Consciousness and Quantum Physics

Anaesthetics turn off consciousness. Studies have shown that the anaesthetics that effect consciousness also effect quantum energy flow in microtubules. 

"Here, we show anesthetic molecules can impair π-resonance energy transfer and exciton hopping in tubulin quantum channels, and thus account for selective action of anesthetics on consciousness and memory." https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25714379/

More general account: 

https://futurism.com/human-consciousness-quantum-physics

Comment:

Not sure I ever made the connection but SRH (search blog) says that consciousness cannot be a part of thinking or cognitive brain function.

We are aware of our thoughts. We know what we are thinking. If consciousness was derived from cognition we could end up in the situation where we are conscious of consciousness. And that opens up a paradox (which SRH hypothesis suggests generally accompanies all self reference) in this case of being conscious of unconsciousness. That is conscious of consciousness and then just negate the second part. The standard form of paradox from Russel's paradox to Godel to Turing Halting. Or put that another way. Use self-reference to map an entity into itself and then negate thus creating the standard "This is false" paradox. SRH stems from this seeming to be possible in "every" case where self-reference is sufficiently powerful to create a mapping of self into self. This led to interest in fixed-points as mapping self into self must have a fixed point that is invariant under the transformation. Very loosely is this the experience of self? But a fixed point it was hypothesises is the target object for paradox. All very lose over view never formalised. Fear is that a formal version of SRH will have sufficient self-reference to create contradiction and so must be impossible. Indeed if SRH is as powerful as it wants to be it must also be impossible! That's what you get for trying to show that self-reference is paradoxical. The only way to do that successfully would need to be non-self referential for starters. 

Anyway I used to think "self consciousness" was conscious of conscious. I am a conscious being, so being conscious of myself must be conscious of consciousness. That experience of consciousness, of knowing about yourself and the world as it happens, it is tempting to associate with self-consciousness. I am seeing the world, and I know that I am seeing the world. This leads many Daniel Dennett especially, but also my younger self, to think consciousness arises from some "feedback" in the brain. Not only am I knowing, but I am feeding information back round the system to know that I am knowing.

In my own history this led to AIME and a very primitive attempt to program this. It was a program that pattern matched. And then I intended to map its state into a 2D pattern isomorphic with the state and feed it into itself. Consciousness might arise was my inspiration. But I remember realising on the toilet one day that the patterns such a system would create would become meaningless to the outside world. To understand what the pattern meant you would need to be AIME!! Such solipsism is meaningless. It proved to me it was a pointless endeavour and I abandoned it.

I discovered later that AIME's patterns would have been fractal and would have some meaning to the outside world. But not to AIME she wasn't a general enough AI to understand fractals.

So quickly we can abandon this idea of feedback making meaning and consciousness.

Consciousness must lie OUTSIDE everything it is conscious of!

So quantum world is a great place to have consciousness because we are not conscious of this!

Paradise & Capitalism & Survival & Forgiveness

This blog is repeating itself, but every version may be different.

Judaism may try to own the Garden of Eden as its own, but the story is much bigger and belongs really to the near East and that primordial time before writing. Like the Great Flood story it records something in our past that has been handed down through generations. Another example of truth in myth I heard is the Nepalese story of how the great lake that once filled the Kathmandu valley was emptied by Manjushri. This obviously happened a long time before Buddhism, geologists think around 100,000 years ago. But it suggests that people from the first wave of human migrations into Asia witnessed this and recorded it in myth. The same is undoubtedly true of the Curse of Work recorded in our expulsion from Paradise.

The Bible continues with people lamenting work. Ecclesiastes is full of lamentations over work:

For what does a man get for all the toil and striving with which he labours under the sun? Indeed, all his days are filled with grief, and his task is sorrowful; even at night, his mind does not rest. This too is futile.… [2:22-3]

This is not a man who enjoys his work. No one enjoyed work, not until very recently under modern economies.

The solution to the problem of work was Slavery. There is a reason that people went to war. It was not just for physical plunder it was the get slaves to work their economies. The Ancient Athens of Plato much lauded as the birth place of Democracy was a city composed of 90% slaves. The Greeks that we read about living lives of freedom and democracy were just 10% of the population and half of the Greeks were women who lived under veils without any access to public life like the Taleban treat women today. Work was something that people have never wanted to to do, it was given to slaves.

The great change occurred with the Industrial revolution. Machines were cheaper than slaves and more productive and so slavery was ended and the "hard work" given to machines. Now in the West people do not really work. They sit at computers typing, or designing things, or doing modelling or sitting in meetings planning these things. The work is then farmed off to machines. This is slightly futuristic the West still relies on sweat shops in the 3rd world where people are essentially slaves to the manual labour that machines are still unable to do.

