Guide to Thinking - 4 fundamental patterns + 1 limit

Realised in debate today just how little people know about thinking.

• Material Facts & Science
  Much debate revolves around facts. But facts are not thinking. Suppose someone says "I fly unicorns." Common debate will revolve around belief in unicorns and the debate will be pointless. Those that believe versus those that do not believe. All that can be decided is some method to resolve this issue. Perhaps people will agree on the results of an internet search, or they will agree on an expert to decide, or perhaps collaborate on designing a scientific experiment to decide. We could call this type of thinking Science. Designing good experiments requires good thinking. The great advances in science often revolve around excellent experiments like the ingenious Michelson-Morely experiment to test the prevailing belief in aether. In addition it established the Constant Speed of Light which is what triggered Einstein's to think about relativity. If speed of light is constant then everything else must adjust and exist in a frame of reference. But all this ground breaking thinking came from the simple established fact of constant speed of light. Right now the prevailing theory of Big Bang is coming under new testing as the JWST discovers new facts. Critical to experimental design is Falsifiability Essentially that experimental hypotheses are chosen that can be practically disproved. So we adopt the hypothesis "there are no unicorns" which is disproved when we observe a unicorn. This is actually quite complex, but note that all the thinking about this cannot be itself falsifiable! Not all thinking is about facts. 
• Immanent Critique & Socratic Method & Logic
  Now this is pure thinking. It involves examining the logic of given statements and axioms without concern for any material truth. Some one says "I fly unicorns." That sounds interesting, but we thought that Pegasus was the only flying horse. We ask them this. If they agree that Pegasus is the only flying horse we have a potential problem. If it turns out that Pegasus is not a Unicorn then we can argue they cannot then fly unicorns. We do not need to worry about material existence here, its enough to examine the internal structure of a belief. This opens up the whole world of psychology, literature and comparative culture. When the Sioux say that the great spirit Wakan Tanka was present at the start of the world why argue and stop the discussion? Keep listening and find out about Wakan Tanka it will tell you a lot about the Sioux. Likewise in the film "Back to the Future" we can discover that Marty McFly went back in time to 4 December 1985. Obviously this did not really happen, but that doesn't stop the story. If however he had gone to 4 December 3017 we can argue that he went forward in time and so could never have met his parents. It doesn't need to be "true" in any "material" sense for us to think about its consistency. The later Socrates never presented anything himself he only got people to speak inconsistent beliefs. 23 centuries later Gödel showed that all systems with self reference are either inconsistent or incomplete. Socrates was exploiting a loop hole in knowledge that it can never be complete and consistent. The establishment killed Socrates for that, Gödel survived.
• Allegory & Isomorphism (& Irony)
  Another critical thinking style is seeing similar patterns in different things. When Star Wars starts by saying "In a galaxy far, far away" it could be literal, but we wonder why say that? Perhaps Star Wars is saying there is a relationship between that far away galaxy and our own galaxy but don't worry for now, enjoy the story. But making the galaxies completely different there is the possibility that they map onto one another. I don't know if it was intentional or "true" in any material way (it doesn't need to be) but the Empire looks a lot like the Nazis, and the Jedi look a lot like Jews seeking to gain freedom from an Evil Dictatorship. The Force becomes the Power of God. And we can start mapping one world onto another. We can look at the history of the West for material to find in Star Wars, or we can look in Star Wars for material to find in the West. This is a very creative and synthetic process. It tells us a lot about Star Wars and also our world. This is common place in art, especially fine art, where painted figures often represent more general ideas and so the painting represent thoughts. In maths mapping problems from one solution space or discipline to another is an incredibly powerful method for gaining new insights. And we meet Gödel again who mapped logical sentences operating on numbers to numbers themselves so that they could speak about themselves. For instance if we can list something then its place in the list is a mapping of  the object to a number. With our "I fly unicorns" statement the options are huge now, what is the person really saying? Are they using Unicorns as an allegory/metaphor for something. The speaker does not need to see the allegory themselves, they can create the structures of their world in unicorns without issue, and the listener can map that onto another world quite independently. Perhaps a child is speaking of flying unicorns to express the joy and freedom they feel. Such an incredibly powerful ways to think, and again nothing to do with material reality or facts. Note if the mapping is to a subset then there will be a fixed point that is the same in both versions.
• Dialectics & Irony
  Have spoken at length in this blog about this one. Dialectics is like Negative Allegory. The most famous dialectic is Yin-Yang. In Allegory the mapping is just overlaying one thing over another and seeing they match. In Dialectic we see that what something is overlaps what it is not. I realised recently it depends upon context to bind the halves of together, or what binds the halves together is context. When we look at the Yin-Yang the obvious context is colour: the Black and the White depend upon each other: no black then no white, and vice versa: you need both to get the symbol and yet the parts are opposites. You also have geometry as the little circles map to the overall symbol shape and the halves are also half circles. The whole symbol is composed from opposing elements that must fit together for each to exist. A classic dialectic is male and female. I discussed this in a recent blog. But everywhere you look are dialectics: whenever you find a force you will find an equal opposite force. This is true in the world as much as in your mind or in a story. Consider something Large. You know immediately there must be Small things that it must be compared to in order to gain its Largeness. To be Large you need stand next to Small things, and so inside your Largeness is really Smallness. In a different world of bigger things, that exact same Large thing could be Small. This is why psychology is always ironic (to quote Adorno). Certain forces in any mind are always made from the opposite force. In the example of the person saying "I fly unicorns" we need look at the Yang of "not flying unicorns" and examine what force may lead the speaker to reject this and assert the opposite. Why would the speaker not just ride horses? which is much more straightforward. Again the material facts are not the point of this thinking at all.

So that concludes 4 fundamental patterns of thinking that no one can do without. I realise however that perhaps only 1 in 1000 have actually mastered these. And that rather worrying realisation underlines the apparent growth in ignorance in the West. 

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There is one important limit of thinking that is not formally recognised and is the topic of much of this blog. Called SRH here (Self-Reference Hypothesis) was a casual name to a disparate collection of problems revolving around systems referring to themselves. Perhaps a better name now that more is known about SRH is the Self-Refuting Condition (SRC)

•  Self-Refuting Condition (SRC)
  The most famous case of this is found in Descartes' Meditations. He begins a program of doubt to see whether anything cannot be doubted. He could have saved himself the whole exercise had he been aware of SRC. The system of doubting is limited by doubt itself. More generally any system is limited by itself. The argument roughly is that given a definition of something like doubt, we create limit to distinguish it from other things. The distinction is powerful to begin with, but it has an Achilles heel that when that distinction is applied to itself it breaks itself. It is obvious in a way that if we build steps to raise us up, we cannot then remove those steps.
  
  Douglas Hofstadter in Gödel, Esher, Bach notes that self-reference always seems to limit systems but he says nothing else about this.
  
  All thinking it seems is ultimately limited. The very act of taking up knowledge and thought commits us to the limits of knowledge and thought. Realising that thought is not infinite, and each system of thought is the condition for its own limits is exceptionally important in properly establishing any discussion or investigation.
  
  The fact that SRC exists suggests it may have a more formal definition, but since its about limits, the formulation must be very carefully done and include irony.
  

 

The Dictatorship behind Personal Opinion

How dangerous is this idea of "Personal Opinion."

It looks like "Freedom of Speech". It looks like a good thing. It looks like the individual is free to say and think what they want.

Awesome! except for a problem. In my freedom I only have an "Opinion" alongside all others, but what if I am right? Is that worth more than opinion? Freedom appears to mean that all individuals have equal say, regardless the quality of what they say, and that means that truth goes in the bin. Its an odd contradiction. Is it only opinion that all people have equal say, or is it Truth? Freedom denies us of any worth.

By contrast "Collective Opinion" is not formally accepted in the West. But when the whole Western media agree on something like "Collectivism is bad" that is actually just "Collective Opinion" yet it seems even in the freedom of the West that "Collective Opinion" is more truthful than "Personal Opinion". How ironic that the collective belief that "Collectivism is bad" is actually more important than "Personal Opinion"! How is that freedom? So what freedom really is there in "Personal Opinion"? Who cares for "Personal Opinion"? Why even have "Personal Opinion" when it has no more value than anyone else's opinion. Don't we really want our "Personal Opinion" to agree with others so that really we hold "Collective Opinion"?

