Ukraine sits at the centre of History

When you speak to people in the West, whether they are conscious of it or not, they are part of a huge historical event.

The issue is whether there is Progress. Whether the prevailing of Western values over other systems represents an improvement.

The Cold War and the battle between America and Russia has been going on since 1945. America wishes to subsume Russia into its Empire just as it did Europe and Japan in 1945.

When Western leaders warn of the biggest military action since 1945 this is what they mean. America is moving troops into Eastern Europe and beyond not just because of Ukraine but because it wishes to continue WW2 and add Russia to the Empire.

Now we might view this Eastern expansion of the Empire like we did the Nazis. But the difference is that America is seen as bringing a superior ideology to the people of Russia, while the Nazis were seen as bringing an inferior ideology.

So its not about the war, the dead, and the destruction its about the ideology. Western Values are seen as superior and this alone justifies the US expansion.

And this ties into the history of humanity is a very deep way. When the Roman Empire expanded its boarders into the barbarian lands they too saw that they were bringing civilisation to backward uncivilised people.

Such imperial disregard for other people is what we call racism. And in the modern climate of tolerance we are very open to people who are different from us. But this tolerance of different people fails when it comes to imperial expansion. We may tolerate minorities within the Empire, but outside the Empire they are to be subsumed and destroyed. We have seen this with the merciless killing of terrorists across the globe over the last 20 years. Whatever motivates a terrorist is of no interest to the Empire: they are barbarians and either submit to Western values or face the sword, get burned at the stake, or get bombed as it is these days.

But America is different from the Roman Empire because as Francis Fukuyama wrote in 1992 America represents the conclusion of human history. The American Empire is the final system to which all other systems were heading. Every war that has been fought in Mankind's long history has been heading towards the values and the structures of the American Empire.

I do not know whether the Roman Empire has the same ideas of universal relevance and eternal longevity. I guess maybe they did, but I do not know of any Roman writer who dared make such a claim that they were ending History. It is quite psychotic really.

Francis Fukuyama borrows this idea from Marx who analyses history into a series of conflicts and dialectics from which emerges eventually not Capitalism and Liberal Democracy but even better than that Communism. In Communism he argues the conflict between State and Individual is solved. This antimony is not new. It is the central theme of Sophocles' Oedipus trilogy where Agamemnon must first sacrifice his own daughter to ensure the States' military success. And then skip forward 2 generations and Oedipus' daughter Antigone must decide whether to respect the States order not to bury her disgraced brother Polynices or perform her sisterly duties. She opts to be a true sister and is sentenced to death.

Such conflicts of interests between State and Individual still exist in Western Values so we are clearly not at the end of History. But never-the-less Francis Fukuyama bulldozes these matters aside to justify the US Empire.

And so after 100s of years of Western expansion, including Britain controlling the largest Empire in history, we have the US seeking to become the final Empire in history that will consume the world. And that brings us to 2022 and Ukraine where History apparently has already crowned the victor.

Obviously any ancient Greek reading this would immediately identify the hubris here. Francis Fukuyama's book was not heralding the rise of the end of History anymore than Hegel's Phenomenology was heralding the World Spirit in the figure of Napoleon. Francis Fukuyama wrote a Swan Song for the US Empire. And the end of history will be just the end of America. But Empire's like the Roman Empire take centuries to rise and fall so its all in very slow motion.

Now returning to the start, what of all the people involved in this slow motion crashing wave?

It is very interesting how our minds get caught up in all this. I think most people in the West will have taken sides. They will be either pro-America or pro-Russia. In church today the prayers were asking for peace between Ukraine and Russia. No mention of the much more pertinent peace needed between America and Russia, or the US presence in Ukraine or the more than 100 years of smouldering tensions between America and hated Communist Russia. Its interesting too that German had equal hatred of Communist Russia, and fears of Communist take over of Germany was the fuel that led to the rise of Fascism and also the hatred of Jews. America never solved these tensions and just replicated them exactly in its attitude to "Commie" Russia, although it did separate Jews from Communists in the popular imagination.

