Quick review of Self, Individual, Subject/Object, Reflexivity

So in West we have got ourselves in a bit of a mix up.

We have Science which seeks to find the "universal truth" this is true for everyone. This links to ideas of Democracy, Law, Rights and Freedom. There is a universal Law that applies to everyone. This is also the Public realm. This is the realm favoured by Socialists.

Then we have Individualism, Private, Relativity and Subjectivity which bestows ultimate weight to private, personal and individual experiences. This is the realm favoured by Capitalists and Romantics who place their own wealth, feelings, experiences above the Universal. Libertarians and Libertines favour this side too. Anarchists too.

Art falls into a complex relationship. Some say the artists is trying to express their private feelings and thoughts, but if they are that private then what use are they to other people? The artist must be expressing something universal to make it of anything other than private temporary value.

There is an unhappy marriage where Private world reigns until the individual encroaches upon the "rights of another individual" where upon the Universal must be invoked.

There is a 3rd option between Universal and Solipsistic and that is Interpersonal. The interpersonal is a Universal that exists between individuals. It does not then exclude the possibility of other groups having their own Universal, but it does exclude the possibility of private individuals hijacking the Universal and claiming it for themselves. This embodies the true dialectical complexity of Individual and Group, that neither exists without the other and that both are interdependent. Groups are made of individuals who then recognised the individuals within the Groups. And likewise Universal is recognised by the individuals within the group...  

What has been raised in this blog this year is something very obvious but not widely recognised. The self we are talking is not a thing along side other things, it is the special relationship a self has with itself. It is this bizarre thing which makes an individual see themselves as more special than another individual.

It is none other than narcissism. When we consider ourselves we are caught like Narcissus by our reflection. Unlike other people's reflection, the reflection of our self raises this interesting thought called "self". But the "self" thought is really triggered not by a thing called self, but by the relationship between our self and our self. Its not the reflection that matters to Narcissus, everything has a reflection, but that this reflection if of the person who is seeing. It is this self-relationship that is the basis of ALL Western ideas. And what we will show eventually is that this self-relationship is nothing. Just like the reflection itself which is just a mirage on water, the relationship of that to itself is even more phantasmagorical.

But just for now its worth just identifying this self-relationship being the object of fascination in the West and not our actual self.

To make that a bit clearer. Lots of people know me. But only one of them IS me. So me is not the point, its the relationship between me and myself that is the basis of EVERYTHING in the West. Its the root of the Religion here. Where G-d once stood now stands and equally improbable and imaginary self.

Just as Nietzsche said "God is Dead" I now proclaim that "I am Dead."

And in that seeming (but not) contradiction I'll leave this.

==

Having added the section on Interpersonal the reflections of Narcissus become all the more complex. And this related to SRH. Quick recap: SRH was just the name given to a number of problems I noticed with self reference, that there seemed to be a Law of dependency that limited the "freedom" of a system that was self referential. For instance like M.C.Escher type drawings, the foundations of a castle cannot be upon that castle. Things MUST be founded upon things that are not themselves. SRH and the impossibility of self-foundation should be a warning to Narcissus. When he sees his reflection he gets that sudden "wow" moment as he realises that the reflection of not of a stranger but of the person who is seeing it. Most animals fail this test and always think their reflection is a stranger. But for some animals and humans they can get the "wow" and combine the object that they see (the objective) and the person doing the seeing (the subjective) in a new thought The SelfConscious Self. In Hegelian Dialectics this is a moment of Aufhebung where a new synthesis unifies the seeming contradictions of Object and Subject. Its a tremendous moment for the mind. But it comes with risks.

Looking into the eyes of the "seer" as we gaze into a mirror we enter a loop. I am seeing, and what I am seeing is I. The object of seeing is the seer. It appears self sufficient. As lomng as I gaze upon myself I have no need for the rest of the universe. The object is proof that I exist, and that I am seeing it is proof that I exist. As object of my own gaze I am solid and existing. I can reflect upon that being and see it as myself, and that being embodies the consciousness and awareness that is reflecting. Its a perfect thing to take home and cherish. The Self.

But Narcissus should consider Descartes. What if Descartes Demon was making up the reflection. We can do that these days. Consider being in 3D virtual reality with your avatar. When you get to a "mirror" and look you see a "reflection" of your avatar, perfectly rendered to look like you. You stare into the eyes and your avatar looks at you. You look away and your avatar looks away. You stare back into the reflected eyes of your avatar and start to pursue the realisation that the avatar really is you, what you are looking at is the thing that is doing the looking. Yet its not even a thing, it's just pixels on a screen constructed from data in a GPU and using input data from eye trackers in a headset. Yet its enough to trigger the self-reflexive thoughts about "me" having the ability to see, and so I start to think about myself as a real entity. Then it becomes Descartes, but instead of a mirror, we are using the existence of thoughts (rather than reflections) to deduce the presence of a thinker (or seer).

I guess what is central to this mirror illusion is the coincidence between what I see and what I do. When I move my eyes left, the reflection goes left, and when I look into my eyes the eyes of the reflection look directly at me. Its this way in which the reflection copies me which leads me to think it "IS" me. Its obviously just a flat reflection. I add the fact it is "me" with some creative imagination. Just as Descartes added the fact those thoughts belong to some "I" with some creative imagination. But it does trigger this idea of "self" and, as analysed already, what is critical about self is not the self itself-- everyone has one of those--its the relationship of the this self to itself. The picking myself out of a photo moment. Its an interesting moment to pick our self out of a photo, or have someone call our name, or have someone love us and no one else, but it has no ontological value. That is to say we are not finding anything new in this moment. We already know there are people on this planet, and we know we are a person so one of them is us. No big deal. When we get to know our self it is the same as getting to know anyone. The feeling that there is some deep thing to discover within our self, or that our self is special, or that this relationship we have with our self will ever grow fruit: all these beliefs are what keep Narcissus staring at his flat empty reflection in the pool. We can see he is wasting his time staring at the water, but in his mind a kaleidoscope of self-reflections open up a well of possibility that he will eventually realise once he falls in is bottomless, dark and empty. Like so many illusions it is fascinating, but its fake.

And this is the essence of what has ended up being called "Good." There is no such thing as good, all there is, is the empty, pointless pursuit of self. People like Narcissus who waste their time on their reflections become a bore to other people and become dysfunctional because their world revolves around this fake bottomless dark well. Perhaps such people can share time because at least they understand the fascination of each others dark wells, but ultimately they are just sharing wasted empty time revolving around a mirage. When you see what is called "evil" there are always 2 sides. There is the negative impulse--perhaps anger and hatred, or greed, or lust-- but then it is always married to self-interest to become evil. Many people get angry and what to hurt someone else, but they are not so obsessed with themselves and so they simply ignore themselves for not being helpful and let the anger go. But for Narcissus there is only the self, so when it gets angry it appears to consume the whole world. Given that you can see why when things are going well Narcissus is happy because his success and joy fills the whole world. The reflection is young, heathy, beautiful, happy, successful the world is a good place. But if anything happens to that reflection the whole world changes. Obvious nonsense, it doesn't even matter if we die in reality: every day 70,000,000 people die, but in Narcissus' world of 1 that death becomes everything. And this is the whole danger of this self illusion, and the way it so easily gets trapped in a relationship of just one between itself and itself.

