Brexit2 and the Woke

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-09-19/woke-movement-is-global-and-america-should-be-mostly-proud

Been thinking about this some more and something obvious has struck me. America and the New World in general has no History or Culture. That is so famous its even a joke (think of Monty Python making fun of Australian culture). America is just 250 years old and is composed entirely of immigrants, cos the original inhabitants were all slaughtered and with them went American history and culture, and so it started with a clean sheet. Now UK is also made of a lot of immigrants. My family came to UK 400 years ago. But the difference is that UK never started from a blank sheet and incorporates a complex society built up over millennia. So naturally we want to presence that identity. It's not that its not open to change, but we respect the Past in the old world. America can never understand this cos the Past for America is Amerindian genocide. So ironically this Woke lark belongs only in America, and in fact their resistance to the Old World way of respecting the Past comes from a genocide they committed that they are psychologically unable to deal with. And that is why the US projects all this guilt into the Holocaust so that they can gain access to all this evil but "over there" as Nazis. Now problem from UK is this has nothing to do with us. BUT the US Empire has pervaded this country so deeply over the last 40 years that many people don't remember they are British and not American. And also that what the US says is utter nonsense from our perspective. #Brexit2 is going to be a long process as we remove the haze from the eyes of the UK population who have been drugged and been sleeping in the American Dream.

Good vid on Banach

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwklT1Cqq1c

A Universal Approach to Self-Referential Paradoxes, Incompleteness and Fixed Points

 Amazing. I don't have the logic background required to do this formally but this is exactly one of the results of SRH that much self-reference, fixed points and paradoxes is the same. I need read and digest and explore this to look for the conditions of SRH. todo!

A Universal Approach to Self-Referential Paradoxes, Incompleteness and Fixed Points

Noson S. Yanofsky

https://arxiv.org/pdf/math/0305282.pdf

Authenticity & Self

 Richard Rohr starts one of his books talking about the spheres of life and how we normally live our lives traversing the surfaces of these spheres but never actually venturing in.

This is a profound and excellent metaphor for how the superficial mind works. Language gives us a map of the world. It is the surface of the spheres. It is what can be seen, known and taught of a thing. Famously in India they say I can tell you all about a tiger, but it will never quite prepare you for the actual encounter.

When we actually encounter we start to move into the sphere and see it with our own eyes. But we rarely stay long because we are habituated to recording and knowing and talking about things. We are habituated to living between things, comparing them, moving from one to the other continuously on a journey but never settling and making our home.

Now obviously becoming settled can also be attachment and grasping where we deny the essence of change in things and set ourselves up for suffering when things turn out to be different from what we have been expecting. So not settling in this grasping sense, but just going into the sphere out of the realm of known fixed reality to develop a fluid and personal relationship that has no sign posts or points of real reference. It's an uncertain time, and we must navigate for ourselves as we go into a sphere no longer being able to use books and what we have been taught and learned. It is the Terra Incognita of old mariners as they sailed off maps to chart a new world. Our lives are a New World always entering uncharted water if we want to. If we want to embrace the boundless possibility that is available to us each day if we want to start navigating for ourselves and move into the centre of the orderly spheres, routines and habits that we have built up around our lives.

This is authentic living.

Now this relates very much to the self. I was very fortunate to have a chance encounter with some spiritual healers who pointed me to some Dissociation. That is to say "I" had formed a sphere out of myself and more of less I lived within that sphere. I'm not that authentic most of my life is lived on the surface of that sphere I call myself.

But they drew my attention to parts of myself that lay outside that sphere. Parts that I had forgotten, of had pushed away. In fact the one I encountered when opened my mind to it was a self that I had abandoned when I was a teenager. There was no special trauma involved but for whatever reason I felt I was better off without this part of myself. So I closed my sphere around the rest of myself and have lived on the surface of that new construction.

Obviously with what has been said living on the surface of any constriction is inauthentic in itself, but doing so also enables us to divide the self and become dissociated from parts of it. That may indeed be the intention like when we distance ourselves from a old friend we have grown apart from. But to put these barriers up also becomes a cage that stops us moving freely through ourselves.

