Evolution and Human Will

When Mankind domesticated the Wheat or the Cow we like to think a ready made Man surveyed the world and brought various useful animals under their command.

But this is not what happened.

Seeds must have been a good source of food for fledgling Mankind and humans with increased Amylase enzyme were better able to extract the sugars from the starch. Humans began to evolve to specialise on starch and seeds.

At the same time we socially evolved to stop wandering after herds of animals and to spend time in the grasses fields that were starting to supply more of our food.

As Humans evolved to be more stationary they started to take seeds back to their dwellings, and at some point had the genius idea of resowing a proportion to ensure a future harvest. This then gave an evolutionary advantage to the harvested grains over the naturally dispersing grains.

Harvested grass varieties then naturally evolved not to disperse seeds naturally but keep the seeds on the stalks until humans harvested them.

Exactly like insects and flowers co-evolving Humans and Grasses co-evolved so that now certain grasses like wheat and rice cover the planet, just as the humans that coevolved with them.

So it was not the case that a ready made Man brought grasses into control, bur rather that Man and Grass evolved together to form a symbiotic organism.

Certainly this is how another sentient species would see it. But because Human's have a tendency to see things from their own perspective the mutual relationship between humans and grass is misunderstood.

Chimpanzees and Bonobos, our closest relatives, did not undergo this co-evolution with grasses and they do not have the elevated amylase levels of humans, and more importantly never evolved the static dwellings and farming practices that dominate modern human life.

Reserved or "reserved"

I saw one of these on a seat today and thought I wonder who it is reserved for. But then realised it was a pile of reserved signs that were being stored on a seat. Isn't this a great example of use and mention. 

In the factory that makes these no one thinks parts of the conveyor belt, or the packing boxes is actually reserved. Out of context it means nothing, it is just a bit of plastic that can be sold.

But it can be sold because in this culture we have this concept of "reserved" (in quotes) which is linked to ownership. We can own a seating or table space before we actually take our seat by reserving it. Really we should send a model of ourselves ahead to occupy the seat in lieu of ourselves. But we have this neat idea of "reserved" and the sign which serves this purpose.

Now how does someone know whether the sign has been "activated" and is actually reserving a place, or whether it has been left there accidentally? We have to look at the context. In my case it was easy, I noticed there was more than one sign, which is not the normal way to reserve. But even if there was just one, the seat didn't look particularly special "why would anyone show preference for that seat?"

Normally this becomes an issue only when we are looking for a seat ourselves and we are in competition. Chances are we notice the sign when we want to sit there. And often if no one is sitting there and we won't be long we can actually ask to use the seat as long as we leave before the reserved customer arrives.

The world is so very much more complex than the symbols that we have for it. As Suzanne Vega sings "These words are too solid, They don't move fast enough." See how complex the situation surrounding an individual reservation can get.

Now there are people who like to "stick to the rules" and enforce exact interpretations of the law. While Godel's theorems have many loose interpretations, they exactly show the problem with too strict an adherence to the rules.

SRH's original form was to do with the context not being codifiable in the syntax. More neatly Tarski shows that semantic features like True/False cannot be encoded within the logic.

It leaves us with the Wittgenstein insight that words gain their meaning from their use. Indeed meaning lies in the use of symbols, and objects.

And for that to be true, "use" must not be encoded within the words. You cannot work out whether something is reserved just from seeing the sign, else that storage chair was reserved. You wouldn't be able to quote a word either like "reserved" has 8 letters. That part of the sentence would be reserved! Or perhaps this whole page, or your computer screen. The word itself does not even tell you what is reserved.

If "Reserved" intrinsically has meaning then that meaning applies no matter where the word occurs. The context has no bearing on the meaning. I can just drop that word into a sentence Reserved and everything would make sense. It doesn't.

Obviously this is not true. "Reserved" does not have any intrinsic meaning. It exists in a context and combined with the context it gains meaning. This suggests that Reserved is nothing. Well in a way obviously it is just 8 letters, or scores 12 in the context of Scrabble; how can 8 letters be anything important, altho a score of 12 is more important. "Hwebbfyl" is 8 letters and it has no meaning just like "reserved." If we want "hwebbfyl" to gain meaning we might use it to refer to the type of light we get on an overcast day. Now suddenly it gets meaning, as easy at that. Tho we might want to see it used a few times to get clear on the subtleties, like can we use it to refer to a room dimly lit by a single bulb? we might also want to hear it spoken to understand what it sounds like. That isn't often clear from the letters. The culture of spoken language is outside the writing in many languages. How do you pronounce the place name "Shrewsbury." If the British had all died out no archaeologist or linguist would ever be able to find out. Its commonly recognised to be pronounced like this.

So its not that words "do not exist" but alone they are nothing. The soul and meaning comes from context. But context alone is not enough. It must have symbols to manipulate. It is a dialectic or synergy between the parts from which springs magically Meaning just as a tasty cake magically emerges from the otherwise not to tasty ingredients. This is a critical part of Buddhism where the Buddha identifies all phenomena to not exist in themselves but to emerge from "causes and conditions" (Pratītyasamutpāda) thus meaning they have no intrinsic permanent essence. The opposite of Plato!

It means that translation is a subtle thing. It depends upon us knowing the culture and society that used the language. And a society changes too. "Sick" normally means unwell, but became to mean excellent through irony. Imagine an archaeologist reading a British text where a kid says, "the goal was sick" - an casual inspection might think it was a bad goal! But it helps a lot that we only need to translate languages spoken by humans on planet Earth. That means that all sorts of things are the same, and change in predictable ways. Pottery for example is so ubiquitous across almost all societies that Egyptologist Petrie was able to set up a layer dating system that has been extended all over the world. But for all the similarities, there are differences and to understand the language we first need to understand the context and without the society to live in that may be lost. People still argue over the meaning of Stone Henge in the UK. With just vague clues to the society its extremely hard to get a meaning.

This is linked to Self also. The "I" we think has intrinsic meaning. But actually it depends on social context in the exact same way! So not only is there is complex game being played to work out whether something is reserved and exactly what is reserved, but even to work out "who" it is reserved for.

Is being Jewish antiquated?

As the world progresses one thing from the ancient Past remains in high profile: the Jew. I struggle with this idea, as this blog makes very obvious. Whether you consider yourself Jewish or not how can this make any sense?

One of the big issues for me is whether the Jews are a group or not, and whether this group membership is supposed to confer anything on individual Jews. And what if it confers something bad on the members?

One classic example of this is what happens when there is a Good Jew? It looks to me like all the Jews give themselves a pat on the back and share that achievement. But this type of thinking is always a double edged sword.

Would the writer of this piece have done so had he known that Melvin Calvin had nothing to do with the discovery of the chemistry behind Photosynthesis and in fact completely eradicated the real discoverer, a Swede called Benson, from history and stole his place. Never having the honour to ever acknowledge the truth. All the worse cos Benson's discovery of a cycle complete disagreed with Calvin's own theory. He not only didn't discover it, he even opposed it leaving his once collaborator Benson to work alone. 

Now Jews believe in God too and God knows perfectly well that Calvin is a fraud, and so Calvin was even more deluded. What a completely irredeemable person! In fact this is the definition of Evil: a person who puts themselves before God. So there are bad Jews because there are bad people. Being Jewish does not protect you from this.

Now this is the question: if Calvin was a bad person, are all Jews tainted by this? If not then Jews do not benefit from all the good Jews either... including Abraham.

