Don't Know

Just spent the weekend trying to fix some code, when as almost always I find the solution, it took so long because I was looking in the wrong place (to quote Indiana Jones).

Isn't this the NP problem. Its also Turing. Its also the whole problem of finding better algorithms, of which there are proofs. If you could do it quicker wouldn't you? Perhaps you can develop heuristics to speed up the search, like not looking in the same place twice. But it seems problems always manage to get around your heuristics.

The fundamental problem that lies in a problem is that you must solve it, and there is no getting around that. There seems to be some fundamental entropy.

Yet and this is the point you can never know what that is before you try the problem. Even the search to discover the entropy is itself a problem with entropy.

Isn't this "don't know" a much greater truth about the world.

In the thinking of Frege et al you can derive a formula, procedure, proof to derive truth. Once you know this formula you can derive truth again and again. This encourages the idea that all of truth can be encode in formulae. But if you try this you will end up in contradictions due to self-reference. Which is the SRH of this blog. Russel took apart Frege with the "Set of All Sets" paradox. And Godel in turn took apart Russel with his Beq paradox (I am not provable). What looks like the strong arm of certainty becomes pathological when it is turned against itself through self-reference. The better your proof system, the more catastrophic your paradox.

So in the end we "don't know" and never will. Its not a pessimistic statement, its just a glass half full statement. We still have half a glass. We are still able to discover things. But like the "Infinite Employment Theorem" we can never know when the things are all discovered. Ultimately we can only know when all the things are discovered by discovering them, and who is to say we don't discover something new tomorrow. Time must be open ended then, because there must always be time to discover new things. If time was to stop, if a conclusion existed, then we enter the world of paradox.

One approach to SRH is to assume there was a way to find the number of theorem T in advance of counting them. But it will end in paradox because its isomorphic with all the other totalistic type problems. Metrics about the Self are impossible. #TODO.

It is interesting that this "don't know mind" is equated with the True Mind in Zen Buddhism. What is about to happen is genuinely unknown. The Present Moment is full of potential. When we lose sight of this sensitivity of the moment to new occurrences, perhaps a faint bird song occurs or subtle fluctuation in our mood, then our mind has become corrupted and faded.

It seems if there is one rule of this universe that pervades everything from conscious experience through to Science through to Logic and Computation it is the "Don't Know."

So does that mean we now know something, that nothing is absolutely knowable or unknowable? Well we know for sure right now whether we know something, but to expand that to universal status is where the don't know comes in. I know I am writing this blog, that is an empirical certainty, you doubt that you end up undermining your own doubt like Descartes. It seems smart to use your powers of reason to start doubting, but via SRH the more powerful your reason the more powerful the catastrophe for your doubting project when you realise that to unreason reason is a contradiction. You start with reason, or doubt you end with reason or doubt. And so Descartes knew at the very outset of his doubting, and Kant at the very outset of his Critique that they had Doubt and Reason, and they were not going away. As Hegel points out what is the point of using Reason to examine itself, if it is faulty then your conclusion it is faulty will be faulty. So we know at the outset what we know. The problem, the "don't know" begins the moment we start to expand that from Now in any direction. 

search "Sin Hae"

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/58d013bbe58c6272b30dad0b/t/59bc14bbb1ffb6e0b139642b/1505498300964/0101_0200.pdf

The Case against Progress

 This really is the key point on which the whole Western project rests. Does Western Civilisation make things better. If it doesn't I don't think anyone would wish to continue it. So does it make things better, is there progress?

If we believe in a fixed truth then it can't. Truth must be true at all times and places, what was true 1000 years ago must be true today. The only way those with a Fixed View of truth can believe in Progress is that this fixed truth is some how hidden and must be revealed through work. For some reason our ancestors were not privileged to know the Truth and our descendant will be. So what of us now? Have we revealed some of the fixed truth yet? How would we know ahead of time whether we have got to the bottom of things yet? Importantly we can't. If may well turn out that everything we have so carefully constructed today turns out to be false tomorrow.

A simple example is the "true" motion of the Sun and Earth. If you spend a day in the garden you will notice that the sun moves across the sky during the day. This obvious proof that the Sun moves has been the truth forever. However this unquestionable Truth was reinterpreted by Copernicus who said it was not the Sun but the Earth that moved. Essentially this is the truth we hold today, even tho that isn't quite true because the Sun itself moves around the Galactic centre. The most recent advance on this question is that motion is relative, and that was Einstein's great contribution-we need to look at acceleration to get the truth of motion. In general we can't know until tomorrow whether our whole world view will be turned upside down (literally).

SRH--a major thread of this blog--is looking for proof that you cannot make a total statement of truth because you would need to include that statement within itself, and provide foundation for that statement within itself, as there is nothing outside on which to found it. And if there is something not covered by the statement that contradictions the idea that it is totalistic.

Now the thing to observe here is that humans seem to have lived quite happily with the sun going around the earth! Copernicus didn't change anything in one sense. Indeed change is actually impossible. The important Truth hasn't changed. Whatever we needed to know to live 10,000 years ago was available to people then else obviously we would not have been able to live then.

So we must bin the idea of a Fixed Truth that is being uncovered and look at how one truth was available to people 10,000 years ago and an obviously different truth is available to people today.

For this to be the case Truth must change and be relative to the society that uses it.

To shorten this blog, hopefully we can see immediately that it is impossible to compare cultures and times. People 10,000 years ago knew exactly what they needed to know to live 10,000 years ago and the same now. So there is no Progress. QED.

Now this has huge implications for Empire. Wars are conducted by Empires seeking control of regions and they do this by arguing that they are superior in some way and the region will benefit. In the West we argue that we offer greater freedoms and technology. And (sarcastically) this is so obvious that we need to back that message up with superior firepower. One wonders how an Empire with superior firepower and the wrong message would fare. How do we know that the West does not succeed simply because it has a more powerful military and it has nothing to do with the message of freedom. But America conflates the two. Despite spending 40% of all world military on its own military it also likes to say it has the "better" culture. This makes no sense. America is just one of many Empires seeking for power. Famous past empires are the Ottoman, French, German and British. Famous current empires are the American, Russian and Chinese. There is no moral superiority there is only firepower.

Those with moral superiority are what Jesus calls the Peacemakers. They have no firepower. You know a good man because he does not carry a gun, they only carry their conscience, conviction and compassion. A gun can only kill, the future lies in inspiring the gun carriers to put down their weapons. 

Perhaps better for another blog but this raises an interesting question about what Truth is. In a nutshell there is an idea of Ethnotechnological Efficiency. This covers the "way of life" of a community. When we compare communities we need compare this. A group who feed themselves a lot via manual fishing like Jesus' community are going to be differ a lot from one who feeds itself through fossil fuel powered intensive agriculture. They both find food, just in very different ways. Truth needs to be understood in context and it can't be abstracted into a universal Law.

We see this in the natural world. People like to say that the Lion is a more "advanced" creature than the worm. But for a lion to do what a worm does it would need to become a worm. A worm is perfectly suited to what it does. It is the most advanced thing for doing what it does in fact. Likewise Imperialists like to say that the modern democratic human in New York is more advanced than the tribes member in the Amazon forest. But as Reality TV shows like to make fun of you put a New Yorker in the jungle and they are dead in a couple of weeks. Likewise you put the Amazonian in New York and they will end up dead as a homeless drug addict. It is bizarre in the supposedly "woke" 21st Century that the exact same Imperial prejudices and racisms exist at the heart of the US Empire as existed at the worst times of the Roman or British empires.

So what have I done here other than create a universal law that you can't abstract truth into a universal law? Well the context here is very limited. Who in my culture is interested in this subject, who will read this post, and will be able to make sense of it? The context here is already very limited!

George Steiner

Thought I'd quickly find out whether there was anything of particular interest in Heideggar's "Being and Time" so read the Wiki entry. Only to find George Steiner being a penis:

"The critic George Steiner argues that Being and Time is a product of the crisis of German culture following Germany's defeat in World War I. In this respect Steiner compared it to Ernst Bloch's The Spirit of Utopia (1918), Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West (1918), Franz Rosenzweig's The Star of Redemption (1921), Karl Barth's The Epistle to the Romans (1922), and Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf (1925).^[5]"

And Mr Steiner should be reminded that everything produced by Jews post 1945 results from the crisis in Jewish culture following the Holocaust.