They said once you become aware of that shadowy self make friends with it and welcome it back into you. And that is almost a physical acceptance into you in space. It is exactly the Prodigal Son parable from Jesus. Just as God will accept us back when we repent, so we can accept parts of our self back when we stop the fight against ourselves and open up again.

And what is an integrated self then? It is part of an authentic self and life where we are free to move through the spheres that our mind creates of the world. We no longer just look to confirm what we know and believe. That is just ego. Look I am right. Instead we start navigating freely without fixed reference to what other people say or what we know, perhaps in a trivial way we don't wear the same clothes today*. Just s small way in which we experience things in a new way. For a moment we run off the surface of a sphere. It is like meeting the tiger and finding that it is quite different from what we were told. we probably expect to see a fearsome predator with eyes glowing with ferocity in the shadows. But perhaps we see a mother and we see her nurturing her cubs. Or perhaps the tiger is sleeping. Or perhaps we don't see a tiger at all and go home disappointed. What we actually experience in side that sphere will be quite different from what we have painted on the outside.

Probably once we come home we will leave that sphere and spend the rest of our lives recalling the story of the day we saw a tiger and traverse the inauthentic surface of a sphere we construct around that day. But sometime lying in bed we may cast our mind to where that tigress is right now. What is she really up to. Perhaps we will examine the encounter from a different angle. We can enter the sphere of the story we tell and perhaps own up to being frightened. On the outside of the sphere we do not mention that we were frightened. But re-examining the inside we find that we were not so brave, and we welcome that timid self that we have rejected and face the fact that it was quite an intimidating encounter where we did not feel so comfortable in the presence of a creature that could crush out skull with a single bite. we welcome that self back and we go into the sphere of our encounter with the tiger in a fresh way. That is authenticity.

Authenticity is like the water of a mountain stream on a hot day. It is cool. It fills our whole being. It is slightly melancholy, like a cool breeze that comes in through an open window blowing away the sultry heat of ego and stale living. Its a moment to pause and rest with something peacefully instead of racing around trying to pick up speed to catch something we feel has gone or we have lost. With true authenticity we want for nothing. There are no sphere anymore to want, or be near or be far away from. We travel through a single joined up space perhaps inside this sphere or perhaps passing into another sphere it is no longer so important what sphere we are in. we will catch other people labelling our sphere in conversation and that is of some interest but its not so important. we learn to navigate from within with our own being at ease.

* of course thinking that what you wear is important is also inauthentic. Once a style of clothing becomes "me" then it is just another sphere we travel on. But a change of clothing, especially if we are afraid to do it, or it challenges our existing spheres may we quite revealing. The problem with makeovers, or indeed any changes we make to our life in order to shake it up, is that soon enough they become fossilised spheres that fix us just as much as the life we are seeking to shake up. Soon enough we will need a makeover of shakeup from the new version of me and so it goes on forever. It is better to learn to navigate away from the surface of spheres. Jumping from one to another, leaving the old one behind like a house and entering a new one does not solve the problem of inauthenticity. Explore what you have deeply is the better approach, turn inwards from the fixed surface and what you think you know and start to live it freely without thinking "I am this" "I am that" "my life is this" "my life is that" all these are just paintings on the surface of the sphere. They may have some truth to them but they are paper thin and not very important. Just covers to the book. It is best to open the book and start to read ones life.

Brain and Thought how are they connected?

 Stealing entirely from Daniel Dennett. He argues that the thinking mind is actually a virtual computer simulated within the brain. He notes the way in which analysing thought led people like Turing to design their machines, and before them logicians to write their logical systems. We work well with computers because our thinking process is a computer he argues. I like this idea a lot.