Which ever way you twist it, being Jewish ultimately amounts to nothing. This kind of tribal thinking has no place in the modern world. As pointed out before a very obviously example of Tribal thinking is White Supremacy. It is widely acknowledge that there is no such thing as a "white" tribe, and even if there was it is irrelevant to politics. Why then do the "Jews" still think tribally when everyone else is so much more advanced? I put "Jews" in quotes cos obviously there is no objective thing called a "Jew" its just a designation that "Jews" give themselves. In that sense it is circular. SRH?

Ah perhaps this is the problem I noted before.

Can a Gentile define a Jew? I think not. Its a common thing in Identity Politics that only a Black, or a Homosexual, or a Rape victim can truly speak about the matter.

So only a Jew can really talk about being Jewish. It is something that a Non-Jew would never understand. Jewish conversion is possible, but I wonder whether Jews really view the convert as a true Jew? This is kind of critical to this argument.

Anyway lets get rid of one avenue here:

Somebody somewhere must be able to determine who is a Jew (else we have no Jews). And if that person must be a Jew we have:

∀x∃y | I(x,y) ↔ J(x)

OK not sure about the logic here, but if I(x,y) is true if x identifies y is a Jew and J(x) is true if x actually is a Jew. So together it means: For everyone, there is someone who x identifies as a Jew iff x is a Jew. In other words if x is not a Jew then no way what they say can be true. That means even if I identify Abraham as a Jew, because I am not a Jew that opinion does not count. What actually identifies Abraham as a Jew is based upon other people, who are Jews*.

* I realise problem here. The Nazis sent Jews to concentration camps. Now if the Nazis were not able to identify Jews then they did not send Jews to concentration camps. So the Gentiles must be able to identify Jews. Either that or the Nazis took the self-identification of people as the test. If someone said they were not a Jew then the Nazis would ignore them. Not sure that is true. So it must be that Gentiles can in fact decide who is Jewish and who is not. That is quite interesting and needs to be considered some more. But assume this is not the case, Lets go down the other avenue cos its interesting.   

But we can see the tautology here. If I reject the idea of "Jews", then as far as I'm concerned it does not matter if people keep calling each other Jews, it's a fantasy. But on the other side, because I am not a Jew those who call themselves Jewish will ignore my opinion too. This needs to be fleshed out but if the only definition of Jews depends upon the opinion of Jews then its circular. You should be able to get a really neat contradiction out of this by SRH.

The way out is to open up the definition of Jew to non-Jews. Interestingly the Nazis thought they knew what a Jew was. But it turned out to be much more complex than they initially envisaged. Some say that even Hitler had Jewish ancestry. How quickly would history have changed course had the international community realised you can't really define a Jew! In many ways the "Jewish" insistence that such a thing is rock solid has been the foundation of much politics both positive and negative!

Why do we need dugongs?

Why do we need dugongs?

"Wherever they survive, dugongs play ..." from the WWF Australia webpage.

It's the classic bad question.

Why do we need Humans?

Well I may need humans, if for no other reason than to hang out with and breed.

So on the same logic Dugongs need other Dugongs for the same reason.

But the bigger question "Why do we need Humans?" has no answer. The universe would be fine without humans. It would make no difference whether we existed or not. And the same is true for Dugongs.

So what is this question supposed to mean? It's not clear.

For some reason WWF Australia has given an answer. But I think that is misguided. Just ignore the question.

Another similar question is "what is the use of wasps." Well wasps are really useful for other wasps just as humans are really useful for each other. But just like Humans, Wasps have no absolute use. They just are. We respect the world just as it is before asking for secondary usage.

Self is a simple fact, but we make too much out of it

Now the original post I wanted to make.

A                                                                                                                                B

Here is a camera obscura pointing at a tree. Now from our perspective outside we can see the tree outside and the image inside and we can clearly see that it is pointing at a tree (A). Turn it around and point it at a house and hey presto a house appears as the image. Voila. We on the outside see the image as a result of the object pointed at.

But from the camera's perspective it is slightly different. It is just seeing a tree (B), and then it is seeing a house. Then it is seeing something else. For the camera it is always "seeing" something, and has no other perspective: what it sees is what it sees. That outside perspective of having "real" things that are seen as images is missing. There are only the things seen, these are reality. There is no distinction between "real tree" and "image of tree" for the camera itself. The outside observer can see that for the camera the image is now more important than what it is pointing at! Indeed the Camera seems to holds all the tricks.

Is this not the World/Self dichotomy where we feel that we exist separately from the world and are more important than the world. While people on the outside see it the other way around? A hardened Nazi prison guard can kill people without even really noticing, or a US bomber pilot can nuke Hiroshima and be completely oblivious of all the cameras frying below. From the outside the camera images are very much secondary to the reality.

If nothing else how extraordinary that what seems like a complex and profound metaphysical thing can be expressed simply in terms of things and images! That is very much the insight I wish to express here.

But nevertheless we add all kinds of metaphysics to this dualism to back up the two sides of our view of the world. We add consciousness and identity and souls and self to the camera images to make it seem different from the world. To give us some greater standing in the face of "objectivity."

Okay it is true the analogy is not complete and camera is not conscious. But suppose for illustration that it is. Subjectivity is just a more sophisticated image isn't it? A new piece of technology that doesn't present the image for the outside world to see, but which processes its own images and comes up with wishes and desire. 

Not getting bogged down in the complexities of as yet still unknown consciousness, the point is that whatever features of the camera we wish to add they never become more than just features of the camera. And the camera can get stuck in the same idea that somehow it is more important than the image.

The other thing to note, and the real motivation for this blog, is that the camera can never not be itself. It is always the camera. So during its life it has many images get created on its screen. It seems to the camera it is an intrinsic part of its own world. Accompanying everything it has ever seen is itself. The screen on which the image falls is always its own screen. The camera seems to be the fundamental part of its "life".

And this is true. Its a contradiction to say that the pin hole and the screen of this camera are not intrinsic parts of itself. That is actually trivially obvious. If this camera is forming an image everyone can see the pin hole and the screen must be present. But the added thing that the camera cannot get outside its own screen, it always only ever sees the images formed on its own screen is also trivially obvious. The camera that forms images on another screen is another camera. So these intuitions of the camera (if it could have them) that it is intrinsic in its own existence are all correct. That is the nature of existence.

But what the camera can't then do is deduce from this a "self". Its a fact that each camera has its own components and forms its own images. But we don't deduce from this that each camera has a soul. Well traditionally in fact we do. Animism which is the oldest form of thought says that existence comes from having a soul. That has become the idea of essence where things embody some substance which makes them the way they are. Essentially its the physical manifestation of the "name." In modern thinking we only give True Names to humans and pets, and some big machines like boats and planes, oh and we do houses as well like the Red Fort in Old Delhi or Buckingham Palace in London or World Trade Centre once in New York. And the demise of the WTC was very much seen as a physical death and loss of a soul to the Americans. So we still think like Animists. But originally everything was like this from a camera to the Sun to our child. Everything had a personal soul. Its actually a very respectful and truthful way to think and we've been on descent into the impersonal and the brutal ever since so that millions can die in warfare now and just end up as uniform printed names on stone memorials. No soul at all. But I digress while we can (and should) give the camera a soul in one sense, the specific thing that leads to trouble is to put a *separate* soul inside things like the camera.

For the animist when a thing breaks or an animal is killed that soul returns to the world. This is direct analogy to modern recycling, and in Judeo/Christian practice the "ashes to ashes and dust to dust" we all come from one world and we return to one world and one creator. There is no separate soul that lives on as separate*.

* but if this is true how can we be judged and suffer after death? Okay that requires some reading about the original ideas. It could be that suffering was achieved by becoming a ghost. But being a separate soul somehow without a body is clearly problematic.