This comes out in Democracy and Voting, and also in Social Media "likes." The more "likes" we get the more we belong to the Collective. The more Votes we get the more Power we get. But we can still be wrong. Hitler was actually voted in, but History will record that the German Voters got it wrong. An individual with a Time Machine and hind sight can go back to 1933 and scream and shout at the German people to try and persuade them against Hitler but it will just be their "Personal Opinion" and make no difference to the Collective Will.

And so it is that the desire for personal individual freedom, really just leads to a collective oppression! 

What we had before the crazy idea of "Personal Opinion" was Truth. This means that a collective can be Wrong and an individual can Right. Isn't the Story of Jesus the most spectacular (albeit subtle) version of this. One person against the whole Roman Dictatorship and ultimately becoming worshipped as the Single God of what was Pagan Society even above Tiberius and the Caesars themselves.

Now how do we discover truth when we can't use Voting or Likes? Well this is the great question. As proven many times in logic, computing and I'm sure in this blog, if there was an algorithm for truth that we could follow like a recipe then we can use Diagonalisation to contradict it. One method would be construct an "I am False" statement that breaks the system. More generally a statement that uses the output of the algorithm to give a different result. Then when you then use the algorithm on this statement you get a contradiction.

T(x) is 1 when x is True and 0 otherwise.

y = T(y) != 1

Which is pseudo logic/programming code for a statement y which is True when y is false. y can work this out using T(y) == 1 when y is True.

But what now of T(y)? y is always the opposite of T(x). So whatever T(y) says y will be the opposite. T() cannot consistently work out the Truth of y. It is broken.

Note Godel does the exact same thing, just instead of Truth he uses Provability. So P(x) is true if x can be proven. So we construct our Beq statement that is a contradiction if it can be proven. #TODO complete this.

This is the universal pattern it seems for all Diagonalisations from Gödel to Tarski to Turing.

So there is no algorithm for truth. You cannot use voting, or likes, or appeals to experts, or "Collective Opinion" or "Personal Opinion". The only way to see if its true is just to see if its true. Sounds crazy, but if we are not able to know what is true, then what is the point of true!

So all these meta statements about truth like "Personal Opinion" are actually Political Totalitarianism in action! Such ideas are designed to control us, and are nothing to do with freedom.

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Another aspect of this is "being heard." It's one thing to speak the Truth, but do we need to be heard? Its quite interesting what the Religious leaders have said. Jesus gives the Parable of the Sower where he admits he has no control over the ears (pun on ears of wheat in English as well as ears of men). And Buddha says quite openly test my teachings and if they do not work for you then ignore them, and he accepts that what people hear depends upon their conditions and where they are on the path to freedom.

Yet in the modern world things are much more Evangelical. There is not just a desire to spread the truth, but there is open marketing to coerce people to accept it. The media for example uses all kinds of language to bias people and agree with the political powers and Hegemony that exists. I do not know whether this is always subversive brainwashing of people, or whether journalists are so  hegemonic themselves that they cannot help publishing what to them looks fair and multifaceted.

My own view is get things right first, and the worry about what you do with that second. To even get the first part right is already a monster achievement. I wonder sometimes the merit of writing a blog. I believe my first post was on this. What do I hope to gain? Well primarily a record of my own thoughts. I used to write onto paper, but have a drawer of this. The other is that there is a chance that the workings of the universe may conspire to do something with these words. I don't know what I expect of that, but perhaps a helpful comment that puts me right or gives me the insight I wish for.

Narcos a brilliant, but covert, analysis of CIA operations in South America

The TV series Narcos is ostensibly about the capture of Pablo Escobar by the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). It is very good and watchable but is shot through with so many obvious holes. At the end they point out that the capture of Escobar made no difference to drug exports and his drug cartel was simply taken over by his rivals and in fact drug exports to the US increased. It seems if the DEA really wanted to keep drugs down they should have left Escobar in place.

It was also pointed out by the South Americans many times in the show, that the problem was not in South America but rather the money coming in from America that was funding criminality in South America and leading to the deaths of 100,000s of people. If the DEA wanted to end the drugs trade they need to do it in US and catch the people selling it in the US. The demand was causing the supply, not the other way around. This is a classic way in which a country like US goes and destroys another country rather than deal with their problems at home. And that is a general karmic issue that you can't change the world but you can change yourself. US needs to deal with its spiralling drug problem where 1 in 3 Americans are now hooked on some type of drug. You can't blame Escobar for that, particularly since the problem continues worse after his emprisonment.

So if Drugs was not the point of the capture of Escobar then what was? Well I annoyed all those present when we watched the first episode by pointing out the obvious. What do we really know about South America? We know it is full of "Commies" and the CIA has been hugely active in South America to destroy Communism there. Indeed the drug issue turns out to be quite the other way around. The CIA were selling drugs to fund their activities in South America and the reason to end the drugs trade was not to protect Americans from drug abuse, but to cut the funding to Communist and Socialist organisation in South America. When we understand how the US works the whole world makes sense!

Afghanistan was the same. How on earth did Afghanistan manage to recently defeat the world's only super-power? How can a load of goat herders in the mountains defeat a country with 1000x the GDP? The answer is simply opium. Interesting the Islamic world is aggressively opposed to drugs (look at the execution rate in Iran which is facing a huge drugs problem - is this CIA backed? Look at Opium Wars with China to see how Imperialists use drugs to collapse countries). But despite being ideologically opposed to opium and banning its production originally, once the US invaded the Taleban used Opium to fund the war.

To the TV series' credit it did leak this all out over the course of the series. But I guess they knew they were making a show for a completely brainwashed US viewing population and so had to go easy with the Truth so as to not blow the minds of the US public. Towards the end of the final series Javier Peña (played by Pedro Pascal) finds himself in a meeting with a CIA operative who explains that the DEA has just been used as a pawn in the huge game of CIA operations in Colombia and across South America. Every single person and thing that has happened to Peña has all been set up by the CIA to get him to take down Escobar. Very X-Factor. But undoubtedly true: it is no exaggeration that the Global Secret Police aka CIA operates everywhere.

Now why did the CIA hate Escobar so much, and not other drug boss (many who they actually worked with)? Its clearly because Escobar had huge popular support and was a serious threat to the politics of Colombia. No other drugs boss cares for politics, they just want the money. If Escobar had indeed become president of Colombia he would have crashed international Capitalism and switched the country to a Socialist agenda seeking to end poverty and increase the welfare of ordinary people. Doesn't that sound like a good idea? Well it is if you are the ordinary people, but its a disaster for Capitalists cos that money going to the masses is money you want and the only way to get it is to have the corporations take over that you can buy shares in and have dividend wealth diverted to you. Once a Socialist country takes over and Nationalises then no more free payouts to the rich capitalists!

But why does the US care about what happens in Colombia? Well imagine if Socialism ever made it to the US!!!!!! That would pull the rug from the wealthy elites who own America and cut their incomes streams and show the American people that they do not need to live as second class citizens in their own country, and they can have a full share in the nations wealth, not having to take the scraps left over once the Capitalists have had their feed. It would completely change US forever and that cannot happen if you are a rich capitalist American. As a result the amount of propaganda generated in US to denounce Socialism is utterly overwhelming and the US has employed the world's leading brainwashers from Nazi Germany and beyond to brainwash and pacify the US population.

Generally its very interesting. Which system of economics would you select. The one that gives money to the rich, or the one that distributes it amongst everyone. Only the rich would vote for the first one, and that is less than 5% of the population. Most people would vote for the second... until they hear that the first one is called Capitalism and the second is called Socialism. When they hear the name they have been programmed to hate it like the plague, despite it actually sounding good. That is usually called brainwashing.

So Narcos is actually a very interesting TV show. Watch if not done.

