SRH (summary) and Time

Technorati Tags: God,proof,meaning,cogito,self,existence

The SRH is purely linguistic. There are no contradictions in reality—things just are—problems only occur when we try to assert things one way and then change our mind. The reader is left unsure what we mean and complains.

To summarise: the SRH (which needs a new name) notes that when referring to something by some description (essence) or asserting its existence one cannot then meaningfully attribute that essence or existence to the subject e.g. “(Ex) x exists”, or “(x) P(x) & Q(x) –> P(x)” respectively “there exists something which exists” or “for all x where x has quality P and quality Q it has quality P”. These tautologies sound ridiculous in logic but “all black swans are black” sounds almost meaningful and “I think therefore I exist” is famous.

To recap further the problem with these tautologies lies in their negations: they are contradictions or at least always false. Respectively above: “(x) x ¬exist”, “(Ex) P(x) & Q(x) & ¬Q(x)” that is “for all x, x doesn’t exist” and “there exists an x such that x has P, Q and doesn’t have Q”. The latter is a typical contradiction the former is a type I don’t know that i’m calling existential contradiction. The famous Descartes’ statement has this SRH problem at root: its very appeal and certainty lies in the tautology that to be thinking at all he must exist (we know what he means even if it doesn’t technically imply an existing self like entity). But the statement is misleading because its negation is an existential contradiction and so there being no situation under which it can be false (it is always true) and so fails to convey any particular meaning! We know nothing after reading it that we didn’t know before. Another way to put that is there is nothing to learn about such a sentence’s use; we can say it anytime and anywhere in any imaginable universe.

The relevant to a proof of God is firstly not to prove “(Ex) x is God” i.e. there is a thing called God. This is clearly nonsense at first sight since God made “all” things so one presumes he either made himself or he isn’t a thing. It staggers me that Dawkins et al. waste time pursuing this dead end. It makes more sense for God to be a principle (principal perhaps) namely that nothing can assert its own existence, instead depending upon other things. The name of God in the Arahamic religions is Yahweh in Hebrew which means “I AM”. It is important to realise that because of the SRH we cannot meaningfully assert this for our self. Any sense of “I am” comes from outside us.

Returning to the thread if this blog entry. The SRH and existential contradiction is linguistic. There is one famous field of existential contradiction namely time travel typified by the paradox of going back in time and killing oneself. The problem then arises was there a murder? If there was then the person who was murdered is also the murder. But if there was a murder it also means that the murderer was killed before he did the murder. However if there wasn’t a murder then what exactly did the time traveller do?

It is only an embryonic thought at this stage but similarity to the SRH signals an alarm bell that this “time travel” and indeed “time” itself may be only linguistic at root and not real. This wouldn’t be a new idea but I don’t grasp it yet. I read earlier in the year (but can’t remember where) a poem in which it is said that “self” is only a feature of our Indo-European languages and with a different language structure we would be able to avoid this cultural artefact all together.

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?

Godel + SRH : big step

It seems to me in symbolic logic that the whole Godel problem arises because there are two different ways of constructing a formula:

1) we may construct a formula grammatically by rules of formation (recursion), and
2) also by deduction from axioms using rules of inference.

This gives us two ways of constructing a sentence and this is the problem. We can see that a formula like:

1.0 ∀ x : x^2 >= 0 • x ∈

is a WFF in standard predicate logic and set notation (assuming I've got my grammar correct ;-) While:

2.0 x x : ^2 = x 0 ∀ > • ∈

is just nonsense in any notation that I know (tho one could create a grammar to which this conforms)

Now whether statement 1.0 could be arrived at by a sequence of transformations on axioms is another question.

BUT I answer my own question because consider:

3.0 ∀ x : x^2 >= 0 • x ∈

Statement 1.0 and 3.0 are both grammatically correct but while there is no integer which is an exception to statement 1.0 it is easy to find a complex number e.g. 3i whose square is -9 and so contradicts the statement which states that x*x >= 0 for all x. Statement 1.0 is true while 3.0 is false.

So being grammatically correct, provable and true are all different. Showing that provability and truth are separate is what Godel did. He created a true statement that was by definition not provable. It is fascinating, as I begin to take this in at last, that he has a statement which by virtue of what it says about itself fractures the rest of the system.It is reminiscent in my mind of the ontological argument for God's existence where it is argued that because God is perfect by definition, it implies that by definition he must also exist since not existing would be an imperfection. Can we really pop things (as Douglas Adams jokes in Hitchhikers) into and out of existence on the basis of logic and definition?

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just found this blog which suggests that godel's 1st incompleteness theorem is the SRH ... but I think its not that simple

http://www.cosmicfingerprints.com/blog/incompleteness/comment-page-2/

yes this is how not to prove the SRH... but first time I've seen an attempt to show it.

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http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/courses/logsys/g-proof.htm

YES!! In 30mins I understand Godel's theorem much better than before!! An excellent summary of the arguments.

Notice that we "prove" that G is true by metatheoretical reasoning, not within S. This is very important to many philosophers pondering the significance of Gödel's theorem and proof. It means that Gödel did something that the system S is demonstrably incapable of doing, namely, prove that G is true. Since formal systems are isomorphic with computers, and since the deficiency proved for S is proved for all systems above a certain threshold of power, one reading of the situation is that Gödel did something that no computer above a certain threshold of power could do. If so, there is something about human intelligence that can never be attained by any computer even in principle. How justified is this reading? Knowledgeable people differ sharply on this question.