Fixed Points and Cycles

Stealing a frame from 3blue1brown's video which points out that each region of the set has its own properties. In the case highlighted it cycles around 3 values. We already noticed that each region is built around a fixed point solution to an order of depth of the equation. The central cardioid is the fixed point for the 1st iteration. Values contract to a limit. The circular region is built around fixed points to the second iteration, and the system cycles between 2 values. Shown is a fixed point to the 3rd iteration and this has 3 values.

Hypothesis: the number of values the set cycles between is equal to the number of iterations of the equation the local fixed point solves. 

Racism

"Racism" as an idea has come under heavy criticism in this blog. Its just another example of people not thinking at all.

Quite a few races have people who think they are superior: Jews and Whites being the best examples. But "being better" is just nonsense in general. It all depends what metric you use. Some races on average are faster, taller, more intelligent etc but who cares anyway.

The real issue of race comes down to territory. And this is where the nonsense really kicks off.

So they say that all people came from Africa. Some races want to believe they are different and have their own origins. It doesn't really matter, the point is people have migrated over time. The Chinese say never die in the village you were born. We move.

The point becomes problematic when people start to "belong" and be "defined" by a place. In the UK we have the ridiculous situation of lots of people who are born in UK, who are British who would join the army and fight for their country, take part in Olympic games under the British flag and yet call themselves African or Indian or Chinese. How can someone who calls England their home be Chinese? Its actually impossible. What does it mean?

Now the real nonsense starts. They may say "I look Chinese." What! You look like a country? They mean the people from this country look like this. Which means even some Chinese think they are not from England and then quite rightly the English say well why not go home? Its not a nasty question its just a fact. Someone who thinks they are "Chinese" belongs in China. Now they may say I want to be British in which case why this "I am Chinese" stuff, just forget about China it far way and irrelevant to you.

So they may have the habit of eating with chop sticks while the broad custom in UK is to use a knife and fork. Well just see how that goes. Pointless trying to buy chop sticks in a UK supermarket, the person who wants chopsticks is just going to have to get knife and fork. Not difficult. Now they may really be accustomed to chop sticks and perhaps start up a trade in chop sticks. It won't do very well not may people use them. Perhaps they will start a massive advertising campaign to change UK customs. But then they will face the same resistance that they have to using a knife and fork but it will be larger and in reverse. Its easier just to use knife and fork. After all that is what all UK people have to learn to do. Now its possible that UK customs will change to chop stick but it takes centuries for things like this to happen. For the immigrant its easier to change themselves, after all they do live in a different country now no point in pretending they do not. So what is the point of talking out China it makes no sense if they want to live in UK.

To put that another way an immigrant who DOES NOT want to change needs to recognise the other half of this that the communities of that country are NOT going to accept them with EQUAL FORCE. Its a give and take situation. Why, the locals will argue, should we change to accept this person if they will not change to accept us. Newton's 3rd Law of motion, and we are talking about people's motion here. And once the locals of any country start to see a resistant people turning up who do not care for their customs and ways of life then you are going to see the spread of hostility. And when people turn up who are obsessed with their own countries and identify with them, it will only encourage the locals to become obsessed with their country and identity more strongly with it. In UK the local people are normally blamed with racism, but actually the immigrants must be EQUALLY racist. SO what is called "racism" actually starts with immigrants not making the transition to their new country and trying to hold on their old identity. This fuels the locals to do the same and division and distrust starts. There is a calculus of human psychology here no-one and everyone is to blame.

But then you get the nomadic people like the Bedouin, Gypsies or Jews who have no land. For true nomads they have no fixed location or identity from the land, their tribe is within. The Jews claim to be wandering like Moses but really they have formed territories before but for whatever reason they have always been enslaved or invaded. And G-d promised them the land of Israel which seems to have been a place in the Bible. Everything would be fine, but the Jews it seems are a bit two faced. On one hand they say they have no desire for physical land, but on the other they have Zionism. I think Anti-Jews have been primarily motivated by a fear of Zionism. And this morphed into Anti-Communism which is essentially the same. The fear from people who have a land is that the Jews (or anyone) will undermine their country and society and take it over. This is exactly what the Americans thought of Communism and its an idea that is identical to National Socialism. The Russian Revolution was closely linked to Jewish communities in Russia. Marx was a Jew. Now quite where you draw the line between a reasonable fear of sedition and treachery and actual racial prejudice is difficult. But Zionism in the 19th and 20th Century certainly did nothing to help the Jewish cause. Which is ironic since now The Holocaust is used to justify Zionism, despite Zionism starting decades before Nazism ever existed.

So there is a mess. People make no sense. No one wants to think about it. Everyone else is to blame. And as a result nothing really improves and everyone is confused. I suppose just through sheer necessity all people will one day start to actually think about this subject, rather than just use it to leverage power against other races like currently happens.

===

So what is the solution? if I do some thinking. There are a few options:

(1) People are not allowed to identify with countries. This means that there are no English, Chinese, Indians, Africans. No Black or White. Everyone must treat each other as human beings and equals. Picking out ethnic regional features becomes a hate crime. So an African calling themselves African or Black is actually a hate crime because it implies they are different from someone who is White and English. And once these divisions occur then people are inclined to not see each other as equals. An African Black is more likely to feel affinity for another African Black and less for an White English. That is a hate crime when based upon ethnic regional differences. It doesn't mean we have to like everyone, but if you like someone just because they share your ethnic features or come from your country that is pure hate of others.

(2) This seems a shame. People do have identity with their places of origin, or their ethnic tribes and characteristics. In UK we have the MOBO awards which celebrate music of Black origin. This is entirely Racist as it excludes music of White origin on pure racial grounds. But it seems harsh to ban the MOBO awards. But it does then mean we needs a MOWO awards that celebrates music of White Origin. And it means that England is celebrated as a White country and people who are not White in the UK know that they are immigrants from countries like China and India and Africa. I believe this is really what everyone wants. Blacks love to celebrate their Blackness and Whites love to celebrate their Whiteness. But as we have seen in history this can lead to problems. England is a White country and Black are immigrants. And it is quite right that many Blacks actually feel more affinity for Africa than they do UK. So what they really feel in their heart is that Africa is home. So when a White person says "Go Home" they know perfectly well what it means, it means listen to your heart. The mistake the White person may make is to think that all Black people feel strong affinity for Africa. But this is the mistake that MOBO awards make that plenty of Black people make White music and your skin colour actually has nothing to do with the music you make or like. Soul music is often thought by Blacks to be Black music but what nonsense is this. Music can't have a colour and anyone can learn any music. "Blacks have rhythm" is actually a racist thing to say, but many Blacks themselves effectively believe and promote this racial stereotype. Its going to be a long and tough struggle when everyone is as racist as everyone else. Hard for a Black to appeal to "racism" when they to their core are as racist as the next person. "Racism" is nonsense there is no such thing. If we want to freedom to respect racial and ethnic differences them immigrants must also acknowledge that they are immigrants in a country that does things differently. If something is Black and African then something is White and English. And if you live in England then you live in a White country. There are two sides to everything.

