Just War?

One of the great problems in the world is the idea of Just War. This single handedly has caused more deaths than any other idea.

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

The problem obviously is that each party in any war thinks they are Just. So its just a justification for bloodshed.

Given an "enemy" people try various devices to escape this obvious conclusion that really they should listen to the enemy rather than silence and destroy them. A common one is that the army they face is brainwashed and fighting under duress. And that given the option they would rather defect.

Many people given the choice between defecting or dying have chosen to defect. That decision is in fact made under duress so doesn't count. The idea that the enemy is brainwashed is a two edged weapon, because how do soldiers know that it is not them who have been brainwashed? Indeed I would argue that all soldiers by definition are brainwashed. Brainwashed to hear their leaders and not the leaders of their "enemy." I put enemy in quotes because it is a universal experience for soldiers to realise that they do not actually have a quarrel with the people they fight, it is just their ruling elites who do.

So there is actually no ground for "just war." And if there is no ground for "just war" there is no ground for war. And this is the inevitable result of all discussions on war. Why should the strongest win for any other reason than they are the strongest?

So you could argue that the "truthful" are the strongest cos they band together more successfully. "There is no honour amongst thieves" goes to saying and this is why thieves don't rule the world. If they did they would just have their stolen earning stolen in return. The Good are always stronger than the Bad because the Good are Good to themselves while the Bad are Bad to themselves. Indeed you can argue that War is pointless cos the Bad will destroy themselves through their own Badness. But the problem with the stronger are better argument is that the winners of conflicts write the history and define themselves as "good". No winner of a conflict has ever declared that they were not the deserved winner and they are "bad". So by definition the winner of any conflict is "good" so its meaningless to attribute anything to this "goodness." The US for example is a genocidal, enslaving, mass murdering nation exactly like the Nazis in every way. Yet the US won the war so is good and the Nazis lost the war and so are bad. For the Jewish Holocaust the US has the Indian Genocide. For concentration camps the US has slavery. And for mass murder and global supremacy the US has Vietnam to name one of many. There is literally no difference between the two regimes: except that the Nazis were stopped while the US hasn't been (yet).

So how do you defeat Evil if not by War? Its simple you learn to be good. Its a long struggle that takes each of us a lifetime, and we can inspire and teach others. This is how it is done. The battle with the Devil is quiet, earnest and indefinite. You never give up, and you don't expect to have it finished soon.

Inside/Outside

 The Truth is known but people struggle to put a name to it. Recently found value in the ideas of inside/outside again.

In spirituality people often say things like "go inside" and "find yourself." The answer and the truth is "within" you. What does this mean? Where is the inside that you can go to?

Chances are the "inside" people identify initially is wrong, which rather makes such statements useless.

This issue is handled amazingly in the Shurangama Sutra Volume 1. While the Sutra does not come directly from Buddha it is still excellent. In Chapter 5 when asked the location of the Mind, Ananda answers what many still believe today at least 1500 years later: 

Ananda said to the Buddha, “World Honored One, all the ten kinds of living beings in the world alike maintain that the conscious mind dwells within the body; ..." [p172]

Then Buddha shows Ananda problems with this view:

“Your mind is capable of understanding everything thoroughly. Now if your present mind, which thoroughly understands everything, were in your body, then you should be aware first of what is inside your body. Can there be living beings who first see inside their bodies before they observe things outside? [p177]

So Ananda is forced to say the Mind is outside the body in order to account for seeing the world but not the inner organs of the body. But he only makes it worse and is ultimately left realising that the Mind is without location. It is the same issue that the characters in a painting might have if asked where the canvas is. In if mind has location where is the "inside" that spirituality speaks of.

It is linked to Relativity and Measurement.

To measure something we take a "standard" and we compare with the unknown in a defined way. For length we put the ruler end to end, for weight we add to scales etc. We then get a count of how many times the standard fits into the unknown. Note that we are talking about standards fitting into an unknown. This is the sense of inside used in spirituality. A 10kg weight can be thought about has having 10x 1Kg weights "inside" it.

Now consider a much more poignant measure: how many years does someone's life have in it? So recently Prince Philip died. Everyone did the measurement and said he had 99 years inside his life. Soon afterwards actress Helen McCrory died and she only had 52 years inside. When we compare these measurement we say that the inside of Helen's life was smaller than the inside of Prince Philip's life.