It's always a shot in one's own foot when we try to relativise material to a particular society. If Mr Steiner wants to say something of universal validity, he needs to acknowledge that in other people as well.

For reference the Time bit:

Time[edit]

Heidegger believes that time finds its meaning in death, according to Michael Kelley. That is, time is understood only from a finite or mortal vantage. Dasein's fundamental characteristic and mode of "being-in-the-world" is temporal: Having been "thrown" into a world implies a "pastness" in its being. "The present is the nodal moment which makes past and future intelligible," writes Lilian Alweiss.^[17] Dasein occupies itself with the present tasks required by goals it has projected on the future. ^[18]

Dasein as an intertwined subject/object cannot be separated from its objective "historicality," a concept Heidegger credits in the text to Wilhelm Dilthey. Dasein is "stretched along" temporally between birth and death, and thrown into its world; into its future possibilities which Dasein is charged with assuming. Dasein's access to this world and these possibilities is always via a history and a tradition-- or "world historicality".

Can't help but think this account talks about Dasein like it is just a person. Aren't we supposed to be dissecting the structure of Being here? Hmm not sure the Wiki entry is very commanding, will have to look at the text itself a translation of which happens to be on my bookshelf...

Anterior/Posterior Self, Time and Now

Quick stub. Theories have a habit of using time. Either like habitual thinking of seeing the objects of consciousness as presenting themselves to a self at the centre of experience, or like the last post seeing that the contents of consciousness have already been processed. In both cases a "self" is posited either after or before the emergence of apparent phenomena into awareness. Science is definitely the latter, seeing the consciousness as a process of a prior existing brain and nervous system. Daniel Dennett is firmly an "anterior self" kind of thinker.

 I never read Heideggar's "Being & Time" but the title points at least to an important connection.

But then you have Zen which suggests that the "Now" is all that matters. I'm all for this because any other theory other than a "now" theory sets up an infinite regress of causation upon which the apparent rests. Yet the whole point of the apparent is that it is apparent.

Most philosophers from Empiricists to Phenomenologists acknowledge that knowledge begins with experience, and the entry point of everything is the apparent. You can deduce posterior and anterior selves but they are based upon the Now.

It is recognising the fundamental starting point of the apparent that is most of the task of the religious mind.

The Evil that is America

 You really need to be some kind of idiot not to view America as the devil. In every way it works to deceive people. I know people who think that America fights for freedom and democracy. Well if this is true how come the head of the Navy in a Sovereign country is not free to express his own opinions about Russia. I mean he should have said death to America, but he didn't and yet he felt the need to resign. There is no freedom under US rule it is just a Dictatorship. And its not just any old Dictatorship, it is a dictatorship that has spread terror around the world for a century killing 100s of millions of people and destroying countless countries. There has never been an evil on Earth or in our galaxy even a fraction as perverted and corrupt as America.

https://www.dw.com/en/german-navy-chief-sch%C3%B6nbach-resigns-over-comments-on-putin-crimea/a-60525709

Like the Devil he makes fools believe he is the "good guy." America does this mostly by spreading lies about other countries so that its vast evils do not look so bad. Its a joke. America has eradicated a whole continent and race of people, and it held slaves in barbaric conditions for centuries. It literally knows nothing about freedom. And you can tell a person by their friends and Americans greatest ally is the world's actual worst dictatorship Saudi Arabia. This is the country that spawned most of the jihadists that did 9/11 and spreads the doctrine of global jihad. This is the country that hacks journalists to death, even as they seek protection in the embassy's of other sovereign countries. And to get hacked to death you need do nothing other than criticise the reigning dictator. America is not far behind, you only need suggest that they have things wrong and it is game over for you, professionally and personally.

We saw this in 2003 when America tried to spread lies about Iraq. People are not entirely stupid, and America just looks like a bloody chainsaw killer stumbling around in its 10 gallon hat spouting clumsy propaganda. But when people tried to point out that America was talking bullshit as usual they were shut down. So much for freedom. There is no where on Earth with less freedom of speech that in the West, where you literally can't even think that your overlords are losers.

Lets see what some braindead hack for the system thinks of this post. Sad fools. Next thing they will be doing is turning on the gas chambers, and being such lobotomised pen-pushers for their masters in the dictatorship, they wouldn't even know.

So at some point the people of the world will have to rise up against America, But we don't want to get chainsaws our self and start hacking people to death like the US does. We'd do better just to ignore the silly yanks. They will murder another 100 million people before the century is out, we can't do anything about that but we can just ignore them. So even Death to America gives them too much respect. America isn't even worth talking about it is so regressive and backwards.

===

Considering US thinking from hawks like John Mearsheimer he is right the US will come into conflict with the whole world, like UK did before it, but when everyone in the world wants to punch you chances are you are the problem. That is assuming you haven't murdered everyone in the whole world by then. But even if you are not the problem, you can't argue when other powers want to punch you, or when America eventually gets invaded and John Mearsheimer gets shot, he will at least understand die knowing his death was rational. And if its universally rational then John Mearsheimer should just shoot himself right now. That is unless he is not rational, or unless he is only interested in one side of the argument which makes him only partially correct, which is as good as wrong. A John Mearsheimer equation would look like "v^2" which is entirely pointless and devoid of any truth until you see that  "v^2=u^2+2as"... which I suspect is the truth: John Mearsheimer is the sort of person who says whatever he needs to say to get his own way, does whatever he needs to do, and believes anything that will get him his own way. So for other people best to have nothing to do with him.

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

 

Right This is It. What is Existence and where is Self? Official exposition.

 I've been going around this for at least 35 years and have read accounts of it over all that time, but nothing ever quite put it together. Robert Pirsig (RIP) "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" was probably the first formal thing I read beyond the Bible. But his account, in particular, is clearly trying to talk about something brilliant and alive but ends up with a dead and complex account that is shrouded in the mystery of him not quite remembering. Heideggar gives a "brilliant" account with his "lighting up process", Hinduism with its Darshan takes it higher, and Zen takes it to another level with  Present Moment (respect to Thich Nhat Hanh who undoubtedly entered Para-Nirvana today) and there is the super nova of Sudden Enlightenment. But between obscurity and dullness I never quite read, or thought, anything that sorted the mess of existence out. Well summary of recent musings here. It's actually surprisingly simple.

Let us start at something really simple. I will use vision as this is the main sense in humans. We tend to think of our eyes as windows on the world. That indeed is how an essay I wrote at school began, and yet I didn't sort this out until now another 35 years later so that isn't enough.

If they are windows then why not just open the windows and remove our eyes to see the world even more clearly? Because, they are more than windows, they are part of the process of seeing.

We have already just uncovered something not quite right. What we think, that we just see the world in a simple way, isn't quite right. We don't look through our eyes, we see with our eyes. And now straight to the point.

Now supposing we light a candle.

We obviously see the candle, as we see this picture.

But if we look carefully that is not what we think is happening is it? What we "think" is happening is that there is a candle "over there" and THAT candle is what we are seeing. THAT candle is sending out rays of light that are entering our eyes HERE and so we are seeing THAT candle over there.

But wait a God damn second. If we haven't seen the candle yet then how do we know that there is a candle OVER THERE? We must have ALREADY seen the candle to see it OVER THERE.

And here's the point about Enlightenment: everything that looks like it is IN THE WORLD and OVER THERE we have ALREADY experienced.

When Sartre talks about conscious entering the room and flowing around things, that is actually wrong, The room IS consciousness already. You are conscious OF THE ROOM already before anyone goes walking around it.

So THE WORLD that seems to be OVER THERE is actually the space created by us experiencing the world already.

Now compare with how our thinking works. We see a tiger enter the room. It is OVER THERE so naturally we want to get as far away from it as possible, so we who are OVER HERE haven't get had contact with it and we can turn around and run away into another room to hide and keep away from it. This is all kind of correct.

But if we haven't already interacted with it, how do we know it is there, and aside from what is over there, what is over here running into the other room? We imagine they we and tiger are separate, but go back a step: if they are really separate then how do I even see the tiger, why am I running?