Somehow and I need to look into how and when this happened mankind started to think that individual identity continued after death. The animist is truthful. A camera has a soul while it exists, and that soul is what makes the camera what it is. But when the camera no longer exists what use is the soul?

I would guess it is to do with Capitalism. Once ownership happened, souls became more permanent to do the owing, and eventually so permanent that they survived death. So the camera continue sto be a camera even when it isn't a camera. Queen Victoria continues to be Queen Victoria even after she is dead. Well in one sense yes. Who commissioned the Prince Albert Memorial in Hype Park. Correct answer Queen Victoria. She still has a name, and that kind of suggests she still has a soul. But you can search the universe and you will not find Queen Victoria and she is no longer commissioning statues. Her soul strictly has gone back to where it came. Queen Victoria now refers to history, not to a living person.

But the camera may disagree. While it is working and filling with images it has this sense that "the whole world" depends upon it. That is the "whole world" as it knows it, falling on its screen. It naturally seems to be the centre of the world simply through the physics of being something, in a place, with a pin hole and a screen. That "self" that is all critical during its life it may think can't possibly suddenly stop when I break. It is everywhere. I look this way and the images falls on MY screen., and that way and the image falls on MY screen. Everything is MINE. How when I break can I not exist?

This is the interesting thing I wanted to highlight in this blog, the facts of what seem a "self" are set in the very physics of existence, or having and eyes and senses and a brain and even thoughts and consciousness. All this like the camera we have. And as a result quite naturally all this is the centre of our world, because we depend upon all this framework to live and exist. This is a very reasonable animist like soul that we have. And all is good. If we lose our sight obviously the images stop just like the camera getting a rip and losing its pin hole. This is all simple and obvious. The problem though is that we tend to add something else to these simple facts. A soul inside all this, a soul that somehow is greater than all this framework, that is bigger than the camera and the images, the eyesight, all the things we are. A soul that is disconnected from all this. Like the previous post a soul that can leave the plane to see what flying is like. This is a fake soul. It has forgotten that it is built 100% from the camera and the eyes and the body and thoughts and consciousness. When these things fail so will it. They are the same!

Oh woe on woe this self thinks. I am not immoral, I will die. I must struggle to keep healthy and stop this body dying because I depend on it. Wrong! This body is you, these sights, sounds, thoughts, consciousness ARE YOU, They are your soul. There is nothing else. But woe on woe I am dead already then, the fake self cries out. Except you remind it that  the real self was born of the world and will return to the world. Just like the camera, it may become broken and no longer form images, but nothing really has changed. The atoms are all there, perhaps someone will give it a new pinhole and it will work again, or perhaps it will be broken down completely and used for spare parts. And now the fake self is struggling. Is it still "me" if I get a new pin hole? Where does "me" go if I am broken into parts and go to make up 10 other cameras? Am I now 10 "mes"? These are all problems for the fake self. The true soul is just what is. You fix the camera and it has a new soul. You might give it a new name, or keep the old name. The camera doesn't care it is working.

So hopefully done a bit of teasing of the know of self. And in particular the feeling when things are happening, because they are necessarily being sensed by us, that they are happening to an "us"! Everything that we sense is obviously happening, its being sensed. But that sneaky trick we add of it happen to a soul hidden inside all this, that is the sneaky trick which is unnecessary and needs to be called out. Why can't things just happen, and the "to us" become just a necessary fact that these particular senses, eyes and brain are involved on this particular occasion. 

The World is Relative, custom/thoughts are Absolute

 In the modern world we are spoilt with the number of analogies to the human cognitive framework. We have a plethora of machines all based upon humans with which to think about this. But the camera is a great starting point for vision.

The pin-hole camera (camera obscura) has been known for centuries. Anything the camera is pointed at will appear as a relatively focused image on the screen behind. Relatively upside down.

Upside down is an unusual side effect that throws the casual observer.

So it looks like we see the world upside down. And yet it looks the "right way" around?

Well that is simply about Relativity. What we see is that everything has the "same" orientation. We have no Absolute point of reference like the stop sign. There is a subtle logical problem in the diagram above. If the "stop sign" on the retina (Retina-Stop) here represents what we actually experience, then the "stop sign" outside the eye (World-Stop) cannot then be what we experience. The stop signs although linked by light are different stop signs. The question for the viewer of this image is that if we now conclude that everything we see is upside down then actually the World-Stop here is upside down, and the Retina-Stop here is the right way around. But World-Stop was our initial reference to decide we see things upside down. Turns out we see them the right way around, and the world is what is upside down.

Its the same as the World Map. There is no reason to have the North Pole at the top. Its just the people who drew the map were from the North and with the Pole Star above them they thought in terms of North as going up, and South as going down. But it could just as easily be the other way around.

All we know in both situations is that the World-Stop and the Retina-Stop are opposite orientations, and the North Pole opposed the South Pole, that is the relative structure. But you cannot apply an Absolute to this and declare either the World Upside Down or the North the top of the globe. You may "adopt" an absolute to remove ambiguity but this is just convention ands custom. But it makes no difference what you chose.

Now its interesting that in everyday life we literally never run into any ambiguity about what is "up" in the world. The only time would be in opticians and people working in optics where images get inverted.

The reason is that everyone has the same world inversion going on. And because it is constant it almost never shows up in the human world. we are all looking at the world the same way and that is all that matters. The actual orientation has NO MEANING.

It looks like orientation should matter. We can clearly see an "up" and a "down". I mean people say lets go upstairs, and we dive or jump we know all about where is up and down. But it is relative. We deduce the down from what we see, not from some absolute reference. It is "immanent" to use a fancy word. The "up/down" we use in daily life is deduced from within the world. It not deduced from an absolute.

So in actual fact the Retina-Stop and the World-Stop are both pointing up, just in different worlds!

The paradox arises cos we are comparing them in a novel way that we never normally do. The idea of "getting outside your head to see the world as it is" is a contradiction. It is like getting outside the plane to see what flying is really like. You get outside the plane you stop flying! You get outside the head you stop seeing! There is SRH in here, because we are always looking for an absolute, but forget that what we have is built upon a scaffold of conditions. You step off the scaffold you change a lot more than you assumed.

Someone I know once said, "do you realise you've never had a break from life." Thing is "realising" is built upon the scaffold of life. You get a break, you stop realising.

Now unfortunately recent musing show that f(g, h) where f is a function that can deduce whether the function h() is a component of function g() leads to contradiction. So at the logic level the idea of working out the scaffolding upon which we stand is impossible.

It is like we are flying in a plane, that we can't deduce we are flying upon, wondering what flying is really like.

Now this all starts to gets very ungrounded and destabilising for the psyche. With no firm place to stand, and no way of even knowing exactly what we are standing on, the world seems very insubstantial and uncertain.

But STOP. What a load of nonsense. And here is the problem of "thinking." Famously Wittgenstein infuriated Russel by arguing in such a way that Russel could not disprove that there was an elephant in the room. "Thinking" can do strange things when we get absorbed into it.

There is a stanza in epistemology, that I realise I have forgotten, about all the doubt of even the university quadrangle existing but it ends with the searing pain of stepping on a pin and the lack of doubt in that.

Its a rather brutal illustration of the heart of Buddhist meditation. Thoughts are just thoughts, and the mind is so wide and great that it can observe thoughts crossing it like clouds across the sky. Yet humans have a tendency to get absorbed into these phenomena and ride those clouds as though they were real. Soon we can end up even doubting the ground on which we stand. But we don't stand, do we?, cos we are just riding clouds!