G is the statement Godel discovered which states that it is not provable. If it is false then it is provable in which case we can prove a false statement (which is called inconsistent) - this is the bit that is likened to the "this is a lie" statement. If it is true then it cannot be proven whilst being true. Truth is thus distinguished from and lies outside the system of proofs.

My understanding at the moment is not that we can establish a fixed grand division between computers and Man, or Man and God, but rather that any system cannot exist in isolation - this is the SRH. It is not as cosmicfingerprints argues that there is a particular outside-circle outside all others called 'God' but rather the God hypothesis (previously suggested) is that any system (of sufficient complexity to refer to itself) is incomplete and implies a external system... ad infinitum as in Cantors infinity of infinities.

From its very inception the idea is inspired by disbelief in the idea that we can gain a single body of knowledge that is entirely comprehensive to the extent that it explains everything about even itself. That is to say that the Aristotelian Scientific project for example will not get closer and closer to a single dogma of truth that eventually can explain even itself, casting into the flames in a vast Humian Fork all that is absolutely false. Originally it was tried in 2007 as a refutation of materialism - in that the scientific process can't be explained in materialistic terms alone. But how to do this?

The method to approach the SRH has been to examine boundaries. A self-contained system has to incorporate its own boundary. Put another way: to speak of itself it must be able to identify and describe itself which means to place a boundary around itself, but a boundary that can be constructed within itself. I don't know if there are geometries for analogy that allow this - I've seen some very odd ones. Not got very far: only to analysis of circles and boxes within boxes at this time.

Self-reference (after which the SRH was badly named) raises the issue of boundaries as well. When we refer to something we are implying that something exists. To exist implies that it must have features which distinguish it from other things. To exist it must have some boundary that separates it from things that it is not, one must then find such a thing! If we cannot find such a thing, or argue for its existence, then we cannot refer to it truthfully. If we refer to ourselves the question then is how would be identify ourselves? or how would be separate ourselves from other things? or how would be put a boundary around ourselves? This is done by name in logic. But my unresolved query is that simply using a name doesn't really amount to full reference. I may use the name of Theodore Roosevelt (as I just did) but I wouldn't be able to recognise him and I know next to nothing about him. To what extent am I referencing "him" then? A computer can use that name as well (as it just has passing it over the internet) but does this text itself really reference the man? We assume that I am referencing it (as the writer) and that I am somehow acquainted with the man. This is a very complex avenue of enquiry one I have avoided!! However the question of the scope of self-reference and whether systems can ever comprehensively and totally self-reference remains. The SRH belief is that one needs a point of perspective outside a system to create the boundary - just as one needs to enter space to see the circle of the Earth, or Archimedes needs a place to stand off the Earth in order to move the Earth. Some leverage is needed in order to operate upon oneself it seems instinctively. Indeed that is a very satisfying analogy: maybe SRH should be Self-Leverage Hypothesis (stating that it is impossible).

Another analogy I read recently in a maths book. Euclid's geometry can be shown to be consistent if we accept that Arithmetic is consistent. In general consistency can be shown for any system but only in terms of another system that it must be assumed is consistent. There is no absolute proof of consistency: it is relative. This essential is the SRH - but it aint a proof.

The SRH is essentially the opposite of Godel. Instead of showing that a metalanguage (isomorphic with the object language) can make truth statements about the object language that the object language can't, the SRH seeks to prove within the object language the existence of meta-statements that it can't prove. Or something like that: metaphorically the finger on Earth pointing at the moon. Need time for this to all sink in.

to construct a sentence which refers to an entity which can only be constructed if we step outside the system.

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OK has some nice beer so bad time to be doing this but the pattern seems to be this any system which allows self-reference automatically allows the creation of a contradiction because it can refer to both itself and not-itself. Thus an infinite progression of ever expanding systems is yielded by analogy like the adding of G to the axioms, or each infinity implying a larger infinity... now how does Cantor do this? Is Diagonalisation the key trick?

Is there a general theory of systems that states that the better defined they become the more power they gain at defining things outside themselves... something like that this would be SRH... dream dream

The other thing is Tarski's undefinability theorem

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarski%27s_undefinability_theorem

A corollary is that any metalanguage capable of expressing the semantics of some object language must have expressive power exceeding that of the object language.

It seems that the semantics/syntax distinction captures the division necessary for the SRH just as the data/code distinction in computing which I first observed the SRH in. Lots of leads... will follow up 2morrow.

On the search so far...

A central search in this blog feels like it may be reaching its conclusion...

Just watching Michael Wood and Seamus Healey talking about Beowulf I am gripped by the fundamental elements of all narratives that i seem to be hell bend on subverting...

The Hero undergoes trials both physical and spiritual that are driven by the need to win; even if this is the destiny of the hero, failure is not an option; becoming the very best we may be is the struggle and the destiny of the hero.

This is in absolute contrast to my own direction of approach for the last few years. What I have been gripped by is the relative and temporary nature of everything. We may indeed win but it is only until next time. We may indeed conquer, build and acquire but it is only until it is lost. Furthermore that which is lost can not remain so forever it will of its own accord become found. There is also the awareness of dialectic that a hero can only be so at the expense of a foe. There can only be triumph at the destruction of adversity, which is great as long as you do not seek to gain from another adversity. As a friend always points out death is good business for undertakers, and I will add, until it strikes at home.

The instinctive narratives we feel the logic of innately only ever seem good in the telling of half the story. The tragic nation of Grendels who are outcast from human society and even the patronage of God; we don't hear their story. As Kierkegaard notes about all love stories we only hear of the conquest, we never have to endure the years of the tale that lie idle in port afterwards [my metaphor].