So in summary there are 2 ways to go about this. (1) is to focus on equality and ban the promotion of racial and ethnic differences. This means MOBO Awards get banned. Music is just music and everyone can appreciate everyone's music without reference to anything ethnic or racial. The music of England is just the music of the people in England it is no longer African or Welsh or Classical. But the moment people want to appeal to ethnicity or region then unfortunately White England becomes a feature too and immigrants become different from their mother country. If they are happy to accept that they are foreigners with a different culture from another place then this makes sense, but the moment that people from other countries and cultures want to someone think that this is more important than the country and culture they live in then there is going to be obvious friction. Why the local people will argue should be accept you if you will not accept us. I think this is essentially the problem the Jews have. They think its fine to move to a country and just set up little Judah without any reference to the land in which they settle. But the local people will say if you do not have any respect or regard for and our ways of life then why should we respect Judah?

This is actually an act of war. When an invading people seek to bulldoze the local people out of the way and just replace them with their own world view they will meet extremely strong armed resistance. This is war. Normally when you immigrate to a country you engage in a complex interaction with the local people which changes you and them. Everyone plays the game, everyone respects everyone, everyone is interested in everyone, everyone cooperates. But the moment an immigrant groups refuses to change or interact then they will be repelled. Again if you won't change then why should we. So the resistance the Jews always experience is really just  reflection of the intensity and stubbornness of their own identity. Its been such a problem of the centuries that the only solution the Zionists can think of is just to isolate themselves in a country and kick out everyone else. Not an unfamiliar solution if we look at what the Nazis tried to do.

So really the only way forward is for everyone to have a bit more respect for everyone else. Not cry "racism" the first time anyone stereotypes you negatively. If everyone who thinks they've experienced racism is honest they will realise that this just reflects their own strong attachment to their own identity and their secret rejection of other people. If you reject other people, they will reject you. You may think its harmless to lock yourself away in some community but that rejection of other people is the seed from which your persecution will come. It's quite logical. You reject other people, they will reject you. A community is a complex thing requiring give and take.

I'm not sure the current climate here in UK is really improving things. All I can see is people becoming ever more obsessed about their racial and ethnic identity. One day this is going to extend to the White English majority and when they start making programs about Whites and the English I think the immigrants are going to start to feel very disempowered and regret their obsession with their difference.

 

Cryptocurrency is Capitalism and so suffers from the same problems as Capitalism

https://insights.glassnode.com/bitcoin-supply-distribution/?fbclid=IwAR0C6lvTv8sgDQpd7gOp-5bz3Iv-Zlkz0qZswJ72NgJLPtC6SMFbsIvtsIw

Crypto currency is much touted as the saviour of the masses rescuing them from the corrupt elite banking system but unfortunately it works by free market and so obey Pareto Distribution (80:20 rule) and so is inherently unequal and unfair. In Bitcoin in Feb 2021 2% controlled 71.5% meaning 98% squabble over the remaining 28.5%. And this will just get worse and worse cos the shrimps are most likely to need their money and so sell, and the humpbacks most likely to have gained spare cash and so invest. Whatever the benefits of Crypto they are being reaped by the wealthy. One day people will realise that the problem is Capitalism itself and Adam Smith was the Prophet of the most evil system ever launched on the human race.

Mandelbrot Fixed points, Non-Self and Poverty

Have I never blogged on this before?

Firstly what have fixed points to do with poverty? It's to do with Self. It is hypothesised that the experience of "self" is an artefact that occurs when the brain tries to process its own output. At the singularity you have Descartes and similar meditations where the direct output like "thoughts" or even "consciousness" is being taken as input. It is quite an illusion even the great Descartes took the self to be a real thing.

I struggle with Heiddeggar's Dasein. For him "mineness" and "thereness" are essential features of Dasein. There is truth to this, but we must be careful not to go too far and instate a "self" that is "me" and "here." "Thereness" suggests, if we are not careful, that there is something "here." And "mineness" suggests, if we are not careful, that there is an owner or a thinker or doer-- the same mistake made by Descartes.

The truth is that we don't need to add anything to the world it is exactly as it already is. The whole problem with Western Civilisation is that it feels the need to "add" something. That something is a mistake.

This is most obvious when we think about our own death. For me the essence of the mistake is the sense that death "takes us away from the party." We think "oh no when I die I never get to see the world again, I must say good bye to everyone, and I will never get to see or enjoy all the things I look forward to in the future." He's a silly example. I want to see Halley's Comet but there is a good chance I will die before it comes around again. In this sense Death will rob me of seeing Halley's Comet. But this is the essence of the mistake that the "mental fixed point" creates. If we look very carefully where am I? So we can study Buddhism and we can intellectually understand that there is no self - I mean point at it? Its no where. And yet the mystery thing still owns everything. It owns that realisation, it owns qualities like its a success or a failure, it owns memories and experiences and it even owns its consciousness. In Buddhism the phantom thing its even looking forward to getting Enlightened! What a ridiculous dream that is. How can something that doesn't exist get enlightened! And even when we think great I understand that I don't exist am I enlightened yet, we are still looking to own. The whole world is illuminated by this lighthouse of shines from "My Self." But look again the light doesn't come from the lighthouse: it comes from the World (sort of - that doesn't produce light either but 1st things first). There is no need to invent a Private Personal Lighthouse to illuminate the world, it just does it all by itself. It is not ours. There is no need for a Self! Its an illusion that comes from fixed points. So Death robs us of nothing cos nothing was owned in the first place. And my future and the things I look forward to that will never happen when I die were never mine in the first place. There is no loss, because there was never anyone gaining. We firmly just let the world be without adding anything. All those monuments, and gravestones to people as though "someone" was actually lost are a mistake. Indeed the person is no longer with us, but there is no "loss." That sense of loss comes from a fixation on a fixed point. The fixed points of self is not just ours, but we project onto other people too. We think inside them is an unchanging singularity that fixes them in the world, around which their world rotates. An absolute point by which space and time are measured relative to them. Its an illusion created by fixed points.

And what has that to do with poverty and this blog. Well if there is no one to own anything then there is no such thing as wealth and poverty. There is just the world. 

And so to Mandelbrot fixed points. A quick rendition of the famous set. C -> C^2+P where C and P are complex numbers (a+b i) with P being a constant which becomes the position in the 2D array of the set. Black are points which are stable or remain finite, and the colours are the number of cycles taken for C to explode out beyond 2.

If we initialise C=P then the 1st order fixed point solves: P= P^2+P. In other words simply the root of P^2=0.
If we expand this:
a^2 - b^2 + 2 a b i
So the root solves the system: {a= a^2 - b^2, b=2ab} which has just one value (0,0).
Indeed b=ai also solves this but we want only real values.
Now 2nd Order solves (iterating 1ce) gives a second Fixed point at (-1, 0).
3rd Order ((P^2+P)^2+P)^2+P=P:

(0, 0), (-1.75488, 0), (-0.122561, -0.744862), (-0.122561, 0.744862)

Here are the 5 fixed points found so far up to Order 3 circled in white.

As can be seen there is a bifurcation with each iteration. It is a bifurcation because this is a square function and so the root proliferate by an order of 2. The fixed points are the stable points. I wonder if this root finding exercise was continued to infinity it would find all the points in the set (the black points).