But this only works from the outside. Lets go inside a year itself? How big is a year? Interesting isn't it: no answer. The inside has no size. we must go outside the year and find something else like the number of days. we answer 365 days. Now a year has an inside. But then how big is a day? we must answer with another outside. By itself a day has no size, or for that matter any measurement or quantity.

While there is no inherent quantity inside our lives there is Quality. Robert Pirsig has a lot to say about this. The key point is that quality without measurement has no boundaries. This is very very hard to see clearly. Wittgenstein notes in 'Philosophical Investigations' how odd it is to consider the word "Red" while looking at a red thing and try to understand how these two things have any connection at all. The perceived colour is a quality that if we don't measure and name, is just what it is, infinite and present. It exists as it is quite apart from the rest of the world. In meditation we can just sit with it as it is. However when we name it, it gets a package and that package distinguishes it from its surrounding and other colours. Perhaps it is a red apple on a brown table. When we let our brains go all the way and process it with a name the red then exists in relation to other colours especially the brown of the table. This named red is solid, graspable and gives us a mental satisfaction. But we lose the quality when we bottle it like this. It is a very delicate mental process that is easily missed until we spend time in meditation looking closely at it. The distinction is also called Nama and Rupa in the Indian literature. Rupa is just the form or phenomenon as it is and Nama is the mental process of giving it a measured box with a name on it. They are quite separate just as Wittgenstein noted looking at a red thing (rupa) and thinking that it is red (nama). 

So we see that for things to have a "measure" we must compare them with something "outside". The "inside" actually has no measure by itself. This leads to a fundamental spiritual discovery: things depends upon other things to be what they are! Inside things are just themselves.

This means that we can change what the inside looks like just by comparing with something else. Helen McCrory only looks young compared with Prince Philip. James Dean had only 24 years inside him making Helen now look quite big. The other thing is what we make of big and small. Its assumed that a big life is good. But if we measure illness then we want small. Going into the outside world in order to get a measure on things is a messy thing. But inside things just are and that makes all things the same. Helen McCrory lived a life and from the inside it looked exactly the same as Prince Philip's. When we go inside there is Equanimity and there is no Suffering. This quality of the inside of being without measure is called Emptiness in Buddhism (originally Sunyata).

So how do we get inside? Its about not measuring things. The tool of measurement is the discerning mind and the key method to getting this distinction is to meditate. That means to get the discerning mind to focus on something. Commonly its the breath. We can discern and measure just in breath and out breath to start with. We go inside when that discernment falls away and there is just breathing.

=, equals, contradiction, dynamic, society

 = symbol has 3 meanings in computers. Often languages express these with 3 syntax: =,==,:=

(a) 1+2=3 is the Mathematical "scales". This originated from market place scales and it says the left and right balance. Algebra works on the basis that if you do the same thing to both sides of a scale you know the scale will still balance. If you have 1Kg of rice and 1Kg or gold and you do the same material action to the rice and the gold the mass will remain the same on each side. The scale will balance. This is the origin of all mathematics. Indeed Greeks could only think in terms of ratios like this, the idea of abstract numbers by themselves began later with the Arabs after the Roman Empire.

(b) 1+2 == 3 is the Logical equality. We accept the statement 1+2 == 3 because indeed 2 and 1 on the left of the scales is the same weight as 3 on the right. Unlike with mathematics symbol there is the super powerful negation logical operator so we can produce statements like 1+2 != 4 (that is 1+2 == not(4) ). Indeed "1+2 is not the same size as 4" is a true statement.

(c) X := 1+2 this simply gives a new name to 1+2. In this case X. Its says that X can now be replaced with 1+2. Using (a) above to equate 1+2 = 3, and expressing in the logical form of (b) we can say X==3

Now in Logic the obsession is with contradictions. Using the above 3 distinctions. If we define X := 4 then 1+2 == X is false. If however we now define '4' to mean 4 := 1+2 then 1+2 == 4 is true. But this now means 2 + 2 == 4 is false because we've redefined what '4' means.

So in fact a "contradiction" is impossible if we just accept the contradiction as a definition.