And so I have been drawn in stages to the ideal of Peace where all narratives stop without want of more or echo of the past; the silence between the words of the bard; that satisfaction that looks neither forward nor gloats upon what lies behind. The death that we can enjoy as the living. This is the true heroic death in this view. Not the ecstatic death of the fallen in hectic and bloody battle, nor the noble death of those burned upon the funeral pyre of past achievements, but simply the death of those who strive no longer for tractable evidence of ones own virtue or existence in this world.

But let me now that I have pursued this line for a few years consider Nietzsche and the alternative views again.

The Nietzschian argument against my view is that this is exactly the view that the Lords would wish... or at least a variation on that view. The Lords want a passive people who are hard working without complaint, who even eschew the liberties and indulgencies of the powerful. The Lord, so argues Nietzsche, of these lower people turns people away from worldly pleasures in favour of a dream of afterlife, even accepts death without struggle, offering up taxes to the Lords without complaint (give unto Caesar what is Caesar's etc). This is coincidentally exactly the mind set that a class system needs so that the Lords can rule. Christianity et al. are simply the products of the slave minds and the True way of man lies in the behaviours of the Lords - almost diametrically opposite to the slave mind. Thus fighting, posturing, indulgence, egoism, wealth, flamboyance, opulence, ostentatiousness, indulgence etc etc are the real free mode of human life from which the slave class have simply gained their code by negation.

There is some truth - but my view of Peace seems at odds even with Nietzsche and Christ because I don't accept taxes, ownership nor even labour in any fundamental sense. Certainly I accept them as they actual do exist, and have a long history and there is no sense that they will ever change - but i don't accept any argument based upon them. They are unfortunate symptoms of misunderstanding much deeper realities and truths it seems to me... (hence my search.). A ruling class I simply don't accept. They may believe they are a ruling class but they are not really ruling in any demontsrable way other than they can pay enough people to kill dissenters - it is that simple law of nature which is what ruling means... everything else - all this talk of Magna Carter and law etc is a thin paper facade over the fundamental law that the strongest can do what they want. It was because the King ran out of money that he was ever brought to bear; if he ever gained the money again I'm sure he would rip that piece of paper up. Problem is History is not a Markov chain and the Future cannot escape the thin windy mountain path of the Past.

But again that said I disagree with the program The Medieval Mind. Professor Robert Bartlett, undoubtedly bound by the need to make exciting TV, seems to me to force the Medieval period into a rather stereotypical mold - that of a brutal and impoverished time of oppression, plagues and torture chambers ('get Medieval on yer ass' from Pulp Fiction). Yet the small amount of reading I did on work in the medieval period (for my book 'Work on Work' which seems ever further from completion - it's a huge project) threw up a completely different view of certainly the existence of bad land lords but a complex land system with itinerant workers benefiting and wanting to work within the confines of a Manor where they had higher wages and access to justice, and the tenants themselves varying from those paying high rents to completely free holders. The idea at the the start of the program that we should be shocked at the prices put on people is a joke to me. Killing a noble man demanded 6 times the compensation payment to killing a serf - I remember the police didn't even want to investigate the Ipswich murders of prostitutes until it became a press story. A homeless person get murdered and a doctor gets murdered - is the police interest and legal fees really going to be the same? An Indian get killed abroad and an American gets killed abroad do they really get the same response? And more of a joke does a cleaners really sell their time (and working life) at the same rate as a doctor? Is the life of a cleaner really equal to that of a doctor since 25% of it is going to be spent at a 20th of the rate. If anything inequality is worse now than in the Medieval period. The difference it seems to me, which plasters over the cracks well, is that people are not dying in the street (in UK) anymore because of the invention of oil driven machines and a vast global surplus of food - not the economics, politics, legal system or wisdom of ruling class - as we are daily told is the cause of our prosperity. I am suspicious of the daily avoidance of the link between cheap oil and global food. It seems more and more that things are going well and the ruling classes simply take the credit for things they have no interest in understanding. Of course when things go badly we can be sure they will quickly side step any involvement. Reading 'Mice and Men' (and 'Grapes of Wrath' by association) for GCSE revision also highlights that things certainly hadn't improved, probably even got worse, almost a 1000 years later - in America of all places: the land that was supposed to be the model for the rest of the world.