All the real roots/fixed points of the Mandelbrot 6th iteration. Solving the equation:

(((((a + b i)^2 + (a + b i))^2 + (a + b i))^2 + (a + b i))^2 + (a + b i))^2 + (a + b i) == 0

But what everyone is most interested in, cos of the pretty patterns, is the behaviour of the points that are unstable and escape to infinity (the coloured points). There is continuous behaviour here as they seem linked by contours of same escape value (the bands) that orbit the fixed points. I'll just note here that these patterns are created around the fixed points and the need to obey the fixed points is what gives fractals their structure. And so I hypothesis it is with much more complex dynamic systems like the brain. The fixed points that occur when self-reflecting provide the structure around which thought and human experience orbit. But they are just artefacts of a dynamic system. And that gives us an insight into not taking them so seriously. Things like the fixed point of self are just artefacts they are not fundamental. 

 

The Future of Bitcoin: the "Poverty Ratchet"

 In zoology and population genetics its a well established fact that small populations are much more vulnerable to extinction than large populations. Its a simple feature of resilience that large populations can survive a much larger mortality event, or crisis than small populations. A large population after all is just a collection of smaller populations and so to make it extinct a number of small populations must go exist. And this ignores any emergent properties from those smaller groups interacting.

And so it is with Bitcoin. The poor are much more likely to go bankrupt in life and need to sell those bitcoin than the rich. And the rich have much more disposable income to invest than the poor and so on average will be the ones who buy up bitcoin. And so, as in Capitalism, as time progresses simply by the laws of probability the wealthy will end up owning all the bitcoin. The only bitcoin held by the poor will be that small, highly volatile subset of bitcoin that are changing hands.

The principles of Capitalism destroy everything and create inequality and poverty in its wake no matter what vehicle is traded.

I'll call this the "Poverty Ratchet."

Halting Problem and SRH are related

Suppose you write this recursive program:

bool DetermineSomeThing(int input) {

    if DetermineSomeThing(input) return false;

    return true;

}

It's a contradiction like "I am false." But importantly it also doesn't halt. The reason it doesn't halt is that it is defined in terms of itself for all calls.

In this case: 

bool DetermineSomeThing(int input) {

    if input == 0 return true;

    if DetermineSomeThing(input-1) return false;

    return true;

}

This will eventually return a value (I'm guessing true if input was even and false if it was odd) because the recursion scans through the intergers and it doesn't recurse for the value 0.

But if all values are deterkined in terms of itself you have an infinite loop and it doesn't halt.

The SRH has a problem with things determined in terms of themselves. Now apparently such hermeneutic circles are not catastrophic. The standard definition of integers begins with the integer '0'. So given an integer you can construct the rest. So actually it doesn't define what an "integer" is only the sequence. And in meaning in general there are no fixed starting points or foundations, you work backwards and deduce starting points from your already embedded position within the system. Being inside a loop or system is not catastrophic, so that to make any move you must use the system you already have.

But under circumstances like above it is catastrophic and you never get out of the system. It never halts.

Now Turing has already proved that there is no fixed way of determining whether a functions halts. If there was you could it to create a contradiction. If Halting maps to SRH then perhaps there is no way to determine if SRH applies or not! You can never tell in advance whether a particular application of self reference will create contradiction. In other words "self reference" remains an undefined bogey man that can always throw up surprises in an undetermined way!

OK quick appraisal:

Wait a second. I was trying to show that SRH is more fundamental than the Halting problem since it is with Self-Reference that the Halting proof is constructed. The contradiction supposes that an algorithm exists and then uses it to create a contradictory input to the algorithm. Since the input function knows whether it should halt or not it can be perverse and just reverse this behaviour. This is like the recursive function above that uses its own value to be perverse altho the looping in Turing proof is not causes by the recursion, it loops after making the decision.

Quick add: not all loops are recursive:

10 GOTO 10

keeps jumping to the same jump instruction. It it not looping because of logic where the result is determined in terms of itself e.g. "I am false" where re-evaluation occurs for ever. Which incidentally suggests that "I am true" should not halt either? Why should we interpret the false statement as an infinite loop and not the true version? Loosely you could say that jumping to an instruction is part of determining the result and if it jumps to the jump instruction then its saying to get the result go here, which says the same ad infinitum. It can be written as recursion:

int GetResult() {

    return GetResult()

}

But are all loops the equivalent of recursion and so self reference? Hmmm how to determine the answer to that?

Fixed Points & Fractals (yet again)

Here is the famous dynamic equation x=kx(1-x) drawn for values of k=[0,4]. The fixed point x=(k-1)/k by simple algebra is drawn in red. There is another fixed point at x = 0 which accounts for the starting part of the graph.

One way to visualise what is happening here is to see the logistic curve with the y=x line. As the dynamic system progresses the starting x value finds a y value through the function, which is then returned to the x axis which is the same as reflecting in the y=x. Using k=2 the start of the path is drawn in green. It will spiral down to the fixed point where the graph meets the y=x line.

Drawn with Desmos Calculator

When oscillating or chaotic behaviour starts it is always spiralling around the fixed point. As far as I can see (with my extremely limited knowledge of this) it is the fixed points which always set up complex dynamic behaviour.

A quick analysis of the differentials should be done as this will probably reveal the reason why certain values never find the fixed point. TODO.

Above is an analysis of the first iteration or Order 1. The Logistic equation for the second iteration is :

x = -k^2 (-1 + x) x (1 + k (-1 + x) x)

And this has 4 fixed points. The original 2 from the 1st Order and two new fixed points:

x = 0

x = (-1 + k)/k,

x = (k + k^2 - k Sqrt[-3 - 2 k + k^2])/(2 k^2)

x = (k + k^2 + k Sqrt[-3 - 2 k + k^2])/(2 k^2)

Drawn in red here:

It can be seen that the Order 3 accounts for the next 4 fixed points. Now interesting things happen after this as chaotic behaviour slips in. No idea why the dynamic system deviates from the fixed points and is unable to locate them. Note that this graph throws away the first 20 points to allow the system to stabilise before drawing.

Recent note on the fractal nature of the brain. Its an interesting analogy that the self is very much the fixed point around which our chaotic lives orbit.

Starting into our own eyes in a mirror and trying to fathom that "what we are seeing is doing the seeing" or more abstract in Descartes "what is doing the thinking is the thinking" these kinds of mental operations are just dynamic systems where the output maps at least to the input. I say "maps" because obviously you cannot see "the self" anymore than a camera can take a picture of the image within the camera, or that you cannot see light until it falls on your retina. The fact that there is "only one way" to be "in the picture" is the key to self. No one can share your experience is the key to the dynamic system. There is no leakage. Consider mirrors exactly facing one another. It is possible that a photon of light gets trapped and bounces back and forward. Being trapped between the mirrors is the experience of a human staring directly into a mirror and seeing "them self." But this "self" is a mental process deduced from the situation. A camera taking a photo of itself in a mirror does not get this experience, just the human looking at the picture so taken. Its an isomorphism that is set up in the thinking mind. What I am seeing, maps to "me." Now that thought is a dynamic system with a fixed point that is "self." Interestingly you never get to "self" it is just the fascinating possibility around which you orbit. And soon like Descartes the orbit ends, and we escape the meditation. But like Descartes we realise that we can get that same experience looking at anything as long as we set up the isomorphism. He ended up realising that he didn't need to just meditate on thoughts of doubt, but any thought would do and eventually any perception was proof of existence. He was back where he started after spinning down almost to the fixed point. I wonder whether Tat Tvam Asi is similar. The realisation that the Atman and the Brahman are the same. What you see in the mirror (the world) is the same as what is looking (the self). Certainly there is only one process really, its not like you are jumping between outside and inside when looking in a mirror there is just the way things are. But there is conserably spinning to begin with.