For instance look how the thinking mind works. We think in steps, and there are connections between the steps. We start with data and premises and we think through using rules to get results. I want to go on a journey so I know I need some forms of transport. I gather data on what is available. I look at the possible train routes. Break the journey up into stages. Look at the possible times, durations and costs of each stage. Then I put it all back together in a few sequences of options and pick the best one. All in steps, all by processes and logic. Exactly like a machine. Animals are not so good at this, although many are surprising. Crows have the ability to think through sequentially tasks and solve puzzles with the same skill as young human children.

Yet we know most tasks we do as humans are not like this. I feel hungry. I walk to the shops. Stop at the kerb side, look for cars, cross, recognise a friend, have a chat, see the shop name, open the door, identify and pick some food I want, pay for it. These are all tasks that are extremely hard for computers. But they are also tasks that animals do equally well. These tasks we find are well replicated by neural networks and machine learning. It is not based so much on steps and combination rules (in computers it is obviously cos this is how they work) but instead works by gradually evolving arrays to collectively represent the processing. In a CPU data and instruction are loaded and the the chip performs whatever operation is hardcoded by that instruction and the machine works through the program instruction by instruction like reading a book. A neural network has its strength in distributing processing across a whole network. This is not to say parallel processing and lots of little CPUs, the problem itself has changed now into solving the most appropriate relationship between nodes.

Now I was wondering why we have the two systems. It seemed to me it works like this. We operate automatically using our neural networks for most of the time. Our neural networks learn quickly what our friend looks like, we learn quickly how to ride a bicycle. These things we just trust our brain to do  and we let it get on with it. But sometimes we need to be sure that the neural networks are working correctly. Their power is also their weakness. They evolve to solutions but it means that we never quite know what our neural network will do and whether its training is complete yet. I have cycled for 35 years and have had my cycling neural networks very finely trained. I don't have tumours of brain damage that I know of so I trust that these networks work well and I cycle automatically almost all the time.

But suppose I was asked to cycle over a path with cliffs on both sides. Now I am cautious. I cannot afford to have the networks let me down. So I start to think rationally. I break the task into steps. I look at how confident I am of each step. Where are the trouble areas. Which bit are most dangerous. Which bits am I confident of. What unexpected hazards are there. I create a plan of the task in minute detail examining each part and rehearsing it. I become a project manager of the task. Even while "on the day" it is the neural networks who will be applied to each stage to get actually the job done. 

Now this process of rehearsing is actually trying my networks out. I am simulating the experiences and letting the networks run through what they are going to face. But critically this process is in steps. It is not a global training program, but instead the step by step thinking of a computer.

I wonder then whether we evolved this rational computer as a way of testing and managing our neural networks. It also means that like Dennett says this is critical to the process of self-consciousness. It is all bound up in the process of self management, self development and self-regulation. That voice in our head is really just an onboard computer stepping through programs to check on our system state and performance.

Now quick check even on that. In this world of project management and performance targets have I just seen this in the brain because that is what I am taught to think by this culture. Or is that the we have evolved a world that reflects and reveals our own behaviour.

Also the addendum that it is always interesting to me that we are able to watch all these processes even the process of thinking itself. What we can see we are not. Ovid says in the story of Pygmalion in his Metamorphosis that to see clearly the eyes need some distance. Implicit to Knowing is that we are separate. The essence of Heideggar's Dasein is the "over thereness" but you could argue that the "over thereness" is a product of knowledge itself. On an aside Heideggar's says of Dasein that it has an intrinsic "mineness" too. In wonder if this too is not intrinsic but rather the social imposition of the idea of ownership. If Heideggar had ever experience Jhana he would know that absorption into the object dissolves both the "over thereness" and the "mineness." The true nature of mind is joyful and not dualistic. So we can only know about what goes inside our head because we are not what goes on inside our head! The fact that we can see our thoughts and emotions means that we are separate from these! So when we talk about brains, thoughts and all these processes we also know that this is not us. That is quite hard for modern science to grasp because it is overwhelmed by a materialistic ontology where things exist. And so the self exists. Science has always been troubled by the location of the self. It was once thought to be in the heart, but today its thought to be in the brain. Both are wrong. Self is nowhere because "where" is created by the self. Like asking the people in a painting where they are. Do they say "by a river" or do they say "on the wall." Where is not such a fundamental material question. Its relative and based upon context. There is no absolute "real" where. So this blog was simply looking at the parts of the brain that we experience in daily life and how they relate. It was not any speculation on what we ourselves are.