The one thing that I must uncover is more about the Saxon and Celtic land systems that preceded the Norman and Roman invasions respectively. Attitudes even amongst the experts seems to sway between extremes so it is any ones guess what life really was like for the ordinary people in any century in the past. Were Celts peaceful or violent warriors? If they were violent warriors it seems odd that they were completely annihilated by the Saxons. But even the Nordic people it seems to me had very just and noble kings, and systemic hardship doesn't seem to have been the way of things. A book I had time to read only a page of spoke of the noble kings of India in a time when Rulers felt strongly the duty of leadership - very much the spirit of nobility that I sense in the Saxons. It is the spirit of nobility (the arya) that I believe got passed down generations. My mother (brought up in the Mansion house in Ashbourne) with Holland and Sadler grandparents is my only testament to the spirit of arya - but from her the strength of duty and social obligation is unquestionably the main driving force of the gentry. Of course the gentry are human and have failing, but these failing have become the exceptions that the bourgeois revolution have capitalised (irony ;-) upon - in my developing view anyway. You simply cannot expect someone who was brought up to be concerned about a livelihood and a trade to suddenly take on social responsibilities - it simply doesn't make sense. It makes even less sense to me to have private individuals who are motivated by the accumulation of private wealth, power and influence to suddenly switch to a magnanimous outward social perspective. Not impossible, but made all the harder by their up bringing. Kings born of kings it seems to me are the best suited to politics and power. It is a logical point, I need read and understand a whole lot more history to substantiate that point. I also mean History that lies outside the tiny confines of the Western Dogma which is the interpretation of the UK period from 1066 to present that has been hijacked by the apologists for the current liberal, democratic, free market system. I feel even the experts are hopelessly seduced by the narrative of power evolution between church, monarch and people. Or is it that any other view at this point in unfashionable. There is a sense of this narrative being an opium to the masses to make them feel that they are in power. My own view is that in reality nothing ever changes (relatively). Obviously we can fly around the globe now which gives UK people the option of a weekend break in the tropics which they never had even 20 years ago, but relatively this "new experience" must rank distant second to the possibility of picking up a book when printing first made texts available to the masses. The "technology and form" may change but the "experience of the people" (which is what we are interested in when we compare human lives) I am saying doesn't. It's an almost impossible hypothesis to prove, but so is the current dogma that things are getting better, or the negation that things are getting worse. Remember that for most of Christian History the view was that things were getting further way from God's initial "good" creation and so worse, the renaissance Humanists simply turned that on its head - naively, egotistically and pointless I reckon. What if there is no change at all and we just live with what we have got? and that links to the point on Peace.

Returning to the concept of Gentleman professor Robert Bartlett takes the John Ball line that the one cannot be born into a way of life - that we are all free to pursue our own course in life: freedom to exercise one's destiny being critical. But this isn't the medieval mind but the birth of the modern mind. Only the modern mind reels at this thought, and I think equally erroneously. We are very much born into ways of life - language, parents, wealth. These are things I cannot really change. I may indeed become poor through choice (I have to some extent), and I could change my language and even my parents and even my race and sex by plastic surgery but it is a lot of work just to alter what you were "given". Consider also how many doctors have doctors as parents? I don't even need to do the statistics: there is an overwhelming correlation. This can't be explained by freedom to exercise our destiny can it? We speak of genes all the time these days: either our parents brought us to be a doctor or it is in the genes - either way it was not a "free" choice. Indeed this issue of freedom is one of the great metaphysical questions that remains unexplained at the heart of Protestantism - but while people like Dawkins strip away everything Godly from the movement they seem oddly reticent in approaching the aspects which underpin their own world views! (Isn't this always the case!!). John Ball it seems to me is part of the much larger movement which culminated in Martin Luther and the break from Catholic domination in the church too... will need to investigate that interesting link... Interesting that "gene" then has always been at odds with the notion of freedom and "gene-tleman" was just a part of a larger picture. Such a view as Bartlett's over looks the use of Arya (noble) in India for example. It was used by Buddha to speak of those people who had become masters not of others but of themselves (the highest mastery). It is in this latter sense that I understand my mother's talk of the gene-try. As power shifted from aristocracy to bouregoise (my mother's father was a mixed product of aristocratic and in part bourgeois pairing), the basis of gene moved from blood to one's behaviour. Except that refined behaviour is how Buddha and the Vedic books spoke about the gentleman 2500 years ago so it seems to me that it is part of the concept long before contemporary historians imbued it with revolutionary implications and progressive class struggle - I say progressive because I am maintaining that nothing has ever changed, that all the narratives that historians find in history are fabrications with contemporary motives - like putting Cleopatra's Needle by the Thames: a link to an extinct pagan empire, why? Maybe to give the illusion that London is the natural successor to Egypt... just a myth to satisfy and justify the establishment. So I don't buy the narrow concept of "gentleman" that is handed down by revolutionaries and I don't even accept that John Ball or his successors made any valid points about freedom, liberty or equality. It was simply that falling population placed power in the hands of the workers - but as Buddha says all things change, eventually; and I add, the reason, excuse or narrative is secondary. So Grendel was going to die, as was his mother, anyway whether at the hands of Beowulf, another hero or just mother nature and where I disagree with Michael Wood is that unfortunately Grendel will die in another way as the story itself gets lost and the monsters of the past are replaced by new ones. And, in an anthropomorphic way, we only speak of Grendel anyway because it was found, and only seek to preserve it because it was found by chance anyway.

A point I have raised a few times in this blog is the question of what would have happened had the Nazis won the war. I have suggested before that nothing would have changed for the masses. The Norman conquest it seems is a perfect example of what would have happened and it does seem that the Medieval period is basically what the Nazi occupation of UK would have been like with us paying huge rents to the Nazi over lords. But not wishing to get too swept along by this nightmarish suggestion it is worth pointing out that has always been the lot of the masses in this country. We payed rent to the Romans, then the Saxon kings, then the Norman, then to the Bouregois and Germans (when the Monarch changed) - nothing ever changes always seems my conclusion! What difference the Nazi? Honestly (war time propaganda aside). This point really rests upon the state of Medieval Britain under the Normans which needs to be seen comparatively against life under the Saxon kings like Alfred (comparative because we have no way of understanding what was the normatively accepted standard of comfort to people in that period).

Briefly raising that old argument: absolutists will say that things are absolutely better today than in the past so today is better than the past. My argument is that things will be absolutely better in the future given the rate of technological development, so therefore things are absolutely worse today than in the future. Now do we feel that things are absolutely worse today than in the future? Does this reduction in our quality of our life compared with the future affect our lives? Well it may do if we dwell on it (I wish I could have free energy for example), but in reality it makes no difference because we live with what we have and what is normative. In the same way the Medieval mind would not be really lamenting the lack of clean drinking water, mechanised agriculture or TV! Hence things must be contextualised and comparative to have any meaning - which puts all modern propaganda somewhere out of the park.