 We already said that the existence of the tiger OVER THERE means that light has ALREADY entered our eyes and the presence of the tiger OVER THERE means that really light has ALREADY made its way OVER HERE. So if the tiger OVER THERE represents light that has already made it into our eyes, then where and what am I? If things OVER THERE are really OVER HERE then where really is over here?

Its not something we can answer! It's actually irrelevant. As creatures looking to survive we are only interested in what is OVER THERE.

As Pygmalion mused in Metamorphosis, eyes need distance between themselves and objects in order to see. Bring something right up to our eye and we can't see it. The reason is that things OVER THERE have already been seen. Take what has already been seen OVER THERE and bring it OVER HERE is hardly going to help! It has already been seen. Being over there IS seeing.

Bit of philosophy. So the space with things OVER THERE was named by Heideggar as Dasein (there-being in German). Things OVER THERE are called the phenomena and the OVER HERE the noumenon. In Hegel the "in itself" is the idea that while the tiger is a phenomenon to me, from it's perspective it is the real thing, a noumenon. Although his is an clean philosophy because that noumenon is just the idea, not a separate entity (you don't want to start inventing new things unnecessarily else your philosophy quickly becomes cluttered). Good philosophy actually ends up doing away with the noumenon, its irrelevant. And that may sting because we habitually think about the OVER HERE as being something. But "things" are only ever OVER THERE. But as we saw with vision the OVER THERE must really be OVER HERE, else how could we, who are apparently over here, see OVER THERE.

Just to recap that last point. We know that eyes see light. And without light they see nothing. So when we see things we know that light has already come into contact with our eyes. That means that when looking at that candle above issuing light apparently OVER THERE, actually the light must be OVER HERE already.

So we tend to start thinking towards the cinema view of experience. We think actually THE WORLD is a film that is playing INSIDE our heads, and the film represents what is OUTSIDE. We imagine ourselves like a security guard looking at CCTV all day. That way we think we have solved the OVER THERE is actually OVER HERE problem. But we went through this in recent posts, don't we have a new problem. Doesn't the film just become a new OVER THERE and the security guard sitting in his seat watching the film just become a new OVER HERE.

The "film" is not a completely bad metaphor and it contains an interesting observation. A better metaphor these days is actually the First Person computer game. Here a screen shot from the famous Doom.

 The computer screen displays a representation of the kind of perspective we actually see as we walk around the world. And what is interesting is that there is a hand in the foreground. In reality if you look at your visual scene right now, you have the computer screen in the centre, and a room around it, and around that is your nose, and eye brows and then a "nothing" which fills out everything else beyond: there is no frame or border to our visual field like in a computer game, it is a kind of "nothing." That nothing is a very interesting thing in itself, we expect our vision should continue forever (and actually it does but that is an extremely advanced level of this meditation). The OVER HERE then, that is OURSELF, is at the CENTRE of the world OVER THERE, but at the same time OVER HERE lies AROUND the visual field like a window frame. Things are clearly not quite right here.

The point here is that in the Computer Game model of existence, the SELF is actually part of the OVER THERE of the computer game. Even the OVER HERE enters the film as hand, nose and eyebrows and becomes something we watch. And this computer game is really much more than just a visual field, it has haptic gloves so you can feel things, indeed a haptic body suit so your whole body can feel things, and most amazing it has thoughts and emotions too. If you think about it your thoughts are really OVER THERE too! Suppose you have a bad thought that you don't like, you try to get away from it. It is like the Tiger! It is OVER THERE! Supposing you had a bad feeling, it is also like the tiger. It is OVER THERE. It turns out that all things that happen are OVER THERE, they are all phenomena. There is no "over here". Everything can be put into that computer game, and nothing is left out of the computer game. So who is playing it? This is the same question asked about the candle and the tiger. Who is running away, who is thinking?

There is no answer, it's irrelevant. There is no "OVER HERE". And it's best to just leave it as irrelevant, no point pursuing this. In previous post pointed out it can get a logical SRH treatment but why bother, once we see it is irrelevant why pursue it further?

This is Heideggar's Dasein. There is just the OVER THERE. This is Buddha's "anatta", all things are phenomena "OVER THERE."

Now this has all been said a million times, and I and lots of other people have read and thought about it a million times, so what is inspiring this post that hasn't been said a million times?

The problem is that no matter how often you go over this there is always an OVER HERE left over. In my original exposition of this as a kid the O-Space, as I called it, belonged to O who was the Observer or the Origin. It was not enough to just call it Space. Even Heideggar makes "Mineness" a fundamental quality of the OVER THERE or Dasein.

The problem with having any residual OVER HERE at all is that you end up with Dualism. You will always go back to having yourself here, and the world over there. But at the outset we pointed out that for the world to be seen or touched it must already be HERE. You cannot experience things at a distance. I don't know what is happening in the room next door. This is all expertly handled in the opening of the Shurangama Sutra 1:172 onwards.

I used to hold up my hand to cover the eyes to show that the object being OVER THERE was not enough for it to be seen. Light must get HERE to my eyes for it to be seen, in other words the Seen object is not the same as the object OVER THERE and it must be seen OVER HERE.

So lets start to put this all together. The opening observation, that what we see in the world, that seems to be OVER THERE, must have been seen already for it to be IN THE WORLD. So things that seem to be OVER THERE waiting to be seen, have already been seen.

We examine the candle, and imagine light leaving the candle OVER THERE and reaching our eyes OVER HERE and that is how we see. But we have already seen the candle for it to be there. The seeing occurs IN THE PRESENCE OF THE CANDLE not IN OUR EYES. That would be a second seeing on top of the seeing we already did. Seeing is having things OVER THERE. That is what being able to see is. There is no OVER HERE needed. Indeed there is NO OVER HERE. The candle just shines all by itself: that is all that is needed for seeing.

Wait a second we think that is nonsense. If I close my eyes the candle disappears, seeing is over here. But you know that not because of anything that happened over here, but because the candle stopped being OVER THERE.

So there is the problem. The world happens OVER THERE its a simple and obvious as that. But while light must get to the eye for sight to happen, that is all bound into and included in the CANDLE BEING THERE. We can't infer an OVER HERE from that. This is the mistake.

So we look into a mirror. Ah ha! There we go now I can see my eyes. I can see the OVER HERE. Except it is OVER THERE. I can see my eyes unobstructed, I can see the light is on, I can see that light must be entering my eyes, and that is all proven because I can see all these things.

This is true it is a brilliant piece of self-reference. You simply CANNOT see a reflection of yourself with your eyes closed! And that would make a great photo! This is a visual Descartes. If I can see at all then my eyes must be open, and if I see a reflection of myself I know my eyes must be open. But note the hierarchy here. I don't see that my eyes are open and then decide that I can see. It is from being able to see that I know my eyes are open. It is because things are OVER THERE that I can deduce that my eyes OVER HERE must be open. We begin with the world and work from there. This underlines the initial observation that seeing happens through the presence of the world over there, and the over here is not important, at best only inferred.

Now what is the point of this long exposition?

It is one way to highlight the fundamental mistake we make when thinking about the world. We assume there is an OVER HERE in most matters. When things happen OVER THERE we tend to imagine that there is some OVER HERE standing up to them. In the case of light its quite easy to see. we think "THAT" candle is sending out light and "I" am receiving it, but we now know that "THAT" candle represents me having ALREADY receiving the light, so adding a second recipient is pointless. The presence of the candle IS the receiving of the light! The "I" that occupies the room with the candle is then a phantom. The true "I" is already present in the seeing the candle, the true I is not separate from the presence of the Candle. This is "Tat Tvam Asi" from the Upanishads in a nutshell (well a very long exposition). On this sad day that Thich Nhat Hanh has cease to be, this is the importance of the Present Moment. The very existence of the world as it manifests OVER THERE is our own existence, they are one and the same.

It is a critical and silly mistake to see ourselves as OVER HERE or separate from the OVER THERE. We are the exact same thing as the OVER THERE.

I have focused much on sight here as the most powerful sense. But turn to breathing meditation and look at the sensations of the breath. As they become apparent to us, we are not watching them from some distant remote point, we ARE them. If we were not already sensing them, how could they become apparent in the first place!