The fundamental problem of Zionism

I say Zionism because it is the highest profile organisation who makes this mistake.

So yes God does call the Jewish race the First among peoples and the Chosen People. But He also gives commandments and the Law of Moses.

So the big question what does God think of a Jew who does not obey the Law of Moses versus a non-Jew who does.

And that was exactly the problem Jesus initially faced. Often he met with non-Jews who had faith that far exceeded that of Jewish people. He was forced to accept that being Jewish was not that important. "Go your faith has healed" he said. It is your faith, your following of the Law of Moses that really matters not what race you belong to.

God does not for instance have a Law that you must be Jewish to gain favour. And what is the 1st commandment? To have no gods before G-d.

And yet what does Zionism do? It places being Jewish above God! In the mind of a Zionist being Jewish is more important even that whether you place your heart entirely with G-d.

It's so common that its a stereotype, even the Jewish people recognise that the Jewish relationship with Mammon is legendary. Jesus says you cannot have 2 gods. Moses very 1st Law says put your heart firstly with G-d before Mammon or Baal or anyone else. But are there Jews who can seriously say they have never placed money concerns over Love of G-d?

A Jew who worships money more than G-d has broken the 1st Law of Moses. If another Jew considers them Jewish even despite this then are placing being Jewish as yet another God above G-d.

This is the whole problem not only for Jews but any other religion. The moment we place that Religion, or any worldly identity before the principles and love of our God then we actually have a different G-d from what we thought.

Zionists make this fundamental mistake of making Jewishness their G-d above and beyond Yahweh. So that even Jews who have no place for Yahweh in their hearts are nevertheless welcome. This is actually pure evil. These Jews are back to worshiping the golden calf of Baal. And need a new Moses to put them right.

Society is actually Anti-Social

 I've posted on this before but it is becoming clearer. I have a friend at a Flat Earth conference right now. He thinks that the Earth is Flat. To get to this conclusion he ignores anything that suggests it is round because "he's heard it all before" and "it is not interesting" and is much more interested exploring the possibility that this is wrong and the Earth is actually flat.

Now its not so hard to decide the geometry of the Earth. The previous blog was a demonstration of one such investigation. But it is sufficiently difficult that people can gain enough doubt to enable them to believe whatever they want.

Now people who doubt the Round Earth gather in groups of like minded people. My father in fact belonged to the most recent incarnation of the Flat Earth Society. When I challenged him on the facts he relented and said it was a drinking society really.

Now this raises an interesting point. People are prepared to form societies around falsies.

That means that the need for society is greater than the need for Truth.

Now this is the dangerous state of affairs the world is in. This is how the Nazis happened. Nazis believed in a Master Race. They did a lot of work to prove that they were (1) Aryans and (2) that Aryans were superior to other races. It is interesting that the Aryan race is still important in Linguistics and some understandings of how Indian religions evolved. Hitler was a vegetarian following the Indian Vedic worship of Cows. And Bovril gets its name from Bovine Vril. A Vril society existed at the heart of the Nazi party extoling the virtues of cows and belief in a magical life energy called vril.

Societies can form around any old nonsense it seems.

And we have seen what happens when societies form around nonsense! They can go mad and do mad things because without any standards of truth, and a willingness to believe whatever they want to believe there are no longer any limits to what they can think or do.

Cults are the text book example of this. People forming societies around ideas, and usually a charismatic leader, who rapidly cease to have any relationship with the outside world and any standards of truth.

Now "Truth" is a dangerous word. Because within any of these "societies" the accepted norms like Vril for example are taken as truth. If you do not believe the "truth" you are kicked out of society.