Modern economists will argue that people working in factories in the 3rd world are not slaves. They get a salary and a work contract and are free to come and go as they please. This is the biggest self serving lie in history. People in modern economies have only the freedom to go from one factory to another factory. They need to work to survive because all other means of subsistence have been bought and are owned by other people. There is no living of the fruits of the forest unless the forest belongs to you! Which every way they look at it they will spend their days working in a factory, they have no choice. And in fact slaves had a better time than modern workers. Modern workers still need to find a place to live and find food and healthcare. An ancient slave would be looked after by their slave owner as someone would look after their car today. It would be a source of pride, and a well looked after slave would work better and be a better investment than one left to fall ill and perish.

The life of slaves changed dramatically under Capitalism where they were employed en masse to run industry "for profit." No longer was a slave a personal possession, they were a company possession and were viewed only in terms of the profit they could return. A slave that was no longer profitable was killed. But the average slave on a sugar plantation only lived 4 to 7 years anyway so little change to become unprofitable. This is exactly where the Nazis got their ideas from. Nazism was identical in every way to the system that built America. Perhaps this is why the Americans are so at pains to criticise Nazism, its a way of diverting attention from their own identical crimes that lie in the foundations of America.

But the point is that work is unpleasant and no one has ever liked it.

So why did mankind ever adopt the system of work if it was so unpleasant? Why did mankind ever transition out of the Paradise that animals still inhabit?

Firstly be under no illusion it was a paradise. Hunter gathers who still exist in a state similar to the ancestors of humans do not understand "work" or the modern system. I have heard them say on TV documentaries that "work" and "money" makes no sense. Why would I work all day for money to buy things when I can just go into the jungle and pick what I need.

Modern humans do not have a relationship with nature. It has been broken. They have been cast out of Paradise so they do not know how easy life can be. We have reality TV shows now with modern people trying to survive in Nature and you can see how total the expulsion from Eden has been. Even experts struggle to survive in Nature now. For our ancestors it was as easy as a walk to the shops.

Part of the reason is that our divorce from Nature has results in immeasurable damage to Nature. Nature is broken, and as a result no longer gives man anything.

If you cut the hand that feeds you it will no longer feed you.

North America for instance used to host tens of millions of bison. Americans used to be surrounded by food and everything they needed. True there was work required to kill and process a bison into clothing and tools but this was work done by communities and would have been a fraction of a day's work. Studies of apes show that Gorillas work about 4 hours a day which includes social grooming and cleaning. Ancient humans cooperating in groups and with ancient knowledge of their environments would have found life easy. And it would have been luxurious. Humans tend to have a diet of around 200 raw food items like Chimpanzees. I wonder how many people today can claim such a varied diet. And fur is still a much sort after clothing item that few can afford now, even when it is legal. Life was good. This is why it didn't change for millions of years.

So why did we ever leave Nature and get cast out?

Well I discussed the spiritual side that Genesis discusses a few posts ago. Mankind no longer worshiped, respected and listened to Nature as the source of all but began to see that they could control nature. The belief developed that mankind could replace God and become creator himself. This really took off quite recently in history with the Renaissance in Italy where the West finally gave up all respect for Nature and started to see Nature as an unworked, dead raw material for industry. This is the step that allowed the Industrial Revolution to take over our thinking.

But a key thing here was famously noted by Thomas Malthus. You feed people and their population grows until there is no longer enough food and people are starving again and the population stops growing. This is the argument against support for the poor. The poor make themselves poor by breeding too much. And there is truth to this. The rich are different, and Capitalism actually reduces fecundity as people are worried about claims to their family title, wealth and capital. When all your money is going to a single Son you will invest a lot more in them. Other children are less important, and those left with prostitutes may as well die.

And the wealth of our ancestors lay in the low populations. Very recent archaeological analysis of ancient footprints gives amazing glimpses into the lives of our ancestors. Invariably the woman is walking with weight on one side as she carries a child on her hip. The need to carry children puts an automatic limit on population growth in nomadic people. And perhaps people were sensible. Perhaps they realised that too many mouths to feed would put obvious pressure on the community. [I need some study of existing nomadic people to flesh this out.]

The change came in the near east where people began to settle. Previously people would follow herds, or harvest as they went. But one community began to focus on grass grain. They realised that if they returned some of the grain to the soil they could get a crop. The quality of their diet quickly plunged as they began to depend on grain. And they needed to work hard to grind this grain to make bread, and collect wood to cook it. And what started as just a casual relationship with the fields of grass developed over time into an intense dependency.

Now why did they abandon hunter gathering? The problem is that grain gives more calories and so their population grew. And being static and now living beside the grass fields there was no limit to population growth. Quickly more children were being born in farming communities than in the nomadic communities around. And the farmers quickly began to out number the nomads and expand their field systems, cut down the trees and transform the landscape to their way of thinking. It was an unavoidable ratchet that was inevitable as soon as humans found more calories.  

