UK Debt – what a load of nonsense… and Iraq… and everything!

Been on Facebook with this one continuously, can’t remember if its blogged. Just crudely throwing this together, but complete analysis shows the same picture…

Grabbing UK debt off Google… (1995 to 2013)… Debt has been stable or falling over a long period up to 2007. Then doubles from 2007 to 2010. Where did this debt come from? But firstly is it falling GDP?

UK GDP off Google… (1965 to 2013)… GDP falls 11%. So no that is real debt in the public purse.

 

Famously there was an economic crisis in 2007. Debt famously was created in banks by them buying US mortgages that would never get paid off. Much of the debt was secretly parcelled in the infamous CDO (collateralised debt obligations). This is the official story.

So we have been told that the debt was created in the US housing bubble, that banks bought that debt, and that the UK government then bought the debt off the banks to rescue them from collapse.

So we know the debt came from the banks.

But the political parties in the UK, including Labour, seem to think it was normal government over-spending (welfare, health, education, defence etc), despite the fact they’ve told us that it was bailouts to the city, and that all the excess debt occurred since 2007.

Clearly the political parties, the media and indeed almost everyone is confused. Yet despite being confused they all agree. How is this possible?

It can only be that they’ve all been told to disagree with what they were saying. Obviously the banking sector is massive and powerful; actually the most powerful. The UK Conservative Party gets almost all its funding from the City. The “conspicuous absence” of The City in contemporary explanations of the UK debt. And the total lack of presence of the ostensible culprits means that this is a full scale “cover-up”.

We’ve seen it recently in the Iraq War (2003 to 2011). Originally Iraq was linked to 9/11. There was no evidence, and the US failed to mobilise its more sensible allies to involvement. Then they used the risk of Saddam’s weapons and their potential threat. SCUD D missiles have a maximum range of 600miles giving them access to targets in Turkey, Iran and Saudi Arabia (and of course Israel). Hardly a “clear and present danger” to either US or Europe. Satellite photos of trucks and buildings was presented to the UN as evidence of chemical weapons (no-one was fooled). The BBC criticised the government, was made to look like they did something wrong (in a “free” nation?), and has never been very compliant ever since, and two other critics also died (coincidence). However unfortunately (and inexplicably) some US allies did accept the idea that Iraq was a threat and the UN passed a resolution, and a war happened.

Obviously Hussein had long ago removed his weapons (which he was sold by France and Britain anyway), since he didn’t want to antagonise the US more than necessary; and predictably no WMDs were found. This was not the reason for the war anyway, just an excuse. Once WMDs were not found, and “no threat” was proven, the US didn’t apologise and withdraw, instead they executed Hussein (logical). The new “reason” became a humanitarian crusade to free the people of Iraq. Just as Alexander the Great did in the 4th Century BC. One wonders why they didn’t present this excuse to the UN in the first place. Despite this transparent sequence of events, the “conspicuous absence” of a sensible description by politicians and the media and the persistence of the idea that the war was “justified” is much the same as the denial of the source of the UK Debt. Rather unfashionably these are called “cover-ups”, but if they aren’t then the word should be removed from the dictionary because there is no better example of “cover-ups”. The Westminster Paedophile scandal which is exploding in slow motion in the UK gives some idea of the duration and water tight nature of the establishments ability to protect itself, cover-up and generate false news.

Personally I wouldn’t mind so much, but exactly the same establishment rejoices in the ability of other world leaders (conspicuously of enemy states/groups) to generate propaganda, while never acknowledging that it is perhaps the World’s best… but then which compulsive liar would ever admit they were a liar. (Politicians never tell the truth. I am a Politician.)

Serious Economics

Given that The City has got us into this fine mess, what options do we have? The standard Keynesian solution has been to buy our way out of recession, but we have been doing that since the dotcom bubble crash of 2000. But our modern economies only survive by continued, unending financial stimulus anyway. Its not a fix for times of crisis, it a fix for normal running these days! We can be sure that even if all “normal” government spending ends we will still be paying high taxes just to prop up the economy (stimulate inflation, keep people spending, create jobs, and direct bailouts like UK selling Gold in 2000 etc).

But if we don’t prop up the economy then the whole house of cards will come down. UK still has a housing bubble, much private debt is offset against the value of houses. If there is deflation, or market sentiment turns seriously bearish the crash will be catastrophic. There is the fear of UK borrowing costs increasing also, finally hoisting the UK on the petard it has terrorised the rest of the world with for several centuries. The ostensible panic solution has been to sell off more of the state; not much to privatise any more (though the NHS is being cut up bit by bit, like the rainforests), the only thing left is to divert tax money directly into the National debt.

The Party Faithful will say that this “panic” solution hasn’t come easily and the Conservatives are at pains to do it. But sceptics will see the long term Tory plan of sell offs and handing of power to their backers in the City.

Taking stock of the situation however, it’s all a bit odd. From Reagan and Thatcher to the relaxing of the Glass-Steagall and the UKs market liberalisation until today the path has been one of giving more freedom and money to the City and the markets. And where has it got us? People point to the great progress in technology (the telecommunications revolution, the miniaturisation of electronics and iPads) and the global markets with a greater variety of foods and cheaper clothing. But all this was happening anyway. In terms of fundamentals life since Thatcher has been harder. Real wages are lower. After the boom of council house sales, we now have a private housing system and an inevitable boom meaning that most people will never own a home; paying debt for the rest of their lives. Job security is lower, with competition from overseas markets, shorter more flexible contracts, and that same telecommunications revolution creating machines that have taken jobs. To the winners the dynamic nature of modern economics is a dream, but to the losers it is the worst nightmare. And this is reflected in the inexorable growth of inequality. While the rich, feasting on all those bailouts and financial support from the tax payer, celebrate; the tax payers (employees, and start up businessmen) who must shoulder all the burden of economic uncertainty and risk; they live lives of increasing difficulty.

And all this in an post-industrial technologically advanced economy existing 4500 years after the Neolithic economy had the surplus wealth to erect StoneHenge. Wealth and production haven’t been issues for mankind for 4000 years, and most certainly not the problem today. The problem, and the source of Mankind’s toil today is economics and its misuse (either through ignorance or design) by those who have the responsibility and the wealth to ensure it, not us, works!

So UK Debt? It’s a load of obvious nonsense.

Nature of Flagger/Coward Distribution

A linear function was chosen to describe the number of flaggers in a group, such that the total number of flaggers across all the groups was equal to the total number of cowards.

f(x) = a + x (n-2a)/g , where n is the total number of rabbits in each group, g is the number of groups and a is the number of flaggers in the 1st group. This integrates to ng/2 i.e. half the rabbits. The gradient of the function is given by grad=(n-2a)/g.
Using this as f(x) the expression Gc – Gf (from before) was calculated. This gives the average predator pressure experienced by flaggers relative to cowards for populations of heterogenous groups with varying numbers of flaggers and cowards as described by ‘a’.
Gf – Gc =


Substituting the expression a = (n-g*grad)/2 into the expression enables a clearer expression of heterogeneity.