And now we come to our thoughts, like Descartes. But this is a bit more subtle. The first thing to do is to watch our thought in such a way that they become OVER THERE like everything else. We are very tightly bound to thoughts so we hold them close like they are OVER HERE. But really they pop up out of nowhere like everything else. It is silent, then a plane flies over head, and it goes quiet again. My mind is calm, then I remember someone insulting me and stuff happens, and then I forget about it and it goes calm again (nothing ever last forever else like if sound that didn't stop the world would be a deafening cacophony of sounds that never stopped). In all cases things pop up OVER THERE and then they "pop down" again. Now once our thoughts are OVER THERE, then its the simple job of realising like with other phenomena that to be OVER THERE we have already thought them, there is no second person taking a look at this. Descartes is in fact right "I Think; I Am" and he is quite right to remove all distinction between the thought and a separate self. There is no "thinker" the thinker is the thought. But we know he didn't quite get it right cos he then went on to make a body/mind distinction. The problem is that we are so habituated to putting an OVER HERE into the picture that even after all the work of the blog post, chances are OVER HERE just comes back in and says I just wrote/read a whole load of stuff just now. And now I'm going onto something else, and we carry our OVER HERE away with us. But the point here is that this blog post while I was writing or reading it WAS ME. I didn't see anyone sitting there writing it or reading it, there was just writing or reading going on and I was indistinguishable from the writing or reading.

===

I realise a small weakness of this exposition already. Lets look at someone called Mary sitting on a chair and looking at the candle on a table.

So we light the candle on a table, it burns, light crosses the room, going into Mary's eyes and creates the experience of the candle. We see Mary notice the candle, and the experience pop up, and then we see her imagine a Mary inside looking at this experience. We ask Mary what she can see and she says "me sitting in a room looking at a candle." That is factually correct, but we also know after this exposition it is also incorrect. I am looking at a candle, is just the same as a candle being there. If you hadn't seen the candle already, then how could it be on the table shining away waiting to be seen! But the weakness is that in expressing this I rely upon a model of light entering the eye.

Now Mary may look at the candle on the table and realise that light must have already entered her eye for it to be on the table in the first place. And she may realise that it being on the table already means that she doesn't need to imagine a Mary sitting in the room looking at it. The candle is enough by itself. But knowing that light has entered her eye for this to happen, she may move the Mary that is sitting on the chair opposite the candle and put all this into a new big Mary's eye, not inside the room but surrounding the room. She will take the 3rd person perspective herself and see the whole room as an image in the eyes of a new Huge Real Mary. Things have now got worse. Originally at least the candle was burning on the table, now its just an image in an eye! we must rescue the candle!

So it turns out that this exposition is just a device to tease apart the mistake we make. The key take home is that the candle burning on the table demonstrates already that it has been seen. We don't need to invent a person afterwards looking at the candle on the table (that is almost a category mistake - the candle is already seen or used, it doesn't need to be "seen" again like a newspaper mention). And the subtle bit we don't even need to invent a person "before" experience to be the recipient of the candle light in the first place! That is actually the exact same mistake! But perhaps this "prior self" is better dealt with in a new blog later. Let this at least be the end of the "posterior self" who enjoys and tries to own the experiences that we have already had which manifest as the world around us.

That solves part of the problem of feeling that the world is happening TO us. That we are somehow separate from our experience, which is the same as the world. The fact that there is a World means that it has already happened to us, once we are aware of something the "damage"--if we are afraid of it--has already happened! What we are aware of can actually do us no harm. If we are looking at a tiger, it means that we are not dead yet and we have seen it in time! Good news!

And just to tie off with the very opening, the sense that we are seeing through our eyes like window comes from believing in a posterior self who receives the world. To realise that we see with our eyes is to give our eyes primary status with the world. Seeing the world, and the world as it manifests are the same thing, we are one with the world as it manifests. And to then think there might be another world that does not manifest is irrelevant speculation for a distant rainy day.

 

Non-Self and Grammatical Cases

Here is possibly the simplest definition of Enlightenment and the problem of Life:

"The unenlightened, suffering being colours all experiences with the Dative case."

That is to say that all things that happen are seen as happening "to" rather than just happening.

Now all the practices of religion are to discourage this colouring of eventualities. This is hard, so the first stage is generosity and giving where we still accept that there are recipients of actions, but instead of making our self the habitual recipient of everything we try and make other people the recipient. This does amazing things as it weakens the grip on the self. But we are still colouring the world with the Dative case.

Perhaps now an expression of what the Dative is. When an action is done toward something then that thing is in the Dative case. So we might say that "Life threw Eric a curved ball", Life threw the ball, but Eric received it. In our habitual world model the World does things which create experiences that happen to us. So for instance I sit watching the sun rise. The World turns, the Sun rises and the light enters my eyes and creates the experience that I see of a Sunrise, and this experience appears to be given to me in the dative. It becomes my experience.

Now this model is the cinema model of the mind (Cartesian Cinema) which Daniel Dennett amongst others challenges. We understand our senses as a film that is playing and we are sitting watching that film. A simple bit of logic can show this is fallacious. Indeed SRH is here (SRH is one thread in this blog). We imagine a self sitting in the cinema in order to explain how we see what is going on. Yet how does the person sitting in the cinema know what is going on. Don't they need a cinema inside with yet another person sitting inside? This is Plato's Third Man fallacy. You don't need anyone in the cinema! The cinema is the experience! And this is all Buddha is saying with Non-Self.

If we go to the cinema and look at someone else we can see the light going into their eyes and they are watching the film. Perhaps at the scary bit they will turn their head away and then they are not seeing it anymore, or they turn to talk to a friend and then they aren't seeing it, but that is what experiencing a film looks like. We don't then put another person inside them to watch all the sensory data coming in!

Same is true for us. When we are watching a film, looking at the screen and seeing the film that IS experiencing the film. That is all there is. We don't need to imagine anyone inside us looking at that experience. The film is not happening to anyone, the experience of the film IS what "happening to someone" looks like! How could an experience not already be everything that "happening to someone means"? When things happen to us, they turn up in our senses. Those senses don't then happen to someone else watching those senses!

So when a thought happens, that is what having a thought looks like. We don't then attribute that thought to some else. When Descartes had his doubts, the DOUBTS WERE DESCARTES DOUBTING. He didn't need to add the I AM bit. Now in fact Descartes was aware of this. He actually expressed it like this: "I Think; I Am." He didn't want a "therefore" in there. The idea was that the thought itself was identical with the self. To have a thought was to exist. But one wonders exactly what he is trying to say here. Bertrand Russel suggests that actually we can just say "there are thoughts." So Descartes has done well to get away from the idea that there is a Self that is thinking. But he hasn't made the full move yet. It is true that the presence of doubts can't be undone with doubt (this is SRH). If you doubt that there are doubts you indeed have a contradiction. But isn't it sufficient to accept this? Doubting can exist, and when it does exist you can't doubt it. But Descartes sneaks in a "thinker" and a subjective case to his musings. There becomes a subject of his doubtings. Like the dative above this case is unnecessary. I realise exploring this that this is all very OCD, did Descartes have a spell of OCD in his stove? 

Now I'm putting all this into the language of grammar to avoid talking about actual self. The whole point of this post is to show that we can live, and experience and think without a subjective or dative case. It is quite simply unnecessary. Non-Self is actually very simple to adopt, and if Buddha is correct this is the end of suffering and the problem of life. Just remove the unnecessary grammatical cases when talking about any of the processes of language and life itself.

Language is great for talking about ordinary things. "Throw me an apple" makes perfect sense in exactly a Wittgenstein like way. There is an apple, I want it, throw me it. But the sentence "throw me the sight of an apple" makes no sense. It is like saying to one painter "paint that apple" and to another "paint the experience of that apple." Well in fact they do have different meanings. In Realism you may want to copy exactly how the apple looks (like a photo), and in abstract painting you will be looking to interpret much more about the apple adding knowledge of its shape, and what it is. Perhaps because of its European association with the "fruit of the tree of life" or "Newton's gravity" or "the poison that tries to kill Snow White" we have a lot to put into understanding an apple. But keeping it literal, painting an apple and what it looks like are the same! You cannot use the language of the world to discuss the language of experience.