Now all this crazy speculation here is not seeking to discover anything!! The point is to show that all possible mental processes like this go no where. What we are really trying to do here is to let go and just see mental processes and what they are. Not seeking to come to an end point and discovery. Mankind has been thinking and discovering for millennia. There is the belief that it is all going somewhere and one day we will come face to face with God; the library will be complete and mankind will know everything. We will be complete. Existence will have laid bare all its secrets. But surly we sense the problem here, that whatever we find will just raise yet more questions. Why for instance was there a limit to knowledge at all? Thinking never ends until you end it yourself! Not that we become a corpse but we let go and let the world just be. But thinking still exists, its useful, its what our brains do, so we don't become a stone either. But we realise that the "self" at the heart of our enquiries into the world is a phantom. And the Hindu's would add that the idea of a fixed soul to the Universe is a phantom too.

Theological detail. The Hindus wouldn't say this actually, its the Buddhists. But by the time the difference is important the point has been made. 

More on Freedom from Self

 The West is a weird place. It's possible that the idea of self has existed for thousands of years but its only in the West that it has become such a dogma. Every aspect of Western life glorifies the individual. I have just argued with someone who claims that private property is freedom. Not realising that their boundary fence is also a prison. The same for self. What seems like freedom on the inside is a prison when viewed from the outside.

I had this experience in Scotland once. Within the confines of the Lord Castle it looks like paradise. But then you leave their grounds and walk into the wilderness and looking back from the hills what they have seems so small and irrelevant within the landscape and the walls of their paradise are just a prison. 

Well so it is for the self. Have been thinking some more on this. So attached are we to the self that we can't conceive of ever being without it. Its very easy to read things on the non essential nature of self, the fact that we can live without it, and still not quite identify what they are talking about. What is this non-essential part of us that we are so welded to that we overlook it all the time, and confuse it with the essential? As argued before its actually all that stuff that has our name attached, the stuff we "think" is us that is actually not us.

I realise that we can read the 1st Chapter of the Shurangama Sutra and start to gain non attachment from the objects of mind and yet it remains "my mind." The weird thing for beings attached to self is not so much where we are in the universe, but that we are not! And that "not" is not oblivion and darkness bur rather we are "no where." We always try to anchor our self in the world. Perhaps this arm is mine, or these fingers that do the typing, or perhaps these words, or these ideas. Or perhaps this computer. We go searching everywhere in a massive cosmic game of pin the tail on the donkey. Yet why are we playing this game. Why does anything need to be mine or me?

It's Descartes all over again. Descartes observed the contradiction in thinking there are no thoughts. That is a thought and so contradicts itself. René Magritte did the same in a picture, although its very telling he needed to add text to his picture to cause contradiction. You cannot paint a contradiction, its purely a textual thing!

But Descartes at no point needed to mention the "self." There was no need to own those thoughts and claim that "he was thinking" nor that "he existed." As Bertrand Russell commented he need only have said "there are thoughts."

Now I don't think Russell realised the full significance of what he was saying there. All we can ever say is "there is x." At no time do we ever need to invoke a self! And that's the bizarre thing, we can live our whole life without ever "sticking the tail on the donkey" in this world in fact donkey's don't have tails. Humans do not have selves! There are humans, there are individuals, there is everything but a self. And its not like the donkey even notices whether you pin the tail on or not. Its completely extraneous.

Tho actually we do notice when we pin a self. Life starts to become very difficult as we look at everything from inside the "mothership" of self. This mothership of a body becomes "us" and suddenly everything that happens happens to "us" and everything becomes really personal. And we respond by being very "personal" to other people cos they are now different from us. We try and stick tails everywhere. You did this; I did that. This is yours; that is mine etc etc. But we can live without sticking  a tail on.

This is most obvious when we consider death. Death will happen, that is a fact. But what we next want to know is when I will die. This is because I have a tail pinned on this body and what happens to it happens to me. But actually this body will die like all other bodies and that is just a fact. It has no great significance that it is my body that dies or whether it is another.

This is why morality occurs. When we have no tail pinned on then we treat all people equally and we are no longer biased to our self. To outsiders this looks like morality. But to those free from self its just obvious.

There is all kinds of metaphysics to try and tie us to the body. Belief in Souls that somehow inhabit bodies and make them me. But then even if this is true, why is that Soul mine? Its just another soul like all the others.

The root problem explained in previous posts is reflexivity. A self appears to be more interested in its reflection than in other selves. That reflection of a self back to itself seems to create a special type of attachment. We are all vulnerable to this narcissism. But actually when we see our reflection it is just another person, there is nothing special just because we are reflecting back to our self. It is true that only I can look into my eyes in a mirror and think that is me looking back. This is true, this makes me unique to myself. But this is like a fixed point in maths. Given that people have eyes and can see each other, and given that mirrors enable us to see reflections of anyone then it follows that we MUST be able to see our self. It would be a very weird world if we couldn't. And indeed sometimes we do look at our self. But like Descartes thinking his thoughts of doubt this does not need to involve a self. When we look at our self we are just using eyes to see a person who happens to be us. It could be anyone it just happens to be us now. There is no need to invoke a self. No need to try and own anything in this situation. Just see it for what it is, someone seeing another person who happens to be them self. It could just as easily be someone else.

It's important to see the trick that happens here. There is nothing different between looking at our self and seeing someone else. In both cases we are just looking at people with their own internal worlds and lives. Just in one case it is us, and in the other case it is someone else. Yet that is just the difference between a camera photographing itself in a mirror or another camera, there is no magic or anything special here. Or if there is magic it is true whether we look at our self or another. This very much is the magic of Love. When we Love someone we start to see them with the same fascination that we see our self. They become us in the mirror.

I wanted to add something here on suicide. When you up anchors and stop trying to own things in the world and try to find our self our there. When we are happy with just seeing everything as it is, without trying to add selves to it then the world becomes fundamentally simple. Whatever happens just happens. We no longer have thoughts like "this doesn't happen to other people", or "that is unfair", or "I can't take this any more", or "I don't deserve this", or "I hate myself" etc we may feel unhappy, disappointed, depressed, unable to cope, overwhelmed, alienated, abandoned, unloved, hopeless or anything but its just there its not "ours." Things happen both good and bad, but since they are not ours we don't have to push them away. They are no where near us because we never put a "tail on the donkey." If we are no where then how can anything ever get close to us? But for that matter how can anything be far away from us. Things just are. This is what Buddha is trying to say to Ananda that identifying with "things" in this world steals us from our true place in the world, which is just to not get involved and not go looking for our self anywhere in the world. So what is there to run from? And what is there to run towards? We are no where! So what does the suicider hope to achieve? They are already going nowhere so suicide actually changes nothing. But suicide does suggest that the person got embedded in the world and got confused that they were a thing and existed, when in fact they should have just let go and not owned what was happening to them. Imagine it is happening to someone else to start with and that you are free is very close to the truth already. Then realise that trying to pin the tail on other people is also a mistake so that neither you not anyone else owns anything and all are free already! That appears to be the right way to see these things. Then good and bad things become the same: just experiences that sail past as we watch them from the safety of shore.