Results
p=0.5, n=10, g=10

Once the gradient is steeper then 60% then flaggers experience rapidly decreasing predator pressure. This is a distribution with group one having 8 flaggers and 2 cowards, and group 10 having 2 flaggers and 8 cowards a range of {2,8}
For 50 groups (g=50) the graph has the same shape but the gradient only needs to be 12% before flaggers benefit more than cowards. The general rule is that the cut-off is proportional to 6/g.
p=0.5, n=20, g=10


For groups of large size there is little extra benefit to cowards until the groups have a larger range than {5,15}. After which there is considerable advantage to flaggers.
p=0.1, n=10, g=10

If the probability of not seeing the predator is very low (10%) there is range of distributions which benefit cowards very much. Suddenly when the range reaches {0.5,9.5} is benefits flaggers. 0.5 isn’t possible so there are no distributions which favour flaggers in small groups.
p=0.9, n=10, g=10

A simple curve where ranges {2.5,7.5} and steeper benefit flaggers. Flagging strategy is an anti-predator strategy and obviously only benefits where predators are skillful and not easily seen by individuals.
ConclusionFlagging as a strategy depends upon strong heterogeneity in flagger/coward ratios. Low dispersal of offspring i.e. children remaining in the warren will create such a heterogeneity. Sexual selection for flaggers is vulnerable to the evolution of a “slag” gene but may provide a mechanism for heterogeneity also.
Another avenue of investigation is in free markets. The local marginal strategy is always to defect and become a coward. However under certain situations strategies that benefit the group will lead to selection for groups of individuals who do not do this, i.e.e those who abandon local marginal thinking.

Our Hedgehog

I’ve started to explain how we got into this ridiculous state of affairs where everyone duplicates the same structures again and again through this country; everyone has their own: car, house, phone, computer etc. Its a lot of extra work and its a lot of waste as most of this goes unused most of the time. However it has evolved and we are for the time being stuck with it.

Its not just us however that suffer because of this problem. Foraging animals that require habitats in different shapes and sizes to us get excluded by the repetitive parcelling up of resources. Had this argument with my mother who is hell bent on isolating her house and garden from the outside world. Watching Springwatch this year and being alerted to this project http://www.hedgehogstreet.org/ it seems I wasn’t wrong. Our hedgehog was found face down in the frost a couple of years ago starved on its meagre rations from our 1/3 acre garden and presumably trying to top up unsuccessfully with food in the winter it died. Now if we had a vegetable patch we’d be over run with slugs (their favourite food of which they eat about 200 a night) and my mother misses our little friend. A parable being written large in Man’s habitation of Earth!

Freedom, Ayn Rand, Individualism, Selfish Interests, Addiction

Technorati Tags: Freedom,Ayn Rand,Individualism,Selfish Interests,Addiction

Dissenters of the traditional view that we ought to sacrifice ourselves for other people might consider this post simply a dogmatic reiteration of the “traditional” view. But if we fear whether our thoughts are fashionable or old-fashioned we most certainly reduce our freedom. I’d rather ignore current fads and simply say things as they are.

Individualists like Ayn Rand, Sartre, Nietzsche speak a lot about “freedom”. So what is so free about “freedom”. A prince in a Hollywood film says “True I can have anything I want, but like all men I can’t chose what I want”. Thus we often end up wanting things that really it is best for us if we didn’t want. This is the whole naivety of the Individualist view. It is also said traditionally that it takes a great man to command an army but only the greatest man can command himself. This is the essence of the Religions: the learning to be master of our self. Shakespere’s Othello is a model of how lack of self mastery makes us to weakest of men. We need only see an addict swearing they are in control and demanding “freedom” to do what they want to see the weakness of this type of thinking. A asked a Buddhist once what was wrong with the ego he said that the ego works in its own interests even at the expense of the whole self. This has turned out to be a very deep understanding of the problem; far deeper than the allegory of the Devil used by religions. The drug addict, or anyone with a compulsive habit, finds that what they want to do, indeed need to do, is actually bad for them.

“Simply look at how many people have died in the name of Freedom—it is far more than all other causes added together.”

However because the wish to do it is so strong they are prepared to ignore the side effects. I once saw a film of a smoking addict in a wheel chair who had lost both legs due to blood clots. The interviewer said that clearly the smoking was killing him, he said he didn’t care and was prepared to die bit by bit. That is a strong desire. Everything was sacrificed for the need to smoke. We would argue that at least a more balanced life with a mixture of other activities would be more worthwhile. But the addict won’t see this and their addiction and need to do what they want will be more valuable to them than even their own life. This is the nihilism and meaninglessness at the root of self-interest, exactly what the SRH says. In any case it is clear to see here the extreme individualist sacrificing everything here for a desire, when originally he wanted to be free from sacrifice altogether.

So “freedom” where does it go wrong?

In a world where we really do determine our own future and every road is open what do we do? Are we like the Dice Man and freely pick 6 random possibilities like: {Eat, Sleep, TV, Sex, Defecate, Kill ourselves}. With complete unconditional indifference to the future and complete “freedom” from the Past we roll the dice and do whatever is says. Except we are deciding to then having our future dictated by a dice. What if we decide to obey a new die: {obey the dice, don’t obey the die}. Decide to roll that a few times and we’re back to square one!

Alternatively Individualists put emphasis on our “will” (Nietzsche/ Sartre) or “desires” (Rand). The idea is that we are what we do/will/desire. For Sartre it is our choices that make/build/design the future. For Nietzsche it is our inexorable innate will to supremacy that drives our very action. For Ayn Rand it seems (and I have only caught whiff of her philosophy) it is our desires/wishes which determine our future. Hers is by far the most juvenile and trivial philosophy: we are slaves to our own desire then exactly as in the above paragraph. She preaches the worst kind of imprisonment and her followers walk in the opposite direction to freedom. As religions endlessly try to persuade people, the Devil is most cunning and will promise you everything so that you submit your soul to him—he is the most expert door to door salesman. As far as I can see it Ayn Rand basically says give into his demands and do whatever you want even if it is bad for you.

Sartre and Nietzsche are however better versions of Individualism but they still seem to suffer from a lack of freedom. To say that we are free to exercise our will to power is to say that we are a slave to power. My personal life at the moment is exactly the will to gain power over the will to power so that I no longer need to be viewed as successful or worth something. Isn’t this the contradictory zenith of Nietzsche’s philosophy—freedom even from this universal principle? With Sartre my problem is that any choice we make to be successful must take into account our environment. If I wish to buy some food I have no choice but to go to a food shop. If you analyse why I wish to have food it is because my stupid body needs energy. I have no choice over this. I may chose to sit down and die from starvation, but really this is my stupid mind rebelling against having to do things which becomes just another thing I feel compelled to do. Whichever way I turn I find myself embedded “in a world”—immersed as a friend once called it. When we are underwater we cannot move without displacing water around us. So it is with the world we cannot move without the world moving with us—there is no escape, indeed even thoughts of escape are movements in the water!