This is very Gilbert Ryle. I never understood his philosophy, but now perhaps I have an insight. But its because of SRH. The reason that the "sense" changes is the same as in logic where meta statements are different from the statements themselves. It's the same problem with "use" and "mention." When we have an experience that is in use, but we then mention it in a private conversation and think that this is a second "use." So the camera takes the movie as it happens (which is "use"), and then plays it back to an audience that doesn't see it as a reply (a mention) but thinks that this is the action happening for the first time. When we think thinks are happening to ourselves we are simply replaying the action that has already really happened.

I was once told of a Zen disciple who kept asking his master what is true self. Eventually the master said to the disciple there is no use I cannot teach you and he sent him away. As the disciple walked away the master called after him his name. The disciple turned around the master said that is true self. I may have got the story wrong, but the purpose here is to illustrate teh difference between our identity being "used" correctly as in turning around when our name is used and fallaciously when we think "my life is rubbish" or "you shouldn't do that to me." These selves are not real, they are replays, and we shouldn't speak or think of them like we do real things. Thinking they are real though we experience suffering.

And the same is true for humans. When things happen to us we get an experience. The experience does not happen to us!!!!

Self seeps into Mindfulness

We bringing the mind to the present moment, being aware not of fantasies or imaginations or thoughts or day dreams or not just drifting but being lucid about what is actually going on right now.

This can be quite mundane where we are aware of a particular thing that is going on, perhaps we are watching a game of rugby and we are engrossed in what is going on. Or as Buddha says in the Anapanasati sutra we can be aware of the nature of feelings of our breath: a long breath, a short breath etc.

But then there is the more transcendent where we are no longer interested in a particular going on but aware of the actual fact that there is a world, that things are going on, that there is a potential for things to go on. As Heideggar puts it we get alerted to the question of why are there things at all. We're not interested in solving that question, that is a pointless activity that drags us back down again. We are only interested again as Heideggar puts it in the "Lighting Up Process" by which the world becomes manifest. The brightness of Being. Some say that Heideggar was in love while writing Being & Time. Certainly there is a brilliance with which the world shines when we are in love. But this is a tainted version of the sublime because it is only temporary and it arises due to an imperfect conditional being namely the object of our love. But it does for a while focus and interest our mind on the reality of the world. When the suffering sets in again and we become disillusioned with the world again, we stop being quite so interested in it, the brightness goes and we dwell more again in fantasy and imaginations. But it need not be like this. That brightness of love is always there whether we love or not. In Christianity it is a God of Love. Jesus doesn't  fall in and out of love, that openness to the brightness of the world is a faith that cannot be tarnished.

But there is a potential pitfall here. The brightness of the world can be interpreted as an "I AM." It goes from a pure consciousness to a "self consciousness." This blog has looked in length at this Narcissistic move. The brightness of existence in general becomes hijacked by an intense awareness that I exist. The brightness of the world emanates from my eyes and it is my presence that makes the world exist.

What is the sound of a tree falling in a forest with no one to hear it. The "I AM" realises that without it there is no sound. It sees itself in that sound. That sound is proof that it exists. "I AM" is what makes the world. This can get fully psychotic as we start to see our fundamental involvement in the very existence of the world. "I AM GOD" we can think in the extreme.

What was a brightness as light as a butterfly landing on our finger, is now a full metaphysical statement about our own primary status in the fabric of existence.

I made this mistake as a kid. The problem simply is that we are using the existence of myself to theorise about the existence of everything else. But if the existence of the world needs a foundation then don't we too?  

This is the Descartes error. The presence of thoughts, Descartes observed implied a thinker. Or originally the presence of doubts implied a doubter. And then eventually in his reasoning the presence of anything implied a self. That "presencing" implied an observer. That phenomena exist seemed to imply a necessary connection with a second entity the observer. Where one thing existed there seemed to be an attendant second thing. Surely a simply application of Occam's Razor might have been handy. It immediately doesn't seem right that for one thing to exist there must be two. Or is it?

But there is truth to all this. Quickly before I forget the conclusion, here is just in "owning" things. None of the reasoning is completely faulty it is just the grasping at things that becomes the pathology.

So it is true that a tree falling in a forest with no one to hear it falls in a kind of "silence." That silence is in fact something we should call "null." Its not that a tree suddenly falls over in silence, that is crazy, its just that there is no one to hear and so it goes unheard. That is a "null", or in math an undefined. We are asking an impossible question. What is heard if no one can hear. Consequently the Buddhist encourages us to observe that a phenomenon arises as the interaction between an object and a consciousness. There are indeed two existences required for a single phenomenon to happen just as Descartes observed.

This can be generalised to the Buddhist doctrine of "Interdependence." Nothing exists by itself; all things are born from other things, and will decay back into other things. It's a simple thing to observe. If a cake existed in the ingredients then we could never eat a cake, it would exist forever. The point is that at some point the cake does not exist. It must be made. And then we eat it and it no longer exists again. The cake does not exist by itself. It is in fact the result of many things coming together, just as the phenomena of our sense are the result of things coming together. Coming together is what underpins existence.

Ah ha says our "I AM". See there "I AM". I am the consciousness that must be present when a phenomenon happens. I hear the tree, I have made that sound. But its only part true. The tree made the other half of the sound! And it gets worse for the "I AM." Because as we can see the tree start as a seed, grows and then falls and dies. And we can also see the exact same thing about our self. Indeed its even more fragile for a consciousness. Every time we fall asleep our consciousness disintegrates. Our consciousness gets made anew every time we wake up, completely new every day! And its even worse, because as we day dream and let our mind drift it can fall to such a low level of consciousness that it barely exists at all. Things can happen and we don't even notice. Best example of this was in the Beavis and Butt-head movie where the on going joke was that nothing happened for them, not because it didn't happen but because they simply didn't notice.

The problem for Descartes is that the "I AM" is very fragile. It will exist perhaps only during the phenomenon itself. It is a different "I AM" each thought. From the previous post when Descartes thinks "I am thinking" he is placing a token with that thought to give it some ownership and "hisness". A car is a car it is definitely not me, yet when I place my token in the car it somehow magically becomes a part of me. Scratch that car, even 1000 miles away and you scratch me. This is because we place a token, like a bet, on that car. If the thought that Descartes has placed his token in is good or bad, right or wrong, important or irrelevant now that token goes with it and that is the problem. Defending that token, leads to all kinds of strange behaviour regarding the thought. You may even write a whole book and philosophy, indeed begin Modern philosophy by following that token.

The giving of authority to first hand direct observation of phenomena instead of arguments derived from Theological texts or God was an important step in philosophy but it was immediately tainted by a spectre of "self" as individuals adding betting tokens. In the Neo-Classical West this is considered a good thing in the adversarial approach to justice, dialectics and politics. And indeed Plato is not wrong, that truth exists in the gaps between people, it is like the sound of the tree arising from the interaction of falling tree and ground; it doesn't stand around like a passive statue to be found, Truth is created in the interactions of people. But lurking around every corner is the desire for the "self" to place a token in this. This truth is mine. I did this. "I AM." 

And briefly picking up on a thread above. Phenomena are weird things. Beavis and Butt-Head may not notice all the things going on because they are incredibly unmindful and alert. But there is another quality of mind called Concentration. In modern secular meditation they don't talk about this much.  If mindfulness is keeping the mind gentle and watchful of what is going on around, concentration is closing the mind down on one thing. A person in mindfulness will notice all phenomena; they won't follow them (or place token) but will just note that they are there. A person in concentration will only notice what they are focused on, they will follow that one thing like a person on horseback follows the horse. Concentration is like a powerful laser beam that smashed through the layers of dirt and cloudiness that blocks the brightness of the present moment. After deep concentration the mind returns completely pure with all blockages removed. It is an extraordinary experience, unmatched by anything in mundane worldly life. This is jhana and there are either 4 or 8 layers depending upon your school. While jhana are connected in a tree you can enter any of them directly. So phenomena are in a precarious position. Someone may be in the forest when the tree falls, but if they are concentrating on something else in jhana the tree still won't have a sound.