But perhaps I give the US empire too much credit. Another view is that it is entirely irrelevant in human history. It is just the next Empire and the next rise of a narrow minded people who promote themselves at the expense of other different people. And it suffers from the same problem of managing to hook into its tsunami of awesome grandeur and violence all the small minded people who cannot just see that this is just the same old "war thing" yet again. And all the Roman Wars achieved nothing, ,and all the American wars will achieve nothing. All this apparent building on rock, is really just of sandcastles against the rising sea of time. The words of Francis Fukuyama no more long lived than the paper on which he wrote. And sadly all the lives destroyed in this tsunami just wasted and thrown to the dogs to be forgotten.

What is perhaps frightening for the US Empire is that the parallels with Rome are growing. What finally broke the Roman Empire were the invasions of the Barbarians. And as we have seen the terrorists and the communists and the Islamic world has remained undefeated. Taleban ride high after 40 years of fighting, first with the Russians (with US backing) and then with the Americans (with unknown backing). Afghanistan shows that desert hills are the Scottish Highlands for the US Empire. Vietnam showed that the Asian rainforest are another Scottish Highlands for the US Empire. Like Rome, Washington is starting to build its Hadrian Walls to keep the Barbarians out. And the Barbarians remain indifferent to the rise of the US Empire. They would resurge as the US implodes, simply because the US has not really solve anything and Liberal Democracy leave too many contradictions and unresolved conflicts to ever be stable.

So what is the End of History. Well SRH says that an end to history is a contradiction, and it would need to include its own termination. There may indeed be a Pax Americana for 1000 years but how do we know it will not suddenly evolve into something else? Buddhism says that all things change, and that even Buddhism has almost gone extinct. The Indians call this time now the  Kali Yuga or Dark Age because all wisdom has left the world and people have gone dark and unable discern truth from false, or good from bad. You can see this directly from the rise of profoundly ignorant people like Francis Fukuyama.

Any philosophy that thinks it is the final stage, or the end, or knows when the end is, before the actual end is flawed. Now it may come that the end arrives, but we would never know and in that lies the whole problem with this teleological thinking.

Now once conclusions and end thinking is gone, then what is the motive for US saving Ukraine from Russian invasion, especially with its own invasion. For Ukrainians what difference being controlled from Washington rather than Moscow? When there is no up or down, then suddenly there is no reason.

Is the human brain a computer?

 First off what do I mean by "human brain"? I mean more than just nerves and ion differentials. I mean also brains in context, that are functioning in societies with other brains, whose operations are more than just chemistry.

A radio program today was describing all the chemicals that are associated with the feelings of love. These chemicals are highly addictive. The scientist made the mistake of describing love in terms of addiction, rather than addiction in terms of love. We evolved the mechanism of love to ensure that we formed long lasting partnerships, presumably with reproduction as the benefit. That we can hijack this mechanism with other chemicals (that we call drugs) is purely a side effect of the love mechanism. It seems hard to explain the corpus of arts that revolve around the subject of love, if love was just chemicals. Instead of Romantic poetry why are there not ballads written about vitamins or elements? You can't reduce human experience entirely to anything other than human experience, any more than you can reduce an apple to a pear. You can see parallels between human experience and brain chemistry and drugs, but they are not the same. If they were the same then what can science learn by studying drugs? Just study love or vice versa! Which scientist replaces their love life with drug injections?

So in this sense a brain is more than just the neurons and chemistry it must include the functioning brain in context. The arising of endorphins is not just a chemical phenomenon, it works within an environment that the brain is evolved to respond and fit into.

This is the flaw at the heart of Psychiatry. Treating the chemical imbalances doesn't treat the cause or meaning of those imbalances. Taking anti-depressants doesn't treat depression, it just switches off the part of the brain that responds to depression. Being a stone can be useful, but if you are not a stone it's not a long term approach.

Now I heard on TV someone saying that surgeons are encouraged to play computer games to keep their hand-eye coordination sharp. They then went further to see parallels between a game console and the human brain and the intricate wiring of both. So far so good. But then they said that a fault in the wiring of the brain can cause complex errors. Problem!

To explain the problem lets invent some "realms." There is the realm of physical cells and chemistry. And then we can create the realm of art and meaning.

We can see these realms in this diagram. The brain is the mass of tissues. The meaning are the boxes and colours containing descriptions of parts of the brain.

We can see that the realm of meaning is broken into sections, and parts. The mass of human brain does not come in discrete regions. It takes close observation to separate it into parts. Watching a zombie movie the camera never stops to examine the components of a brain, its enough just to have some brain tissue for the zombies to eat. There is little meaning attributed to a brain in a horror film, just a disgusting and abnormal mass of flesh usually extracted from an unfortunate victim in unwelcome fashion. Meanwhile in the operating theatre of a brain injury department the exact same flesh is given huge meaning, not just in terms of the close attention to the parts and functioning but also the person and the life in which they belong and take part in.