No freedom is a complete misnomer. Even the search for freedom binds us to an activity that becomes a bore and an oppressive tyrant. Simply look at how many people have died in the name of Freedom—it is far more than all other causes added together and squared. Freedom begins when we accept where we are rather than confronting it and trying to change it. If we are trying to change it then we are just slave to another force from within. What proponents of freedom are really responding to is the notion of a sovereign self: it makes a difference whether the tyrant is from within or from without. That is the next discussion. Historically Freedom is an obvious major issue in the West because we are in opposition to our history of Slavery. Like a guilty man we are particularly sensitive to slavery and rather over do the freedom angle. What we ought to see immediately though is that without the possibility of slavery how can there be freedom? When we speak of freedom we are really admitting that slavery still exists.

Most of this is blogged already in this blogroll. The puzzle from ancient Greece of whether the Argo returning from its 10 year quest was really the same boat that left since every plank of wood had been replaced at least once on the journey. So it is with us. Which thought, which desire, which body part, which possession is really us? Are they all us? If so do we lose a bit of ourselves when we lose one? If we do then where is that bit of myself in my car, or in my hair on the barbershop floor? Rubbish it is just a car, it is just hair. There is nothing about me in them either on the shop floor on in my possession. It is the same as a piece being in check in a game of chess. It isn’t really in check unless you understand the rules of the game: we simply make it up. That is all the self is: something we make up. The search for freedom is just something we make up; and we can just as easily unmake it! If we were truly free we would be able to unmake it… but we can’t! Especially when we believe in a philosophy that is based upon that very belief in self. Free yourself; stop believing.

Like all things, Individualists are right about something however. It is correct that we take responsibility for what we do and we do find our self so that we can become master it. It is not good enough to just follow the crowd like sheep, any more than it is to simply switching off saying it doesn’t matter it’s all just make believe. This just sends us from one make-believe world into another where everything is make-believe—we start believing that everything is make-believe! It is not that easy. What does “make believe” mean anyway? Ayn Rand started off in the right direction, she saw the irony is forming a “group of believers in Individualism” but the Devil is strong and she fell foul very quickly of her own philosophy believing that this meant that she should follow her desires. She ironically became to a slave to herself as she ran from what she perceived was others becoming slaves of the mass. True Freedom ain’t so simple which is why mankind has been pursuing it for 10 thousand years and why so very few have ever achieved it.

Do I own the thought "There is no ownership"?

Do I own the thought "There is no ownership"? If not then do I own the thought "There is ownership". If not then do I own any of my thoughts? If not, then what part of me can I own? If there is no part of me I can't own then what can I own? No still don't agree with John Locke.

Shockingly bad program last night http://www.channel4.com/programmes/civilization-is-the-west-history ... well a question posed for almost an hour and then a single 1 line answer that the N.American system was better than the South... which is a circular argument since we say it is better because it has risen to power but then that is what we wanted to explain so no explanation ... but excellent question why did N.America rise to power rather than S.America... does anyone have an actual answer?

[cut from Facebook]

Notes on Economics

"He who pays the price calls the tune" goes the old saying. Yet for the person to pay the price to call the tune, they themselves must have sung a tune for someone else who then paid them. So everyone in a good economy thus sings other peoples tunes! This is the essence also of a good society.

Economic theory thus points to the truth that we can't sing our own tune. This is a plus for economics.

However this simple truth is under threat in Western economies because of ownership. An owner not calls the tune but they also get paid the money too (by return on their investment). So in property owning economies the saying ought to be "He who owns the piano calls the tune and gets the wage."

Now an owner like this goes out of business because they aren't playing the tune the customer wants, at least in theory. In reality the owner finds the marginal cost of playing each tune and selects those tunes that give maximum audience response for minimum skill and time of the pianist. The capitalist might also do marketing, or introduce complex pricing to confuse customers like (2 tunes for the price of 1, knowing that they are more likely to buy a drink after the first tune). Blanket advertising on media channels might be expensive but if it raises sales of particular tunes is profitable. So the audience ends up with a limited selection and reduced expectations that all benefits the owner.

Now I realise writing this that really what difference is there between a customer asking the pianist to play a tune and the owner of the piano asking him to play a tune! I guess the only difference is that the customer/pianist relationship is between someone who wants some music and someone who is skilled in producing it. One might say it is an authentic relationship. The customer dealing with the manager/capitalist/owner who then deals with the pianist is experiencing a relationship with someone who is not actually interested in the product but in the mechanics of producing it. There is no reason that this should be an inauthentic relationship (owners and pianists can both be bad people), but it is not the same type of relationship as that of the first example.

Conclusion:

1) In a free market the good principle that each person plays another persons tune is true. However when people become too powerful then they start to decide what tune other people hear and then economics breaks down.

2) The relationship between a customer and the service provider is not the same as the customer-capitalist-provider relationship and should be recognised in systems of property. It seems on this analysis that this is my central issue with Capitalism that it places authority in the hands of the owner and so doesn't respect the skills of the provider which are at root what drive a societies ability to meet its needs. As Veblen argued capitalism actually works to stifle the creativity of the working classes in order to maintain wealth in the ruling classes.

===

It seems to me that Capitalism is primarily a ponzi scheme. Prices are inflated and then we borrow increasing amounts from the future to maintain the rising prices. Everyone feels wealthy and so we are encouraged to borrow more which inflates prices more. The house of cards builds higher and higher with everyone expecting to find an even more extravagant fool in the market to buy off them. Eventually the system becomes so unstable that a tiny blip and it all collapses leaving the biggest fools high and dry with relatively worthless assets. The market over corrects and it all starts again. What wealth is really created in such a system apart from simply redistribution of what exists from the stupid to the smart? How in other words can anyone support such a system?

Where is the sensation?

It occurred to me while leaning on my hand in the library and looking at my reflection in the window that I could see my hand on my head. Before that I was concentrating on the feeling of my head at my finger tips, feeling the hair and the scalp and massaging it. It then occurred to me that my mind as it was, positioned at the tips of my fingers, was very much involved with the outside of my skull. Looking at my reflection I then switched to the usual visual experience of the image on the retina that I have long considered before, and my traditional question of whether the visual space is inside or outside the brain. What was different this time as I kept my mind at my finger tips was that clearly my mind was outside my brain because I was experiencing the feeling of the hair on my scalp and that on top of my skull, and that housing my brain.

This is the question: where is the sensation?

It is not so simple as the plain visual question where all space can be reduced to looking out from some central view point. With the mind at the finger tips we are already out-there. Where when we feel something is the in-here. There are no cues of perspective to infer an in-here at all, a homunculus at the centre looking out. The fingers are far away from "me" sitting on my head in the out-there feeling "my" head... how can I feel "my" head I need to be outside "my" head to feel it, but if I am out-side it then whose is it? Very Shurangama but first time I had it so clear.