I've heard people describe the experiences of the mind like watching a movie from the safety of the cinema and I've never liked this because it suggests a hiding and removal from the world, like recluses or people who get stuck in habitual lives cos they are too afraid or can't be bothered to engage with life and try something new. But this is what happens if we try and take the self out of the world. The self doesn't get to the safety of a cinema, the other shore (Gate, Gate, Paragate, Parasamgate) or a heaven, it doesn't hide: rather we step outside the self, there is no self there in the first place! We give up on self. That is the other shore, it is the realising that the ocean is the world with a self pinned on it. Unpin and the world becomes the other shore!

In Buddhism they say that the Bodhisattva looks forward to difficulties in life because these are the best ways to learn. How do we really know whether we have taken up the anchor of self and set ourselves free if the world doesn't turn unpleasant. A pleasant world is the kind that encourages us to own it, we want to be part of it, we like it, we are happy to settle and start to take up ownership of things. All goes well until the storm blows and our world gets shaken. Then we wish we hadn't taken up ownership so permanently. A skilful can let what is going go without struggle. But the tightly bound who believe in self, they struggle and this is suffering. (That said its a fine dividing line: no wise person goes looking for trouble, they just embrace what comes and see the value in difficulties.) 

Perhaps the storm blows so hard that we cannot think, we lose direction, we get confused and we just want it to stop. It has blown so long we forgot what it was like before. On one hand this is the perfect time to learn to let go, but if we are confused and emotions are stirring our brain we won't be able to see this so clearly. But struggle tho we may, the truth is trying to get in and uproot our attachment to the world. We are trying to be taught the lesson to let go and realise we don't own anything here, we need to disown this world and step out of the vehicle of self. It's no where else either is what is confusing, we are not stepping from one world to another, but just not trying to stand at all. We don't need to stand to exist, we already exist and we can abandon standing. Let bodies do the stand that is what they do. We don't need to do that. Let things be what they are. Let all struggles take care of themselves. None of it is ours!

What is the point of pay rises?

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/tory-mp-salary-peter-bottomley-b1933668.html

Here is one of the great mysteries of the world. What is the use of a pay rise? It's an established psychological fact that money only works to bribe manual labourers. People who work in creative fields that require their brain do not respond to pay rises.

Surely after a pay rise you get the same money for less work, so you are inclined to do less work?

It got me thinking: what is the point of pay rises for non manual labourers. Answer: there is none!

Never-the-less lots of people like pay rises: can they explain why? My best guess goes to the heart of conditional/relative human existence. We only want a pay rise so we can be better than our neighbours, and they the same so it enters into an arms race. One of the oldest pieces of text (~3000BC) is a cuneiform letter from wife to husband complaining that the neighbours have just put up and extension, so where is theirs? That's the real reason for pay rises. But how sad are these people to be defined in relation to their neighbours rather than by what they really want. On that account they should not be given pay rises and the public system should get the money for democratic collective spending to avoid me vs them time wasting.

High-level cognition during story listening is reflected in high-order dynamic correlations in neural activity patterns

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-25876-x

Fractal dimension of brain scans increases when creating meaning! What amazing research. Have my own thinking on this. So fractals are created when you have systems that work upon themselves and that implies fixed-points too. Fractals build up around fixed points. Now totally crazy speculation but what is thinking other than running internal models against themselves. And the holy grail of thinking is the concept of Self where we try to process ourselves. And at its limit the self-existing self independent of outside input "I think therefore I am." I've reckoned for a while that Self might represent the fixed point of thinking, perfectly introverted brain processing a la Descartes. Get volunteers to think Descartes should get the highest order fractals... altho its also meaningless! And what is the practice of meditation other than undoing all this. Fractal dimension of people in jhana next please.

Has North America really done "better" than South America?

Niall Fergusson essentially says that the North did better cos it adopted the Hegemonic View. 

"The reason North America’s ex-colonies did so much better than South America’s was because British settlers established a completely different system of property rights and political representation in the North from those built by Spaniards and Portuguese in the South. (The North was an ‘open access order’, rather than a closed one run in the interests of rent-seeking, exclusive elites.)"

https://www.msnbc.com/morning-joe/excerpt-niall-fergusons-msna37090

I've argued at length in this blog that the Hegemonic view did not prevail cos it was better but quite obviously on the back of global warfare where the West fought virtually every people on Earth to impose its view. After gaining control of the oceans and all trade routes the UK was able to command every people on Earth. Unfortunately we will never know what would have happened had the Spanish or Portuguese won the Imperial Wars. Surely had the Spanish or Portuguese controlled world trade South America would have done better than North?

But that aside another huge difference between North America and South America is the genocide. North Americans cleared the native humans off the land, killing the majority and pushing the remaining ones into reservations. In contrast in the South the natives were allowed to continue living their traditional ways of of life. Contrary to Niall Fergusons entirely Hegemonic view South America is the success from the perspective of the original inhabitants. Europeans Property rights did not drive them off the land and did not lead to their almost complete extermination in an American Holocaust.

So we know that both North America and South American native populations suffered heavily from the import of European diseases but clearly not enough because in the North the settlers began a long and difficult campaign to remove them entirely. Washington at one point was offering $1 per scalp to encourage people to kill Indians. And to finally rid the plains of Indians, Buffalo Bill almost completely eradicated the buffalo on which they depended. No such Holocaust occurred in the South. As we compare Holocausts to get a sense of the gravity, it is worth remembering of the Nazis Holocaust that a major killer was disease also.

Very hard to calculate the scale of this Holocaust just as it is hard to do the same for the Nazis. But a random graph off the internet suggests over 95% of the global population of American Indians were exterminated by Europeans settlers in the North making it one if the worst Holocausts in Human History. To put that in some context the Nazis at most killed 63% of European Jews and far less of the global population. But worth noting the decline in American Indians was over centuries not years!

The current population of North American Indians after a huge recovery in recent decades is 6.79 million. By contrast the population of Indigenous people in South America is currently 32 million.

North America covers 24.71 km^2 while South America covers 17.84km^2. This makes South America only 3/4 the size of North America. Yet South America supports almost 5 times as many indigenous people as North America. This very much rejects Niall Fergusons assessment of the success of North America, and rather suggests that in fact South America is the success story here.

"Group Effect", Luck, Ego, Quantum, Capitalism, True Self and the First Dark Age

 "Group Effect" I'm coining for something passive and very subtle but incredibly important. Politically its picked up by Anarchists and all those opposed to property amongst others.

Consider a diamond that has been lost on a beach. The tide is coming in and there is only 2 hours to find it.

There is no way a single person could find the diamond without extraordinary luck so suppose the original owner gives up and abandons the diamond. Word gets out there is a diamond on the beach and a "gold rush" starts with people flooding down to the beach in the hope of getting lucky.