War really is the best way to see how the Brain works (or doesn't work)

 https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2022/sep/29/russia-ukraine-war-live-news-pressure-grows-to-declare-russia-terrorist-state-norway-beefs-up-security-at-gas-sites

Looking at Western media coverage of the War in Donbas is comical for the way it crashes the Brain.

The headline says "annexing four Ukrainian regions" which rather misses the point. Since the Maidan revolution in 2014 and the new Kiev government--which is aligned to Europe and America--the Donbas region has been in civil war to extract itself from this fate.

In the light of Brexit in the UK this makes perfect sense. Given the choice to be governed from Brussels or Westminster the British people rejected Brussels and left the EU. Who wouldn't do the same? The whole point of freedom and Democracy is that you govern your self, and you fight to repel any foreign power that seeks to take you over. The oldest rules in the book.

The Donbas region is ruled from Donetsk which is some 850km from Moscow. Kiev is 720 km from  Donetsk and once it made sense to be ruled from Kiev. But Brussels is 2700 km away and Washington isn't even on the same continent 8400 km away and while you elect MEPs (Members of European Parliament) it's not actual Democracy (your MEPs can only veto policy not create policy giving the Commission complete control to avoid anything they don't want just like a half-dictator), and obviously only Americans vote in US elections (so being ruled from Washington is full dictatorship. NATO is actually a dictatorship!) So quite obviously the people of Donetsk would rather be ruled by Moscow than the US/Brussels led Kiev. Really the whole of Ukraine should prefer rule by Moscow than the West but the politics and trade agreements with the world's only superpower and Imperial capital in Washington are complex and easily corrupted. Washington for instance only needs to threaten sanctions or provide trade agreements to buy the loyalty of most governments.

The absurdity of the situation is rather well illustrated on this map from Bored Panda which has places named by Americans. Americans are so far away from Europe that they don't even know the names of the countries, and Ukraine just had "land" written over it, how can Americans possible govern Ukraine or have anything to do with the interests and cultures of the region. So when Americans vote they vote for Imperial leaders who represent US Interests, how can "American Interests" have anything to do with Ukrainian interest or worse Donbas interests. Even Brussels seems far away and irrelevant to the Ukrainians. Given the choice between Washington, Brussels or Moscow you would always chose Moscow.

I know people involved in Ukraine and they are of one mind that Ukraine is better off under Washington than Moscow, but they have their headquarters in Washington. One has to wonder whose interests are being represented here.

Now US operations have occurred literally all over the world since the end of WW2 (and probably long before). There is no country on Earth that has not had/does not have the CIA operating in it to direct the country towards US interests. A brilliant analysis of this comes in the form of the TV series Narcos. I blog separately on the deep insight this series gives us, albeit done very gently as it is perhaps quite radical and mind-blowing for a US population brought up on a strict diet of Pentagon propaganda. 

Now why mention South America? Well the CIA is operating in Ukraine too. And just like the DEA it has secretly employed and set up overseas NGOs and government agencies to do their work for them. Just like in Colombia and South America. You won't get a job in post 2014 Ukraine if you do not work with the CIA agenda of reconstruction of Ukraine to become a Washington vassal. Now from the perspective of someone looking to work in Ukraine it looks amazing! You wanted to pursue some agenda and indeed have been hired to help the country. Its looks like you have been granted freedom to do what you believe and want to do. But the fact you were hired--and anyone who believed something else was not hired--means that it's not your views that are being respected, but rather than you share the views of those in change: you become useful. You have become what is called a "useful idiot" (this is Western propaganda for people who do not accept Western control, but really is better used on those who support the Western hegemony.)

Its very hard to tell whether someone working in a political matrix like the reconstruction of Ukraine is doing a valuable job based on their own learning and ethics or is just being allowed to execute their plans when they suit the CIA. Its an interesting problem. When I hear that the CIA is operating in a region, I tend to assume all those who collaborate are "useful idiots." I mean if you ever started to criticise the US operations in the area you would quickly find everything dries up and you would quickly be on a plane home.

Returning to the top then a little further down the article is announces "marks the largest forcible annexation in Europe since the second world war." How can the West's role be "non-forceful" when it has been training and arming a proxy army in Ukraine to fight the Donbas War for 8 years now. Clearly every action has an equal reaction (to quote Newton). If Russia is pushing its because the West is pushing too. This is the silly thing about War: like dancing Tango you always need a partner in a fight. Quickly it becomes obvious just how biased and brainwashed Western media is that it assumes that when non-western powers like Russia seek to protect their interests that is considered "forceful", while when the West seeks to protect its interests that is considered non-forceful. Its the classic pointless argument with your partner "well you started it."

The general and better measure is not Force/Not-Force but the number of conflicts you are involved in. UK has been at war continuously for over 100 years and famously the US has only had 15 years of peace in all its 246 years of history. This is so infamous that its even been mentioned in presidential speeches. No other countries even approach these levels of aggression and "forcefulness". US and UK are clearly the global violent offenders and biggest threats to Peace.

With regards the "brain," media only works on the level of the Brain, both writers, readers and the scientists who design propaganda to push political agendas to control people (that applies to advertising as well) are all working with the Brain. When we read propaganda, like this Guardian article, its worth being away how it influences the brain, and being marvelled too how brains can be quite so inaccurate and barely see reality at all. A serious message to us all to work hard on our minds to overcome brainwashing and the lies that are designed to change our behaviour and confuse us into compliance. 

Mentioned many times in the blog one observation which is probably the most alarming thing about the West is that ALL media agrees. I can't think of any media in the West for example that does not label Russia an enemy, but does not label Saudi Arabia as an enemy. To me Russia is just another country, while Saudi Arabia is a brutal mediaeval dictatorship which does weekly public beheadings of political prisoners. There can be few people who can ignore the horrific violations of human rights that occur inside Saudi Arabia (and outside if you look at Jamal Khashoggi who was hacked to death on foreign soil and his body parts removed in bin bags just for criticising the government). Yet the whole western media is very muted in its attitude to Saudi Arabia. How can a "free" press agree so uniformly on anything? The only way is that it is not free! So in the West we actually live inside a system of Total Propaganda where the only way to get another point of view is freelance private media like this blog which has no backing or affiliation and which most people will just ignore as "personal opinion". How dangerous is this idea of "Personal Opinion" that I blog on separately. 

Anyway hopefully that little blog tweezered the complete spaghetti of Western propaganda and bias apart to see more clearly the interplay of forces and prejudices that goes into making it.

Natural numbers do not contain infinity. SRH, boundaries and Reality

Containing one self is problematic. This is the SRH.

As argued in this math stack exchange : containing ones boundary creates a new boundary and so contradicts the definition.

Specifically for any counting numbers you can always +1 to get a new element. This is the whole definition of countably infinite. So if you add Countably Infinite itself to the set you get an element that is the limit and so can't +1.

Not rigorous but it seems to me that Cantor's explosion of infinites comes from the SRH. Every time you create a set, you create a new boundary and so a new type of number via its cardinality. And this is recursive and so it explodes. I called this the +1 or Horatio Theorem before rather conservatively because any idea such a "I know everything" becomes a new item of information and so you can't. But actually from Cantor its not just +1 item of information but an explosion of new information because you need to adjust everything to incorporate the new boundary.

Knowledge does not approach an unobtainable limit of "everything" so that you are left with a trickle of +1s as you negotiate the limit. Knowledge actually expands exponentially and gets further and further away from any limit the more you learn.

SRH has interesting implications of ideas of Reality. If Reality is the moment when your knowledge matches what there is to know, so that there is nothing left to learn then mankind is getting further and further from Reality! Science is not a gradual approach to singular Truth, but an exponentially explosion away from a singularity of ignorance like the Big Bang. Which raises questions about what we are learning all this about?

The classic naive view of Reality is there is some actual stuff hidden out there and Science and Learning is an investigator uncovering it. We are simply revealing a fixed Reality.