Now what is especially interesting here, and directly influenced by SRH, is that the human brain is understood by many to be the source of human meaning. Yet as we see in the picture above the human brain that is broken into functioning sections IS already in the realm of meaning. No meaning has been explained yet. You can't make meaning out of meaning! That would be like buying a chair from a carpenter and then seeing a delivery of chairs at the back door. What is the carpenter doing, and why not buy directly from who ever is delivering them missing out the redundant carpenter?

This was captured brilliantly in the Mouse Mill episode 8 of the UK kids program Bagpuss (with added music not in the original!):

Its like seeing the image of a cup fall on the retina and thinking that this image is what we see. If you can make sense of the image on your retina then why do you even need an eye, the cup is surely already made?*

*Let the function m(x) take some x and produce meaning from it. So we see a cup m(x) = "cup." Now we see the cup form an image on someone's retina m(y) = "cup." And then we do extensive study of the brain and come up with new entity z such that m(z) = "cup." So far we know nothing about m. What a scientists is really looking for is some entity 'a' such that m(a) = m. Or if we take meaning as an object itself what m(m) will produce. We're in Descartes or Kant territory. If we don't already know what m(x) is then how can we know what m(m) is? What we can do is make a machine so that n(x) = "cup." But the problem here is that the machine will either agree with m() or it will make no sense. It can't actually give us any insight into meaning. We already know that brains and machines can make meaning, but we are looking to understand how that happens and give it meaning. There is a problem here. But its not game over yet.

For meaning to be explained we must show how we get meaning arising from before there was meaning. If we explain meaning within the already existing realm of meaning then we have failed to add anything new. We are the carpenter taking deliveries of chairs, or the mice putting a biscuit into the mouse mill.

So how does the brain work? Where does meaning come from?

Well we can say for sure that meaning does not arise from meaningful parts of the brain. It must arise from what is as yet not meaningful. That is obviously a deep thing to discuss, but for a shortcut its called Sunyata in Buddhism which is translated as "emptiness." The world before we apply meaning is meaningless.

Wittgenstein devoted the second part of his life to this question and he found a realm that is prior to meaning. He called it the "game." Before we know the rules of a game the pieces are meaningless (in that context). We may see people pushing wooden statues around a checker board and wonder what is going on: it is meaningless until we learn chess. Likewise we hear foreigners speak and the language is meaningless. we may travel to another country and see customs that seem peculiar and meaningless to us. In archaeology whenever "meaningless" things are found they are almost universally attributed to "religion." This seems a rather "off the shelf" approach. If we don't understand yet, then what is wrong with things being meaningless to us (for now). Wittgenstein observes children's games and notes the process by which a ball gains meaning. The kids learn the rules of the game, and then they can play, and then the ball has meaning. Analogously he talks of "language games" to describe how words that are quite arbitrary in themselves gaining meaning through their use in a game of language. Pictorial scripts may indeed draw pictures of the things they are talking about, but this is no use in spoken language! Well apart from onomatopoeia like a dog going "woof". So we can see meaning arising from the practices of the world that we learn by physical processes like copying and being corrected. Wittgenstein identifies for example finger pointing as something that precedes language. I think all higher animals know when they are being looked at. Looking into the eye of an animal precedes meaning, it is universally understood. David Attenborough refers to the wealth of meaning in the gaze of a gorilla, and that is all pre-language. Often when you look at an animal, even as lowly as a lizard, it scurries away. This is a world before meaning. But how far can we go into the world prior to meaning. 

Slightly more specifically that TV program's suggestion that errors in the neuron wiring causes problem like they would a computer is false. There is much evidence of neuron plasticity. The brain rewires to get around problems. Brain wiring is not what gives the brain its function. You do not just wire up neurones to get a working brain. 

This means there is not an direct correlation from circuit board and function. It is true that brain damage and brain scans do show correlations between regions of the brain and external phenomena. But these are probably artefacts of embryogenesis. Brains grow and as a result they grow in particular ways and using similar instructions they grow in  similar ways. So indeed there is correlation between brains on which parts are important in vision for example. But we should not then conclude that this correlation translates into an understanding of vision. All it does it correlate with the fact that we have separate vision and hearing senses for example. It doesn't explain how we are able to know this and how we give meaning to our vision and hearing senses even just by experiencing hearing and seeing with no knowledge of brains at all.