Now interestingly this is why the Flat Earth society exists. Its a reaction to the hegemony. People are sick of 9/11 and all the lies around it. They are sick of wars. They are sick of the US industrial military complex blowing up the world. They are sick of secret services like CIA. They are sick of government lies. They are sick of mainstream media talking nonsense all day. And the establishment has itself to blame for this for trying to coerce people into a "society" which accepts them as the rightful leaders. Especially ironic since this society says it tries to promote "freedom" as the same time. As a result the baby has now been thrown out with the bath water. People reject the official narrative entirely and things like Flat Earth are the perfect way to show solidarity in rejecting the oppression of the western narrative and society.

But its only possible because the very idea of society is corrupt and opposed to Truth.

Now Truth I want to distinguish from "truth." Your particular society may threaten to ostracise you for disagreeing with its truths. You may be branded an heretic and burned at the stake. And this illustrates the deep anti-social nature of society. But if you are correct then you have Truth rather than truth.

Now what is Truth? Some might believe in a fixed reality and its just a matter of discovering it, This is dangerous. It leads to Dictatorship. Whoever believes they know the Truth has total authority. Some might say it is purely relative and you gain it from your society. In other words don't argue with societies norms i.e. Tradition. This has the same oppressive danger. Some might say you make your own truth. This is as good as saying there is no Truth.

Probably the best way to look at Truth is like Plato's dialectics. It is a journey of discovery. You can never say when that discovery has ended, you can never know where it goes next. But you are invested with the ability to make those discoveries and that is the essence of freedom. We are all able to discover the truth.

Now what is dangerous with Flat Earth is there is a sense in which people are not able to just go and find the truth. Its not that hard to set up experiments to test it. See the previous blog. This means that people have lost belief that they can decide truth for themselves and instead are happy to just follow the crowd. And the crowd really is their goal. This is a type of oppression and loss of freedom in itself. All is great until your society starts to believe and do things that are not so hard to disprove. Then what looked like a cosy hammock of social interactions become a living hell.

Society is built upon the anti-social.

So what is the True Society. Well we are all bound by the Truth automatically. Truth by definition applies to us all. If it only applies to some of us then it is not True. We are all bound by Truth. We live in a great society of Truth whether we want to see that or not.

Its analogous to God. Religious people see all of humanity living together in God. Some people see this and some people don't. It's there for you to see whenever you want.

Of course religion can fall foul of the same problems as society. People who don't see God get excluded and denounced as heretics and burned at stakes. But God is there whether they get burned or not. This is just society being anti-social and has nothing to do with God.

The correct way to treat people who do not see or have faith in the Truth is just with compassion. If you know someone who refuses to believe that fire will burn and they keep putting their hand in flames through a dogged resistance to the Truth the correct and Truthful attitude if compassion at their self inflicted suffering, We can try and help but our motive is just compassion. It is certainly not punishment because they have stepped out of line with Tradition or social expectations.

I like Buddha's example. In the search of Truth he rejected and was rejected by everything. In the last weeks when he found the middle way and broke his austerities even his attendant monks left him. But he had faith in his buddha nature and his compassion to end all suffering was strong. So he just pursued his path in the full belief he had the power to find the Truth. And he did. But even after this people rejected him and di not believe him. He only ever said try what I have to offer and if you don't find any use for it then go somewhere else.

Truth is not dogmatic. It is not about being liked or socially accepted. It is not about solitude. It is not about avoiding the stake (as Jesus found out). It is not about being believed. It is just about the faith that you can find the truth and that you value that above all other things.

What is the 1st Jewish commandment after all:

Have no other gods above me.

Society should never be a god. But when it becomes one it becomes anti-social. Truth must always be our guide,

Which means that the Flat Earth convention has a problem. The problem isn't just the details of Planetary geometry but rather the promotion of society above the values of truth. And once we reject Truth then we are lost entirely even while the ship of fools appears to sail along merrily in the short term. 