So it is tempting then to say that "I AM" does exist, it is just the power to chose what I focus on and make exist. This is the transcendent version of something mundane like "I want to see Bodh Gaya". We go through all the processes, travel plans and eventually we arrive at Bodh Gaya and there are the temples and the people all manifest. We have made them manifest through our pilgrimage. "I AM" we conclude. And indeed this is true, you did make this happen. Wow people say you have done the pilgrimage. Unfortunately that means a token is placed! But it is done now, the journey is over, now you are there different things happen. And if we are tempted to start to leave a counter on the achievement of the pilgrimage it is worth reminding ourselves that we only exist because our parents gave birth to us. When the "I AM" does its awards speech on having achieved the great goal of having travelled to Bodh Gaya it needs to remember its parents, and the people who built and ran the transport, and the people who built Bodh Gaya and Buddha himself, and the worms that made the soil healthy that grew their food... the "I AM" is not so central after all.

I walked Lands-End to John o'Groats in UK once and in retrospect the big dissatisfaction was not knowing exactly when I arrived. For me it was following the straight line between coast to coast. But how do you pick the end? In the end I found a post on the cliffs by the lighthouse as the end. But went down on the beach all the same, and went into town. After so many weeks it ended with a fizz spread over a day, not a bang. This is life, there are no definite things or points, or landmarks or sign posts. You can do the whole walk but there is no clear line around it, like climbing mountains I mentioned before the exact top is unclear. We should set a precision limit when we aim to complete a task: within 20m of the top is enough. For some people they may say within 50miles of John o-Groats will do as the end. Likewise the boundaries of our pilgrimage to Bodh Gaya are a undefined. We get home and someone says they spent a week on retreat at the temple and we think oh no I didn't really arrive I only skimmed the surface like a tourist. So the phenomena are boundless and the events of the world really quite undefined. But we are not Beavis and Butt-Head, the point is that when we look closely and are fully aware they are no longer so black and white.

This reminds me of the SRH too. An entity cannot define its own boundary. The boundary of a thing necessarily invokes things that are not that thing. The idea of self contained entity, a pure substance that is itself is a contradiction. And even in abstract logic when someone tries to create a total system it fails as Godel showed. Or before him Russel with the Set of All Sets.

OK I may have lost thread here. Returning to the conclusion. There is a stage in the lucid mind where we have an amazing experience of the Now where we deeply understand that we exist. Life is no longer a dream. I really do exist! Its a profound life changing realisation. "I AM HERE." When I see the sun rise it is rising on and even for me. It is religious and gives grounding and solidity to the world. But beware. We can grasp at this inauthentically and hold that self as a permanent being. I need to explore this more myself because in Hinduism the Tat Tvam Asi (TTA) is very close to this. The Atman (or "I AM") is seen as identical to the Brahman (or "That is"). Which is very near Descartes. In the manifesting of the world we see ourselves. They are not different but the same.

Perhaps easier to put the TTA in terms of its opposite. In mundane existence we see ourselves as separate from the world. The world is there to be grasped, owned, conquered, and in turn it fights back and crushes us, disappoints us, lets us down, makes us hurt. The opposite of this is TTA. We realise that there is no soul that exists in "opposition" to the world. My deepest soul IS the most hostile and alien part of the world. Not similar they are the exact same thing. Look one way it looks like Self look the other and it looks like World. Yet people do not regard Descartes meaning this. For Descartes the thinker and the thought were bound together, they were not the same thing!

And Buddha differs from TTA too. For Buddha the Thinker and the Thought are separate things, what is important is that neither is permanent. The phenomenon or consciousness of thinking arises from the interaction. For Buddhism there is only one goal and that is to up anchor and drift away from the idea of a solid statue like permanent self. The problem with TTA is that it places a solid statue like self at the heart of the universe. In reality this means people with this teaching are more likely to grasp the TTA and attribute some solid reality to it. The proper use of TTA is to use it to get rid of the opposition between self and world which is the mundane state of belief and awareness. Absolutely not to then posit the existence of something solid and permanent behind this that we can hold onto instead. What kind of Moksha involves holding on to things?

And so to wind up. A lucid consciousness in the present moment may start to grasp a self and use this as proof of a self that is separate from the world; the "I AM." This should be resisted. The proper mind state is just awareness that this is now and that we are inhabiting a very present now at this moment. But we take nothing from it! Once this lucidity goes it is gone! Carrying things around after meditation or pure states of mind arise is like putting another rock in our rucksack. We aren't supposed to be carrying anything, we're supposed to be lightening the load.

This is the fallacy in declaring your enlightenment. Indeed you may be enlightened, but you don't carry it with you as a weight. Enlightenment is the giving up on such weights, labels and binding. How can Siddhartha Shakyamuni have been enlightened, he wouldn't even have accepted that name (except for pragmatic reasons of discourse). Likewise how can there be a "I AM" beyond a fleeting moment. We certainly can't be bothered to carry it the freeloader with us.

Cue Zen story. So a novice monk and his master come to a swollen river and find a woman unable to cross. The master offers to carry her. She climbs on his back and he wades over. Some days later the novice says that he is troubled by what the master did. You are not supposed to have contact with  women how could you have carried her on your back. The master said I only carried her across the river, you have been carrying her ever since.

And this is the point, not of rules and petty worldly concerns but the essence of life that it only ever happens in small chunks and when the chunk has happened it is gone. All of it. Even our precious memories are temporary. Things happen, we remember them, we re-remember them and change them, the original memory is gone we hold on to some new version, it changes gradually, and then we forget them or we die. There is nothing to carry with us. Not even a "thinker" or "rememberer" being carried along. Even mind states no matter how wise and enlightened only lasts so long. As Venerable Kondanna realised at Sarnath what is born must die, and what exists must have been born.

Its a common feature of mankind that as kids we look to the future and as elderly we look to the past and at some point in the middle we are concerned with what is actually going on. There is no reason it has to be this way. In a long difficult journey at the start its good to look back and appreciate what you have achieved, rather than be overwhelmed with what is to come. And at the end we focus on what is left to do. When all is done we can relax. The elderly don't need to look back, they can look only at what is left to do, and rejoice in that freedom of everything being done. Compare themselves with a child who has all the struggle of education, finding love, settling down, becoming someone still to do. There is no fixed approach here. We don't have to carry anything unless we want to, but then like the monk carrying then woman, we put them down once the river is crossed. Easier said than done, but that is the challenge of enlightenment... which we also put down eventually.

So in conclusion, at end of another very rambling and lengthy post while I think onto paper to sort out my own ideas out: in lucid states of mind the temptation to grasp at a self is the wrong take home. The take home is the opposite that we can let this go.

And ironically the take home from this text hopefully is no doctrine, but rather a step closer to upping anchor and considering nothing in this world worth carrying for longer than necessary. And the "than necessary" is critical. It tempting when first beginning to throw everything away and carry nothing at all. What did Buddha do other than abandon all worldly interests and even almost starve himself to death. We shouldn't be concerned about such an extreme approach, we all need to learn. I sometimes think "middle path" is interpreted as caution and mediocrity especially in strict societies where rigid social conformity is expected. We should not be worried about making mistakes, the whole point is to abandon such concerns as reputation and achievement. If we seek earnestly we will find, that's all. But if harm arises, like Buddha almost dying of starvation, or at the other extreme our motivation weakens and we become fat, formulaic, dogmatic and lethargic, the message is pretty obvious we have placed too many betting tokens, our debts have risen and we are carrying too many things.

This Way and , Ego and Betting

 Things can either go this way or that. Usually we prefer one or the other, or don't care. When we do care it can be trivial or it can be important to us. When we take sides we end up being bound to this way or that and then it matters existentially to us. If things go against us, like in gambling, then we feel we have lost, and have literally lost something of us. Enough losses and we really start to feel that we are being eroded and are less than we were. Death we presume is the ultimate loss when we lose everything, so a long run of bad luck can feel like death.

But all a long run of bad luck is, is not anything special about the world, it is just us takin the "wrong" sides.

If we watch people betting we can see people get happy and sad in equal measure and see that it all doesn't matter. Its just how individuals have taken sides.

So what is this "taking sides", this caring about "this" or "that"? It is linked to a belief in a substantial self. Because we belief firmly in a "solid self" that like a roulette counter we place on a number we experience the outcome as a "real" thing. Having placed our counter in the world we are bound to the outcome and so bound to what happens.