However the above analysis is an immanent analysis of thought. That deep within thought we like to think we have grasped some solid absolute and we "know" for sure the way things are. This leads to all the bigotry and confusion of the world. It is good for the searcher of truth, and the bigot to feel groundlessness at times cos it reminds us that we are just in the realm of thoughts.

To feel grounded again we simply put the thoughts down and return to the world "as it is." We observe that we are thinking, we observe that we are not thinking. We observe that we are seeing. We observe that we are not seeing (perhaps we close our eyes). Obviously observing that we are not thinking is a very special moment indeed! It means the mind has finally broken from the chains of thoughts. RIP Descartes. I believe some psychologists say that ALL mental illness begins with not being able to master our thoughts. It begins small, but gradually takes over and changes our brain chemistry and becomes a full blown psychiatric condition. True all people are different and some more susceptible than others, so it may appear that some people are string and can survive very unhealthy mental worlds, but that doesn't make attachment to solid thoughts good.

And so when we feel that things are grounded and we really know what is "up" we need take a break and reflect on the fact it is relative to some other things we are holding on to, and that we can't ever know how much foundation we have stood upon to get there. We just stop and look at the world again with fresh eyes.

The World is here whether You exist or not

Its a strange thing in the complex Western World that we build up lives so high when we still haven't sorted out the foundations.

Its weird that we have an ambiguity. We know the world existed before we were born. Unless we lived forever or somehow spawned our self, obviously our parent must have been there before us (SRH). And this is the Big Existence that no one really disputes. Its not a fruitful dispute either so lets leave that.

But there is the World According to Me as another existence. "I'll believe it when I see it" comes from this very valid existence, that unless we are witness then it doesn't really exist. What happens to me is REAL.

So we have 2 ways to think about existence. In Hinduism, respectively, its called Brahma and Atman.

Now both modes of existence have something in common: they both surround what we might call the fundamental truth. In both cases we are looking for some "origin" or "foundation" or "solidity" for the world. Holding one of the theories we have our feet on the ground. The world has some heart or soul.

But we end up in conflict, We want to believe in some objective reality AND we want to believe in our self. But you can't have both. Ultimately it boils down to the world telling you something versus you following your own way.

Now there is a way to marry these, but it depends upon first working out why the two are not compatible.

Its down to that desire for "solidity" and "foundation" above. The world is already here, why should we want to "add" any foundation to it? Indeed what can we do to make it any different from what it is? If the world doesn't exist as it is then we are already doomed. But we can argue Anthropically or Descartes like that if it didn't exist then how can we even be disputing the fact (SRH again). So we know there is a foundation before we even start. 

That fundamental strength is that there is a source, and no getting away from it.

Within this world we then try all the manoeuvres above. We do exist, but as all the religions try to tell us this is by the grace of God. Which is another way of saying our source is the same as the world. We don't have our own separate Atman and soul.

But if we are not separate from the world how then do I end up in "my" life? If "my" life is the same foundation as "your" life then how are they different?

We aren't looking deep enough.

We are all sitting in old fashioned toilet cubicles. The ones where if you stand on the toilet you can almost see over to the next one. All the cubicles are in the same toilet but it still gives us privacy.

That privacy and sense of self, it part of the amazing creation of the world. We have the same origin as everyone and everything else. There is only once source. That source even made the privacy, that we think is down to our self existence.

Its when we get to consciousness that this is particularly subtle. I may be in the Matrix and everything I see and think is a lie and is all implanted and made up. But you can't make up that I am awake. I might be looking at a hologram and thinking implanted thoughts but I am awake and experiencing all this. And its "my experience." It looks like everything I am experiencing is mine, and that adds weight to a self existing soul "in here." Heideggar calls that brilliance of the world consciously existing as the "lighting up." But as argued already that lighting up that happens when we wake up, that ignites the flame in our consciousness and make us seem to come into existence. That lighting up, is the light of God. It does not come from us! I don't make the lighting of consciousness. No human even understands that yet. No one knows how something comes to be "seen by an individual" so that only that individual sees it. It's a complete mystery. And so no human makes that happen. It happens by itself,I have nothing to do with it. And so given that the world makes it happen by some magic why do I think its "my consciousness?" Surely its just consciousness. A gift from God. But then we think, well who is looking, who did God give that gift too. Well no one is looking, cos the gift it looking itself! And who received that gift? Well we are running out of room for this Atman in this world. What ever is left that we think is that secret solid self inside it all, that is actually made by the world, belongs to the world and has been given for free. And the world didn't need to give you a self in order to received these gifts, that would be pointless.

This length exposition achieves only one think. To remove that nagging doubt that inside us, is a self, like a ghost person inhabiting our lives. Nothing that we have, or that happens to us, even being awake and conscious of our own experiences needs any ghost or person inside us. We can just let go of it and carry on exactly as before but without hanging onto this belief. Everything carries on by itself exactly as before but free from any "me" inside it.

What does this mean practically. Well the mistake we make is to hold on to what we have as though it was a separate existence. We hold on to "what I see" as though it was made by me. We don't have the first idea how to see. We barely understand the eye and even the greatest brains in the world have no idea how the brain works (SRH). What chance to understand how we see, and even less to actually "make it happen." It happens by itself! It has its source not in "me" but in the world.

When we "see" we are watching God in action.

And this is the point We don't need to search for "our" self, or worry about "our" self, there is no self connected to us in any way different from everything else. We don't carry a self around like a baggage. The world makes all this by itself, and it worries about all this all by itself. There is nothing for us to do, cos there is no "me" separate from the world.

Now done properly this changes absolutely nothing. We still see, think, live just as before. The only difference is the nagging thought that there is some "solid" foundation inside us, or connected to us, that is private and ours is gone. We know that inside we are completely without anything solid that is separate from the solidity of what is already there in the world.

There is only 1 source. Its goo to look for that source, but it's a mistake to try and own it and believe it is mine, or chip a bit off all for me. That is the road to a lot of trouble. 

Women's Rights & Racism

Who would have thought these are closely related issues!

How do you get a Pure Race? One way is to stop your women sleeping around. Then a man knows who his children are and there is the possibility of pure inheritance down the male line. In this world the man can sleep around, cos any man who cannot control his women deserves to lose control of the lineage. Pure Paternal lineage also makes a Race. Interestingly this corresponds to the nucleic acid.  

The other way is to define the Race by maternal line like the Jews. Then women can sleep around and all their children count as the Race. Interestingly in modern thinking this corresponds to the mitochondrial DNA.

But what when a child is born to a Patriarchal father and a Matriarchal mother? Say a Israeli Muslim male married a Israeli Jewish female? The Mother will claim the child is Jewish and the father will claim the child is Arab. The child is actually both! Their Mitochondrial DNA is Jewish and their Nucleic DNA is Arab!

Anyway Women's Liberation is the process of eradicating patriarchal line and either removing the idea of race, making race depend upon female line. Women's Liberation very much suits the Jewish side of thinking. But perhaps in that Matriarchal world there should be "Men's Liberation"? 

So the idea about Gender Liberation especially Women's are intimately linked to ideas of race. Who would have thought!

JWST supports that Big Bang didn't happen

 Absolutely nothing to do with this blog, but the biggest news for almost a century deserves a mention.

If it is an expanding universe then things were much closer to each other. Which means they appeared larger. So the universe would have inflated a lot and the distances increased and the light taken a long time to arrive but they should be bigger. And they are not.