And this marks the start of the Curse of Capitalism. The moment you return some grain to the ground in the hope of getting "growth" on your investment you want to hang around that field and make sure other people don't get your crops. The concept of theft was invented. This was the start of "ownership." Famously the nomadic Americans that the colonists encountered did not understand property while the Europeans did not understand non-property and interpreted much of the American behaviour as theft which led to the start of hostilities between the originally sharing and caring Americans and the demanding and possessive colonists. And this is the beginning of the destruction of the world by the West that has been spearheaded by Britain and America. Far from liberating the world the West has amplified this trap and caught all people in it.

So the original farmers learned to "own" their fields and keep other people off. This was the beginning of conflict that has led in the millennia afterwards into wars of unimaginable violence as people fight to protect what they see as "theirs" or to steal what they see as "others."

The wedge was forced not just between Man and Nature as Mankind starting to fence off the outside world to protect "their" inner world. But the wedge was forced between man and man as each person now had an "inner" world that they owned.

This escalated into cities and civilisation so that now today the world is dominated by the idea of "private" space, with an owning person at the heart of it. And, as began ever so gently with our distant ancestors 8,000 years ago, once we invest in that private space we look for profits from that.

But this idea of "making profit" from our investment is what has really destroyed our relationship with Nature. Its a stereotype that this began with the Jews but they have certainly become associated with it. The idea of investing just for the purpose of profit is the sin that has ensured we will never return to Paradise. If you look at the history of the Jews it is littered with persecution that has almost all come from the Jews trying to profit from non Jews. Jewish law says that you can only "lend at interest" to a gentile. But this created much resentment between Gentiles and Jews. So Jews are a great example of how this casting from Eden has polluted all relationships.

In the ancient Near-East farmers used the same ideas as their nomadic compatriots. They only farmed "what they needed."

But at some point people realised they could sow more than they needed and then exchange the profits to other people. On one hand this is logical. But what invariably happens is that people in "need" end up indebted to people with "plenty." This idea of profiteering from the less fortunate has now grown to become the dominant idea across the globe. Not least through the growth of the British and now American Empires.

What began as a simple casting out of the Garden of Eden has snow balled now to cast the whole human world into gradually descending levels of Hell. And there was a strange flourishing in religions just at this process began to take hold in the Iron age. There was Buddhism in India and Daoism in China both in the 6th BC. And the Pre-Socratic thinkers in Greece at the same time also told a similar tale of Logos. And then Christianity in the Near East at 0AD. All these religions warn people away from Ego and worldly possessions. We are taught that suffering comes from petty worldly thinking, and especially in owning and grasping at things. That freedom and liberation are really found by letting go of worldly certainties and cannot be found by erecting fences and boundaries around things,. All things are interconnected and inter-dependent says Buddha, you harm this over here then you harm that over there. And Yin-Yang is the ultimate weapon against the Capitalist who seeks to own the profitable white and off load the unprofitable black only to find that they are really indistinguishable. As we progress the human race into wealth and profit, the world from which we are born is destroyed. This rise of religions I wonder was not a final recognition of the Paradise that the world was on its last crusade to forget and destroy. Buddha himself said that by 2000AD the world would have forgotten the true wisdom. Was that wisdom the one everyone knew in Eden?

But as explained in the Spiritual post on Eden a few ago. Eden is still here right now and we can access in a moment when we know how. But we need to put our egos away and remembers that all things come from God. And we can start to train ourselves in this simple truth by watching our breath that issues all by itself from our bodies. Watch our breath, appreciated it, get to know it, love it as the source of life, and as we get to know it well--gently rising in and falling out ever moment of our lives--we will steadily open the doors once again to Eden and God will forgive us and welcome us back in.

The Cult of Doing

 The brain is sympathetic with the world. That it its job. It is not a stone that weathers rain and sun without question. It is dynamic and sensitive to the world which is how organisms with brains are acutely sensitive to their environments.

Now we enter the complex bit. Is our sympathy with the world all there is? Does everything start with the world and organisms are only ever reacting to environmental stimuli.

Is art just a response to stimuli, or does the human add something. Perhaps even something of "themselves?" 

Certainly at one point all philosophers agreed that knowledge begins with experience. Kant fleshed out a theory for the "synthetic a priori" which means actual knowledge that can be derived before experience but which is not "obvious". That the angles of a triangle add up to 180 can be logically deduced, but this depends upon the assumption of flat Euclidian space. The two are interchangeable. IF you define the angles to sum to 180 you are also talking about flat space. But what is space? This cannot be "experienced" since experience depends upon space. So Kant argues for an unlimited hierarchy of transcendental truths that we can extract from experience, but which experience depends upon rather than come through experience. SRH shows that such dependencies must exist. You can't have experience or knowledge that is self-evident or independent.