Now while each person is no more likely to get lucky than the original owner, as a group there is now a much greater chance of the diamond being recovered.

Suppose it is found by a person. They celebrate their "luck" and walk off rich.

In the West this is how we see acquisition of resources. You get lucky. I've worked in companies who "got lucky." It is true that the discoverer worked "very hard" to make the discovery but so did hundreds perhaps thousands of others. The more people in the human race who take part in these searches the more likely someone is going to make the magic discovery.

Take fusion power now. The more people who are researching it, the more likely one of them is going to find the winning formula.

Yet because of the way the West sees this, only the discoverer actually gains anything. It's named after them and under Capitalism they get the patent, they get the wealth.

This is not quite true. When Alexander Fleming discovered Penicillin in his small laboratory at St Mary's in Paddington in London (right) he gained the accolades but Mankind gained the wealth of a huge leap forward in the fight against bacteria. Everyone gained.

Yet all the other researchers who went down to the beach to help in the fight against infectious diseases don't get anything. Only the one who found it. This is a misunderstanding.

Another way to see this is in Stock Market predictions. There are tens of thousands of people making stock market predictions. Lets just make them binary predictions of up or down for this example. Completely at random half will get one prediction right. 1/4 will get 2 right. 1 in 1000 will get 10 predictions in a row right. Because of the way that media, networks and all sorts of things work that one person will rise to prominence. Blog entries referring to them will say things like: they predicted the dotcom crash and the CDO crash of 2008 and now they predict some new thing. We think that they must know what they are talking about to have got all that right. But actually it is just "group effect." 10,000 people started making predictions and 1 in 1000 are going to get 10 right quite by chance.

Once that successful person has been selected we can't look back and say they were better than the others. This only works going forward. If I say that Professor A knows what he is talking about, I am saying that going forward he will be right. The fact that he has been right 10 times before doesn't work looking backwards if he started off just one of thousands.    

This is also true with companies. We apply for a job at a company and meet the entrepreneur who in all probability thinks they are God's Gift to science and technology or whatever the company does. But like 1 hit wonder in music, they don't see the 1000s who have failed so that they can get where they get by luck. We never apply for jobs to those failures, so by definition employees always work for deluded people like this.

Another classic example is the Monkey's and Typewriters theorem. Suppose the goal is to type the first 1000 characters of the Bible. Obviously the chance that a monkey does this depends upon how many monkeys are in the room. The more that take part the more likely an individual is going to succeed. But when an individual does succeed, looking the other way, they look like a genius. That monkey gets famous for typing the opening of Genesis. Yet it is a meaningless achievement when viewed in the context of a trillion trillion trillion monkeys all typing randomly away.

A quick note from that Wiki page about the Total Library of Borges. This links to SRH. SRH says that a Total Library is impossible because the existence of such a thing would create a whole load of other meta-literature. Then the question of whether a Total Library was possible would generate a load of other meta-literature. And then meta-meta-literature would exist on the meta-literature and you have a Cantor type infinite expansion of the Total Library. It could never complete itself.

So returning to "Group Effect". From the perspective of the one who finds the diamond, or gets all those stock predictions right, or becomes successful in business: their Ego, if the individual has attached to it, might start to think they are some hotshot and get rather confident. Narcissism may take over and start attributing qualities that are not there.

Now it is possible that this is not "group effect." Perhaps they were intelligent in the search for the diamond. They interviewed the person who lost it to find out where they most probably dropped it to pick the best spot to search. They took a fine rake to comb through the sand. Perhaps they actually do understand the markets and can make good predictions. The problem for us faced with just a history and "group effect" is that we can't tell the difference. Are they really better, or are we just faced with the one out of thousands who got lucky?

Science is very particular about "Hypothesis Testing." This is to eliminate "group effect." It's no good "cherry picking" results from experiments to fit your theory after the event. You need to be up front. My hypothesis predicts that changing this one parameter will lead to a distinct result compared to control. This is like "collapsing the wave function." After the collapse we have a distinct event or "choice", we can no longer exist in a probabilistic undecided state. By "choosing a hypothesis" or choosing a diamond hunter or choosing a stock advisor we remove "group effect." We have just one individual now, one path through time and only one future. If this hypothesis or piece of financial advise turns out to be good in the future then it can only be because of our choice of hypothesis or advisor now.

But now it gets deep. We are just one of millions choosing our "future" by making choices. We think we are eliminating "group effect" and being good scientists when we chose our hypothesis before the experimental data is in. Our neighbour in the other lab gets his data first and then, when writing his paper, forms the hypothesis. We see that his hypothesis has not been tested but the journal editors don't know this. And we see that our science is superior and our hypothesis is tested. But it all goes into the network of science and becomes subject to "group effect" anyway. And most deep of all even if all scientists were good and performed proper experiments and hypothesis testing we are still like the diamond hunter who gets lucky in the crowd on the beach. We have only eliminated "group effect" from our individual studies, but we can never escape the fact we are just one of millions of researchers. Indeed it is turning out that nearly all studies in the realm of psychology are not repeatable. Have researchers just got lucky before? Okay I need to think about this bit much more...

Now the real purpose of this blog is the political/economic angle. How do you pay the monkeys or the diamond searchers?

So in the case of the diamond it is a lottery. Everyone has a chance of winning and they are prepared to lose as long as there is the chance to win. But while the chance of the group winning increases with the number of hunters, the individual gain shrinks. You turn up at the beach and no one is there and you are excited because you are the only one who can find the diamond. But you do the maths and realise you are wasting your time you will never find it. Alternatively you turn up and see the beach crawling with people and you see that while it is now going to be found there is little chance it is you who will find it and you turn away. Is it worth doing a math model of this to see whether there is an optimum number of people for a "gold rush" search (TODO)?

It is interesting as Borges points out that time and number are interchangeable. 7 people working on a searching task for a day can do the same work as a single person working for a week. Note not all tasks are like this. Any task where cooperation helps like carrying heavy things has a different type of group effect. 7 people can carry something a single person cannot so the team will be able to achieve things the individual cannot. I'll call this Active Group Effect to distinguish from purely passive probabilistic Group Effect here. In Active Group Effect the sum of the parts is greater than the parts, new qualities emerge from the joining of parts. Buddha would say that all things are actually Active Group Effect as nothing has intrinsic nature, and the nature arises from things coming together (that is "inter-depending" on each other). 

But the diamond is more complex because there is a time limit: the sea is coming in. This means that number and time are not interchangeable. If not enough people go and look no one will win. So you turn up and think its pointless: 2 hours to find a diamond, no chance. And the more people who are there the less your chances. You give up, and likely everyone gives up and the diamond is lost. The "gold rush" ends.

So the diamond loser calls the Police and offers a reward for its discovery. Same problem. No one is going to get it. But say an actuary (and note to self this model might be interesting to create when I have time) works out that 1000 people have a 75% chance of finding the diamond in 2 hours. The reward money is £10,000 so the Police offer £5 / hour for people to come search. For a load of kids that is okay pocket money so the search starts and the diamond is found.

Now in this scenario each individual is compensated for the "group effect." While it is true only one kid can get lucky, no kid is going to get lucky if the number of people searching is not big enough.