On Endless Desire

(From notes)

Either I'm not very good at it or I'm a coward, or secretly sceptical, or unlucky but whichever way I realise today more deeply that getting something is only ever a means to another end. There is no thing you can gain which will end the craving. My belief that I have been stuck with for a long time was that falling in love would give me the thing I am missing in life. This become "my muse". I realise then however that it wasn't so simple because that entailed fighting for status to be desirable and to be eligible. Now I realise that even had a fallen in love did I really think that would be the end of it and I would lie my head in my lovers lap adrift in halcyon summer meadows for the rest of eternity? Somehow my heart still believes this is how it is. Watching others (as if I needed to to see this almost a priori truth) lovers become families. Even homosexuals who one would have thought had sort not to be fertile and sort not to involve themselves with children are now gaining the rights to family. It seems a certain progression for all couples. And then there are other issues like a better home, and a better job, and then schooling for the kids , and then the desire that our children do well at school and all the desires heaped on them and then just as we think it must end, we then end up having desires for grand children and expectations for their lives and then finally we die ... to be reborn and the cycle continue.

Desire is never satisfied, yet it is Desire's power that makes us think that the next desire will end all others. This is the most ancient realisation but I am only awaking to it slowly now.

>A quote from a 1060s Hollywood film I forget went "A king can get whatever he desires, but can he chose what he desires?"

>A friend was saying what if some magic was powerful enough to influence the lottery balls. But then we realised that if such a power existed everyone would be using it so the result would be no change. What we need is not the power to make the lottery balls come up how we want them, but the power to make us want what the lottery balls will come up like! Of course even with this power the lottery would then just get split evenly and no-one would make any money either.

Ayn Rand

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayn_Rand

A friend of considerable academic merit has decided that this woman speaks the truth. After only 5 minutes of hearing her I note that in my opinion what she speaks is about as far as one can get from the truth. I wouldn't bother to blog other than she seems to have a considerable following in America so add a drop to the ocean of rejection of her ideas. I needn't say much as this entire blog is examining the opposite poistion to that which she holds.

A single line from Jesus addresses what she believes. In response to those who say an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth Jesus reminds us that there is little merit in liking those who like us and hating those who hate us (essentially Rand's position) - any automaton and primative creature will do this. What is remarkable is those who can love both those who like them and those who hate them. I understand most people are animals and primative people, and such talk sounds like nonsense, but then so does Higher maths to grade 1 students. Just because you can't understand something doesn't make it wrong. Rand speaks to the grade 1 so I imagine this explains her following.

Golden Rule

It's got a name...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Rule

Not read the page yet just blogging its existence. I wonder if it explains the reason why the Golden Rule is true... namely the contradiction of Self (SRH), the dialectic of Self/Other, and the nature of the Grand Illusion of Reality. Doesn't start well tho talking about "individual rights" which is a contradiction already.

Human v Machine: Watson

On the subject of machines taking over the last remaining jobs...

http://smartdatacollective.com/stephenbaker1/32872/watson-less-efficient-human

When it comes to computing efficiency, humans beings blow Watson away. As Jonah Lehrer points out, the human brain requires with less power than a dim light bulb. Watson, as it labors to replicate only one function of the brain--question-answering--heats up a room full of computers, and needs a bank of roaring air-conditioners to keep them from melting. There's no contest.

But the efficiency of the human brain won't prevent machines like Watson from encroaching on certain jobs, starting with call centers. First, these computers will grow dramatically more efficient. That's the nature of information technology. Not too long ago, generating the computing power in an iPhone also used to require a roomfull of hot machinery. The other point is this: While human brains are efficient, we consume a lot more energy than that single lightbulb. We drive cars, we heat and cool our houses, we eat food from all over the world. From a company's perspective, operating a human, at least in this country, costs tens of thousands of dollars a year. When it comes to efficiency, they'll be comparing the cost of the entire human being to Watson. We're far more than our magnificent brains, and we cost more, too.

Colour Cube

Saw this on a BBC documentary last night but with a single explanatory line that gave much greater insight than I have heard before.
The question is to determine whether the blue squares in the left picture are the same colour of different from the yellow squares in the right picture.

Now it would seem an easy question to answer, after all the question has given away that they are different by referring to them as blue and yellow squares. But not everything is at it seems.

The thing to notice for the discerning aesthete is the setting, or the context, of the two pictures. The left picture is apparently under yellow light, while the right is under blue light.

As a result of this seeming triviality our brain is forced to make some rather deeper than usual decisions. Yellow light (a mixture of red and green) lacks any blue light and so nothing will look blue under yellow light: it will simply be a shade of grey. As a result there is ambiguity and the brain cannot tell whether in thi context there is a blue or a grey square. It could be either. Faced with this problem and presumably because of the other bright colours, and also because it is comparing with blue squares in the right picture, it it reasonable to decide it is a blue square.

The blue illusion is not so good because we know that there is red and green light present because we can see the red and the green squares, it is quite possible that yellow is present. However in blue light (lacking in red and green) it will be a much duller tone more similar to grey. It is easier to bust the illusion in this picture which is why we look at it second.

Now here is the point. With the context removed this is the actual colour of those squares. The Blue on the left are actually the same as the yellow on the right. With two piece of paper held close together to create a slit over the picture above this can be verified.

What was so good about the casual comment in this BBC documentary was the recognition that it was the context that fooled the brain into making the logical deduction.

In a sense the squares on the left (if they were real squares under yellow light) would indeed "be" blue. The grey squares on the right most likely would be yellow and not grey.

This goes to show however that what we "see" is not early in our visual processing but actually after a good deal of assumptions have been made by the brain.

Here I agree with the science. Where I rapidly fall out with the science is this. It has taken a good deal of study beyond the visual system for mankind to deduce this feature of his own visual processing system. That is to say that where the visual system does some study to work out what it is "really" seeing, mankind has now done a lot more processing to show up the visual system as not always consistent. Thus we can fill gaps (with considerable time and difficulty) where the primitive system fails. We now claim to know "reality" better than the visual system, and this I have a problem with.

It is correct that we have shown that what we are conscious of is not reality. An easier way is to wonder what a dream was "of". We were certainly conscious of something: we can tell people what happened and we can sometimes even describe colours, smells, touch, sound and tastes. I once dreamt of eating a banana and the unripe texture and taste was so bad I was put off eating them for years! But what was the "reality". We seem fine about dismissing this as make believe. Now in this illusion we are seeing/dreaming colours that are not there - that are created so it seems not by "reality" but by our personal "brain". Yet to prove the illusion we turn to another picture where we see "grey". Now are we dreaming that also? Why scientifically are we allowed to consider the "grey" in this experiment as reality and the dreamed colours before as illusions.

It is only because of logical inconsistency. Our thinking mind is referring to memory and within the framework of language, culture and history. As if to prove that point see this entry in the online etymological dictionary for blue [http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=blue]:

c.1300, bleu, blwe, etc., from O.Fr. blo "pale, pallid, wan, light-colored; blond; discolored; blue, blue-gray," from Frankish *blao, from P.Gmc. *blæwaz (cf. O.E. blaw, O.S., O.H.G. blao, Dan. blaa, Swed. blå, O.Fris. blau, M.Du. bla, Du. blauw, Ger. blau "blue"), from PIE*bhle-was "light-colored, blue, blond, yellow."