Round Earth is a better model than Flat Earth

Not that I probably need this discussion but there is a sizeable group of people who maintain the Earth is flat. And this is important for the next blog on the nature of Society. Well flat earth is fine, its certainly a good approximation for the local geometry but is the entire earth flat is the question. And if it is the concept of "entire earth" becomes interesting because what is the boundary like. Does the water fall off the earth in a massive waterfall, or is the earth an infinite sheet. Boundary conditions are almost always more important than the main model.

So here is a picture I took in 2019 of turbine in the Rampion Offshore Wind Farm on the South Coast of Britain. It is perfect for measuring the curvature of the Earth because there are platforms near the base.

Now lets look at the theory predictions:

Flat Earth predicts that as things disappear into the distance they get smaller simply by perspective.

Round Earth predicts not only that things will get smaller with perspective, but that they will drop over a horizon too.

Regarding the platforms:

Flat Earth predicts that the turbines will just get smaller with distance, so the ratio of the distance below the platform and above will remain the same. 

Round Earth predicts that the turbines will fall below an horizon and so the ratio of distance below and above the platform will also reduce.

If we measure the turbines from the picture and scale our turbines to be the same we get this:

 Clearly the distance below the platform is reducing. This suggest an horizon below which the turbines are falling.

Let now try a Round Earth model. Very simply an "horizon" is the tangent to a great circle on the Earth sphere. we can convert to 2D now. Lets project everything onto the line that runs through the horizon so that distances are relative (what we see with perspective). This is the also the ry axis of the model. I've labelled 3 points (w1,w2,w3) as windmill base, platform and height respectively. As the windmill moves farther away on the circle I've drawn an example of how the points move. We then project these back onto ry from the perspective of the viewer (the star) who is 'a' metres from the horizon line. That is just scale it according to how far away the point is. Earth Radius is just R. The angle 't' that a windmill on the surface of the earth subtends to the horizon line is simply distance from horizon/R. I have two vectors rx and ry for the x and y of the model. This doesn't need dot or cross products as rx and ry are orthogonal and I've chosen ry for the projection to make it ultra simple.

Here are results for an observer 10km from the horizon. You can work out how far you are from the horizon from your elevation (D). And can work out the physical drop like this:

D = R(1-cos(a/R))

But this is not projected. For projected results you get this. Yellow is the apparent/relative top of an 80m wind turbine as it moves away from the horizon. The y-axis is just for relative measure. Magenta the platform and blue the base.

What is interesting is that in the picture the turbines appear to be dropping over the horizon at a constant rate. If you work it out the turbine platforms lose 2m as they move each step away. They have already lost 10m by the 1st turbine. Can work this out cos the platform should be 20% of the overall height so you can see how much is missing. And a turbine stands 80m out of the water. While the tops of the turbines appear to drop very unlinearly due to perspective the platform appears much more linear and by the time it is approaching disappearing over the horizon at 14km its looks almost linear.

The Rampion Offshore Wind Farm is massive. It is over 10km from the coast and is almost 10km wide. I don't have any data however on which part I photographed. I need to go back and get an accurate photo.  

 In the photo it looks like the next turbine will have its platform on the horizon so from the model can say that it is 14km from the horizon so that is 24km from land.

This model looks much more promising than the Flat Earth model which suggests the turbines would just get smaller as they went into the distance and we would be able to see their bases in the water as far out as we could see. Clearly in this photo you cannot see the bases in the water: they all appear to rise from the horizon. And the platforms drop to meet the horizon so they are clearly "over the horizon."

There may however be other ingenious models that I have not considered to explain this behaviour. Perhaps a new Copernican revolution is yet to happen. Certainly physicists talk of the world being in 11 dimensions not 3 so we don't really understand the full geometry of the Earth. Plus it is fractal so has no clear surface. But for the purposes of simple observations like this the Round Earth does seem to be a satisfactory model.

America is a global dictatorship.

9/11 was an attack on America. War on Terror was US policy. Yet 88% of those who laid down their lives for War on Terror were non Americans who couldn't vote. When you die for a regime that won't let you vote that is dictatorship.

Deaths directly caused by War on Terror