There is an extreme view (narrative) that the world is undergoing a vast shift at the moment toward global governance, but in a planned and hostile way by some supreme elite. I happen to agree with a friend who works in an NGO and has first hand experience of the "elite" who says that humans simply don't have the capacity for such high level agreement and planning. However I do agree with another friend who says that the masses are very much the victim of this shift. Intentional or otherwise the media (and I realise the markets, and politics) are all manipulated in the interests of the powerful and against the interest of the masses. Ian Stewarts 'From Here to Infinity' p17 he makes the interesting comment:

'...and it would be unthinkable to release [the key to secret codes] to the enemy (or the public, which many governments seem to view in the same light)...'

I think it is more a matter of psychology than deliberate machination for the powerful to behave in such a manner. If someone really believes that they have the best interests of someone at heart then they will feel justified in giving themselves unlimited license over that person. I can genuinely see some leader protecting himself by killing his own people in the belief that protecting himself is in their interests. There is a whole world of power psychology I realise I have to explore some day - the complex dialectic between myself as myself and myself as myself for someone else or The People. Probably accepting in the process the obvious conclusion that people can achieve "more" together under a strong leader than apart without one. However i still question what real gain there is to be had: a strong leader may bring a nation to win the war but then what?Alexander the Great a prime example... but then what? Lots of nice stories but the crops still need the sun and rain regardless what stories fill the heads of the farmers.

Reading this back I am made nauseous by the references to the world political stage - what a world teeming with lies, deceit and the most basic of human instincts, or so it seems to me on reading back. One thought about the vast complexity of the legal, political and economic edifice which seems to achieve nothing but shore up the existing structure sends a shudder through me - it seems as though I stare at the decaying bodies in the mausoleum of Caesar: the workers in the city the ants and other insects which scurry across the fragmenting burial shroud. All this built upon a dream of what the West should be like, dreamed in pagan times, and endlessly patched up and refounded. It doesn't sound like "Life" to me at all - it never has, I have always dreaded like death this thing busyness. I see the sun setting over the sky scrapers downtown and all I see are trees.

OK enough of the metaphor and emotive stuff, it is not my intention to persuade (I disagree with GCSE here on the use of emotive writing) it is simply to entertain and describe my own attitudes and feelings for fun of writing and to open the window and fly language outside the limited mode of factual analytic writing for a short mental break.

In summary of the current position: things never change so Peace is what is left when we stop trying to change them. That has been the approach and now the summary and I will try and test that view by shifting back a bit to hegemonic view of progress and change.

GEB & SRH the deal!!

I am being put off from reading this because it is so huge (and life isn’t that long… and so is this blog!!! will weed through it an condense it down to less than 1000 words when I get to the destination!!!), but I get the feeling that Hofstadter has trail blazed through the very land which I have been looking towards all these years. That said I don’t think there is a proof of the SRH or given the work last week that he even has it right! Dipping in last night for the first time I came to this:

However, it is important to see the distinction between perceiving one-self, and transcending oneself. You can gain visions of yourself in all sorts of ways – in a mirror, in photos or movies, on tape, through the descriptions of others, by getting psychoanalysed, and so on. But you cannot quite break out of your own skin and be on the outside of yourself. .. A computer program can modify itself but it can’t violate its own instructions-it can at best change some parts of itself by obeying its own instructions. p478 GEB.2000 edn

Now this is exactly the SRH, but Hofstadter has made a very fundamental mistake. If we logically cannot get outside our ”self” then what exactly are we talking about? In other words what we think is “ourself” is exactly not ourself because such a view would break the SRH. What we think is “Ourself” is always just a trivial construct within our “true self”. Ergo we can’t know self, for the very idea of self defeats itself in a viscous circle. That is the SRH.

Hofstadter seems (at this point in the book) to keep the idea of self as a fixed “reality” that somehow he magically knows about even while admitting that we can’t step outside ourselves. He seems satisfied somehow that this isn’t self-defeating.

This is Descartes in a way: “I think therefore I am” doesn’t construct an individual self it only implies a larger self – that self is exactly what allows B.Russell and A.J.Ayer to say, “I think therefore there are thoughts” – if there is are thoughts then there is also a world and then there is also be a self for they are the same!

I can’t remember what is in notes and what is blogged at this stage but last week it became clear that the only necessary object of study is the circle.

[while just looking for some reference for what I was about to write I looked at http://www.themathcircle.org/coursenotes/settheory1.pdf and saw a very simple demonstration of NULL as discussed before in this blog: {All x such that x is not in a set} which they decided was identical with {}. It is not quite the discussion of True/False/NULL but I blog it for future reference]

Circles are interesting for two reasons:

(1) They are isomorphic with the notion of set theory via Venn diagrams. So to define the set of points “within” a circle (using set theory) is at the same time isomorphic with defining what a set is (via Venn Diagrams)!! E.G. I may draw two circles and put names in each meaning that there are two sets. But I may also write a set constructor which defines two circles. It works both ways. Can I use this? Also what about the boundaries – is the line around the set in Venn Diagrams part of A or ¬A. Also the issue of open/closed sets. If A is an open set then ¬A is closed and vice versa. The points of the “edge” condition belongs to either A or ¬A but the condition cannot be “in” the set. I.E. the elements may conform to a rule, but the rule cannot be in the set itself. The points of the boundary cannot be the rule!!! This needs to be explored
  
as well as I know set constructor logic at the moment : it is the set of points within a circle (the unit disk), a subset of the Euclidean plane where x and y are members of the real numbers. It’s an open set without a boundary.