But there is nothing really there, there is no counter to place in the world. Well there is, but its just a temporary counter that we make decisions with. It doesn't last and it has nothing to do with us. We don't take it with us.

So an enlightened being can lose 10 or 100 or 1000 times in a row and apart from having lost a lot of money, they themselves are completely unaffected. There never was a solid self being staked on this side or that side, so after each spin of the roulette wheel they reset as though nothing had happened. They actually would make a good gambler. People who get permanently attached to stream of betting start to feel unlucky after things go against them for a while, and magically start to think that "their" "luck" will change: the classic Gambler's Fallacy. Well they never had any "luck" in the first place, it wasn't theirs either. It was just a series of events that they took sides on. The taking sides was the thing they added, and it didn't really exist anyway.

So we create all kinds of nonsense in life my trying to take sides and stick on one side or the other. When actually this kind of betting is all in the mind, and there is nothing taking sides either. Its all just imagination.

So everyone laughs at us as we lose 1000 roulette spins in a row. Wow that guy is unlucky all the people around the table say. They joke and make fun of you. Well wouldn't you? Reckon that's a pretty ordinary response to such an unlikely event. They will talk for ages about the time this loser lost 1000 roulette spins in a row. Fair enough. But this is great in a way, its a real test of whether we "really" took sides or whether we just took it all as it came. Given that the self REALLY is insubstantial then literally no one has lost. Suppose you never turned up and never placed those bets. The ball would still fall the exact same way. This is the reality. The bets you placed or didn't place didn't really happen. Well they did but no one was REALLY taking sides, so no one could REALLY lose. Its a bit like a play. Yes all those things happen, but the characters don't really exist they are invented by the actors. We do the same thing in life. We invent a person to take roles like the gambler, but they don't really exist, not in a permanent way that follows us around. 

I was watching something on TV today where a guy commits suicide cos he can't handle what we had done. But what was apparent was the question: what does a suicider think they are getting rid of? Once they are dead the body is still there. And what they have done is still there. Nothing actually changes. What the suicider is trying to get rid of is the "bet" that they made, when they became someone. They took sides, and now can't undo that. So they kill themselves to try and get away from this bet in them self. But they don't realise that the token they placed on red or black is just a token. Tomorrow it will be someone else placing the same token in a different bet. It isn't permanent. This body, our self, our decisions, everything is just a token that we place a bet with today and tomorrow it is gone. If we think to kill our self, we are just killing something that is already gone. Likewise if we think to kill someone else we are getting rid of something, that thing we try to kill is already gone too. None of these "selves" or "tokens" exist in a solid permanent way. We are always free.

We could take this freedom wrong to think it means we can just behave anarchistically. If nothing survives then tomorrow we wake up with a clean slate and whatever we bet on yesterday is gone. This is actually true. Its the cheat people think of in Christianity. Jesus says the person who truly repents is forgiven. So people think, well I will just sin all I want and then repent. The problem is, with this attitude you won't be able to repent cos you did it all in the full knowledge you were doing it. What makes you think you will suddenly change to realise it was all wrong? Likewise once you are free from taking this side or that then you won't be interested in types of behaviour that seek this way or that. All evil stems from seeking my way over giving up to some else's way. That is this way rather than that. What is giving other than accepting that way (your way) more than my way (this way). An enlightened being isn't interested in winning or losing, or having things one way rather than the other. Things just are, and even if we do bet, the token is only on the bet for a short while after which it is forgotten.

Another classic example is when we place our token on one side of an argument. All we can think of then is this side of the argument. It becomes "our" side. And we fight, even when the "other" side starts to make sense and we can see that we could have put our token on the other side. Perhaps we will change sides and move our token from red to black. Then all we can think of is black, that is now "our" side. Its often difficult to change sides, we believe we really exist on one side and moving will make us not exist. That feels like humiliation or embarrassment, but it also feels like fresh air to let go and be able to move our token to another colour. We realise after looking at both sides that it isn't so clear which side to chose, and we realise that people stick to the black side and people stuck to the red side are both experiencing the same thing. In an argument it is the same. Both sides can get stuck to their side, and it feels like death to let go. That fear that we become nothing if we let go. We are nothing! That is the essence of the freedom that allowed us to chose. If we really were one side or the other then how could we chose?

Joni Mitchell says this well in Both Sides, Now

Perhaps the roulette bet is a bit unrealistic. In real life the sides of a choice or argument or life are rarely completely symmetrical and identical. You literally have no way of knowing whether it will be black or red. In the real world if you look one way one side looks appealing, if you look another the other side looks appealing. Being able to inhabit both sides of an argument is freedom. Only then can we make a proper choice. And to make that choice purely we are nothing yet. To do this means that we invest only a temporary self in a side, just a reusable token. We experience the cool fresh water feeling that Buddhists call emptiness that accompanies the ability to let go, to be this, to be that. It is the opposite of the gambler who feels they have to take sides again in order to feel complete.

A cheap model for Pandemics and the place of Viruses in general

Mortality from the 1918 pandemic and 2019 pandemic aligned so peaks match.

1918 had no medical intervention while 2019 had vaccines before the 3rd wave.

Mutation rate for SARS2 = 3.7E-6 and FluA 1.5E−5 that is FluA evolves 4 x faster than SARS2. The peak Wave Length for SARS2 = 9 months and FluA = 4 so 2.25. I needed to stretch the 1918 graph by 2.25 to make it fit. Not sure exactly how to relate rates and wave lengths but they are comparable.

So what have we learned:

(1) Viral mortality is caused by poorly coevolved parasite and host. As pandemics progress mortality falls.

(2) Peaks are caused by new variants, rising as variants take over from previous less well adapted variants and falling as host immune systems adapt

(3) Pandemics are short lived taking around 3 significant variants and peaks until the parasite has evolved to coexist with the host. Coronavirus evolves much slower than influenza so the 2019 pandemic took longer than 1918.

(4) Hosts exist in an interdependent "viral ecology" and depend upon viruses for their health. It is wrong to think that viruses are the enemy and cause illness, they also cure it. If we remove viruses we create a blank slate for poorly evolved lethal viruses to take over. Omicron is now protecting us from a whole range of transspecies cross over "bat-flus".

Hypothesis: The above presents the mechanism and pattern of a typical pandemic.

Its a shame that no "experts" have put anything as comprehensive as this forward, or shown any real understanding of the pandemic.

Can you really gain enlightenment in the world?

This was a favourite topic of the early blog. Can you gain enlightenment through work, relationships and life in general.

Definitively I can answer no.

The reason is that the motivation for "worldly" existence is literally the opposite of the "spiritual" path.

The worldly path seeks to divide things into preferred outcome and unfavourable outcome. And we work for the preferred outcome. Often this seems easy and harmless, but the devil is working already. Once we reject one outcome in favour of another we are training ourselves to bind to the world and struggle for only certain eventualities.

Not outcome will ever be perfect or final and it will lead to more decisions and preferred outcomes and soon we will be stuck in the world in an endless struggle for this but not that.

We will have been teased away from the spiritual path and the goal of being centred and unmoved by worldly phenomena and events.

This sounds cold, unemotional and deathlike. Surely a living being embraces the struggle of life and suffers and rejoices at its fortunes in equal measure.

But this is not the correct view. The struggle comes from being *bound* to certain outcomes.

If we look closely in fact any outcome will do. We only prefer a certain outcome because we chose to see it in a particular way.

We might think that death is the absolutely bad outcome and obviously all creatures struggle to avoid death. But death will come to us all. One day no matter how we struggle or not, death will come.

Someone once told me they had a near death experience canoeing where they got a shoelace caught on the canoe and couldn't right it, or swim clear of it. They were stuck underwater. At first they struggled, but eventually they realised the game was up and they stopped. In that moment they were overwhelmed by a feeling of complete peace and tranquillity. Time seemed to stop. But then all of a suddenly the instructor righted the boat and they could breath again. When you realise now is the time not to struggle, then you have peace even when facing what you consider the absolutely worst outcome. Even in the absolutely worst outcome, if you look at it correctly is profound peace. The phenomena are always just illusions that our minds stick together in a certain way, but which is never the only way or the complete way.