But I digress look how hard it was for philosophers to get away from the idea that the brain is just a passive sympathetic organ that responds to the world. That all knowledge is just passively injected through the senses.

But knowledge is only the start. The main question here is where does action and doing come from. Is it just the passive reaction to experience?

Imagine someone who behaves without any sympathy with the world around. It is cold and raining so they wear a t-shirt. It is hot and sunny so they wear a thick coat. People would think them mad.

The ability to be sympathetic to the world is certainly something we expect of a healthy person.

Artists obviously struggle with this. If all an artist does is respond sympathetically to the world then they would not be seen as "creative." Artists do rely upon inspiration, and they do need to be culturally sensitive and not too ahead of the times. They have to "add" something to their experience. It cannot just be passive. Even with "realist" painting where the artist seeks to add nothing and just reproduce what they see, the irony is the level of skill required to do this. To exactly replicate is far from a passive process, it requires millions of decisions and accurate craft. But you could argue that a machine can do this, and while it is not passive the decisions that a realist artist makes are just technical skill not content.

So let us separate action and doing into the physical skill and the content. A bad musician may still play a great piece of music, while the great musician may still play rubbish.

Ok time is short for me let me get to the point.

There are 2 extremes of thinking here.

(1) The Worm view of the brain where it is purely a reactor to stimuli.

(2) The God view of the brain where it originates "new" things.

The truth is actually these two coming together.

There is no God capability to individuals. I remember as a child one of my first stages of thinking aged 5 was about the process of creation itself. If I was to be successful I need to be able to create. But where do new ideas come from. Invent a new mode of transport? That was my particular question. It is interesting that we seem stick with what we already know. Walking, running, cycling, driving, flying, swimming. What you already know is easy. But something new seems impossible.

And yet creation does happen. People do invent, things do change. Who first started using the world "sick" to mean good? Its not particular creative, its just a reverse in meaning, but someone had to initiate it, and it had to catch on.

Often people create at the same time. Darwin and Wallace both came up with the evolution by natural selection at the same time. Leibnitz and Newton came up with Calculus at the same time. Altho in both cases there are questions of plagiarism, there was genuine independent creation too.

It seems to me that creation does not just occur at the individual level. It is changes in a society and community that cause seeds to grow in individuals. I may think I am very smart to be using a laptop but of course it is the culmination of centuries of human progress, countless individuals involved in the gradual development of this entity. It is a community effort, and the humans alive in the age of IT are part of that community and learn the skills needed to be part of that community just as people learn the skills to be part of their community regardless whether that community hunts the forests or works in a post-industrial society.

So creativity is not the product of an isolated individual brain. It is a community thing. An emergent property of the collective. But a collective like a brick wall is made of individuals. We have the classic Individual/Group antimony here. And creativity comes from that.

Going back to our man wearing a thick coat on a sunny day. If we were to try and be a God like creator the chances are we would miss the mark and create stuff that had no meaning of significance to people. We could gain some kind of cult status where people follow us simply because we are original and apparently disconnected from the world around us. Some might say Damien Hurst and Tracy Emin achieved this. Tracy herself says that what she was making wasn't really supposed to have a wide audience. That kind of ironic, knowing and intellectual art makes no sense outside the circles of high art. Yet she was propelled into the public sphere and most people didn't understand her art. She gained a cult following, but her art was meaningless to most. I wonder whether you see this in music also. Sometime just being different is the artists only way of trying to define themselves. And indeed different attracts attention, but often it has no staying power because it simply doesn't make sense in the context. Times may change and the art become relevant, but as an individual this cannot work.

So we see that humans are neither completely sympathetic like worms, and they are not God like creators either. They are a subtle organic mix of individuals in societies and what they do neither a simple reaction to the world around them, nor a radical innovation in the face of the world around them. There is a slow evolution of human society, culture and language that mediates the world around us so that our actions are really a very deep interaction between world and brain.

The point of this blog was to end the idea of isolated islands of individuals who process information and then make personal decisions on how to act. What I called the Cult of Doing. The causes amongst other things the problem of freewill. When action is seen as mediated by a society and culture the individual and the collective come together to inform action.

From the misunderstanding that is the Cult of Doing humans appear to be faced with a blank sheet of what to do. Especially for the young who feel that they must "do" something with their lives. This is just a misunderstanding. All societies and cultures have predefined roles that mediate the problem of life. Be that being a farmer or a writer or unemployed slob. Of course the "unemployed" is simply a creation of Capitalist society, it never existed before Capitalists took over industry and started hiring and firing people.