Blue comes from the root word for pallid, light coloured, blond and even yellow. Our thinking mind claims this knowledge that the visual system is inconsistent as proof that colours are not reality, and that it is closer to reality. A scientist will pull out a spectrum analyser and measure the bend of electromagnetic radiation to find our exactly what wavelength it is. That is reality he will claim, "I can tell you more about this light that even your own eyes". And this is fine he can. But can he claim that he could do without his useless error strewn eyes then and just use his spectrum analyser? After all, the eyes, it has been proven, don't show us reality at all only colours that we have made up with our brains. This is the problem because in fact he can lose all his senses because they are all prone to errors but what else has he got? Maybe he can invent some new senses that are more accurate; Terminator or Robocop senses; but they will still be imperfect. And exactly what are we to make of the "consciousness" of these new dreams through new senses: are they just made up also? It is a mess.

The point is that consciousness is about sensing. But sensing is not some useless telescope that lies between our pure thinking minds and some pure reality. And our pure thinking minds can somehow exist free of this telescope and can even examine it quite objectively to discover that really the "blue" and the "yellow" in the telescope don't "really" exist... but somehow the "grey" does "really" exist... and then discard the telescope. It was with the telescope that they ever "saw" anything in the first place. All the thinking that surrounds colours, spaces, dimensions and the language of all this exists inside the telescope... you can't escape it. And what we are looking at is not outside the telescope either... if it was then how would we ever know what it "was" apart from just light. A man limited to looking at the stars with only a telescope will never be able to tell if they are just holes through the cosmos letting light in or whether they are actual material things. What was the illusion for our eyes above, of deciding between grey or blue, becomes the equally intractable illusion of deciding whether the stars are just pin holes or material things. Thus matter and reality itself becomes an illusion of our mind just as colour was an illusion of our eyes. There is no outside the telescope.

So when we discover that indeed we are tricked, we do indeed discover something about our visual systems... namely that they can be tricked and we can learn the ambiguous circumstances. Just as an illusionist will make us "think" that the ball is in one hand when really it is in the other. The mind is as trickable as the eye. But while scientists don't like to dismiss the "ideas" as dreams when they are caught out, they are happy to dismiss the colours as dreams when they are caught out. And worse the scientists will say that colours are created by the brain, and not realise that the "brain" (which is just an idea) must therefore be created by the brain also which is an absurdity (a la SRH).

The conclusion is that either everything is an illusion and a dream (which I used to believe) or nothing is. They amount to the same thing! because if everything is an illusion then what does the dreamer who dreams the colour experiment above think is happening when he makes up the colours blue and yellow?

Humpty-Dumpty

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less."

Lewis Carroll -- Through the Looking Glass, Chapter 6

Excellent and laterally this is the problem with "internal" self-reference.

Name

How do we know our own name?

We know someone else's based on some character. This is most evident with identical twins where physical characteristics are so similar that it is hard to tell them apart. What we may need to do is talk to them to see their personality. If this is also the same we can check for information they remember which links them to a place and a time. For example if they can't remember what they ate when you last had a meal together.

If the twins were never apart however then this is hard. It would be like a Turing test where we had a fixed period of time to determine who was who and if we couldn't then we could conclude, not that they were "a conscious person", but rather there was no difference between these two persons. We would then have to rely on what each of then told us, in other words what they called themselves. No good one saying "i'm me and not them" and the other saying exactly the same. We need them to uniquely identify themselves.

Now how can we tell whether they are telling the truth? We have to be able to mark them with a constant characteristic and compare what they say relative to that mark - measure them so to speak. Suppose we could put them in different cells then ask them their name, write it on the door and ask them each day. They need to always say the same thing AFTER isolation. What was said before is not important!

But what if they are called the same name? Lots of people have the same name. What we tend to do in that situation is give them a nick name. Two Marks renovating my cousins place gained the names Mark-the-floor and Mark-the-plasterer for obvious reasons just as people gained the names Margaret Thatcher or Adam Smith in days of yore. And usually people come t accept their monikers. But it is not satisfying if our two twins keep calling themselves say John. It is as though 'inside' they still don't accept their difference. Outside however we can test their memories and gradually their different histories will show up; for example if we give them different meals and then ask them to remember their meals. This is what Buddhism calls streams of consciousness which I believe is the way that we pass through time for Buddhist theory (but i am unsatisfied by this explanation: it doesn't really get to the heart of the illusion of "self" because we can just replace the idea of self with "my stream of consciousness").

Now is this how we know our own name? Do we look for a character in order to know that it is us? That is the problem for a speculative philosophical moment. In reality however we don't think like like this. Our name is a part of our learned behaviour. From a young age we know what to do when addressed. Almost like a dog who can tell when he is being called because his master is looking at him and saying this word in that high pitched way. Our name becomes part of the language game that surrounds us and in which we have grown up. In this way our name is unique to the social context in which each of us finds ourselves. It is not about naming some object but rather 'being' part of a team and social reality. So how do we know our name? It is because we are part of a social reality in which our name gets used. What is my name? Is a question we are a fool if we can't answer just as I felt very childish not to be able to spell my middle name when I was 11. In the same way we learn to address other people in this culture for a variety of purposes. So it is not so much a case of directly refering to a 'self' when we use a name - a thing called 'Alva' that is naming that thing (any self-reference) - but rather being part of a society that uses this word in particular situations and "Alva" becomes just a social context rather than an object . . Just as a "goal keeper" is a context in a game of football so "Alva" is a context in the game of English Western society. So our twins above are perplexing because they seem to be able to cheat at something that is so fundamental to this society. Just as a man the size of a goal mouth would 'cheat' at goal keeping!

On reference & Custom

When someone is called "John" in human culture it means that the word "John" is taken by speakers to replace the actual person John (who may be short and dark haired with a light hearted attitude) in verbal structures. When John hears his name he knows that he is involved in the conversation.

But this is only convention. John could just as easily refer to the person who is also called Mike. Now we enter the problem of identity loved by Elizabethan playwrites. Quite when we use the name John and Mike can only be determined by custom, context and circumstance. In an alien culture there may be complex formal rules governing when to use particular names that will seem random and of no sense to a human guest. Imagine explaining the old use of you and thou to an alien who doesn't have a concept of intimacy or informality!

Now isn't the same true of sentence themselves. It is customary to interpret a sentence that described the previous sentence as having eight words as meaning the sentence before this one. Were the customs of English different it might mean this sentence itself. Likewise a sentence that says that it has nineteen words might be customarily interpreted to mean the previous sentence.

What is true however is that to create a current point of reference we need some level of identifying the here and now. A sentence which says "the first sentence of this blog entry" must still make reference to the here and now even while not envoking itself. This shows however that "this sentence" is actually referring to itself only by use of an external here and now reference which is customarily accepted for the English language. It is certainly external self reference and so of little interest.