The boundary is given by

So the  union of the two sets is the closed set of the unit disc with a boundary. There are a number of points I’m not analysing now just splattering down on the scrapbook: but one is whether the set of the boundary can be used to construct the closed circle… basically impredicativity.

 

(2) They are also interesting because all this is becoming identical to that experience I had as a child with the angle-poise lamp. Last night I realised that everything here is heading to that one point.

The conclusion last week was that to construct the set of points within a circle we need to agree on a system of defining points. But as soon as we do that we define a space larger than we need. Within this canvas we then create a rule to define the subset which will be our circle. Thus a circle presupposes what is not the circle. To have a circle means that we must already have not a circle. This is the same as saying that every set has a complement (I wonder what the official proof of that is … explore). “A” seems to imply in some sense “A U ¬A”, or at least is presupposes … I have a bad cold and not much sleep at the moment and my brain isn’t up to all this today (I just had difficulty following the plot of The Departed – not good !!) … this is Hegelian Logic and inside here somewhere is this realisation that an entity implies (at some level) its opposite – not literally but at a deeper level. Is this isomorphism between something and it’s opposite expressible in some logic. That was the goal of the SRH.

===

Returning to GEB I have issues with the the concept of perceiving oneself too. How many photos can there be of “oneself”? There is no limit. How many selves can there be? By definition the latter question can be only one. Thus no picture (of which there are endless potential copies) actually “contains” in any way something that can be called self (of which there is only one). It is at best just a name for the self. “My Muse” had an imaginary friend called George. Just because George has a name doesn’t mean that George exists. In fact just because “My Muse” has a name doesn’t mean that she exists either. That relation which by definition must remain singular to qualify as “self” cannot be experienced; if it is perceived it is through intellect only not through sensory data. The search for a definition of self in symbols has been the failed quest for the SRH. Given a symbolic model of “self” the rest of the SRH should follow simply.

The best example of self found so far is Smullyan’s “norm” based on Quine. To recall the norm of a sentence is that sentence followed by itself in quotations. It is a purely mechanical function. Thus,

1.0 norm(A) = A”A”

1.1 The norm of.

1.2 The norm of “The norm of”

Identifies the norm of the sentence “The norm of” (1.1). The norm of 1.1 is 1.1 followed by its quotation which is 1.2. So 1.2 identifies itself.

I know there is still something interesting about the self-reference because of the way that a system can be committed to an inescapable contradiction or an inescapable truth – that inescapable relationship is interesting. However it is not “very” interesting anymore. I feel like Gilbert Ryle removing the mystery of knowing one’s own thoughts “privately”. The set of things that an axe can cut in half includes anything wood. It even includes its own handle in a general sense and the tree that formed the handle. The only reason that these two examples become a problem are not because of something intrinsically mysterious about “self” but simply because those system contain a contradiction. But, there is not anything intrinsically mysterious about contradiction and self is only one way to create contradictions. (This is more the way of my mind after last weeks analysis). One may create a system where an axe is shared by two lumber jacks who accidentally agree to use the axe on the same day. They can’t both use the axe at the same time: this is just a factual limitation of “being one thing”. There is no issue of self here just issues of existence as an individual thing. That is what seems magical about “self”.

So the SRH had been much more precisely demarked and errors in my original conception finally exposed. It is not actually about self very much at all! Rather to do with self being a conception that presupposes non-self. “Self” can never be everything, no construction can ever be everything, and also that every self implies a greater self which is composed from the old self and its antithesis exactly like Hegel. Hofstadter over looks the fact that for a system to know itself it must actually be not itself!!

Unstructured reverie on the answer to this Blog…

A friend said last week that the person who has taken my job is “doing better than me”. I got to thinking about this throw away remark yesterday.

The Nepali who took my job is new to the country. Does not have the educational background, the cultural acceptance or even the language of myself - a white middle class male and yet got the keys to a house last week. He has a job, a car, a wife and children and now a 3 bedroom house. My friend’s point was that I have none of these, and as my father would have reminded me, given the money spent on my education and the advantages I have in the UK being a direct descendant of aristocracy, I “should” have these.

Long ago I rejected all these things – too much hard work for uncertain benefit.

What occurred to me was my friend’s use of “better” – we talk talk a lot about these things there was no hidden criticism for me to understand in what he said. It is true that he now owns a big house and I live only in a rented garage. This is a material fact apparent to anyone. What is fascinating tho is that idea of one being “better” than the other.

I’m not naive I know exactly what they are talking about – it is fundamental to my culture (indeed all human societies). But when you look at it it is absurd. A material fact that his house is “larger” than my living space means that he has done “better”. Same applies to cars, or wives or children or anything. A man with 3 children has actually done better than one with none – or 1, or 2! A man with 100 cows has done better than one with none, or 1, or 2 etc. It is so simple, but also so abstract and bizarre.

There is some logic. If you have more children then your family line is going to progress further (probably), if you have a bigger house you have more to sell in times of trouble etc but more importantly these things are hard to come by so represent a level of “fitness” which is attractive to mates (see point 1) and which acts as a signal to others of your rightful place in the social pecking order (social structure)… which is back into the social hierarchy analysis already completed…

But, in actual real terms everything in the previous paragraph is not self-explanatory… why even do we care about survival? A version of the anthropogenic explains that if we didn’t we would not be here to reflect on survival… but apart from this only self-consistent restriction (that all other possibilities are inconsistent) we are not the wiser.