Apparently JWST images and redshifts can all be explained in a static universe. Amazing! Come to think of it the Expanding Universe always was an outlandish theory. But it does point to an eternal universe. 

https://iai.tv/articles/the-big-bang-didnt-happen-auid-2215

Rule vs Law (4/11/2008)

This is the heart of the argument in this webpage.

An example of a rule are the legal moves of the knight in chess. We know that physically the knight can make any move, so the rule limits these possibilities. If we don’t obey this rule it has no real effect, it simply dissolves that game. We could use the new move and so have a new game. Rules create games, and games require the adherence and obedience to rules. It is up to people in authority to enforce and maintain rules. This is all in the mind however, it is not real.

A Law is different. If we let go of an egg the result is not an option, it will fall. Whether it breaks or not depends upon other factors but it will fall. Falling obeys very precisely rules which have been expressed in physics and indeed on paper. These arbitrary equations could be otherwise F=ma might have been a=Fm and the school master will enforce the correct rule. However in reality no one has to enforce the egg’s behaviour: it is always the same, it cannot be otherwise, it always falls. This is a Law for it cannot be otherwise. When people speak of God they envision an absolute unwavering enforcer of this cosmic game, the one who keeps the universe obeying these rules: the one who puts the authority behind the Laws.

If we disobey the rules we have only the wrath of imaginary human authority. If however we disobey the Laws we run into God. If we drive too fast it will upset the authorities but it does no real harm. But if we hit someone then we run into God and into Reality where real rules come into force. Laws that cannot be changed or undone.

This distinction between Illusion which is just man made custom and authority is to be seen as distinct from Reality which is factual and indisputable.

There is very much confusion on this subject because liberating ourselves from custom and authority is essentially anti-social. It demands that we see human authority and culture as non-essential. We exist in society and such a move is understandably frightening; it challenges us to our very core.

It is sad however to see this very move toward God become embodied in further customs and society as it has in the worlds religions and cultures. Our forefathers in every society retreated to the hills and the deserts and the forests to enact this transformation to God: they did not wear clothings or join in customs and cults – these entrapments are the opposite movement toward Man. The religious wars are between societies of men who have lost sight of the Laws and God and replaced them with man made customs which need enforcement. If you need to guard and enforce a Law then by definition it is not a Law.

There is an advert at the time of writing in the UK for army recruitment. It paints the compelling image of the comradeship and society that one experiences as a member of the army. What it doesn’t show is the equal comradeship experienced by the society of people that we will fight. Wars create strong social bonds and inclusion, it feels good to a fundamentally social organism like Man. But for every bit of belonging there are people who do not belong: all societies include and exclude at the same time: all societies unite and divide at the same time: all societies bring peace and war at the same time: all societies embody rules enforced by man, they do not embody Laws given by God.

Lawful society is already here we are all already members of it. There are no Lawfully righteous and no Lawfully heathen, there is nothing to Lawfully fight for, no Lawful kingdom to create; it is already here.

Disharmony exists because we humans cannot bear to accept the authority of God. We have insights but like my very writings here we chose to embody them in arbitrary rules. These words I use here can be written in myriad ways, they can say anything: some things that are Lawful (like F=ma) and some things that are Unlawful (like a=Fm); things that we call true and false. Lawful rules mimic God at first but soon come to replace Him.

Scientists once thought they were uncovered the Laws of God, but today some seem to think that they are responsible for the Laws. Unified Field Theory will be great detective work when it is complete, but the crime of creation happened all by itself billions of years before life had even arisen! Whatever rules we find to express the Laws of the universe it always remains to be explained why the universe obeys these rules as Law rather than others. That Law-giver is the ancient Logos: in various other languages called God (English), Allah (Arabic), Yahweh (Jewish), Dao/Tao (Chinese), Dharma/Dhamma (Indian). (To confuse us in some systems the Law has a personality as a god, in others like Buddhism it is just a Law).

To have a discussion things have to be one way or another. We can discuss rules, discuss what people have thought, written and said. By contrast the Law can only be one way. That is why it is a called Law not rule. On Law there can be no discussion. This is how the universe is, at the beginning there is always just Law. All men have always known this.

We are born as instinctive players into a million games and spend our lives learning the rules.

Rules of social acceptance,

Of board games and sports,

Of intellectual excellence,

Of sex and political retorts,

Of poetry and writing,

History! its fighting,

Of names and places,

Our airs our graces;

Through this maelstrom of rules,

Enforced yet changing,

God is forever distant,

Eternal light, self-effacing.

We know God not in the trip to the supermarket, but in the realisation that if we do not eat we will starve. Feel hungry once in a while just to remember the way things really are. We know God not in the money we give to charity, but in the realisation that if we didn’t someone really would find life more difficult. Spend the money on yourself one day and look at the difference it makes. We know God not in being pious and good (there is no such thing), but in realising that if we are bad it leads to confusion, frustration and suffering.

By contrast we know there is little God in TV because if we don’t watch it is makes no difference at all. We know there is little God in a shampoo brand because any soap will do. We know there is little God in a political party because it makes little difference who is in power - wheat grows as well under communism as it does liberalism. We know there is increasingly little God in the work we do because as the current downturn illustrates it makes no difference whether we are in work or not. But that is subject for another page.

It is obviously a subtle point as evidenced by the confusion that surrounds it: but rules and laws do seem distinct. Rules can be otherwise and are therefore zealously enforced by the games players, especially when their desire for society draws them deeply into a particular game. Whenever we feel that we need to enforce something: it is because it can be otherwise and it is therefore manmade and a rule. By contrast Laws are the foundations of all existence. They can never be otherwise. We notice them because they enforce some rules (F=ma) and not others (a=Fm), some statement and not others. In themselves they are beyond discussion and compromise: they just are. There is nothing to enforce: God enforces his own rules. We need only look and learn – that is the Way of Mankind.

Total Nature is a name for this underlying existence of Laws. Mankind is creative in making a buzzing and busy world full of stories and fantasy: but the test comes not from human authority and judgement but from the Laws that truly govern. Get it wrong and we all suffer.

http://totalnature.atspace.com/

Human & Animal (04/11/2008)

 

Human & Animal

Do animals have Fun?

I once watched a gull from a cliff top in Wales. It launched itself from its perch high on a sun drenched ledge and like riding a swing swooped down and away out to sea, before rising, wheeling around and riding back to its perch, using the light sea breeze to lift it that last bit. At first I thought it had fallen off the perch, and was returning to get settled again, but it missed its footing and began the ride once more. When it returned it missed its footing yet again and went soaring once more on its high aerial swing. It was at this point that I wondered whether this was really all an accident or whether this creature was actually doing this just for the fun of it. Sure enough it didn't perch the next time either and went again on its exhilarating round. As I watched I was struck, actually lifted in my spirits, by how much gleeful enjoyment it was having and I couldn't believe I had never thought of this before. It takes a very cold-hearted behavioural ecologist to ignore the signs that most "higher" animals can enjoy themselves. You see a dog playing with it's stick, or a cat playing with a fake mouse, or fox cubs tumbling in spontaneous wrestling matches, or a bird on a post singing away, or even just an animal lying in the sun and it takes very blinkered vision not to see that they are enjoying themselves. In the harsh economy of survival there is time even for animals to enjoy themselves.

While there is no doubt that animals differ enormously in the faculties they have and levels of development of those faculties it does seem on closer examination that a little too much has been made of the differences between animals and Man. To consider animals as having leisure time, a break from the routine of feeding and general survival, is to me already encroaching on the precious domain of humans.

