There is so much nonsense in this world its a miracle that humans ever survive. In fact the inability of humans to make any sense is proof that the world works all by itself. Westerners say of India that what seems like chaos somehow producing a functioning country is proof of God. But we only need to observe that without humans the world somehow produced humans. So following the previous anti-recursion argument whatever produced humans must be of greater expressiveness than humans.
Just to revise that: humans cannot be explained in terms of humans. So there must be stuff out there which is not human which goes together to make humans. Not getting into the nature of emergence and sunyata but any Turing machine can be replaced by a non recursive function. You just make a set of rules so vast that it can click along a step at a time and make the correct replacement. I've not studied this its more of a hypothesis to be tested at this stage. Recursion is not needed. You can create any fractal a step at a time, indeed my first fractal tree did this in a left-turn algorithm drawing all the way down each path and just using binary for the L/R decisions. Only after that did I do it recursively with a branch function which had position and scale! You can find all the fixed points of the Mandelbrot set by traditional root methods, but admittedly the functions are built by recursive replacement, but there must be a way to directly find the equation to root for the nth degree of the Mandelbrot: Z = Z² + C without recursion. So recursion is a red herring. It can always be replaced by a canonical function. It is just appealing from a computing perspective because a small amount of code can create much more impressive results. In fact recursion is the slowest way to code it is just theoretically pretty. Never use it in time critical code! Its like modern AI, in fact the astronomical amount of data that goes into GPT etc makes the results not that impressive. They are just impressive at managing such vast amounts of data, that is the true power of neural nets. SO if we put the "magic" of recursion aside we simply have stuff coming together and humans being the result. That is the miracle and it is beyond humans how this happens. ** Okay one caveat. Systems with input coming from output do have fixed points and do evolve towards or away from those constraints (in fact experiment to find a system which ignores a fixed point: i.e. not attracted, repelled or chaotic in the region of the FP ???). So over history humans have changed the path of their own evolution, and so you can say that current humans are built upon "humans." But again this is catastrophic cos it means that whatever we are today is part attributed to what we were yesterday, and whatever we think of ourselves today depends upon yesterday. We can never escape the legacy of the Past--there being a modern tendency to think we are "improved" in some way, but actually we are more constrained.
Anyway massive digression. US Gun Crime debates are all nonsense.
Graph shows US States ordered by strictness of gun laws against murder rate. There is no correlation. That means no matter what laws you apply to gun control it does not change the murder rate. Where people are confused is that in states where guns are easier to come by murderers use guns more which makes it look like the guns lead to more murders. But they don't. Americans kill other Americans regardless the methods (well actually the whole world, they drop 46 bombs a day on foreigners).
This is true for lots of things like violent crime, rape, mental illness. They all correlate with inequality best.
So why might this be?
Well this blog has speculated the answer all along. Wealth is relative.
You only know how much you have or do not have by looking at other people. 40 years ago people did not feel poor because they did not have mobile phone cos such things did not exist yet! If other people they have little then you need little. If they have a lot you feel you need a lot. This is why Frankl observed status in Auschwitz. Even in the depths of abject poverty people still had a hierarchy of fortunate and unfortunate. And this misunderstanding (typically American that more is more is why the planet is facing destruction - how serious is that America!).
So in countries like America where there is an economic "free for all"--especially given Capitalism where the wealthy can develop further income from "investing" to make them even richer, and the poor have the opposite effect of borrowing and so giving hard earned money to the already rich lenders-- in a liberal capitalist market you have increasing inequality. And in a world of inequality many people come to feel poor because they see such extreme wealth in the hands of a few rich. This injustice leads to stress, mental illness and criminality.
Now Capitalists are right in a way. In a country with equal rights where everyone has equal opportunity to work and become wealthy then this softens the blow of poverty. But it doesn't make poverty go away. The only way to make poverty go away is to have equality of wealth. When everyone has the same amount then no one feels rich and no one feels poor. This is the only solution to poverty. But in Capitalism poverty is the driving force that makes the poor work, this is why it is so productive. People who are not actually poor, never-the-less feeling poor and feeling they have to work and get more. It is a perfect treadmill. But it is an illusion. Under Capitalism the rich will only get richer through investment, not through work. So the poor are already disadvantaged. While poor are busy working, the rich investors in their companies are getting dividends and wealth simply through parking some of their money in the company. That is all they need to do to get an income! And their is no loyalty as soon as another company starts making profits they will withdraw that money and potentially crash your company through no fault of yours. The poor workers spend their lives struggling to attract the wealth of the super rich, and they pay them for this service. Its a profoundly unfair system in its very heart. And this unfairness underpins the creation of "poverty" in Capitalist economics. There is no such thing as poverty in any other system. You don't get native Indians living in poverty, or Australian aboriginals. They just take what is on offer and are thankful for it. There is no struggle, there is no unfairness or inequality beyond what Nature and God dishes out.
This is why Capitalist countries have the greatest inequality and the greatest mental health problems, murder problems, rape problems: it is because they are unfair.
Now the thing everyone wants to know is which economic systems create the greatest happiness.
Unfortunately happiness measures actually measure income. So the richer you are the higher your happiness. This means that you cannot use happiness statistics to look at whether wealth makes you happy. Which is unfortunate cos it means we cannot test at the moment whether Capitalism really makes you happy!
But if murder, rape, mental illness and crime are all made worse through Capitalism it rather suggests that happiness is also reduced by Capitalism.
And that is a rather shocking result because the US has been bombing the world and holding the world in a constant state of warfare in order to promote Capitalism. But if Capitalism actually makes you unhappy then the US has been killing millions of people around the world to spread unhappiness!
This actually seems rather obvious. You don't make people happy by killing them. Iraq, Afghanistan, Europe, Japan, Philippines, Israel are all profoundly unhappy because of US involvement. And places like Iran, North Korea, Russia are equally unhappy through endless unfounded hostility and sanctions. In everyway the US is an aggressive ignorant behemoth much like its own people, and does nothing better than kill.
That just sound ridiculous cos the movies and the media always sell US a exceptional and advanced country with only good intentions. That is except the anomalies like the vast number of bombs they drop, the high murder, suicide, rape and crime stats. In fact everything the media says about the US doesn't make sense in the data. In the data it is a failed state lagging behind the whole world in basic civilised benchmarks like literacy. You might think how a country looks after its ill might be a measure of its civilisation yet US scores bottom in healthcare outcomes in the developed world. Despite spending 2x that of any other country its health care is a total failure. The country is a disaster, and yet the media never says any of this. The only conclusion to face here is that the US has bought and control the Western media and journalists are silenced from criticising the US. That makes its atrocities even worse. The US must then be the leader in global propaganda and brainwashing! That makes everything far worse!
Anyway reliable data on happiness would be the ultimate decider in this, but unfortunately all happiness data is currently skewed towards economic performance.
What we can say for sure though is regardless where the human race has got to in the 21st Century the human race before us has prospered sufficiently well to have got us here, so we certainly can't criticise that.
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One hot debate is whether gov should spend more money. One thing that tends to come out is no.
This is murder rate against per capital government spending. R2 only 5%. However per capital government spending is essentially GDP so this is just a graph that GDP does not really affect murder rate. Altho the trend is down so it does help.
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