So "what to do with my life" dissolves. It is just the result of a mistake. Life will find you! But we are not worms waiting to react to stimulation. But we are not Gods either upon which all the questions fall to us to solve.

Why is US trying to take over the world?

I Googled this yesterday and got a load of stuff. And what nonsense it was.

One argument was that the US was trying to open up the World's trade and make it work properly. What a load of nonsense. The US is the number one maintainer of sanctions around the world, and turns to protectionism whenever it suits it, along with having complex trading agreements with its partners to exclude other countries. There is nothing noble or forward thinking about US trading and economic policy.

To cut this all rather short. What is wrong with US just trying to create an empire? Rome did this. Britain did this. Now America is doing this.

Now why do states/countries try and create Empires?

That is more complex. It is a combination of ambition, protection and genuine self belief. When the Athenians beat the Persians in the C5th it launched an flourishing of civilisation called the Golden Age of Greece. This self belief propelled the Greeks into History and while their time in the limelight was short their brief empire has left an indelible mark of the West. In the most obvious way we still use elements of Greek or Classical architecture and the model for a human sculpture has never been bettered.

No whether the US has anything to give to civilisation and mankind remains to be seen. McDonalds & Coke and the Vietnam War and not going to go down in history. And will the inevitable defeat of Russia in the long drawn out Cold War be a great loss or will the US be able to synthesise anything positive from this.

But US creating an empire for all the old reasons seems the obvious place to start to answer this question. And yet no where on Google does anyone say this. There may have been an intense piece of brainwashing to try and separate the obvious two words that go hand in hand: USA and Empire. And in the absence of this obvious link I write this blog entry.

No formula for Samadhi

The problem with Samadhi is its not the result of a formula. Formulae lead to worldly things and states. The world works on formulae, but is always surprised when things turn out differently from what we expected. The future is always unexpected.

This unexpected is the nature of Samadhi. That's possibly unhelpful, but it means we don't spend time searching for something like we normally do. Just let all this search and need for definite things go.

Nature is good for this because at its heart is no formula. There is no reason for nature, it makes no sense, and that is its wonder.

So we sit with that nothing in particular nature of nature, the mystery and wonder that children feel and if that lets the formulae and narrative drift off for a bit that is perfect.

Nature & the Real Secret Garden.

 A post on the actual root subject of this blog :O quelle surprise! Reading Chris Packham at the moment and while 1001% respect always goes to him for his natural heart felt enthusiasm, knowledge, respect and love of Nature I wonder if even he has solved the core intellectual philosophical problem that remains in my view unsolved in the West. How does Man relate to Nature? Reading Chris Packham reminds me how my own project, and that of this blog, has virtually no formal representation in the West. Thunberg and Attenborough bring enormous impact and attention to the issue, but the root philosophy is floundering as far as I can see.

We hear justifications for nature all the time such as free pollination, free economic services, and that it promotes good mental health. Without Nature we would be dead. Many ways to try and make Nature relevant in a world that evidently thinks it can exist without. But this is all symptomatic of the problem of The West.  

I say West. This is not a new problem. It lies at the core of Genesis.

In that moment where the serpent persuaded Eve to taste the fruit of Good and Evil, in that moment Man and Nature were doomed. God was furious and cast mankind out of the Garden of Eden to spend every day of his life thereafter working the fields.

We have this historic record of a time, mythical or not, when Human beings lived in harmony with nature. Our daily human life was indistinguishable from nature, there was peace between man and nature, indeed there was a bliss to existence and everything worked.

But there was a crack in that eternal bliss, and it broke. On one side fell nature and on the other fell man and the two have been irreconcilable ever since.

Well the Bible drops the story there and the Jews go on to exploit and toil their days away. But there is some suggestion that were we ever to go back to God and say sorry for that original sin then we might be forgiven and things with Nature might be patched up and we could return to Eden. That is 100% my project. It is an economic, a philosophical, religious and spiritual journey. And the best part is its all been done. Just no one is listening cos its subtle.

But there is nothing to say really, Nature speaks very loud to anyone who stops to listen

TL;DR. The practice of Meditation is the practical way to bring Nature and Man back together. The breath is Nature, the Mind is Man. When breath and mind are in perfect balance then we find Eden.

Eden in this is Jhana. When we apply our mind to the world perfectly then we enter this much lauded state of infinite bliss that the sages, especially in India, have recognised for millennia perhaps before even Genesis was written. Is it a practical thing that we can do, any day like today, any moment like now, but it may take many years of practice and guidance because we have very many bad habits sent down to us by Adam and Eve.

And in this we begin to see the whole Western Project fall apart. The struggle to conquer and economise the world. To create wealth, to progress, to improve, to upgrade, to increase, to change, to revolutionise: all this starts to seem unnecessary.