I realise that this is the first moment in this on going blog where some new understanding is waiting to enter… I wonder how long its exposition is going to take! After some work this week I realise it will take me a long time to come up to scratch with logic and information/computer science to really make in significant roads on the self-reference thing – there really has been a lot of wonderful work done in this area already and I suspect the SRH will be only me understanding what already exists than contributing anything.

The new understanding tho is a consistent idea that there is no need for a “foundation” on which things must be built. That the choice of axioms, or ontology is not a fundamental “starting” point and that as Hofstadter realises things on different levels of a structure both found and imply other things in all directions – in strange loops. This combined with the idea that complex structures (like the Mandelbrot set) really can arise from the simplest constraints applied to self-feeding systems.

My colleague has done better than me when measured along the lines present in our societies. How else could we measure it? But at the same time standing up alongside the many rulers that are present in the world of meaning that are Life does lead us to ask what is the ruler that rules the rulers? What standard brings us to measure ourselves thus? What rule enforces us to buy bigger houses and strive for more beautiful partners and more kids and bigger bank accounts? Jesus calls that rule Mammon (old Chaldee word apparently). What rule holds it true that my colleague has done “better” than me by measure of his house and attainments? That such a rule exists is not in doubt, but it is not a rule that I follow. Does this make me wrong, or is that rule not universal?

Ontologists will say that this rule has some place in ontology, but I’d like to ask is this rule a construction that arises only in a particular context (a la Buddhist dependent origination)? Does it owe its existence to other things, and they in turn owe their existence to other things – not necessarily in a line of causation from future to past, or top to bottom, but in a hall of hazy mirrors from which no-one can determine which is reflection and which is source? This a la Hofstadter.

Are the structures that we are familiar with in our Life, and which measure us and which we measure by; those things which by association magically produce a window on how big, how good, how rich each thing is, are these naturally emergent from the maelstrom of the world as much as the things that we measure are?

Is this the vague outline of the answer to my long standing question, hatched as a child, as to why there was no manual on how to live Life, and what such a manual would look like?

There is no foundation to the world. There are no founding rules upon which it is built. The roof of the world supports the foundations as much as the foundations support the roof. We really do live in a castle in the sky, the magic of which obscured because there is no ground and no sky from which to marvel at this oddity. Where ever we stand, our axioms, our ontology, we find is just another room in this miraculous castle. The structures that ask us to find their sources, are as much the source themselves through reflections and strange loops as the things outside, that is the ¬selves (not-selves), from which we seek to construct them.

This is the outset of a rigorous description of that idea that the world “just is” which is known instinctively by those who know God at all, but escapes the thoughts every time.

What remains to be expanded using hopefully logic and computer science (especially Turing computability) is some description of systems to show that they are forever dependent upon what is not present in the system itself. This is so close to Godel’s un-decidable propositions, or Turing’s un-computability that I can’t believe it isn’t already in the literature. I know Godel was working on something like this – that he failed => uh oh!!!!! is it really that hard? This is the source of the SRH also (i.e. self-reference [SR] hypothesis i.e. SR is impossible consistently): that while self-reference is everywhere it is fake because were something to “actually” (to be defined = this is the hard bit) refer to ITSELF it would have the ability to construct itself within itself and so be independent of an external system – and that - remains to be proven - is inconsistent with the system itself.

Raymond Smullyan has come to my help extremely – eternal thanks. I have his 1957 paper on languages which allow self-reference. He introduces the idea of the normalisation function (written norm or N). This is identical to the Quines that I have mentioned before. The “norm” function applied to a statement simply generates the statement and the repeats it with quotes around it. His examples:

(1) John is reading.

This is a simple sentence. If John were reading this it would be true. When I read this as I am called Alva it is false. Truth isn’t the point here however. Apply the norm to this sentence and one gets:

(2) John is reading “John is reading”.

Were John to read this it makes a statement about what John is doing. It is true that John is reading the sentence “John is reading” (which is sentence 1 above). But it is not self-referential because sentence 2 says that John is reading sentence 1.

However if we take the sentence:

(3) John is reading the norm of

When we apply the norm function to that we get:

(4) John is reading the norm of “John is reading the norm of”

This states that John is reading the norm of sentence 3. If we remember what the norm function is, it simply generates the original statement and then the same sentence again in quotes. The norm of sentence 3 is actually sentence 4. So sentence 4 says on the one hand that John is reading the norm of sentence 3, but the norm of sentence 3 is actually sentence 4. So sentence 4 also says by implication that John is reading sentence 4. Sentence 4 thus tells John that he is reading sentence 4 but way of applying a function to sentence 3.

If John is being slow (as indeed I was while reading this part of Smullyan’s paper) that “implication” may not be apparent. But when it comes it is exactly the same as moments of enlightenment. The light of awareness suddenly falls upon oneself and we are bathed in the light of truth. It is interesting how being drawn into the field of observation by self reference is so literally “illuminating”. No wonder religions use light so liberally to speak of truth and Heideggar speaks of the “lighting up” process. Our eyes and vision are very linked to our mental processes – we say “I see” what you mean. In Avatar they say “I see” you, and mean by it not with the eyes but with the mind. Light and Mind are metaphorically linked. When John realises the he is reading a sentence that tells him - not in words, but with his mind and with implication – that he is reading that sentence there is a flash of intellect that illuminates the blank words on the page and brings them to life in a higher way. That shift to a higher level is what the intellectual life is all about. Is why Plato worshipped the mental realm of forms in favour of the poor images on the wall of the world. Is why spirituality illuminates us in a purer way than the light of the sun. Why souls become alive and why souls can die whether there is material food or not. Why the reader can sit engrossed in words, that to the non reader are just marks on a page. The mind, interpretation, is what texts need to live, indeed what all material things need to live. It is not the material world which makes us live, it is why a brain is not a scientist…. and so the AI debate starts which I don’t want here (at least Turing seems to have got that wrong?).