The Distraction of Evolution

Many people will leap to the evolutionary perspective and argue that if animals do have anything we might can "enjoyment" it is simply an evolved strategy for survival in their environment. For example enjoyment might be considered a reward for success and therefore a reinforcement to encourage the animal to learn and adopt this strategy in future. Bird song for example might be explained in terms of mate attraction or territorial display. An animal resting in the sun might be viewed as maximising its energy budget by not wasting energy. All these might be true in the long run, the answer to why the world is the way it is. However to the organism doing the learning, singing or relaxing this is all literally academic. None of this distracts from the suggestion that the animal is a living creature that is experiencing a moment in its life. This is seemingly the preserve of conscious human agents, but where is any evidence forever thinking that animals are not the same?

Animals and Consciousness

The problem is that we don't get animals talking to us about what they did today. Being silent we can look into their eyes forever and never have any evidence that there is anyone looking back. But isn't this true of a dumb person also, what evidence do we need to decide that there is "someone" there?

Imagine that you are in a field and a cow says "excuse me but could you scratch my shoulder?" we would immediately assume that the cow was conscious and it was a "somebody". If there was a panel of 10 buttons meaning things like "give me some grass" and a button which said "scratch my shoulder" and the cow pressed it, it's not quite as convincing but we would still think that there was "something" there, particularly when we scratched its shoulder and it presses the button "thank you". If there were just 2 buttons "give me food" and "give me a scratch" and the cow "asked" for a scratch by pressing a button, and showed in some way satisfaction that it had got what it "wanted" - its not as good as a deep discussion with a partner - but there is still the sense that there is "something" there. If you took a knife and approached the cow and it looked scared and tried to get away then even at this crudest one-dimensional level you would still think that there was "something" there. The cow might not show appreciation when we decide to put the knife away and leave it to feeding, but we do know its happier not dying. The whole animal kingdom operates at this level or above. Even an ant or slug will try to run away from things it doesn't "like", its the argument Buddhists use for their respect for all living things.

In the above paragraph, in my opinion, the stage when the cow goes from being smart to stupid is when it stops responding to me. If it can answer me in some way then I feel that I have engaged with it and it is a "something", the point basically when it stops saying "thank you". There is little doubt that few animals, if any, have the ability to ever learn the respect of their fellows in this direct interactive way, it takes humans long enough! However there is another less direct way in which animals can show their appreciation. If they like what you have done for them they are likely to learn it and come back for more. A dog when it learns that you will throw a stick for it remembers your scent (rather than face) and will be more playful in future, if you hurt it the opposite will happen. If you gain pleasure from the dogs company then it's a reciprocal relationship and you'll come back also! Its certainly not as sophisticated as human relationships, but the principals of enjoyment and reciprocity are present just the same in both human and animal.

In conclusion of the above the question of consciousness couldn't be determined absolutely since it is such a subjective and vague term. It does seem to involve the level of reciprocal interaction possible. Consciousness ranges from the most borderline machine like behaviour of attraction and avoidance like in ants and amoebae, right through to us who have the same crude behaviour, but also levels of almost unlimited mutual awareness. I can see no reason in this discussion to separate animals from humans based on consciousness, since it is a continuum on which even people vary - consider the consciousness of a new born child with that of the child's mother.

Dreams

Something, which may come as a surprise, is that animals dream. The part of the brain which controls movement is normally put into paralysis during sleep so that animals and humans do not move in their sleep. If this paralysis is stopped then animals act out their dreams. You can have dogs chasing sticks in their sleep, cats chasing imaginary mice and maybe even birds even singing to imaginary mates (don't know if this has been tested). Quite what the animal might be experiencing we will never know, anymore than in a human patient who forgot their dream on waking, but it is already bizarre to find oneself speculating on the possible contents of the dreams and maybe even mind of an animal!

Do Animals Fear Man?

The recent discover of an untouched "lost world" in the Indonesian jungle highlighted an often forgotten thing. Animals do not innately view humans as anything other than other animals. The animals discovered had no fear of humans allowing the biologists to pick them up without any struggle. The only difference between these animals and the ones we know is that they have never met humans before. Their fear of humans must then have developed due to contact with humans, and in particular an aggressive attitude we must have always had to them. To me - a human - it has always intrigued me why animals should be afraid of me when I have absolutely no wish to harm them. The reason it seems is that not every creature which looks like me is a "human". Some are animals themselves whose more biological instincts of eating and hunting are dominant. The choice to be human or animal seems to be a recent one then, one that most animals haven't learnt we can make.


The take home point discussed here, like with so much of this webpage, is the sense that Life is a whole of which Human and Animal are just parts, or perspectives. There is no reason not to see Mankind as an integral part of an all-encompassing Nature and existence alongside those creatures once marginalised as just animals.

Nature & Man (04/11/2008)

Some thoughts from 2008.

Crowds gather in central London on 21st Jan 2006 to watch the £100,000 rescue of a stranded bottle-nose whale.

Japanese whaling ship kills sears whale (worth between £11000 to £70000)

We humans are certainly contradictory creatures of many sides. Consider the quite opposite attitudes to whales in these two photos. I visited the site of the top photo. A crowd of thousands waited patiently partly to get a sight of the extraordinary creature, but also to encourage the team in their rescue. It was actually very touching and when they winched the whale aboard the boat I remember a child announcing in some confusion 'Mummy I'm crying', so there was nothing pretentious here, quite natural expressions. Unfortunately despite all the efforts to save the London whale it later died.

The Japanese on the other hand view the animals as a source of amongst other things food. It would certainly be hypocritical to criticise them since we in the UK slaughter thousands of farm animals a day for the same reason. Such a judgmental comparison is not my purpose.

I wish to highlight these two quite legitimate sides of human nature which we all share. The first I will call Man-the-human and the second I will call Man-the-animal, which I will now tackle first. (This distinction was one of the two problems, which became very apparent to me during my John o'Groats walk.)

Man the Animal

All animals have basic biological needs. The needs for water, food, shelter and reproduction are common to all animals even protozoa and for more complex species social inclusion and status becomes a requirement. Humans are no exception and it is the search for these basic resources which determines much of our behaviour. The often quoted destruction of the planet, the hunting of animals, the love we show our family and the hate we often show to strangers are all simply expressions of our animalistic nature. It is an irony that it is humans behaving as animals that are the threat to fellow animals. Many people argue that because animals are incapable of being human that is the justification for behaving like animals to them. Whether we accept this argument or not, we do have a choice.

Man the Human

The saving of the London whale is hard to explain in animal terms. There is no apparent reward for the people involved. If it wasn't saved it is hard to see how this would make any difference. Surely £100,000 could be better spent elsewhere? I would think most hard-line pragmatic Darwinists would agree that the operation was a misdirected expression of love (or altruism), which should have been directed to people closer to our own genetic line. Others might argue that humans have no right to interfere with nature, and we should just let things run their course.

For anyone who identified with the suffering of the animal it is much easier to explain. It is hard to resist helping anything that is in difficulties. Such empathy and unconditional appreciation extends to all forms of life and certainly further than any biological theory. It is the same breadth of vision and wonder at the world which inspired humans to explore the world's plants and animals as widely as we have, and come up with such evolutionarily pointless theories as Evolution. This sensitive appreciation of the world, something maybe the whale will never have understood (see essay on Human and Animal), is what makes us Human.

The Human-Animal Balance

In the event a person is forced into a survival situation the basic issues of water, food and shelter will turn the natural world around them into the means to the end of survival. Animals will be hunted for food, trees cut down for timber and firewood, plants foraged and rivers dammed for irrigation. This is how our ancient ancestors behaved in the UK cutting down 80% of the forests once covering the island. This is how we often continue to behave now with mining and factory production an added activity.