SRH identifies the inevitable problem here that sooner or later we are going to stop looking "there" and start looking "here." Essentially the scientist starting to ask how the uncovering actually happens. And when we start to uncover ourselves we have a contradiction because weren't we supposed to be the collection of everything uncovered already? So it turns out that Science itself is a mystery that needs uncovering and then you are in real SRH trouble. Hegel smashes this when he says that you can't use a faulty telescope to look at itself to find the faults. If the telescope is faulty then your data is going to be faulty. One has to begin "where you are" and have no choice but to take that as the starting point. Quite how you get here is fundamentally an unsolvable mystery. This is the inspiration for Phenomenology. And it is EXACTLY what Present Moment in Buddhism is and what Meditation seeks to get clear.

So Reality is necessarily unlike anything we will ever think, its boundary is unfathomable, and the process of knowledge and discovery is explosive. All those people who are struggling for a Theory of Everything look out, your great^n grandchildren will still be searching.

As far as I can tell SRH is the closest you can get to a Theory of Everything. Its the recognition that "Everything" is a self contradictory idea because if you ever add that boundary to itself you smash up all the knowledge you already have and make the problem even worse.

Perhaps this is where Hubris comes from. All those civilisations who think they have mastered the universe actually end up smashing themselves because the struggle to grasp that shows them they have not.

It still remains to get a handle on SRH. Is there is a general formulation of it outside the informal ramblings of a blog. The more I look at it, it seems to have its own answer. If SRH was ever fully formulated it would explode itself. Very casually written, we did much better earlier in the year where we realised that the contradiction at the heart of "everything" may actually be helpful in giving the Theory of Everything an exception to really be Everything. Two -ve make a +ve kind of thing. 

Homosexuality & Narcissism & Enlightenment

Commented on this before but didn't have the word "Narcissism". As a test I bet that in a room of mixed homosexual and heterosexual people with a mirror on the wall the homosexuals will check themselves out in the mirror considerably more than the heterosexuals.

If true that may well be because of an obvious feature of homosexuals that they find themselves sexually attractive.

Now we can't deduce causation here. Is it the narcissism which causes the homosexuality or is it the other way around. But the involvement of self in the construction of sexuality is critical here.

It may be the intricate involvement of self here spills out into other parts of the psyche. The homosexuals are fundamentally more egocentric than heterosexuals, and have a closer relationship with themselves beyond the sexual relationship. But is it the overreach of the self that causes Homosexuality, or does the Homosexuality lead to overreach of the self?

Anyway some speculations on the difference between homo and hetero sexuality with regard to Self.

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I used to argue a bit more that Sex is about Other. In biological terms Sex evolved so that DNA could become more diverse and mix with other DNA. Its pretty universal across the various kingdoms. Even bacteria exchange DNA in something akin to sex. Certainly in heterosexuality the Male and Female are considered opposites. And this opposition pervades the universe Yin-Yang in Taoism. So Sex has difference at its root.

So how can there be homosexuality? This is actually a misnomer. If there really was just one sex we wouldn't call it homosexuality. Its because there are 2 sexes that homosexuals are able to call themselves homo. In fact homosexuals should do away with this term as it depends upon Heterosexuality for its meaning. But homosexuals still have the problem that they are different from the other half the population. Male homosexuals must ignore the females, and vice versa. That seems an odd society doesn't it. The male population all involved in sexual relations and the female population all involved in relationships. You might argue why are there only 2 sexes? You could have any number of homosexual sexes and each sex only has relationships with itself. But all this immediately makes sense in Heterosexuality where the two sexes fit together -- quite literally.

Well the Male Homosexual may say well we fit together through the anus, and the Female may say well who needs to fit together anyway that is pure dogmatic prejudice.

But everyone must admit it is quite neat that there are 2 sexes and they can fit together leaving nothing over.

Probably my favourite graphic. The whole divides into parts that are made and depend on each other. That is whole the whole divides into separate parts, that opposition that drives them apart is only necessary because they are really together. Newton's Third Law is really universal: when you push things apart they respond with an equal force in the other direction. That force that separates Male and Female, incurs an equal force that brings them together. And when you ask why you need to separate them, it can only be because actually they are unified. Psychologically we note that someone who avoids something and pushes it back, only needs to do this because they originally perceived it as drawing them in. Hate and Love are intimately entwined. When we fight something, it's to keep it away, but we only need keep it away if we already feel it is already here or approaching. Generally we only see opposites as Opposite can originally we had them as a Unity. We pair Salt and Pepper and see them as different but only because they are both Condiments. We never pair Salt and Cats normally because they do belong in any common unity. But perhaps cos of Cat's relation to Witches and theirs to the Occult and the Devil (after Christian persecution of Pagans) and we use salt to protect from the Devil we might now see how Cats and Salt belong together in a new way, and suddenly we have this new way of separating them but only because we first found their connection and unity.

Yin-Yang really underlines the nature and dialectic of Unity/Difference perfectly. Certainly in Heterosexuality the idea is that male and female fit together like this. They are whole because they are different. Its a very sophisticated and ancient idea the Unity of Opposites. The very first writings in the Greek system are about this Law and Logos.

(Famously Derrida wrote his seminal paper Différance on this very subject, placing Difference as the heart of Similarity and observing that when we draw things together as alike one another, it's really based upon movements to separate. Long time since I read that paper... #TODO check this - is he dialectical here or not?)

Anyway by contrast the Homosexual thinks that Unity occurs through Similarity which is quite a different idea and leads to things being left over. It is only as great an idea as a type. If you have 2 sexes you have 2 separate unities which do not fit together. Full sense has not been achieved. With the unity of opposites everything is accounted for and the types all fit together like a jigsaw.

Quick processing of the recently prevailing idea of intersex and non-binary:

People like to make things complex. In terms of gender it is complex if we wish to label every single variant. Perhaps as a man I like machismo, but I also like to be in touch with my feelings and enjoy delicate and fine living. I wouldn't call myself the brute of classical Masculinity, but I wouldn't call myself Feminine. I don't actually know what this is called but its close to Camp. We can invent any number of gender combinations. Actually neutral is a good one where we can't be bothered with gender identity at all. That doesn't get much of a look in. But ignoring all this social stuff and sticking to the physical there are actually only 2 sexes and that is because there are only 2 genital types. If there is an intersex or a nonbinary sex then draw its genitals.

Unfortunately no amount of social theory can remove the basic physical facts. And there is nothing wrong with that. Facts like the Sun rises every morning, or we need air to breath are not a political expression of authority they just are. And there is a certain madness these days which tries to replace the simple observing of the way things are with some paranoia about political prejudice. One could do well to simply observe this paranoia happening for a start. But the radicalised will say, but the way "I think things are" is just the result of brainwashing or the Male Gaze or the Patriarchal System dictating my thoughts and we are in the paranoia that I mentioned in the blog on Fascism. People need to meditate more. Get clear that you are breathing right now, know that this is true and you have not been tricked by the State, or Descartes Demon, or anyone into thinking you are breathing and then like Descartes go from there and get clear about what your life is and what you think is right or wrong. Absolutely don't let the Patriarchal System tell you want to do, but at the same time don't let the radicals tell you what to do either! 

So actually I've argued myself back into where I used to be. Homosexuality is not just a different type of sexuality it is fundamentally different from Heterosexuality, but also derived from Heterosexuality. If there were not the males and females of heterosexuality to start with then there would be no homosexuality. Important to note there are 2x homosexualities a male and a female one. Homosexuality is bounded by sexuality (it can be labelled as either male or female). But there is only 1x heterosexuality and it is not bounded by sexuality, it explains sexuality with nothing left over.

Heterosexuality is the founding principle here. Now what homosexuals do about that conceptually I don't know. How does it work conceptually and politically to have budded off the main stem of sexuality?

The other issue is psychological and mentioned above. While Heterosexuality embraces the Other, homosexuality allows mission-creep of the Self. It is true that Self is a feature of all our lives, but the Heterosexual must put that aside when forming a relationship and embrace an entirely different creature into their life. The male must link up with the female. At least sexually the heterosexual cannot find satisfaction within them self. Yes they can masturbate but it is always with longing for the Other. For the Homosexual I speculate there is this extraordinary psychological situation where the self can actually find sexual gratification and Romantic Love in itself. I may not be my own type, but there is nothing to stop me actually been drawn to myself sexually. I can gain that gratification within my own essence with no need for searching in the world.