The world got here all by itself 

That is quite a thought worth spending the rest of our lives contemplating. If mankind had never done anything the Sun would still rise every day ALL BY ITSELF. It owes not one thing to mankind at all. Not even one tiny thing. For the Sun we are completely irrelevant. And yet the Sun is the centre of life on this planet. As the day begins and the birds start to sing and our mind wakes from its slumbers and the thinking machine starts to spin up planning our day: it is always worth remembering that all this happens all by itself without any input from mankind at all!

Sitting quietly, doing nothing:

Spring comes,

And grass grows all by itself.

[Matsuo Basho 1644-1694]

It is not a new observation.

The world works all by itself 

This rather changes things. In the West we are increasingly brought up to think we must make our mark on the world, that we have some almost predestined thing to do with our lives, that we must struggle before we and our lives come good, that we are worthless until we have proven ourselves, that there are great people that we must struggle to emulate, that we deserve nothing until we have earned it, that like Adam and Eve we are punished for a Sin we are born with that we must absolve ourselves from through hard work, struggle and becoming someone better.

And so there is no Peace. Eden is something "over there" and we must fight and struggle to get "over there."

Nothing is further from the truth. Eden was and is always Here. If Genesis could be rewritten we would see that in fact it was the desire to make things, be creative and be like God that drove us from the Garden. Or more accurately the wanting to own the things we create like God does. As Jesus says to Pilate you only have power over me because God gave it to you. Mankind only has the power over things that God gave him. Remember the world works all by itself, nothing starts "in" Man. But he sort to believe that power was our own, and came from within us, and that is when we start to get things wrong and start to "sin". That desire to be God is the mistake. The walking away from God was something we did, God did not push us away and punish us. We did that. We walked away all by ourselves. Why would we do that?

This is the false god of Ego. Things are peaceful, but then men get jealous of the Gods and want to be Gods themselves. And so they walk away from Eden and enter the life of struggle and suffering. Its the Devil's trap and no human who has ever existed has not fallen for it. Some like Jesus avoided the trap, but look how the devil tries even harder to test them. At any point Jesus could have avoided the Cross "I'm sorry Pilate, Caesar Augustus is God's ruler on Earth" and he would have been free. Buddha the same. But it is not freedom, it is the life of toil in the fields. It is the life being estranged from Nature. Okay already said a lot recently about Ego in the blog.

So the long and short of this blog is that all Conservation in the West is missing the point. The climate crisis and the demands for political change and attention to the environment and the climate are like putting a sticking plaster over a skin cancer. You cannot legislate or shop your way out of this. All these "problems" arise because we left the Garden of Eden.

If we want Peace and Happiness there is only one way. Sorry to God, and resume life in The Garden. Ego down, we must admit that everything mankind has ever tried has only led to more suffering. If we can sit with our breath, peaceful, steading and engaged without worry and distraction then we open the doors to a Secret Garden that our ancestors walked out of thousands of years ago because they felt they could do better. Well it has got us here and its been a failure.

===

Okay deliberate ego arousing language at the end cos I want that debate. Has Mankind really achieved nothing? Has our walking in the Wilderness since we left Eden been all in vain?

Yes and No.

As it is written above, if the world works all by itself then I'm just going to sit here and let the world feed me. Some weeks later I am dead. See my ghost says: you are wrong. The world did nothing for me and now I am dead.

Well thing is you did do something, you decided to sit there all day long and that is what killed you. You make an unwise choice and you don't get what you want.

So what then does Basho mean by "While sitting, doing nothing?"

You can't actually do nothing. Even sitting there you are sitting there, breathing, watching, thinking, being.

But he is drawing attention to that way of being where we just abide with the world. We are not drawing up plans for the landscape development of our garden, or bidding to own land, or hiring people or execute plans. We are just co-existing with the world, letting it talk, listening. When we do that we notice Nature, and we hear its song.

This I imagine is the wonder is drives Chris Packham and all the other endlessly inspired and inspiring nature lovers, that when you stop anywhere in the world and just listen and let the world in you will quickly pick up the song of nature. Perhaps literally in a bird song, perhaps in some leaves rustling as a beetle trundles along or a rodent goes snuffling around, or a miniature miraculous flying machine goes buzzing past. Isn't it amazing that we are so excited by these miniature drones we can buy, yet every day even more amazing alien flying machine are flown past us by Nature and don't even notice.

So the long and short of this is not that we try and do nothing, that is a contradiction anyway. Try putting "nothing" as your first task of the day and see what happens. But that what we do starts with listening to the world around us. Yes we need food, but to find it we just listen. In Eden that was easy, fruits grow on trees we just look around for the right trees and find the fruit and our food is ready. Even in the fields actually it doesn't need to be that difficult. If we listen to Nature we can farm very simply. I used to have an allotment where I let "weeds" seed naturally and all I did was remove the plants I either couldn't eat or  didn't like. Secretly I used the allotment as a toilet sometimes to add some nutrient. Really the simplest form of farming and it was actually surprisingly productive. And because you continuously harvest as you need parts recover while other grow. Very close in fact to the original farming methods, which were just a modification of foraging in fact.