When not in an extreme survival situation another attitude can be liberated, the attitude of experiencing and enjoying. Forests no longer become resource for survival but becomes a pleasure to visit. Animals no longer become sources of food, but become living things in their own right. Landscapes are no longer the places upon which our food is grown and our houses made, instead they become places to spend our time.

There is an essential balance between the two. Obviously mankind must make a living from the land, and while we rarely consider it, that living is intrically bound to the land and its wildlife. The celebrated chalk grasslands of England, that hosts one of the country's richest wildlife, were created entirely by ancient man cutting down forests. But that biological living is only half the story, because more importantly we are humans, and as humans the world and its wildlife matter for its own sake.

The irony then is that the closer to nature we become the more like an animal, and thereby the more of a threat to nature we become. While the more we distance ourselves from nature and its drives within us, the freer we are to experience and enjoy it as it is, and through this awareness we become much more harmonious with other living things. Perhaps the most innovative part of this view is the realisation that the world of technological advances, high brow politics and economics, which to many sets us aside from the natural world, is actually our most animal side. Indeed despite all the advances the human world seems more than ever dominated by a belief we are in a 'survival' situation. The idea that we still need to struggle for our pay and survival as though it was the stone age is absurd (see essay on Work). By contrast it is the world of arts, literature, religion and outdoor pursuits aimed at exploring and appreciating the environment for its own sake that are our most human side.

The risk is always to go to extremes, either to the extreme of conservation and become too human at the expense of our animal side and needs; or the extreme of industry and become too animal at the expense of our human side. On my walks and in my lifestyle I have explored this balance for many years. I can say that my animal side requires much less than I was led to believe it did (especially by advertisers), and the human side has a potential to be much greater than I once cynically thought it could be.

updated: 04/11/2008, 01:43:58

Conservation (15/12/2008)

Some thoughts from 2008

Conservation is the natural response to seeing the monumental changes that mankind has caused to the planet. That we risk losing the natural world has become a very real concern epitomised by the plight of whales and giant pandas. Despite its apparent simplicity it is a very complex idea and I wish to sketch an outline of a rarer view here.

Naive conservation views the interests of Mankind and Nature against one another. Land is either preserved for wild habitat or it is dug up and built upon for man's use. In America this view is taken to its extreme in the concept of Wilderness and untouched Nature. Writers like Henry Thoreau romanticised a view of Nature as a mystical unknown world separate from mankind. Such a view of Nature leaves it extremely vulnerable to rampant human endeavour.

By contrast Nature can be seen as something which is embodied by Man. We are the products of evolution - the handy apes. We have biological bodies and an ecology which relates us as much as any animal to our environment which we both depend upon and shape. We are Nature. Such a view is much more realistic and it avoids the irreconcilable divisions of the previous view.

Conservation is not about conserving Nature then, but rather about harmonising mankind with his environment. It is obvious to any city dweller that we are far from cut off from Nature in the city. There are foxes in London that snoop around bins on cold winter nights by St Pauls. There are peregrin falcons in Trafalgar. Large parks host tree, flowers, insects and birds. If we have a microscope of course we can never escape the protozoans that form in puddles everywhere and anywhere.

Isolating regions of landscape as pristine wilderness it seems to me is a very limited concept of conservation. What is far more important is to integrate our lives, our cities, our farms and our transport with natural concerns. Building forest corridors through cities, leaving rivers over-ground, providing animal crossing points under roads, cutting the grass in parks in a rotation that leaves part of it wild for a year are just a few easily introduced measures that would harmonise the use of land between humans and other creatures.

Much of the natural world already depends upon human activity. Britain was once completely forested in climax oak woodland but the cutting of this down in the neolithic period and the introduction of farming hugely increased the biodiversity of the island. Chalk grasslands are one of the rare and complex communities that have been created and are managed by mankind. This is a good example of the essential symbiosis that could exist between mankind and the rest of the worlds ecology.

An important aspect of this view is the removal of mankind from a leading role in conservation. Nature is an ongoing event that mankind is just a small part of. The future of nature is assured, that of mankind like any species is not so secure. Improving our ecology is a conservation measure as much about preserving nature as it is about preserving man. The two are intimately linked and doing one ensures the other. What is unrealistic is the idea that man will prosper with or without nature as though man really were a world and a law unto himself. This is the previous idea of wilderness.

Conservation then is not just an arbitrary policy decision. Instead it is a fundamental question about man and his environment. Every aspect of mankind's activity from farming, to transport, to cities requires ecology as a broad ethical and scientific framework intergrating the near and the far and placing man sustainably and sensitively within his world. That is the view of conservation here.

updated: 15/12/2008, 20:02:10

Physical systems have fixed parameter space dimensions, altho the parameters are arbitrary

https://www.nature.com/articles/s43588-022-00281-6

It appears that while the choice of variables is arbitrary, models of physical systems must have sufficient parameter space.

After training an AI to model a physical system, the researchers repeated it to see if the AI would arrive at the same solution. It didn't but the number of variables was constant, and matched the existing physical models.

I wonder what would happen if this AI was trained on itself?

Isn't the result indeterminate, or actually infinite. Starting with random weights it would be a hugely complex system to model with the number of weights being the number of hidden variables. But could it actually deduce its own hidden variables? The question is whether the error propagation function led to diverging, converging, or just chaotic system. At its limit the answer would be the number of variables (weights) in the actual AI. But would it end up modelling a virtual machine "within" this system. Perhaps the actual behaviour of the system would be considerably simpler than the underlying hardware, and could be modelled in fewer weights. The only constraint would be  kind of "fixed point" solution where the number of variables in the model that was training was equal to the number of variables in the output of that same model. 

SRH: the negation of a set must have its own definition (disproved)

The point is that you can often create a rule that defines a set such that the negation is very much harder to define in itself. Take the Mandelbrot set. The white area is easy to define: it is all the points which drive the algorithm to a magnitude greater than 2. We can calculate this. The black set is what is left over. Now I believe we can construct the Appleman directly from the fixed points of the iteration but its much harder. (Kind of playing with the fact that white points are computable cos they compute in finite time, while the black points basically never halt). The Mandelbrot set is thus by definition non computable looking at the black. However you can deduce it from the computable function of the white. Now is there a computable way to define the black?

I need think about this but I'm borrowing in part from Douglas Hofstadter who discusses this. Negating a set can create a new set which is hard to define.

Now for SRH the point is that you cannot create a set whose negation cannot be defined in itself, that is without reference to the original set!

A set whose negation is only definable in terms of the original definition is a problem. That is the hypothesis.

In the Jewish analogy it means you can construct Gentiles without reference to Judaism! That will comes as a challenge to Judaism because in Judaism the whole world can be built from belief in God and Jews. The idea that you can construct things from outside Judaism and God is catastrophic. But that is what I meant at the start (previous post) about being Hermetically sealed. It is essential for Jewish belief that there is no Outside. And it is that rejection of the outside which I believe is the cause of ALL the suffering that the Jews identify.

Just restate this side of SRH.

So if some formula f(x) defines a set F there must be a formula g(x) which defines  ¬F where there is no h(x) such that g(x) = h(f(x))

That is to say there can be no theory that uniquely defined f(x) and ¬f(x). ¬f(x) must be defined by functions unrelated to f(x).

And this goes into that issue of what dependency really mean. In what way does a function contain another function or depend upon it?

We can illustrate with some maths.

Take f(x) which is defined x:= x^2 {x ∈ N}

F = {0,1,4,9,16,25,36,...}

¬F = {2,3,5,6,7,8,10,11,12,13,14,15,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,26,...}

Now this hypothesis says that we must be able to derive ¬F without using f(x) that is a formula that does not use x^2 or can be reduced to a form with x^2 i.e. no x^4.