Now this is very akin to the religious path in fact. The life lived seeking worldly gains is also a never satisfied life. Nothing in the world is very predictable, and it is also hard trying to make it conform to what we want. How many house moves and renovations does it take before we just accept what we have. Surely the goal of life is to be satisfied in ourselves and not have need for anything else. At least crudely I believe this is what the Hindus and Buddhists seek, and probably true for all the other religions. We stop looking outside and invite God into our hearts for the eternal fulfilment that He offers.

How then is this different from the Homosexual inviting themselves into their heart to gain sexual gratification without venturing into the world. Being in love with oneself essentially.

Well perhaps this is a huge pitfall for religion. If you meet a religious person who is smug and self satisfied without a care for anyone you would think they have drifted off the path. The religious path has Other people at its heart. The religious is caring, giving, patient, compassionate they are in fact willing to take on the sufferings of other people. But if we are self-satisfied where is the motivation to take on the sufferings of others?

Suppose you have gained Arahant level and have ended suffering for yourself, you might easily think "I am thus come" I have shown and verified the path. If you want to end suffering then walk the path yourself. And then have nothing else to do with people. For those who are suffering, they have only themselves to blame. The path is free and open, if you want to end suffering walk that path. It must be an easy trap. Indeed I believe the story of Buddha includes something similar where he thought the path too hard and so decided to enjoy his freedom from suffering alone. Various deities beseeched Buddha to begin teaching "some beings are blinded by only a single grain of sand" and he relented.

So I guess this is the issue. Is there a type of homosexuality that stems from not wishing to accept the Other into ones life, so that there is the self assurance of sexual gratification within oneself. Or is it the other way around, that homosexuality has other causes which as a side effect open the door to the possibility of self-sexual-gratification.

I guess the use of words there answers the Arahant question too. A self-satisfied religious practitioner still has self!

From a discussion with a homosexual I discovered that the sexuality really is a mirror image. Where the heterosexual thinks sex with the same sex is disgusting and shuns it, so the homosexual shuns the opposite sex. That is quite interesting in that the same mechanism of sex selection is working just in opposite directions.

Anyway extremely contentious issue whether homosexuality is a state in and of itself, or whether it is derivative from heterosexuality. But certainly in this investigation there is a much to explore and think about. 

Does Fascism have anything to teach us?

The news that Giorgia Meloni has consigned "fascism to history" is a shame because it is one of the most successful systems, much better than Capitalism and has much to still teach us. That is the claim here.

The difference between systems is that Capitalism is Imperialist and enables the international wealthy to exploit a country's success, while Fascism is Nationalist and keeps the wealth for the nation... indeed that is the essence of National Socialisms in general. Communism by contrast keeps the wealth for "communes" etc. So far so good.

To do this the nation creates national monopolies from the best companies, so there is some enterprise and competition, but profits all go to the people of the country. So far so good.

Now this is where it gets murky: who are the people of a country? The debate is still on!

For Capitalism "workers" have no identity they are viewed only as able to work or not, so immigrants are just as good as the established community. It means that products made in a Capitalist economy have no cultural or historical craft an Indian makes cars as well as an American. There is much interest in "ethnic" handmade crafts these days made by people employing the tools and skills of particular communities because this has all been lost under Capitalism.

Contrary to the claims of Capitalism most communities actually name themselves from their "country of origin" (COO) so you have Chinese, Indians, Africans/Blacks, French, Germans, English, Jews (is an odd one) so implicitly everyone actually thinks in terms of Nations being Races also. Under Capitalism people move about to find jobs but still identify with COO. When racists say "Go Home" they are simply articulating this implicit idea that everyone already has... everyone thinks they know their "home". So Fascists try to honour this sense of "home." The Crisis of Modernity in fact is caused by everything in Capitalism losing its home.

Now that is complex cos we all came from Africa originally, that is our true "home" but since then communities have developed other meanings to "home." Anyway under Capitalism people's home is where the work is, under Fascism home is where you think it is... and that requires some negotiation because 1st generation immigrants are split between COO of their parents and where they were born.

This does not need to be complex. In essence I think the litmus test is "which country would you fight for in a conflict between them" is the necessary condition for a passport. Which is actually incredibly intuitive and simple. Can you really call a country your "home" that you would allow another country to invade?

This potentially does get complex for some people. What if Britain invaded Saudi Arabia or Israel would Muslims or Jews in the army take part in the invasion? I say Saudi Arabia cos that is where Mecca is.

So anyway Fascism should not be consigned to history as it absolutely has important lessons for the Capitalism! Altho the "Capitalists" is really exactly why it is supposed to be consigned to history! And like criminalising drugs sending things underground only creates a black market and a festering underworld. Fascism needs to be brought into the open and discussed. Conspiracy theorists may argue here that our fear of Fascism in fact rather suggests Capitalists feel threatened by it.

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To be fair this is all wrapped up in the infamous "Holocaust" since that was instigated by the Germans under Fascist organisation. But Italy and Spain were fascist too and did not have a Holocaust, so we can't argue that Fascism leads to Holocausts. Holocaust in quotes because actually it means a whole host of things to different people. For some the Holocaust is the whole period of the concentration camps so includes the 1930s. For others it is the mass starvation of concentration camp inmates during the 1940s war (more than half of victims died AFTER the war ended from starvation), and for others it is the Death Camps and the gassing of people. Jews were the largest racial group in the Holocaust so it is often called a Jewish Holocaust but of course Germans needed workers for their factories so did not just amass Jews. Russians were also well represented in the Holocaust. So its a complex period of history, meaning many things, and importantly it is not necessarily entirely linked to Fascism. As argued before in this blog, with the complete destruction of Germany by the Allies and the wide spread starvation this caused, it seems a bit unlikely that all the Jews were starved or gassed to death by the Nazis alone. Hard to believe but the official story of the Holocaust is still that the Allies liberated the camp inmates and the Nazis tried to starve and gas them all... and not one inmate succumbed to the starvation caused by the Allied invasion. If/when this error of history is corrected it may well turn out that the Capitalist invasion of Germany had a bigger hand in the Holocaust than the Fascists! And then importantly we can see how destructive war is and why we should never go to war. But as an aside Fascism gets a reprieve and we can look at it again, and Imperialist Capitalism which has been the real reason for most of the wars of the last few hundred years can get the proper criticism it deserves.

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Saw a program last night on Nazi home movies and included videos of the horrors and excesses of Operation Barbarossa. The sheer brutality of war is always shocking and no one can ever justify war at any level. I ended up wondering what was worse being an innocent Jew rounded up by Nazis and shot, or being an innocent Japanese and having your city flattened by a terrifying atomic weapon and then wandering the streets for days with you skin hanging off before dying of radiation poisoning. The correct answer is both. Both are worse. Both are unjustifiable, unimaginable horrors. But what is revealing is how propaganda works. Unfortunately for the program on Nazi home movies it was spoiled by sections of emotionally driven and extremely prejudicial narration which made it look like propaganda. Can't people let the Nazi atrocities speak for themselves? If you need to add prejudice this rather suggests the atrocities are not bad enough, which is actually letting the Nazis off. But in the same way you see coverage of the War in the Pacific or Vietnam and there is a matter of fact approach to the atrocities of the Americans which works the other way to make you feel the US is a bunch of psychos who don't care for the lives of anyone and can surgically remove people from the skies without the slightest concern. Who is more terrifying the Americans or the Nazis?