Eden lies just in the heart felt joy of listening to the world.

Now where Western Nature Watching could perhaps evolve is that Nature is not just outside, it operates inside us also. Just as the Sun rises all by itself, what causes our thoughts to arise? Why did I decide to write this today? There are causes, but ultimately they lie outside myself and Others in the mystery that is Nature.

And when we start to listening to everything as a Whole then we start to get very close to Eden. No longer are we in a position to oppose God, there is no solid "me" anymore. And when we stop opposing God then we are welcomed back and experience that infinite bliss the Indians call jhana.

I've said all this before in the blog. This is the Joy of Poverty. Its been said by people throughout the ages. But unfortunately its become a fringe thing in the world today. A lifestyle choice that can help us become happy. When in fact that is all the wrong way around. This is the core and foundation of everything. We may wish to add all the other "doings" that we feel we need afterwards if we want to as add ons. The Western way of life is just an optional add on and never was or never will be anything else.

To yes the West has done a lot, but none of it will ever amount to the simple truth of Eden that lies at the heart. Unfortunately what the West has contributed may not only be a poor copy of the pure happiness that lies at the core, it may get in the way of finding it. We are getting further from Eden as we believe we are making our copy better and better.

The Western Enlightenment was a false dawn, and a pointless one. The sun rises every morning anyway.

Capitalism and Gender (and Ukraine)

I'm sure I've seen books with this title in the library, but just a simple point here.

Sex is biological, gender is social. Just for simplicity cos they are in some way connected we can use gender loosely for both.

Now in Socialism there are men and women. But the essence of socialism is equality so men and women are equal. They have equal access to resources and tools needed for work and an equal stake in society. Men and women are different, and because of that and indeed through that difference, they can be equal. That is a good example of dialectics actually. A scale with only one side cannot balance and so can never be equal. We need two genders for them to be equal.

In the West right now this is seen as a conservative, dogmatic, static, fascist, totalitarian, divisive, oppressive structure. But actually it is not. Those scales are flat. "Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit" is story about a lesbian girl finding her feet and the title points out that freedom lies in the possibility of being different. For equality to exist there must be difference. But, and this is the fear, difference can be exploited to create barriers, prejudice and conflict.

Liberal Democratic Capitalism has a different idea. At root we are all the same. Every single human being has a human seed of individuality within them from which comes their vote, their freedom to chose and their right to be treated as a human being. That seed is identical in all human beings. There is no quality of it that can be used to distinguish people and act as the seed of prejudice: all humans are the same. We sit as individuals on the scale before all judgement and before any possible inequality.

Such a view separates our "seed" from all other things including our body. It means we do not actually have a gender or sex but rather this is something we can chose. And its the fundamental lack of gender in the conception of freemarket capitalism that leads perhaps to the current debates of which J.K.Rowling most famously got embroiled. Are we free to chose everything? Well as things stand in Western philosophy because we sit as Green Spheres on the axis of all the world's scales we can chose literally anything. How else, does the West argue, could any other thing be called freedom?

And this then ironically is the scale that balances these two world views right now:

On the one hand the conservative world where people are different, but through that difference we see the need for equality and compassion. And the other hand where all people are at root the same free agents with equal right.

Some will see Ukraine as on this pivot also. The Old World of patriarchal fixed societies in Russia and Belarus versus the New World of free dynamic people in the West.

The problem though is that like much that salesmen sell the sales pitch makes the product seem essential, but after a few weeks we realise we don't really need it after all. If the US was really selling something that important don't we think that mankind may have found it already?

I've discussed this so much in the blog probably don't need go again too much. Yes we did find it, but in the West at least it got lost.

That scale of scales is ridiculous. And we're thrown back to Descartes and even Plato. How does mind and body relate? How does individual and gender related? Individual vs society? How do all these apparent different things go together?

And I'm not saying I get all the awesome depth and power of this in anyway. Its a totem for the subtle way that solves this problem, a way that we walk more or less well every day of our lives.

Jim Morrison sings "We are thrown into this world" but at the same time we must add "nothing is thrown." If we look back on our lives we have a messy mass of memories of stuff coming into and out of them. Parents, family, friends, ideas, experiences, beliefs, attitudes. In there will be sex in some way or another, what we like and don't like and how other people behave also. A true mess. And from all that we condense some kind of understanding.