I need also be careful here of use/mention. A sentence can't actually refer to itself so easily because "this sentence" is just a quote and marks on a page. While this sentence is an actual sentence. Or is it because it doesn't quote itself so it is actually non gramatical within the rules of English.

The power of the blank

Quote from 'Black Books' comedy sitcom.

Was thinking again about an acquaintance who has decided for mysterious reasons yet to explain to lose me from his friend group. It came after the death of his mother last year and I wonder if connected.

Anyway was watching my own mind in relation to this. It is interesting how the first line of defence is to decide that he was not a good freind anyway and to look for faults in him. Needless to say I gave up on this whole line of thought and just gave him the freedom to do whatever he was doing. I myself have blanked two people before (one being "my muse") and it is only fair I expetrience "not being liked".

This is an interesting illustration of the dynamics of human relations. We give people recognition when they give us recognition, and devalue them when they don't. It is all Hegel. We cannot give someone the authority to judge us, and then have them judge against us; that is tantamount to judging against ourself. Except it isn't if we can give them freedom; but it is hard to do this because we also have to give ourselves freedom and that means we weren't looking for the recognition in the first place. But we can only gain freedom if we know what freedom looks like (after Hegel) and we begin this process by giving people power over us: and that is the slave mentality. Ironic that we are gaining knowledge of freedom by actually losing freedom ourselves. But like the monk looking critically at the prostitute and the prostitute looking respectfully at the monk: it is the prostitute whose mind is clean! Or as noted here in this blog, if we want to see a mountain we climb its neighbour! And Pygmalion says the same quoted in this blog elsewhere.

So there is very much in the coming, but also the going of relations; and one can't really point at either as being more important or better.

Why do humans need to do things?

This appears to be one of those big unanswered questions. Indeed even asking questions is one of those things that huamns 'do'.

It seems that Life entails doing things. I don't think it matters what we do, we just seek to be doing things. Even people with money enough not to work will try and find ways to do things, even if it is only parlour games and activities of light amusement. I am entertained looking at teh world around me and trying to explain it, I keep this blog, I do reading and lot of instinctive thinking: yet what is in common is that I am always trying to do things. Even my search to do less (since doing things I have seen before is the cause of most of our problems today) has ended up in an active search and so is doing something.

What is the root of "doing" - that seems to lie at the root of Life itself. It seems to be perhaps more than just part of our economic paradigm, tho I know of tribes in other paradigms where they would rather go hungry than do anything. They have the lowest working hours of any primate at just 2.5 hours a day.

Worth looking at the "optimum" hours of work. After a while we make more work for ourselves by working. For example with everyone in the construction industry for example there is more competition, pulling down otherwise fine building, and negotiation and selling to be done than if just a few people worked in it. Certainly the rise in marketing is an excellent example of where people work to get other people to buy things they would never have bought otherwise, do they need to work more to pay for them and the wheel turns a little faster - but for no other reason that we were trying to do more!

I meditation doing something? What is actually doing "nothing"? If we don't know what doing nothing is like, then do we really know what doing something is like?

=== Update 27/1/2011

I must never forget what the Master of Fo Guang Shan temple says: pure action is compassion. It is the corollary of: pure mind is wisdom. These are the two parts of enlightenment; there is not one without the other.

This morning I also saw a parallel between inaction and the problem of singularities in physics. Models are excellent until they crunch into a singularity which squeezes all the information out and the compass fails. The Big Bang is one such famous singularity. Once the Universe is compressed into an infinitely small point the theory becomes useless. Just as f(x) = x/2x is a straight line for its entire length at y=0.5 with the momentary exception of x=0 where we can assume it has a value of y=0.5 but can't define it as such. If we did say that 0/(2*0) = 0.5 then do we say that 0/(4*0) = 0.25. Yet the denominator of both are the same 2*0 = 4*0 so we have an inconsistency so we can't decide what the value is.

This same problem occurred to me when we "think" and model action. It is fine to muse on the motivations of people in history or in law courts and even our motivations as we struggle to understand who we are, but that thinking runs into a singularity in the present as we cannot predict what we will do Now. It is undefined. This is the origin of the concept of freedom which Existentialists amongst others find so terrifying; the staggering vastness of the possibilities that face us now make most shy into inaction. This Hamlet mentality troubled with contradictions and resolutions (myself as well) led Sartre to dump essence all together and start with existence. Don't decide between "possible" worlds of whether or not to marry the girl, he said to a hesitating student, make the future... let history write the essence in books afterwards. I've never been so sure; that seems to me simply follow social pressure or ones desires without questioning type of behaviour: carpe diem. If I have learned one thing from my walking it is that the two most crucial stages of a long walk of many hundreds of miles are the first and last few hours. Errors you make at the start are the most costly, travelling large distances in the right direction is then very easy, what then poses a problem is the small scale again where we try to locate a specific place. I imagine the same with Life. If we head off in the wrong direction we will waste a very long time getting it right. But then what is the right direction? That is the whole question since the dawn of antiquity! If there is no right direction then there can't be a wrong direction and then it doesn't matter what we do... this is blatantly not our experience as we discover regrets and disappointments in Life. But what then "ought" we do, or have done to live better Life? I am wondering here if even "doing" is the right way to look at this. What if I really did nothing for my whole life ... and I'm half way through having done nothing. I have to respond to an old friend of Facebook sometime soon explaining my life. I have to honest I have done nothing: no career, family, property, responsibilities, titles, achievements, even wonderful experiences: the lack of all this bumph just says simple peace and happiness to me. Yet this seems fine to me, just sounds a bit boring in the retelling, so am I so wrong?

Being a node in the system.

AN idea that has emerged in this blog and my life is the realisation that most of the work we do is caused by other people.

The most important example is that of war. Imagine how simple this life would be if we weren't constantly beating people up, and then having them beat us up also. At the end of it nothing ever changes and after people give up hitting each other over the head then life continues as before. The biological reason for this is "competition for resources" and there is an unfortunate bi-product of reproduction that population growth leads to increased competition which affects individuals differently and so selects (to some extent) their transferable characters which leads to drift in population character. It is however a drift in "character" and not in "identity". Tomorrows population may have 100 people in it of which none are "my" children, or of which some are my children. There is actually no difference because "my" children don't inherit any of the "myness" they only inherit my characteristics but they are no more "me" than your children...

That is unless I wish to define my "identity" in terms of my characteristics in which case an identical copy of me is the same identity as me. Now in Dawkins terms this is true. If we were to make a genetically identical copy of Richard Dawkins and him and his copy in a crashing plane with only one parachute then they would have to toss a coin to find out who lived because it makes no difference to them. For normal people however we have a problem because it is not the facts of our character we are trying to preserve but "ourselves". If I die and my copy lives that is a very different event, to if my copy dies and I live. Most importantly I get to parachute to safety, mourn the loss of my copy, get home and tell everyone what happened; if I die with the plane that is it - game over.