Synaesthetes may draw attention to their "miswiring" that leads to cross overs in their senses. So that a sound may also create a sense of colour. But we are still just dividing regions either in our consciousness or in our brain scans. We have not gone even 1 step closer to understanding this process of how we divide things up into meaningful parts itself.

The realm of meaning should meet a "fixed point" or "singularity" when it comes to examining the brain (if the brain is indeed the thing doing the examination). Such research should create some kind of fractal as you would expect when a function is applied to a closed field repetitively.

I believe I have covered this regarding how "ego" is perhaps the fixed point of the meaning realm. When we come to think about ourselves in depth we are forever trapped by a chicken and egg loop. What is the nature of my existence? But if I don't already exist then what am I thinking about? If I already exist then what is the nature of that existence? And the loop goes on. Out of this recursion should come a fractal. Pure science fiction but perhaps that infinite loop is the cause of all creation.

So we need be careful about making pronouncements about the brain, like its wiring is critical to function. The reason is that we are at some level using a brain to make this prnouncement, and if we are to explain ourselves we need go below the basic level of the brain's functions like meaning and pronouncements themselves. We need explore into the realm prior to meaning upon what all this rests. This sounds like nonsense, but it can be done. Enough for this blog, that would begin a discussion of meditation and jhanas.

Ukraine hmmm

 Once again the US is on a war path. Suspiciously after ending operations in Afghanistan. Perhaps the timing of this suggests its more in US interests than Russian. If Russia was driving this they would have done it while US was preoccupied elsewhere. Plus in 2014 the US spent more on getting their man into power in Ukraine than is spent by all parties in the US election. Given than Ukraine 1/7th the size of USA that is a huge expenditure per capita on propaganda. And the US worries about other countries interfering in their elections ;-) It seems had Russia given Trump money and support that is just par for the game these days?

Now Ukraine is an interesting place because of its impressive agriculture and this led to protectionist policies. Bloomberg article from last year:

"Buying and selling of land was prohibited in Soviet times and then banned again in 2001, ..., because of fears that much of it would be acquired by the super-rich and foreigners"

That is just the general Socialist argument against Capitalism. Once you open up resources to free market the international wealthy imperialists just end up buying them and profiteering from them. You find your nation quickly changes emphasis from supplying a means of living and wealth to its people, to supplying profits to the wealthiest overseas foreigners. It stands to reason the richer you already are the more of the world's resources you can own and profit from, and the wealthier you will become, meanwhile the non-capitalists becomes less wealthy as a result. In general Capitalism is completely counter the interests of ordinary people like Ukrainians.

Does any one want to be ruled from abroad by foreigners who have only distant interest in the concerns of local people? Is this not what wars are usually understood as: defence of the realm from foreign invaders. And yet Capitalism through the back door does exactly this: it puts the country up for sale so foreign investors/invaders can take control of the country and profit from it.

Obviously this view of Capitalism never reaches our ears because all the media channels (in a Capitalist country) are owned by Capitalists! Its very much in their interests to find ways to sell the idea of a wealth elite owning everything as somehow good for ordinary people. In UK an important obstacle has been the removal of the national media BBC which is only part owned by Capitalists. It is the only braodcaster whose interests are not completely entangled with the interests of the Capitalist Rich International Super Elite (CRISE) 

Now in the case of Ukraine selling the country has been sold as "feeding the world." But why does the world need feeding? It has survived quite happily for 10,000 years why now?

Isn't it more that Ukraine is about to feed the Capitalists of the world, it is about to feed the CRISE?

So is this not America's real interest in Ukraine. Capitalism is faltering, it has run out of resources to plunder, it has faked growth and investor returns by printing too much money, there are no "wonder technological innovations" waiting to create new markets like dotcom and telecommunications have. In fact the dawn of things like AI and Energy Fusion will crash markets as labour and energy becomes cheap. More worrying with the crash of Capitalism the workers of the world are going to be left jobless. And since they have given up all their land and assets in forced sales like Ukraine is experiencing they will have nothing to fall back on to feed themselves.