The problem I am trying to highlight here is how Capitalism does not compensate people for "group effect." All those millions of people who contribute to the search for new things who never get compensated even though they passively took part through "group effect."

This is why in fact all discoveries are really achieved by socialism and government funding. You simply cannot find the diamond on a "gold rush" mentality. People's lives are too short, the tide is coming in, and the individual chance of discovery is negligible. Equally with the market place full of researchers there is a sense that there is no point is trying, other people are already researching everything. What is needed is some form of group compensation for the effort that mankind as a whole puts into the endeavour of Life.

Thinkers like Kropotkin are very strong on this. Human discovery and advancement is not done by individuals but by the human race as a whole. We all benefit from the discovery of fire, and at some point there must have been an individual who made that first flame artificially but they did it as part of a community of thousands trying again and again over tens of thousands of years. It was a collective effort by mankind and mankind was the winner. All those years ago there was no sense of property or compensation. Those individuals who found fire did not conceive of owning it, or probably even discovering it. It just came about like monkeys on typewriters, and they could never have imagined what it was or the huge impact it would have.

A quick note on Anthropic Principle. So this is similar to passive Group Effect but with SRH wrapped in. Looking out on the universe there is a contradiction in supposing that it has properties that undermine the possibility for intelligent life. The fact that intelligent humans are here already says huge things about the universe. Another way to say this is that suppose there were infinite universes then only some of them would have intelligent life that was able to be aware of its existence, and so all those universes that could not support life must also be unknown. By irrefutable necessary definition this universe must be one of the known universes else we would not even be talking about it. And turning all that around any universe where inhabitants can formulate the Anthropic Principle must be suitable for intelligent life. So this is like the Monkeys not typing works of literature but instead creating universes perhaps by pressing buttons on Cyclotrons to perform as yet not understood quantum operations that cause big bangs in new dimensions separate from our own. Some of those monkeys will create universes with the conditions for intelligent life and so create individuals wondering how they came to exist but like the selfish Diamond Finder not acknowledging how their diamond of intelligent life really depends upon all the failed Monkey experiments where nothing occurred. So in fact Anthropic Principle does ignore "Group Effect" and the possibility that our "specialness" in this universe is linked and offset by all the universes where nothing happened, but without which we would not have happened.

Ego, Nature and True Self

And that links to the whole concept of Ego and Nature. As blogged recently the self does not exist. At which point we tend to panic because we think if I do not exist then the world is just an empty dream, like a movie and it will be switched off and the great darkness and void will take over. Or we think if I don't exit then what is the point of life, I am already dead. And we have a load of chaotic panicky thoughts and we probably give up thinking about it. But its a serious point and we need to separate the baby from the bath water.

Realising we do not exist actually does not effect things in the way we think and fear. It just means distinguishing the book of "me" from the cover. As a child I used to think books looked really exciting cos of their arty covers especially all the thrillers and things. But then you open them and its just boring black words on white paper and no pictures. This is a bit like how we look at ourselves. We like the colourful cover. This has our name on it, our family ties and who our family is, the things we have done, the memories, the things people say about us, our qualifications and achievements, our salaries, our marital status, how many children we have, and it probably included the tragedies that have befallen us which we also identify ourselves with. It is all things we can tell people about and when asked about ourselves we can say to prove we are someone and distinguish ourselves from other people.

But when you open the book its not like that at all. All this stuff is just trivial. What we really are is what is happening right "Now." It is completely different from the cover. We are the fount from which our future is springing. A common example. We think that we are a mature and reasonable person. But then that person cuts us up in the queue to the supermarket and we lose it and get angry with them. This is not the self we tell other people about, its not a self we like and we may not even recognise. We are adults we just hide it and fake some polite indifference (I am British this is how culture works here), but that side of us is there. That is the real self. Being angry is real. Faking we are not angry is just the cover.

Now we obviously don't want to become an angry person, no one is saying that. Being an angry person is going to make life hard. Fuelling that anger will make us hostile to people and negative and it will colour our outlook on life and start making us make decisions hurtful to our self and others. Perhaps I will shout at that person in the supermarket and fight for my place in the queue but really for what gain? Just 1 place in the queue and a bit of pride. But also a lot of hostility and who knows where it will go. So we do acknowledge this side of us, and we sit with it and we understand it and get to move forward with it. But that is quite different from just ignoring it and faking it cos we think we are superior to anger and the book cover doesn't have anything out it on. And importantly it is different from going the other extreme and labelling ourselves as an angry person. Basically any time we label ourselves and place a cover on the book : that is the self that does not exist. I never read Kierkegaard say this but its possible he said, "Once you label me you negate me" (he was opposed to formal statements and truth) and it would mean this: that a label is no more or less than a grave stone, something to stand next to a dead corpse meanwhile the self is living and quite of opposite of dead stone and labels. Anything that can be written on our grave stone is obviously nothing to do with us. If it can be said about a dead person then its obviously got nothing to do with being alive. And Buddha puts is more succinctly by saying "Everything is Not Self." So when we say that the self does not exist we mean that the dead labels of our "self" are really dead and do not exist.

So we struggle and say well I do exist, look I just thought something: who did that? its not your thought its my thought, see how could it happen without me? (see Descartes "I think therefore I am"). And there is some truth to this. Indeed you had a thought, and indeed I don't know what that thought is until you tell me: all this is correct. And indeed that brain of yours it generated that thought for you to see, and me having a different brain has different thoughts. All this is correct. But why put a grave stone next to all that? Why kill it by thinking "me"? Why not just let it all happen in a smooth flow of time without interrupting it with things coming from a self and going into a self like a beehive with things flying in and out. I say something to you it goes into the hive and thoughts come out like some mysterious oracle. And then you have the problem of where that beehive is: is it brain or somewhere else. And then the problem of freedom of choice and whether the beehive works deterministically by the laws of science or whether the bees just fly out from nowhere completely free. Why have a beehive with my name written across it? Why not just have the things as they are? So all those things on the cover of this book: my name, and memories and achievements all this can go in the trash bin. All this "I" is not me. If its anything it is someone else.

So that links to the "group effect" because what is it that distinguishes me from the events of the world and makes me feel like a spaceship navigating through a world of events? It is just the belief and attachment to certain things that I think are "mine." Rather than just having thought, I must believe they are mine. This is just like the diamond finder who doesn't see the group effort of thousands of diamond hunters on the beach and takes all the glory of themselves: they "own" the discovery all to themselves. This is exactly the problem of Ego. The False Self divides everything that happens into Mine and Not-Mine. So when they are successful or a failure it is all theirs. Its like runners in a race. There can be only one winner, but one person does not make a race. There must be other runners to set up the conditions for winning at all. The winner must recognise the invaluable part played by those who raced them to make it possible for them to win. Being the "best in the world" only matters if your competitors have seriously tried to win themselves. If you train for months and then win the parent's race at school the winning is not so valuable because everyone else just turned up and never made a very serious race.

The way that Capitalism and modern society only see the self and the individual in this modern Cult of Self is undoubtedly the worst development in human history and promises a very bleak future for the human race. We are seeing the emergence of the first True Dark Age.

[Pushing the boundaries of my understanding here but many ideas more clearly defined than before]