I've mentioned many times in the blog the problem with brainwashing is people replace thinking and sensitivity with factoids. Most people in the West can easily think about Hiroshima as little more troubling than burning their breakfast toast. "It saved lives" is the mantra. Such double-think is particularly typical of the work done by the Pentagon to brainwash. When you have double-think you can almost guarantee it began life at a Pentagon desk. "Saving lives by killing" should start off alarm bells immediately. But perhaps the US is right, by ending the war decisively it saved a long drawn out conflict and saved lives. Except suppose that long drawn out conflict had led to the Japanese winning! That's a deal the Japanese would have accepted. Was it really about saving lives or was it about winning? If it is really about saving lives then why didn't the US just stop fighting? The US has never cared about lives that is the lie hidden in this propaganda. For instance they bombed the Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians mercilessly for 20 years killing innumerable civilians with no actual goal and then withdrew and the world carried on as if the US had never visited SE Asia and destroyed it.  Entirely pointless loss of life. The US can never argue that it cares about life! But never-the-less the brainwashed never even think about this. This is exactly the horror of war that people become glazed over and unable to see the horror what they are doing or witnessing. This is exactly how all countries and regimes conduct the insanity that is war. What often happens in fact is that the horrors of war become so great that the propaganda cannot hold them back and then people realise the insanity and head for the negotiating table if they are in power, or start protesting if they are the powerless masses.

So the problem of speaking about Fascism is the over whelming amount of propaganda and brainwashing that the Capitalists have created against it. It leaves you unsure what you think any more. If you are totally brainwashed then perhaps Fascism was never bad at all? And if you are totally brainwashed then perhaps Capitalism is the total evil? This is the problem of Propaganda. Once you realise your establishment has an agenda and has been lying to you to coerce you then don't know what to think anymore. And this is extremely dangerous for everyone. Lying establishments should face the International Courts for misleading their people far more than establishments that abuse and kill their people. At least with violent dictatorship you know where you stand. With insidious brainwashing dictatorships you are inclined to madness.

And this rather underlines the issue raised in this blog that we need to go back and look at Fascism properly, ignore all the prejudice and propaganda and learn properly any lessons there are, which as argued are actually considerable.

How the tiny decisions of the mass become what looks like the master plan of a hidden cabal

So I'm told in the military there is a "need to know" system in operation which they call compartmentalisation. It means that no one has an over view of the whole organisation, and each ant never sees the full significance of what they are doing. I guess this has some advantages. It means that the enemy cannot find out from the ants either cos they don't know, the ants are more efficient, and the ants will not interfere with the master plan as designed by their commanders. It rather suggests that at the top of the pyramid there is a master commander who does see the whole picture. A God so to speak.

But is this really the case. Does the commander in charge of a  nations forces really get the whole picture. In the old days standing on a hilltop overlooking the battle and seeing it unfold. The problem for the over view attitude is that in reality an army is like a clockwork mechanism. You train and teach the army, but in the heat of battle all that comes together as the battle and the outcome will be quite unpredictable. Indeed if every battle was predictably why have a battle. Just surrender if you can calculate you will lose, and keep surrendering until such time as you think you will win. The problem is when two armies face each other and the commanders don't know what will happen. Then like game of poker with high hands players throw it all into the battle and this is when winners and losers emerge.

Donald Rumsfeld headed up a reorganisation of the US military to bring it into the 21st Century with a focus on I.T. The idea was for all parts of the military in a battle to be connected so they could work in unison. It would mean faster response times and quicker changes of plan as things unfolded. Unlike battles of old with runners carrying messages across the battlefield, in the 21st Century a message can be sent instantly and plans changed instantly. But of course this then leads to the handling of the huge amounts of information so created. Invariably I bet computers have been deployed now on battle fields to process that huge amounts of data and simplify what is going on so commanders can get access to important info quickly so as to make decisions. But as can be seen "what is really happening" even in a battlefield of the 21st Century is a seriously complex issue and to say that any one person knows is a simplification.

So much for compartmentalisation then. But perhaps at the very top of the tree there is an Emperor who just says like a robot "destroy anyone who opposes my will". But we know in reality this will become compromise and negotiation and even that Emperor will become embroiled in complex networks of information and need to assess a constantly changing situation. They may have the final word, but they do not know "what is going on" and when their "word" is dispatched they do not know whether it will be a success in advance.

The world is a lot more fluid.

Compartmentalisation is a kind of Schrodinger's Cat, but instead of a box waiting to be opened there is all the knowledge we don't know yet. And that gets into the nature of existence. Now if no one anywhere knows the big picture is there actually a big picture to know! Do Historians discover History or do they create it? What kind of History would for example a Churchill supporter write? So think like most things it’s a mixture. Was thinking about this the other day. Buddhism says that for something to “occur” you need both the thing and the viewer. So you can’t have History without an Historian and same then for contemporary issues too. What you get will depend upon who you ask. So the civil servant will get one view, and the politicians another. It makes you wonder what the Queen knew from the perspective of 70 years meeting more high profile people than anyone on Earth. But her role means she never wrote it down and so it all died with her and so actually no longer exists. This is where conspiracy theories get lift off because people think there is some “fixed truth” that is waiting to be discovered and they will invariably see what they want to see, but then confuse that with reality. In actual fact what isn’t known has no reality! I wonder on this analysis whether there is a central plan? What looks like a joined up plan to conquer the world may actually just be an emergent property of a militarised capitalist society like ours whose fundamental principle is ownership and so naturally it leads the ants to work together to own everything without any particular ant planning that.

This very much supports the idea that there is no top ant to take out, instead if we change just 1% of each ant's behaviour them the whole system changes. Property is a good example. In fact no one enforces property, it’s a Nash equilibrium and is a spontaneous equilibrium state for the ants. We all agree to property because we all benefit from it. The laws are almost epiphenomenal and added after the agreement. How could you sign off a law if you didn't already know what it was about? Property happened spontaneously, and the Laws just got adopted as a result. In a Wittgenstein way they got enveloped in the change of society that they are about. It’s Nash. We all lose because we don’t own everything, but everyone loses the same, and in place we all get a bit of the whole. There are other equilibriums, this is just our one. But suppose for whatever reason society found a new equilibrium state, it would probably actually be just a tiny change in each ant behaviour but would end up with a completely different society perhaps with no wars or international conquest and no apparent grand plan to control the world. We would all look for the “peacemaker” who created this new status quo, but actually that is the wrong way around. Society changed first.

This might explain the paradox of why the poor join the wars of the rich and vote for parties like the Tory whose only loyalty is to the rich. Why do the poor always support the rich? Wrong way around. The cellular automata of this society have some simple Capitalist rules that end up creating rich and poor and what looks like the poor supporting the rich is actually just emergent property. No one actually planned it like this, it’s just with all the ants thinking in terms of private profit the society changes into rich and poor. And again that makes sense of religious attitudes. With all the ants being just 1% more generous and selfless the whole society can change to be better.

So in conclusion the egocentric idea of individuals being the core nodes of the network of reality misses out much. Its much more like the incomplete nodes coming together in unpredictable ways and producing through their interactions the patterns we see in society.

I criticise Capitalism thoroughly in this blog but perhaps the criticism should not be levelled at "Capitalism" like that were a plan by someone. Rather "Capitalism" is just what becomes of a society with belief in property and profit. Its not like Adam Smith created the "Pin Factory" it was already there, he just analysed it. Likewise its not like Karl Marx invented the "Workers Revolution" it has already happened in the French Revolution. And its not like his predecessor Georg Hegel invented the "World Spirit" Napoleon was already riding across Europe. In all cases the writers were just documenting what was already happening, and now I'm guessing those happenings arose from tiny changes in people's behaviour across whole societies. If Napoleon wanted to know why he rose to power he should not look inside, but rather in the changes all around him that created the opportunity for someone to shine. In fact it was when Napoleon did think this was all because of himself and he crowned himself Emperor then the dream died and people's behaviour recoiled and changed again. When Egos subsume reality for their own, that is when they kill it.

What actually is non-attachment?

Buddha says the root of suffering is attachment. What actually is this? And why is the monastic way of life relevant?

You don't need to be a monk to find non-attachment. Eckhart Tolle did, but its interesting that once he found it he initially did the same thing as Buddha: nothing. Buddha sat for 40 days under a tree and Tolle became homeless and slept on park benches. So naturally we think non-attachment is abandoning worldly interests and "dropping out."

Well maybe. Those who have found non-attachment often drop out. But most who droop-out have not found non-attachment: they are absolutely not the same thing. After dropping out both Buddha and Tolle went on to teach, live conventional-ish lives and Tolle even went on to have a relationship.