SO this is the crux of life, death, reproduction, personality, self and existence. We have the teaching that actually but Richard Dawkins and I are wrong (and me more so) because the truth is that it makes no difference who takes the parachute: even if we were completely different people. Given that it makes no difference the standard solution is to offer the parachute to the other person this way the person who lives knows without doubt that the person who died wanted that. It also proves that the person who died understood that it didn't matter. This could be taken to undermine the value of life (as some pointless suicide) so it is important to understand that this choice only makes sense in the situation where only one can live. If we take the parachute for ourselves then we never know whether the person who died accepted their fate, but it also means that we didn't accept the situation. We have simply avoided the situation by taking the parachute and continuing as if everything was all right. For such a person the only situation where they can approach death is where there are no parachutes (either their opponent took it or there never was one). Such a person thus rejects choice and therefore freedom!

Returning to the main thread at the top: much of the struggles of life are created by an unfortunate by product of reproduction. Without competition for resources we would have a very much easier life. Another example apart from war was my last job where I made a coating for medical equipment used in heart operations. Most of these operations arise because of unhealthy life styles created by the very food and motor industries that people spend their time working for. It is depressing to realise that the work you get paid for is simply pasting over the cracks of the work someone else has been paid for. It really is no better than the hamster running in its wheel.

But to take this argument to its final conclusion, what about a planet of bare rock. There is no work to do here at all. Work only ever arises because of people. All the work we do is because of people. It is therefore slightly erroneous to seek work that has an absolute meaning. We may work in the Red-Cross and heal people who have only been injured by the actions of other people that we are fighting. We may work in hospitals healing people who are only unwell because of the food or drink they have been sold by someone else. Yet we are always only ever addressing the issues made by other people.

My life has been organised about the principle that I am as least work for myself as possible. This is where Buddhism is so important. To be happy with little makes life very much easier. If a single apple makes me satisfied then I don't need to deal with the complex problem of getting hold of truffles or caviar. But it is a double blessing because I don't need to involve other people in the problem of getting hold of truffles or caviar. So well mastered individuals not only make their own lives easy but they make the lives of those around them easy.

But this doesn't work in reality because most people cannot be easy. In particular I have noticed (and blogger recently) women can't be easy. Women are always scheming, changing and working towards things. I suggest it is part of the "nesting instinct" where they feel the impulse to create homes that the maternal instinct will then want to fill with children. It means that they are never easy having these very strong, and poorly understood, impulses. These impulses are also extremely complicated and difficult to satisfy. In men I suggest it is a bit simpler - we have impulses for sex, and dominance. Desiring women and dominance (which is implied by having women) is enough to enslave us to their impulses. As a result people are never easy and this means they can certainly never be happy.

But I must (and this is the point of this blog) never take this argument too far because without people at all then everything goes. If people didn't reproduce then in one generation there would be no problems for anyone, but then there would be no people to be easy either. Like the equation 0/0 we have eliminated both the numerator and the denominator at the same time and so have no answer still!

The equation for peace is much more sophisticated and Dialectical than simply eliminating difficulty. I need to eat, sleep and various other "troubles" that I make myself... and in so doing I make them for other people because I can't eat that apple unless someone drives it to me, someone picks it, and someone plants it and keeps it free from predators and thieves until I eat it. So inevitably I make troubles for other people, and I am engaged in working for their troubles also.

The middle ground must be in "harmony". The war industry is probably the second largest in the world after the health industry. War is not a complete waste of time. There are times when certain groups simply refuse to be harmonious or dialectical and inevitably an escalation of power will occur. My personal view is to walk way and let the ignorant fight, but I must understand that where a lot has been invested (say in a hospital or government) it is not so easy to walk away and conflict will occur. This will make work for both the war industry and the health industry. The point for me to contemplate this year is not so much how to stop causing trouble for other people (mastering desires and minimising life's requirements), but instead to find a way to assist as many people in their goals as I can thus choosing to become a node in the place where my own actions and existence is "harmonised" with the environment I find myself.

This seems to be a step above the simple view of minimising ones needs and in so doing reducing the load on other people. Rather it is the seeking modes of behaviour which link my activities with those around me to maximise their effectiveness. So it is not a matter of stopping the war machine and the health machine, but rather find a mode of action for myself where I improve the goals of both.

Can we be Wealthy and Equal?

This Xmas has been a time of upheaval for me. It seems that the ground work for the alternative way of thinking has been set and now it is time to be accepted back into society and see how it fares.

The impact of the heavy snow showed up the weakness of capitalism very clearly to me: a socialist economy would be able to redirect huge resources much more precisely and efficiently than the fragmented capitalist industries watching their profit margins at every turn. That said I was brought to consider more how BAA might be operated as a capitalist venture than to use it's failure as a demonstration of Thatchers far reaching errors. If we can mend capitalism would it be better than a mended socialism? My only problem is that I still see Capitalism as working superficially in a society of competitive and selfish individuals better the socialism but intrinsically it remains illogical and flawed; Socialism on the other hand is fundamentally rational but superficially fails because of errors in the Western cultures. It seems absurd to justify Capitalism based on a human culture that is flawed. And so here we are at the big challenge: is Human Culture and Society flawed? A summary of this blog's positions says yes and also how.

It is Xmas and the church is spreading the message of peace and goodwill. The Archbishop of Canterbury calls for the rich to shoulder more of the burden of the economic down turn, there is the (brilliant) adaptation of "The Christmas Carol" on Dr Who this Christmas Day (most satisfyingly well thought out by Stephen Moffat - lots of SRH in there) and the general looking after the poor. But I have always wondered why there are poor at all and why they have and always will exist. The Christian message is missing something. Well this blog seems to have the answer and now i see it vividly.

Firstly Wealth is Relative. It is a simple idea but gets held up the the belief in "needs". Whatever a human situation there will be a hierarchy of value. Even if it comes to dying some ways of dying are better than others. "Needs" are a red herring completely - this should be apparent hearing kids learning English and, realising that want is not as good as effective as need, decide to need everything. Once we realise that Wealth only exists in relation to other things then naturally it follows that a wealthy society must have a poor also. This is not an accident it is fundamental to the concept of wealth.

Secondly is the idea of Power. This is the other type of hierarchy. Humans exist in a society that is dominated by relative social status. We judge our position, obviously, relative to other people. A friend's girlfriend was saying that she was offered a better title at no extra pay, the title supposedly being the reward of the new workload. What has confused me about authority hierarchies, but now I understand, is that obviously systems of organisation must exist in order to harmonise complex groups of people working together. "Orders" mean that information and responses to new information can rapidly spread through a complex network. Certainly in the army an order enables very fast and accurate implementation of plans.

Yet lots of people who take up positions of authority seem to confuse this with something else. It is I now see the hidden notion of status. By being in power people can consider themselves "better" than other people. It is the instinct of status and hierarchy.

