made a decision by a method that said we should use that method. In other words how valid was this decision?

The point from SRH perspective is that we already made a decision to use coin flips to make make decisions. So setting the next decision to be "should I make decisions this way" gives an insight into what "should" means in English rather than anything else. In logic we would say something like "are decisions made by coin flip true?" And there is the liar paradox. But in English we fudge this out by saying "should" to mean "it is correct" but we aren't going to do it this time. So when we coin lands on tails, despite already having made a decision with the coin, that we are taking as valid, we now think that decisions made by coins is no longer valid - decided by the coins!

What this illustrates is the complexity of "prior" which is what SRH has been struggling with. In this case "temporal prior". In fact we have always aready made the decision to use coins to make further decisions, and when we decide to rest the decison on a coin of "shall I use coins?" we are not contradicting what has gone before, i.e. the prior, but determining the future.

But removing the dimension of time: "is it ALWAYS a good idea to use coins to make decisions?" CANNOT be decided by a coin! And this is SRH. We are then contradicting the prior, in this case a logical prior. If the "prior" is a decision to use coins, then we cannot ask those coins whether we should use coins, because we already did. SRH does exist, but defining how the prior binds us is provide complex (as argued before I suspect there is a contradiction in even defining rules about the relationship of prior to a state of affairs... and infinite regress of priors of priors... would being able to define the limits of freedom of a system with priors, define priors to those limits?). It is quite possibly undefinable what the limits of a system based on SRH are! That SRH is itself a contradiction, but a peculiar one where it must be a contradiction to be true (Godel style).

However we can ask the softer question "is there ever a time that coins can decide?", but if we use a coin to decide this we cannot know the validity of the answer. If it comes down heads (yes), then we don't know if this is one of those times, and all other outcomes undermine the validity of the outcome.

As a friend pointed out we have a "third" way here: true/false/undecided. And this 3rd option is "outside" the system of true/false. Every system (which is complex enough to have self referemce) must have a "outside the system" outcome. This is SRH.

Now a classic case of self reference which is generally considered valid is the definition of the natural numbers by induction:

We take a starting number "1" as an axiom which belongs to set N.
We then define a successor S(n) to define a new member of N, where n is a member of N.

Then S(1) -> 2, S(S(1)) -> 3 etc

Now from an SRH perspective the interesting thing here is N. We already created the set N prior to the rules of membership. Can we define these axioms without pre-defining the domain of the function S.

I need do some reading and thinking on this. But induction is considered probelematic by some as it looks like things are being degined by themselves, in other words there is no definition occuring and the prior was already there...

to be continued...

Eckhart Tolle - what more is there to say. This is it, said better than anyone else.

So progress has at least achieved one thing: it has developed a youtube algorithm that eventually recommended this video. Well I have read and heard a lot of stuff, and searched in my own life and had a few insights and here is a man explaining what the crowning achievement is. The extinction of self and the emergence into the eternal and blissful indissolvable and perfect now.

I note how poverty for those who have returned to the homeland of the self means nothing. The true sustenance we seek is within, but our return home is blocked by egotistical desire to conquest the world and ignorance that running into the kaleidoscope of sensory phenomena and thoughts that spring up eternally is actually forgetting the present and the peace at the heart of our lives from where we come at every moment.

I have said it, but its funny how you don't always even understand the depth of your own words, let alone the depths of others. Strong feelings are what throw us out of the now. Very pleasant feelings may make us leave the peace of our present now as we feel inadequate without these feelings and so we go in search. The addict feels without this feeling they cannot exist, but it leads them out of the now in missing the experience in the past and looking forward to it in the future. Likewise very horrible feelings are the opposite. We cannot bear to stay in the present with these feelings and we wish for the future to come to free us. We live in fear of the bad feeling coming and refuse to stay in the present in case it comes for us. We destroy our lives so that we never have to come home to ourselves and face sharing the present now with this feared feeling. This is why often great loves, when they fail lead to great despair because during the process of loving we were drawn away from our self, and when the love is gone we find ourselves lost in a barren land far from home. Looking into the future and dreaming of the past we keep ourselves away from the reality of now and the perhaps frightening gaze of now. But if we make resolution to be good, to be upright and to be able to stand with our own selves so that we can start to love ourselves then we can return home and rest blissfully with what we truly are, peacefully just being as Tolle himself did.

I don't really need to say anything other than justify why Tolle is on this blog, he has perfected this and says it the best...