So it is not that those on the spiritual path just give up and don't struggle. But the point is the vector of their life is the opposite of the worldly. The worldly is bound to certain outcomes. Only the chosen outcome will do, and they transition forever from one chosen outcome to the next.

Capitalism exploits this to the maximum. Currently there is a growing number of housing adverts that use all manner of techniques to make the viewer feel that they are in the wrong house, or they haven't found the right house, or that they are missing out on a new life of happiness because they have not moved. All complete nonsense that doesn't even need thinking about. It is simply estate agents trying to get people to give them their money. Whatever house you move into, you will see another advert and realise you need to move again, The only way to stop is just to stay where you are and make that work. And that is the general truth of the spiritual person. Find the peace in the place you already are. There is no need to do anything, change anything, it is simply a matter or rearranging your thoughts until what you already have works. In this sense Capitalism is nothing but the work of the devil.

But this can give the image of the hermit sitting under a tree and just wasting away. How will find food, and how will they live.

There are things even the spiritual person needs to do. If they are canoeing and it capsizes they obviously need to right the canoe. It is true that they could find peace in the overturned canoe and just drown. But it is also true that they could right the canoe and find peace in the alive too. Perhaps they could flick a coin to find out which to chose. Anyone thinking like this is already so unbound to the world that there is little risk of being bound if they grasp for life. Such an act to save oneself from drowning is not then an act of suffering, but just an act of kindness to allow a body to live. But if indeed their shoelace is caught and it turns out they cannot save their body from drowning this apparent disaster is not really a disaster. It is just the end of the road that was coming some day.

So we must make this choice: are we going to struggle to make the world go this way or that way to satisfy our desires and so bind ourselves into a endless struggle--and literally endless as every second there is something wrong or not quite right. We can put a brave face on and just ignore the sufferings, becoming so tough and insensitive that apparently nothing touches us. This is a useful skill, but it doesn't actually solve the sufferings. We still would prefer things to go this way rather than that. If we day dream for a second about how we wish things could be, we will find what our actual desires are and the imperfects and disappointments that keep us from those wishes. But its not just us: this type of happiness is impossible. There is always something there to break it, we just overlook it as we grasp for happiness. Obviously the opposite is true: there is always something good out there even when we grasp for unhappiness. But it is all suffering this grasping.

The spiritual path is the opposite. We look to undo the thoughts and mindsets that make suffering in the world. We are still seeking that peace and happiness but no longer by diverting the world into this way or that way. Each way has its strong and weak points. The purpose for us is to have mastery over our mind so that we can see those strong points. Nothing is ever just one sided, there are always so many ways to see it. And with our deluded minds literally making up fantasies about the world, it can be very hard most of the time to get away from what we want to see, and instead see things in a different way. This is what they call karma: the force that drives us to see things in a certain way and so act in a certain way. With spiritual commitment the change does not come from acting out our views and desires, but rather changing ourselves to fit the situation. Finding happiness is what is there, rather than pushing for it to be different in some future.

In reality we are embedded in an extremely rich and fruitful world. There is deep beauty and satisfying wholesomeness everywhere. But under the force of our mental preconceptions and desires to see things this way or that we don't see that and see what we want to see instead. This is great when our mind is forcing the world into a positive fantasy like when we fall in love, but it is equally horrible when that same mind forces us to see things with hate. In both cases it is us who decides these outcomes and makes them happen, but with worldly attitude we go our fighting and get bound to a world that can never really satisfy us. With spiritual mind we give up trying to change the world and instead seek to see it correctly with peace and happiness and appreciation for what it is before we try and change it.

Again this does not turn us into passive meditating hippies. It turns us into beings deeply sensitive to what is going on and what is there. Satisfied with what is going on and what is there. Not bound within superficial mental formations about what we think is there, but seeing through the cracks and open to the newness of our existence and the world. It should feel like a cool shower for our soul. When we act with this clarity it cannot be wrong. We already have what we spiritually need, everything else is just a bonus.

So no you can't be worldly and spiritual. You either seek material satisfaction and hoard up a particular way of life, or you turn the complete opposite way and reject the whole worldly thing to seek peace and acceptance of the world as it is. Preferring to change oneself in place of the world.

Little investigation into primes

There is a problem with all this! It has nothing to do with primes! The final expression is true for any infinite list of numbers! It's a tautology.

The original idea was to use the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra to partition the natural numbers into those with particular lowest prime factor. But because numbers usually have more than 1 prime factor this is not so simple. Since 3 x 5 = 5 x 3 there is a fundamental symmetry to all this.

Anyway we can construct a list of primes like this:

Ignoring 1 if we take the first non coloured square it is 2. This is prime. We know that every 2nd number is now not a prime because it is divisible or has prime factor of 2. We can colour these red.

The next non coloured square is 3. We know that every 3rd number from 3 is now not prime as it has a prime factor of 3. Let us colour green. The next prime is 5, let us colour that purple etc 

Now of the green squares i.e. the 3 timestable obviously half will have a Lowest Prime Factor (LPF) of 2. That is 2x3,4x3,6x3 etc will all have a LPF of 2 and only half will have a LPF of 3. For 3 timestable beyond 3 then the LPF must be 3 e.g. 3x7 has a LPF of 3. Let us denote the ratio of numbers in timestable T with LPF P as R(T,P). This has values = 0 except for P <= T. For T = 3 the values are R(3,2) = 0.5, R(3,3) = 0.5. The sum of R(T,*) = 1. R is undefined for T = 1 and P = 1.

Let us look at T=5. That is the 5 times table: 1x5,2x5,3x5,4x5,5x5,6x5,7x5,.... the highest LPF is 5 since any multiple of 5 above 5 has a LPF of 5.

R(5,2) = 1/2 as with 3.
R(5,3) = 1/6. That is because half of the 3 times tables has a LPF = 2 as above.
R(5,4) is undefined since LPF of any multiple of 4 is already 2.
R(5,5) = 1/3. We can calculate this as 1-1/2-1/6 but also with the following algorithm.

If the prime at position i in list of primes is Pi then

αi = 1/(P(i-1) -1)+1

And R(Pi,Pi) = R(Pi-1,Pi-1) / αi, Where α1= 1

Once R(Pi,Pi) is known then

R(Pi+1,Pi) = R(Pi,Pi)/Pi

and then

R(Pi+2..∞,Pi) = R(Pi+1,Pi)

As above R(Pi,Pi) = 1 - Sum[ R(Pi,1..Pi-1) ]

So for Pi = 5, i=3

α3 = 1/(3-1)+1=1.5

 R(5, 5) = R(3, 3) / α3 = 0.5/1.5 = 1/3

And for Pi = 7, i=4

α4 = 1/(5-1)+1 = 5/4

R(7, 7) = R(5, 5) / α4 = 1/3 / 5/4 = 4/15

We can work out the rest of the matrix from the diagonal.

R(Pi+1,Pi) = R(Pi,Pi) / Pi

So

R(7..P∞,5) = R(5,5) / 5 = 1/3 / 5 = 1/15

R(11..P∞,7) = R(7,7) / 7 = 4/15 / 7 = 4/105

The rows sum to 1 in the matrix:
Sum(R(Pi,j) , j=P1..P∞) = 1

This is the grid so created:

Each Row represents a timestable and the Columns represent the proportion of numbers with LPF equal to Step. The green squares are derived from the ochre above by dividing by the Step.

The green square is also in the ratio to the ochre square of
1:step-1
where step is the step of the green square.

The green squares sum to 1. That is the ochre squares / step sum to 1.

So R(Pi,Pi) = R(Pi-1,Pi-1) /  [ 1/(P(i-1) -1)+1 ]
And Sum[ R(Pi,Pi) / Pi, {1,∞} ] = 1

Sum[ R(Pi-1,Pi-1)  /  [ Pi/(P(i-1) -1)+Pi ] , {i,1,∞} ] = 1

This simplifies to the series:

Where P1 =2, P2 = 3, P3 = 5, ... are the prime numbers.

Which can also be written:

OR

as by defining the next term:

t(n+1) = t(n) (Pn -1)/P(n+1) where t(1) = 1/P1 and Pn is the nth Prime where P1 = 2

Well that ties all the primes into a single expression. But its not a very nice series as the terms tend to an infinite expression themselves.