So why does all this exist? The obvious place to look is biology. Higher animals have very complex dominance structures. I discovered on BBC Autumn Watch this year that even birds at a feeding table have strict dominance hierarchies - and these aren't even considered to be social organisms. Dominant individuals will take control of the food resources with progressively marginal individuals getting less and less control. When a predator strikes and the birds scatter, researchers have found that the most subordinates return first - I am guessing because an empty feeder offers a high reward and so it is worth risking breaking cover. Once they have proven that the coast-is-clear then the dominant individuals return and take charge of the food again. Thus individuals experience risks from predation and also other birds on the feeder - and the two are balanced. I was surprised to find this in rabbits when I studied them at BSc but see that it is a universal phenomenon that predators offer a similar level of danger to one's own species and kin! The evidence is that Rabbits spend as much time watching for predators as for proximity to dominant individuals! This is the one thing that Darwin got wrong that there is nothing special about individuals being of the same species - fellow species members and even clan members are as likely to kill you as predators!

Dominance is expressed essentially through violence. Birds for example have very sharp beaks and they don't use them for feeding only! Rabbits don;t just use their powerful jumping feed to move they can disembowel with a single kick. So why do individuals go to such lengths to achieve dominance and be violent to other individuals? It is so that they can secure essential resources. The issue is not our own absolute fitness but our relative fitness. If we can ensure that no-one else breeds then we don't need to be that fit to secure all the future offspring and so spread this gene. Thus it pays to spend time upsetting ones competitors as well as acquiring resources. The balance depends upon circumstances.

So given the simple brutality of nature it is no surprise to find EXACTLY the same structure in humans. Humans find that rather than play the game straight it is actually beneficial to dominate other humans and ensure our mastery of resources that way. With humans, and the sophisticated way we can communicate our wishes, it is possible for dominant individuals to steal (tax) resources from others and get them to completely support the dominant individuals. Of course we do this because being in the hierarchy to a powerful dominant individual places us in the running for resources ourself (from which non loyal subjects are excluded) and also offers us protection from other dominant individuals who would wish to upset us.

Large populations can be supported within violent systems when resources are plentiful, but when resources become scarce it is the "poor" subordinates who die first. When food on bird feeders is scarce the strong dominant individuals will be able to secure the food better and so remain strong, while the subordinates will die. This ramping of fitness offers an inbuilt buffer to extreme environmental changes. It may be (and I like the idea of group level selections) that species that don't incorporate a hierarchy of fitness, when faced with sudden scarcity, experience the shortage equally through the population and all individuals out compete themselves and the population dies together. So in this view intrinsic violence is actually an adaptation to environmental heterogeneity. It would be an interesting test to see if dominance hierarchies are more ramped in species from temperate climates where winter produces a regular time of scarcity and so group level selection. In humans it certainly seems that it is the historically recent Northern tribes who have been the most socially organised and dominating in human history (Aryans, Mongols and Saxons especially). Anyway pure speculation here.

So Human Society and culture obeys the most fundamental laws of nature, and many right wing thinkers would happily stop there. But as this very argument shows humans exist on a higher level than mere resource allocation. One of my poorly realised argument against Dawkins is that "his ideas" do not have fitness: they don't obviously make his children fitter; and, if they are fitter memes of the mind, so that they spread, then the prevalence of meme theory is attributable only to what meme theory says and not being a theory of Truth we can't say that meme theory is True! Why Dawkins then gets so irate about other memes doing well I don't understand: it can only be because he secretly believes in Truth as the measure of fitness and this contradicts meme theory which is not a theory of Truth! This is SRH in action. It is incredibly hard to argue even after all these centuries of art, philosophy and religion, and these many thousands of words in this blog, but the Human Mind transcends the physical and even its own contructions. This is the realm of the essentially indefinable which has been called the spiritual. It intersects human society in this issue of wealth and equality.

We have only two choices. We understand that wealth is relative and so have to accept inequality; or we believe in equality and so must abandon wealth. It is the argument at the heart of spirituality and it is why those who seek the Higher Mind have such a difficult relationship with the material.

If we abandon wealth then we also abandon Hierarchy and this was difficult even for World spiritual leaders. Jesus most famously in Matthew 15 called a Canaanite woman a "dog" because of her low standing with the Jews. It was here commentators say that he had to face this side of his culture and understand that faith, and hence the Lord's power, extended outside normal social hierarchies. It was with Buddhism that we first see a spiritual leader teaching equally to all. This was as far as I know the first time that the idea of Equality arose (2500B.C.).

Our Western society is certainly a messy admixture of contradictions. We believe in professions, education and skills yet we also believe that the unskilled masses can run a country (or at least have the collective power to chose leaders to do highly skilled tasks). We believe that each person has equal power to vote, yet in the market place some people can buy multimillon pound pleasure yachts while some can barely buy a car... it goes on. Democracy is based upon an idea of equality that is completely (and essentially in places like the flight deck of a plane) absent. At least we have made the effort to incorporate this idea but democracy is just a superficial add-on the a society that is at root flawed because of its belief in wealth.

The great economists have resolved huge problems in markets, and modern oil based transport and communication have aided in providing us with an efficient trading world that rapidly distributes produce and information to maximise spending and money flow. Complex debt management has also increased the availability of credit and the flow of money. People have more to spend and more work to do. It is a miracle of wealth. (Personally I attribute almost all this apparent wealth to energy from oil rather than economics but I'll gloss over that here.) Most apparent of this success is the fact that people in the West don't starve any more. It appears to produce the solid basis for a belief in wealth. Yet Economic growth seems to contradict this notion of wealth. If there is an absolute wealth then at what point will we be satisfied? It is hard for modern people to realise but we are no more wealthy than at any point in history. At every point there have always been people more wealthy and less wealthy and we have always felt "as" wealthy as we do today. It is by focusing on this inequality that we get the sense of wealth. Indeed it is by the difference between things that we get the sense of physical matter at all. Wealth sadly for economics is not a real thing and it can't really be created or destroyed materially.

The problem that we face is the growing belief in this most basic and tragic idea that what is relative creates things that are absolute. Dawkins, and his cohorts are, unbeknown to themselves, no different from rabbits or tits on a bird feeder. It is a great irony that those who would seek to be better and correct are applying for status through arguments that apply also to the lowest organisms who have no choice whether to argue one way or the other. Surely Materialists can see that the very freedom to "apply" for this status places them beyond the level that they are applying to! This is the still poorly realised SRH idea. Dawkin's mind is master of the arena that he believes his lives within and wishes to confine himself within. If you can describe what your house looks like then you must have been outside so you are only choosing to stay inside and that the root choice of Dawkin's and all materialists and atheists' etc that wilfully clouds their vision.

Once we are brave enough to step outside we are faced with a huge challenge: are we ready to abandon wealth and accept equanimity and equality?

De Facto/De Jure

These terms already distinguish the argument made a while ago in this blog between "law" that is natural and "law" that is man made. The existence of "de jure" (de rigueur also) is the evidence of the nature of society in this blog. The rules which have no "real" basis other than custom and norm. Language and maths fit mostly within the "de jure" conception since how a language or maths is constructed is relative. By contrast the knowledge that a man jumping off a cliff will never lead to him flying is de facto and no matter of relativity of construction can change that fact. As Eddie Izzard says " some things ARE impossible, like eating the Himalayas. It can't be done." and I add no matter how fanciful the logic system, story being told or persuasive the King's orders!