Now contemporary thinking is an equal mess. What is it saying? Is it saying that there is nothing fixed out there, its all customisable and we chose on a sliding scale/scales of grey? Or is it saying that there are fixed options in the catalogue, but we are free to chose which option. Or is it saying that things just are what they are, accept them? Well fact is no one is really saying, or allowed to say anything.

Well lets clear up that one thing. Things can be different, without being apart. The hours of twilight don't last from mid-day to mid-night. We have definite day and night, and then some transition period in between. There is nothing to be afraid of here. Oranges are different from Apples, that is how we have many types of fruit. "Grey" is a load of nonsense. What there is is "Yin-Yang" which is a complexly and hierarchically interwoven opposition of black vs white. I often argue that Jews don't exist just to remove the whole hyped up hysteria surrounding what is just a regular ethnoreligious distinction. I mean does the Indoeuropean Aryan really exist? But once the hysteria has abated then obviously we have actually cultural groups. The world is not a pluralistic sea of atoms who each person having their own religion. Some belong to multiple groups for example some people see themselves as both Jewish and Black but the groups that people get meaning from are not grey: they are distinct entities.

But the fear is that someone who identifies with White will come into conflict with someone who identifies with Black. And the solution is to make everyone "grey." Nonsense. The point is that a Black and a White recognise they both have a skin colour, and having a skin colour means it must be one way or another and so there will be people who are different. This is the essence of equality and freedom.

Skin colour looks like a good example of "grey" in fact. No two people have the same skin colour. But would I form an identity of 1 person, namely myself, who has skin colour coded #356.42.1154 based on the distribution and range of tones that I have? No the Black/White distinction is not really about skin colour its an identity and belongs me to a group. That kind of thing has nothing to do with "grey."

So the same is true with gender. No need for Grey. Whether there is grey I will leave open, but no need for it. The world can be perfectly well constructed with existing identities. Without issue.

And so what is the US bringing to Ukraine that was not there before? The Ukrainians will find out. I know some Western NGO workers in Ukraine. The country was a free and open testbed for their new social ideas. But does Ukraine need all this? It had the seeds for its future already within it. The West cannot bring anything that Ukraine didn't already have. That is the hypothesis. Lets see.  

Why are so many film villains British?

 In his book Occidentalism Edward Said notes that The Orient maps onto the conquered territory of the various Western Empires. So that an Oriental for an American is East Asian, for a British they are Indian and for a French they are African. Occidentalism is the way that Western Empires project what they don't like onto the conquered and reserve the good for themselves. This is essentially the Jewish analysis of the Nazis that in their belief that they were superior they projected all the inferior qualities onto the Jews. This blog would note of course that the Jews are not immune from this and they do the same to the Gentiles. This Yin-Yang (or rather lack of awareness of the Yin-Yang) is universal.

Key features of this process occur in gender. Oriental men are seen as weak and unthreatening to the Imperial rulers, and the women loose and alluring.

So as the US Empire comes into ascendency it has an increasingly fraught relationship with the Empire that gave birth to it namely the British Empire. North America was until recently just another British colony, and there was a time in Britain where an American was seen as Oriental: unintelligent, unrefined preferring base animal instincts, weak men, attractive dumb women.   

After independence things slowly began to change. In 1942 Churchill finally let in the US and UK has been a country under occupation ever since. Escaping Europe through Brexit is just out of the frying pan: the US Empire is still in occupation across the whole of Europe.

So what effect on popular culture. Initially the British film star carried his/her weight. There was respect. But gradually the crass, fast talking, wise guy American that always existed to some extent in the shadow of the aloof superior English gave way and the American Film Star established them self as a genuine force to contend with and eventually out smart the conventional, old fashioned repressed English. While the British sit for afternoon tea the Americans ride in and take the glory.

So Hollywood has played a critical role in rewriting history. Many iconic scenes from history and especially WW2 are now rewritten with the starring roles played by Americans and the British simply playing support roles. A relationship that represents the new Non-Churchill understanding of WW2 that really it was the American War and the British were just a support role (that I myself subscribe to).

So what of the bad guys? Who gets evil projected onto them? Well for the US it is going to be their closest and dearest rival. When everything is stripped away, Empires are Good and the conquered are Bad. Its the oldest story in history. Its also the weirdest part of the human psyche that the real meaning of "evil" is "the conquered". If it was otherwise then why is there no way that evil can win? By definition evil will lose, and that is because evil IS loss. In Imperial thinking anyway.

So its a natural feature of Empire that the Imperial masters are fundamentally motivated by good, and their subjects--especially their chief conquered realm--are motivated by evil or at least dishonestly and malice.

And so what looks like fun in Hollywood just represents age old Imperial processes. And the British have been suckered into accepting it. Ironically the one country that has never had an independence day namely Britain is scheduled one very soon so we can start writing some stories where we are good guys again.