We are talking to a witness of a murder. The witness says they heard a scream and then a tall man ran out of the building and got into the red car. Then they say a short man got out of the car. Now this means either its the same man how was tall but is now short or there was another man in the car. We ask the witness was there another man in the car. They say no. So lets define the tall man as "John". So John is tall. John got into the car. John now gets out of the car. But John is short. John cannot be tall and short so we have a contradiction. However what if the witness' has bad eye sight. So we can quite happily say that John appeared tall and then John appeared short and no contradiction. But lets get crazy. There is no explanation. The story starts with Tall John and end with Short John. Don't we then just make 2 separate witness statements. They must be separate because they contradict, but within their own world's they are fine.

Now this is the actual problem with contradiction. Every time we contradict we fracture reality. I forget the Analytic Philosophers involved but every text defines (3 above) an "ontology." And if it starts redefining this like John is now defined as short we have a different ontology and a different narrative.

In the end it may turn out that the witness' first statement about a Tall man leaving the building fits in with other statements. Perhaps another witness says they say a Tall Man running around the corner. The story of a Tall man getting into a car, and a short man getting out may never be useful or explained and never fits in with anything else from the investigation. A different world that the investigation can just discard.

I once called this idea "harmonic structuralism." A narrative could be judged simply by its size and usefulness. There was no "truth" but rather usefulness. Most people can see and most people on a rotating globe can see the sun at some point in their lives. There must be unfortunate Eskimo babies who are born and die within a few months during the Arctic winter who never see the Sun. But for most people the story of the Sun fits in well with their lives without contradicting too much. So its a popular "truth".

Now "dynamic systems." A dynamic system is not like X:= 1+2 because it is recursive. A very famous example is X:= k X (1-X) studied by Prof Robert May in relation to population growth constrained by resources.

Unless X is the "fixed point" it is a contradiction. So if k := 2 then X:= 0.5 means that X == k X (1-X) is true. Indeed with X := 0.5 the equation gives the result 0.5.

However for X := 0.75 then the equation gives the result 3/8. Now if we ignore the contradiction like above and redefine X:=3/8 we can do the calculation again and keep going.

Perhaps we need a 4th definition of equal to mean "keep redefining"

X =: k X (1-X) means ignore any contradiction and keep redefining.

Now for X =: 2 X (1-X) where X := 0.75 after 5 interations X == 0.5 is true. The result is the fixed point. Indeed in stable dynamic systems the result of either the fixed point or infinity. Mandelbrot Set most famously plotted the stability of the dynamic system X =: X^2 + C in the complex domain to get this picture.

the speed of convergence should be a second result of such statements. So the full statement for dynamic systems should be:

X =: 2 X (1-X) == (0.5,5) where X := 0.75 and

X =: X^2 + C == (inf,inf) where X := 0, C := 3+4i

But what of:

X =: 3X (1-X) where X := 0.75

This ends up cycling between two values of X := {0.673..,0.659..}

And

X =: 3.6 X (1-X) where X := 0.75

This definition never settles down. It keeps changing forever. It is what is called Chaotic.

This constant motion or "struggling" of some dynamic systems to find a stable equilibrium is analogous to the struggling in other systems to deal with contradictions. X =: f(X) is not happy constantly changing in the hope of  finding a value which solves the equality and balances the scales. But sometimes like a Greek Tragedy the trajectory conspires against the system to ensure it never gets to that value (even if that value is finite).

Can we define Infinity as the solution to some dynamic systems.

X =: 1 + X only has a solution at X := infinity. That famous conundrum of the infinite hotel with infinite guests staying there. Nevertheless if everyone moved to the next room then Room 1 would become available. In fact isn't this analogous to what Cantor did with his Diagonalisation argument?

Dynamic systems however are constrained and you can't split the ontology in order to relieve the problem of contradiction. It is this problem that provides them their "energy." I wonder if we could define some quantity E for dynamic systems to measure the "movement" in values as they seek resolution.

On the subject of resolving contradictions Hegelian dialectics utilises exactly this "energy" to trigger Aufhebung and context changes that provide new perspectives that resolve apparent contradictions. It is this energy that motivates History itself. The resulting perspective is one where the contradictions between individual and group are satisfied, captured in the maxim "the I that is we, and the We that is I". Marx famously took up this idea to argue that the resolution to the contradictions in society was the state of Communism where individuals and society becomes stable. Its a sad reflection on Post Modernity that rather than solve these contradictions it seems the energy has just been bled out.