They say that AI will create new jobs. But if that was true then employers would just employ people and not AI. The whole reason to employ AI is that it is more efficient than humans, reduces labour size and costs less, and that means Capitalists have to pay lower wages and that means lower income for workers. AI means lower income for workers full stop. Now things will become cheaper because of AI, but as usual its the Capitalist in the driving seat. They will need to lower prices so that starved part time workers can afford to buy anything and keep the economy going. But perhaps when AI becomes as versatile as human workers then human workers won't be needed at all. Only Capitalist owners of machines  will exist, and human drones will be surplus to requirements. You can just cull huge redundant swathes of the human population exactly like the Nazis did to inmates of the Concentration Camps who were too weak and ill to work anymore. This is the natural progression of all Right Wing thinking. Its not Nazism we needed to get rid of but the Right Wing in general who value economics and profit above human life. And that includes America and West. But that is exactly where Ukraine is going under US stewardship.

Now in India things are different. The country successfully kicked out the Western Imperialists and has run its own economy since 1947. Attempts by Capitalists to defraud the Indian population have not been successful. At the end of 2021 the government finally rejected the calls of the CRISE community to open up farm land to international investors and the government has done something unheard of in the West and actually represented its own people repealing the farming laws. India should be an example to Ukraine (and the World) of how it really can keep control of its assets and protect its people from international plunder by Western Imperialists.

However it seems that the US is not backing down. Whenever Capitalists fail they send in the army to destroy resistance. In the case of Ukraine the US propaganda puts all the blame on Russia seeking to add Ukraine to its Empire. Rather suspicious given that the USSR actually gave Ukraine away. But its a propaganda that rather doesn't work anyway since US just added Ukraine to its Empire in 2014. And when US says it is worried about invasion it itself then invades and moves its own troops into Ukraine. 

In reality it was the US increase in military activity since 2014 that has caused Russia to move its troop to its border in a defence move! Everything the US says is such obvious nonsense I'm amazed they bother to say it. And I'm embarrassed for Imperial journalists who are forced by Washington to repeat this nonsense. In the UK you have anchors on all channels reading nonsense all day. Whether they realise the ludicrousness of the words Washington has prepared for them on the auto-cue, who knows. I guess at the end of the day it pays their bills, its just a job, so they don't think about it. I wonder what the UK public who tunes into the NEWS thinks? Do they realise that the NEWS is just a "reality" TV show where everything is carefully scripted, rehearsed and created by scene writers?

 So anyway even a simple glance at Ukraine leads to "hmmmm". Ukraine is not so much "German Appeasement" but Iraq "45 minute claim."

And German Appeasement is a load of nonsense anyway. The Polish government pleaded with the UK to declare war on Russia after the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact between Germany and Russia to share Poland. UK diplomats just came up with a load of technical jargon why only Germany needed to be invaded. And all these so called German "invasions" were across fake borders literally drawn on a map by French and British civil servants in 1919 after WW1. Germans didn't accept the existence of the fake country Czechoslovakia, or the fake borders with Austria or Poland. They were simply re-drawinhg their version of things rather than France and Britain's WW1 view. And Poland has historically almost never been a free standing country. It has been partitioned many times without Britain apparently rushing to its aid. I suspect the Allies gave Poland independence not for the benefit of the Polish people, but just to create a wedge in Eastern Europe they could use to start war again. How foolish the Poles to accept this agreement and become just a pawn in the West's long game against the East. Rather proven by the Allies who had supposedly expended so much time and effort to protect Poland handing it to the Russians as a spoil of war in 1945. Meanwhile US Empire took Britain and Europe as their spoil of war.

So really Hmmm its all a load of nonsense. This is why no one should ever fight, because it's all nonsense. If some government salesman ever convinces you to lay your life down for them just call that a moment of weakness, and remind yourself its all nonsense. After all if no-one ever fought then no-one would ever need to fight. We only fight because we are told someone else is fighting. And why are they fighting? Because they have been told we are fighting. Likewise in Russia they see the US build up of troops over the last 9 years and they mobilise their own troops. And when Russia mobilises its own troops then the US makes a huge noise about the apparent threat they pose. It's all nonsense.

So on all levels Hmmm. Stay strong Ukraine. Kick out the Americans, plicate your neighbours, kick out the Capitalists, save your country from foreign troops and investors and stay true to yourselves. #Ukraine