Non-attachment can't be measured by material things like this. Instead it is simply not seeing yourself anywhere in the world. Completely no where.

This means while you may have possessions they have nothing to do with you. If one breaks it makes no difference whether it is "yours" or someone else's: it's the same experience. It means even when you encounter a thought, memory or emotion you do not find yourself in it anywhere. It just is as it is, and whether it is yours or someone else's makes no difference, even no sense.

Its very hard to do. Almost all the time we grasp at things as "ours." Especially with mental phenomena we "let them immediately into the exclusive club of ME as VIP guests" we don't even stop them at the door they are already inside ME. If we arrest that process and ask how are they really in as difference space from anything else then we get back to non-attachment.

The problem with all these VIP guests in our club is that everything that happens to them happens to us! If we empty the club then nothing happens to "us", it just happens. And that is non-attachment and enlightenment.

All economics designed in US is a fraud

I've got an empirical theory that all economics deigned in America is to defraud people.

Check out the nonsense that is Laffer Curve. It claims that cutting taxes can lead to greater spending and so economic growth.

So I suppose the tax receipts just sit under the treasurer's bed? Quite the opposite! The most reliable spender is the Government.

If you cut taxes people are most likely to end up with surplus cash and put it under their bed. Plus the people who benefit most from tax cuts are the rich (the people who presumably promoted this nonsense from Laffer) and the rich are the ones least likely to spend, and most likely to save and invest.

So cutting taxes always leads to economic stagnation!

What evidence is there for evidence?

Classic SRH question.

Lets start with a simper one. What evidence is there for frogs?

Well there is a frog. Just noting this is a slightly disingenuous example, because why would there be a word for frogs if we didn't know what they are. Perhaps a better example:

What evidence is there for Unicorns?

 

However these became attributed to Narwhals. Anyway the solid evidence runs to nothing other than mention in ancient stories.

Now what is the Evidence for Evidence?

Well it appears we can just take the frog and the unicorn examples and show that the presence of frogs is an example of evidence.

However is this actually evidence of evidence?

The problem we are going to run into, like with frogs, is that we must already know what evidence is before we are presented with it!

If we don't already know what evidence is then how would we know evidence when we see it.

This is quite Kantian. Evidence must be a priori, in some way it must be hard wired into our brains in a way; this is not learned but something upon which we then construct our world.

Now is this evidence for SRH? That things cannot be their own foundations and where something is built upon itself e.g. looking for evidence of evidence then we know automatically it will fail.

Lets just check that. Is there a contradiction in looking for evidence of evidence?

The problem is that with contrary evidence we reject something. So to reject evidence we would need to find something that contradicts evidence. But the problem is that we have already accepted evidence as a thing before we even find evidence.

Suppose we found evidence that there is evidence that does not support truth. That is impossible, which then means that finding evidence for evidence is a tautology and meaningless. After all the whole point of evidence is to support belief. If evidence itself was not already a solid belief then what use would evidence be!

Looking at the previous post and Richard Dawkins his reliance on Science looks even more precarious! He looks like nothing more than a bigot with his own religion. For anyone who does not already think truth requires evidence, there is nothing Dawkins can do to convince them! Likewise it appears for anyone who thinks all truth must require evidence there is no amount of faith and belief that can sway Dawkins. Altho he is on the weaker ground here, since only he is denying the a priori, while everyone is relying on it!

Richard Dawkins, Existence of God, Evolution.

Now Richard Dawkins made a name for himself while Chair for the Public Understanding of Science taking on Creationists and also the wider religious community to argue that it was all nonsense and there are entirely rational reasons for the existence of the universe.

Youtube is full of Creationists making fools of themselves and for many Richard Dawkins stands as the beacon of light in a world of mediaeval superstition and ignorance.

However there is a problem. In order to attack Creationism and Religion as in "The God Delusion" amongst others, there needs to be an actual doctrine to attack. But find any two religious people who have the same idea. The goal posts are not as well defined as Dawkins would like to make out. This argument here is a variant of the Straw Man fallacy, but fundamentally different from the usual one which suggests that in order to defeat an opponent you make a simplified version of their argument that you can defeat.

The more fundamental problem for Dawkins is that not only is there no fixed Religious doctrine, but that people change their ideas all the time. The religious path is actually a path of evolution itself. And so is the scientific path. Science did not land on the table fully formed. It has developed and evolved over the centuries from for example a clock-work static world to the dynamic world of change that we believe in today that seems with every generation to become less certain as we had recently with the development of Chaos and Quantum theory and Gödel in Logic. This is not to say scientists and logicians are not sure, but that their theories have had to incorporate uncertainty.

What Dawkins appears not to grasp is that even his ideas have changed. He is famous for promoting the idea of the gene as the unit or atom of evolution. Obviously to get a name for this, it was not the prevailing wisdom before and perhaps in the future it will be superseded by other ideas. We are right now facing the possibility that the Big Bang theory is not correct. And who knows how much of what we believe will be over turned in the future.

Now scientists think they have a special advantage over the religious community because of evidence. You can do an experiment a hundred times and get the same result. You can demonstrate an indisputable, universal fact. Say for example the Newtonian separation of light into wavelength with a prism. But where science is on shaky ground is how we explain that. These explanations are in flux and will change forever! That is part of SRH. To suggest that there are theories that are unchanging is a contradiction. And obvious proof of that an unchanging theory must be with us now! To count as absolute Truth is must have been True at the start of Humanity. So lets scan those Hieroglyphs on Egyptian tombs cos anything not there can't be unchangingly true! But if it can change then how do we know it won't change again? Indeed the knowledge of whether something is Absolutely True is what causes contradictions. If we can start making Truth statements about statements its a short step to "I am false."

Now some religious fundamentalists think that religion does not change. But how can this be true? We may start as a child thinking that God is a man who sits on a cloud like many Greeks used to think of Zeus. Then perhaps we develop to think God sits in a special realm called Heaven that is separate from the real world. And then perhaps we develop to think that God is not a physical human at all, but more a presence or personality. There are as many theories about God as there are people. How can anyone say that there is a single doctrine? Some religions like Hinduism and Christianity incorporate this by having many faces to God. Others like Judaism and Islam try out a Single God but have to be incredibly careful then not to make that God a definite. See even Humans collectively have different ideas about how to handle the expression of God. 

And if there is no single doctrine then how can you argue with it. Perhaps you might want to argue with the whole thing like Dawkins and say "There is no God" but that falls foul of the same problem of creating a single doctrine and then challenging it. Its one thing to ask a person of Religious faith what God means to them, but what does it mean to Dawkins is just as interesting. What is he riling against? Why is it so dangerous to him? 

The truth is that things change. For some the Resurrection of Jesus is too hard to believe in. But they accept other parts of Christianity. But perhaps in the future they will come to believe in it.

Dawkins is rather saying that there must be One Fixed Truth that everyone believes in unison, which actually rather deviates from his own Theory of Evolution with its emphasis on variation and change!

The implication of Evolution theory is that things change, and this must ultimately mean that Evolution Theory must change.

To be Religious is to walk a path, and be present on a journey. Where we are at any moment is not to be seen as an achievement in itself but must be seen as part of the journey. And when Dawkins rails against this he is rather missing the whole point of truth and God.

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Now what of that basic question "Does God Exist?" What is written above is extremely unsatisfying for a person of knowledge who wants to know the answer so they can answer a pub quiz correctly (UK culture - that's a quiz performed by teams at tables while drinking). Well its actually doesn't matter, God is not like that. Try out both. Decide that God doesn't exist if you like and see where it takes you. Alternatively try and believe he does and see where that takes you. "God" is so vast that actually both attitudes and searches are within the dominion of God. Any anything that vast is clearly not easily handled.

The point here in its simplest form is that we as individuals are not done growing yet. We will change and improve with time like a wine. Now the issue of God is just where is that path heading? It's not something we can answer now, we just have some faith that we will develop in a positive way. Life will throw many things at us, and struggle as we might to ignore them and stay the same, life will change us, and always for the best in the long term. Some people may appear to become broken by what life has thrown then, they have lost all spiritual will to live, there is no joy and they have no direction. This is because what they were doing no matter how wonderful before, become no longer beneficial in the long term and they needed to grow. How can we understand the greater picture this if we just go from day to day?