Now we know we can create a Turing machine that will take any input and create any output. So there must be a formula that will compute ¬F. But the question relevant to SRH is can we show whether that formula entails accessing the set F.

For example the algorithm I used to generate ¬F just counted from 0 and removed numbers in F that is I calculated the complement of F. But we're saying there must be at least a way of doing this without reference to F.   

Wow that is quite a statement. I need think whether it can be proven or disproved.

Anyway if it turns out to be true, if we map it back into Judaism it will turn out that Judaism was actually the path to the Truth but ironically, and so J(x) remains central to the world!

---

Lets see what this looks like:

Let f(x) be a set definition. It decides {-1,1} for all x.

Let g(x) is defined as -f(x). Simple. f(x) = -g(x) for all x.

Now we are saying that g(x) must have another definition h(x) = g(x) such that there is no i() where i(f(x)) = h(x)

Ok as written this makes no sense cos an example of i() is simply the negative function.

What we need is a way to express the idea that h(x) does not compute f(x) at any stage.

Now didn't we already show that such an algorithm is impossible. So it is impossible to tell if h(x) does or does not computer f(x). And therefore this hypothesis is meaningless!

Just check this:

So the simple proof was (after Turing):

Suppose there is a function C(f,g) which determines whether f is composed from g. That is if in calculating f(x) it involves computing g(x) at any stage.

Then we can construct the following function:

B(f,g) = C(f,g) ? 1 : g(1) 

Now what does:

C(B,g) mean?

C determines whether the function B involves calculating the function g. But if it decides that B does involve calculating g() then it actually only produces 1 and if it decides it doesn't then it ends up calculating g(1).

There is a smarter proof involving currying to match the arity of the functions but this will do.

So having a function that can determine the composition of functions leads to a contradiction. This is the end of the road for SRH based on composition and dependency. You cannot determine in a formal way the composition or dependency of a function, and so you cannot determine if it involves itself. This is also the end of the road for the Universal Engineer or Eva. That was the idea of a program that could work out the the "faulty component." If you can't even universally work out from the output whether a function entails another function then how can you isolate the fault! The only way to do this kind of testing/debugging is to "open the program up" and isolate the output of its components. You can't do it from the "outside." This is almost reverse SRH. we set out to show that there is no intrinsic "self" hidden within a system, but did that from the perspective of the entity: any entity require an outside:

>that was Horatio "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy" meaning that all system are like Horatio's and cannot be total for they require an "outside" which is not accounted for by the system.

>+1 Hypothesis was similar that all systems will fail at totality because they will miss out themselves. So we can show that the "components "of a system are opaque to a viewer, it means that no system looking at itself can ever know its own construction!

AIME1987 (Artificial Intelligence Mechanism Emulation 1987 ) was a super naïve AI based around language structure. It wasn't a self learning machine, it was just programmed to asked syntactic questions about your text input so it could generate sentences itself. It never got to the point where it could ask itself questions. Primitive and useless. But it led to AIME1996 which was a pattern analyser that sought to reduce your input of a binary sequence to simpler geometric descriptions (kind of fourier). It was then fed its own state to see what would happen. This was the original insight for SRH. It started from particular speculations in 1990 that self-consciousness was linked to self-awareness and processing on self.

But all this appears at this stage to have just ended up showing that all systems have an inside that is not deducible from the outside.

Which is a trivial result.

Does f(x) = {1,2,3,4,5,6...} for x ∈ N arrive from returning just x or from returning x + 1 - 1

An algebra function can determine through formal steps that they are equivalent. But we are asking for actual function composition so we could determine "self" dependency where self was a particular application of a function where f(x) -> x+1 and g(x) -> x - 1 are examples of actual functions.

Regarding self its interesting that this echos our experience of "other people" that we don't know what is going on inside, and we see other people as a black box. That sense of other people being "black boxes" is very much the foundations of the ideas of "privacy", "self" and "personal identity." It great that no machine can ever deduce from the outside the true nature of our inner workings.

But it raises the question of what we know about our self. We don't view our self as a black box. But do we really see ourselves from the inside, or are we just viewers on the system from a different perspective?

If no system can universally deduce composition of another system, then it can't itself! Isn't that SRH! we are always on the outside!

Interesting that this current thread began with speculations on the Hermetically Sealed nature of the Jewish identity. I don't know if its is true, but Jews have a view that there is an inside and and outside to the world. There is the closed world of Jews and the outside world of Gentiles. Proofs on this page suggest we are all outside every construction, or at least we are unable to deduce the composition.

But is there still an "inside" beyond deduction. Can you still argue that "I AM" (Yahweh). You don't need to deduce yourself because you ARE yourself. But we speak of self knowledge, this must be impossible if self is "inside." If there is a self it is unknowable. Perhaps we can call that Yahweh? Altho this now sounds like Eastern Philosophy. There is no discernible difference between God and Man. This does not mean that God and Man are the same, but it means we can't know. We can't deduce composition from the outside we need take apart. The Original Sin suggests to Jews that they are separate from God. This means they do know.

#TODO Need to digest. 

We also showed recently that a similar contradiction occurs in the more specialised function that looks for self reference. A function that determines whether the function is being passed itself is impossible.

#TODO Check this proof too.

So the foundations for a formal description of SRH are slipping away :O

===

Okay what about a function embedded in another.

Take that function C(f,g) again which determines whether f is composed from g. That is if in calculating f(x) it involves computing g(x) at any stage.

Then we can construct the following function:

B(f,g) = C(f,g) ? 1 : g(1) 

Now what of?

C(B,C)

Does B require the computation of C. well by definition it does. (is there another way to calc B without C?)

C(B,C) = 1

But we said that C() was not computable.

So although C entails a contradiction we can still define a single value of C that must exist from definition because of our self referential definition that it is used to build B.

This also means that in the case of self-reference we can know that we ourselves compose a function.

This is now Descartes. Given that we exist (or are presented by the ontology that is by definition) we can use this to construct some truths.

So a function can use itself as an axiom, or building block for logic.

So if we take any function f(x) then we can build f(f(x)) by definition.

Self-reference becomes the basis of an infinite inductive construction. But only one way

if g(x) = f(f(f(f(f(x))))

C(g,f) = 1 is fine through definition.

But given h(x) we can't work backwards as to whether it is constructed from f(x).

In fact there must always a function that is derived from itself, and so we can construct an infinite number of functions from self-reference alone.

So there is a sense of self which means just "the given entity."

In English we often start a sentence with "I am going to the shops". This is like defining the function me(x) where me can consume any number of things and we set x = "go to shops".

The sentence introduces the axiom of "me", and that then give the rest of the sentence something to build upon.

Where does this "me" come from? well it is like f(x) above. It is just a starting point, or basis for recursion.

Now we can go forwards and use me(x) perhaps there is the form me(what/verb, to/noun) so that the above is written "me(go,shops)". And it can get recursive and self-referential "me(wash,me)" or

if "me(write about, holiday)" then we can have "me(write about,me)" and if we can even write about our writing so "me(write about,me(write about,me))"

But we can go the other way and investigate "me(x)." It is a given, and it is a contradiction if we could know about "me."

So this is original SRH actually. The idea that there is a given that cannot be based upon itself.

To summaries the way here is to realise that you cannot work out the composition of a thing. You need open it up to deduce the real contents. It means we cannot work out what is inside the self. But we can go the other way and use components build other things. And our life is the process of using the self as an axion to build constructs. But it can't build itself.