Subtle point here. Some will say well its all just dice throws and you end up making sense of them with a narrative you add afterwards to try and make sense of what is senseless. Well this is 1/2 true. We do no live in a pre written story and our lives are not guided by a benevolent God like that. But at the same time we can just say it is random dice throws. The process of it happening, and of us making a story of it go hand in hand. Making the story and meaning is part of what happens, they are inseparable. I am always reminded of Kierkegaard asking the reader to separate the dancer from the dance. When the story teller collides with the random we get a life.

So yes its wrong to think God holds our hand the whole way and conducts from Heaven, but its wrong to say we are a just leaf being washed down a river.

So does God exist? Its the very fact we don't even know what that means which gives God his potency. For people of faith, they stop expecting an answer and just run with this the question to find out where it takes them.

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Few things to say on that. So the greatest fear for the Religious person is what if it all turns out to be a lie and I have wasted my life. Well the thing I see most profoundly is we all waste our lives. That is the beauty of life. It was given to us for nothing, and we spend our lives completely wasting it. Is that a sad thing to say? Well that depends on your Ego.

The gnawing resistance at the heart of this fear all comes from the Ego. Spend Aug last year to this year discussing Ego in depth. The thing at the centre of our lives that won't budge and seems like a Russian doll inside the whole of our life, or a personal Sun around which everything orbits, this is the thing that also doesn't like talk of Death or even talk of God.

Controversial interpretation of Christianity coming. But what did Jesus do on the Cross? He forgave everyone and died a sinners death without demanding justice or even trying to escape and save himself. How different from the average person who will try everything to stay alive - even if they are guilty. The two robbers would have fled had they been given the chance, but Jesus (we believe) had the power to escape and didn't. Now he was either mad, was suicidal or had nothing to protect. And his desire to forgive suggests this one. Sad and Mad people don't go to any lengths to make peace. So Jesus had no Ego at this time, and there was nothing to defend. Yet he was certainly very human the previous night where the fear of dying was a great for him as any mortal.

Now for those who struggle with the Resurrection, it could be seen as metaphorical that without an Ego there is nothing to lose, and so death "loses its sting" already no need for anything else. But this doesn't explains the reports by hundreds of people of actually seeing Jesus. We know He looked different, so different that Magdalen didn't recognise him. But for those who doubt we even have Thomas becoming convinced when he sees Jesus. So its a mystery whether believers are the expect fully body resurrection: something the Church seems to have abandoned as Cremations has been legal in the UK now for over a century. So ideas change and the path is a forever changing.

But returning to the importance of Ego. The idea of "Life being Meaningful" is 100% the need of the Ego. It needs proof that it exists, and proof that it existed. So we look at achievements and memories and hold them as proof we existed. And then we weigh them up and start wondering if ours was a good life. Most probably the things that makes us doubt will be regrets or desires we never fulfilled. Perhaps we never married that person we felt we were destined to, or we never got famous, or never achieved the goals we set our self. Well its all good stories. but it doesn't have any meaning at all. Without an Ego there is no one to be great or a failure. Things just what they are. A failure of a life is the same as life of enormous achievement. Obviously not everyone can be Einstein.. but then do we need to be? And why would we need to be? Perhaps that makes us think well why did I bother then. If a life sitting in front the TV is as good as climbing Mount Everest then why bother? Well each person knows the answer to that! If you are the sort of person who has it in them to Climb Everest then do it. If you are not then don't. Its actually very simple. But don't do it just to be famous or prove yourself. That is the bit that is ultimately built on bad foundations. But perhaps this is what you need to grow, so even the pointless stuff done from a belief in Ego has a part to play in the greater picture.

Also said that the Ego hates God. Well obviously: the Ego IS God. Last thing the Ego wants is to have to accept that it is subordinate to a greater being, that is so vast that the Ego can't even start to grasp it. So the Ego creates huge resistance to belief and acceptance of God, and also resists all change and growth cos the Ego already is so what is there to do?

The world has a great way of punishing the Ego to encourage us to grow. But we always take that the wrong way and decide its unfair and we want justice. We do make the path much larder than it needs to be! 

Work and Emergent Properties, Growth and Nature & Harry Potter.

The Modern World is very much based on some fundamental features of the world.

Isn't it interesting that the key idea that came about through the Farming Revolution was the idea of "growth on investments." You plough a field, plant and seed and sit back and watch the profit come in.

Nothing has changed in 4000 years. Except now those with assets plant them in the stock market, buy the political class to ensure they always promote economic growth (even at the expense of the working population and the planet), and then sit back and reap the harvest. Except where once it was plants growing the fields, since the dawn of Capitalism it is people working who generate the growth. And thereby started the exploitation of people which is the essence of the modern world.

Another fundamental thing is Emergent Properties. Mankind really is fascinated by this illusion and spend all their time making and buying things to enjoy the illusion. Much as modern humans love watching media be that books or films or youtube. They know it isn't real but they love the illusion.

But working is at least as old and is the illusion at the heart of materialism. We go to the cake shop, see previous post, and get all excited about what the baker has been working on. Somehow the baker takes that flour, eggs, butter and sugar and puts them in an oven to create this wonderful new things.

It's the same down the electronics shop. People take metals and silicon and conjure up these amazing electronics like phones and computers which are unlike anything the world has ever seen. And yet the raw materials like the cake are all that are really there. But the illusion is so captivating that humans are prepared to spend their whole waking lives working to make new illusory things and their free time consuming these illusions.

After all these millennia we are as hooked as ever. We even named one of our ancestors Homo habilis because the most notable thing about this hominid is that it made tools and could make things. The beginnings of the world of illusions had started, and we jump at the chance to recognise that.

Now there is nothing "wrong" with illusions. They happen. But we should never take them to be "real." they are the emerging properties of certain arrangements, of causes and conditions so Buddhism describes it, and what come from nothing will return to nothing because it is nothing.

But its interesting in our thinking that what comes from a certain seed remains that seed even when it is no longer a seed and is a tree. We think dismissively oh that grew from an acorn, it is an oak. And somehow those 3 letters are supposed to replace this extraordinary organism that may live for 1000 years. Likewise we actually miss the deep illusion of cake in many ways. We know there is no magic. We know there are recipe books, and we know bakers can do this trick. Its like seeing the Magician at a fair. We know there is no real magic, they just hide how they do it. Likewise at a restaurant of amazing foods we know there is no magic, we believe we could watch the chef and learn how to do the trick to create this wonderful food. But actually we are happy to pay our money and be a bit dazzled by the illusion so created. But never so dazzled as to see how completely extraordinary making something is. In fact even the chef does not really know how they do it. They have just studied certain combinations and with experience and practice they can do it again and again. But ask them how and its like riding a bike. I have no idea, it just happens. Perhaps a Chemist may study the chemical and explain why certain things create certain flavours. Like heating ginger to 120oC creates a lot of tasty zingerone a taste we really like. But however we rationalise it we cannot explain away the fact that a qualitative change occurs and the new quality comes from no where. Zingerone is qualitatively different from Gingerol and heat. A cake is qualitatively different from its ingredients and heat. If they were the same we would ignore the baker and just eat the raw ingredients. But you could never guess what a cake was like if you saw the raw materials. It must actually be made for us to know what cake is, no recipe is enough by itself. This fundamental magic of emergent property is a magic that mankind is still, perhaps more than ever, enthralled by. No need for Harry Potter the true magic of the world is as vivid and enthralling as ever before.

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Altho I add one thing. Bhutan launched its first TV station BBS in 1999. The first broadcast was an address by the King reminding the people of Bhutan that the images this machine made were just impermanent illusion and that they must be careful not to confuse them with reality and worse to become attached to them. I understand that within a year the crops were failing cos the farmers were too busy catching up with a Russian soap opera that had taken the country by storm.

This ability to capture reality in shadowy images says a huge amount about how the brain works and how reality is constructed. But the fact that we get trapped by the illusions also says a lot about how little we understand about the nature of reality.