So i don’t know whether any reader of this will ever exist or if they do exist are called John, and regardless will have grasped what Smullyan means and what I have tried to render in more verbose fashion. But, for me the point is that sentence 4 is not actually self referential!

It provides the road map of self-reference but it requires a “computer” (in the sense of someone to do the computing). If I am wrong the question is -what function exists to test that something is self-referential? What proof is there. Does it always rely upon the logician to make some meta-judgement to the effect that WOW that is self-referential. So I’ll turn to computers now and think about an algorithm which will test the self-referentiality of a statement.

OK that didn’t take long. A SR() function that takes a statement s and sees whether it can compute s from the instructions in s. Well that is nothing other than our friend the Quine. But it doesn’t completely pass the test because the function that determines self-reference is a meta-statement of the system s. What I realise I am asking is that a self-referential statement must “know” that it is self-referential. Obvious really because if it refers to itself, and itself is self-referential, then it must refer to a self-referential statement and that is a statement which makes some reference not only to itself but also to its self-reference.

So the SR() function must produce the boolean result 1 only for itself. That is the challenge.

===

The above was all cut into an existing passage which continued like this…

The proof is probably just 2 lines and one day when I have the energy this lazy pointless brain of mine has to compute the problem once and for all!! unless I can find it in the literature or someone can offer me that very same proof.

I have a wedding to be best man of in 12 weeks, a stag do to organise and that girl mentioned before in this blog to link up with and the students exams in a few weeks… my energies are being dissipated in this hall of broken mirrors… help!

Godel Esher Bach – Final lecture – mega-summary of a my own interests from 1990 onwards

 

Referring to Lecture 6 of this series: http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/hs/geb/VideoLectures/index.htm

A load of notes here about different related things.

 

 

First: The Sierpinski Triangle has an area of 0: that is the limit of 3/4^n as n->inf. But this means that within each pixel in the normal rendering (like above) there is another complete Sierpinski Triangle with an empty triangle (1/4 of the area) in the middle. The blank area is 1/4 * (0.75^n – 1)/(n-1) which approaches 1 as n->inf. There are no pixels in the true triangle!! It has no area. So what does the Sierpinski triangle look like if it has no area? And the approximation that is rendered approximates to a shape of 0 area how?

The MIT course is excellent and has refocused my eyes on some important concepts. Isomorphism was previously present in what I knew as Hermaneutics – the idea in text interpretation that a text has many layers of interpretation. My favourite film ‘Betty Blue’ is of interest because of an interpretation that I have of it. Isomorphism simply being a word for things having parallel structures that can be superimposed like football and rugby, or music and poetry.

What I question however is to what extent the structures that are recreated in the isomorphism are “really” present in the original? Does my interpretation of the film really represent something “in” the structure of the film? If we say that there is an underlying structure in the film then apart from the film itself which isomorphic interpretation shall we use to represent that structure. Another way to see that question is to ask what links isomorphisms, or what makes analogous things similar? What makes things different or the same. There is some dialectic involved in thinghood itself which gives a mixture of similarity and difference between things.

How is the rendering of the Sierpinski triangle then isomorphic with the real triangle? Mystery! In fact this is the age old problem which leads very fast to the Third Man Fallacy if we are not careful. That is to say we create a new entity to represent isomorphism (an arrow for example). But then we have a new problem how this arrow relates to the two isomorphic parts. It forms an infinite regress and a chain of infinite number of entities each relying on the next to explain isomorphism. Sooner or later we just have to accept some form of relation as an axiom… and why? Isn’t this the SRH that to explain a relation in terms of a relation creates an infinite regress…

The other big issue from the course is Emergent Property. Up until today I didn’t believe in it. I have played around on the computer for decades and been hopelessly disappointed by the uninspiring creativity of my ants or genetic algorithms. If anything such agent simulations have turned me off the subject and made we realise how remarkable the diversity of the real world and even make me doubt evolution! I am always left with the unremarkable “so what” of a magician who knows how the trick is done. Alan Turing getting excited about his self organising black and white splodges or even Kieran’s computer simulations on the computer screen are “so what” – you are getting out what you put in: a load of rules which effectively transform (in a lose interpretation of the word) the Euclidian plane to create the shapes. Put those ants in a line and suddenly their creativity is less etc etc. The “plane” while featureless and boring enables remarkable transformations to occur – that is what amazes us most I have thought. Odd also that the lecturer should have been put off Biology by realising that it was all the logical implication of Evolution and not been put of everything else by the same thought! This is what puts me off automata.

However, that said, I do understand now what they are going on about. The point is that whatever shapes are created they are not “explicitly” coded into the computer at start time. The same occurs to a pot of paint being spilled. There final splatter is not explicitly encoded into the pot of uniform paint before the accident – it emerges from the complex interaction of paint under gravity, the air moving into chaotic vortexes as the paint falls through and catastrophic release of energy through the paint as it hits the floor. That final “splatter” is an emergent property of a paint spill.

That doesn’t explain the issue of Emergent Property though. The most important thing is to realise that Emergent Property points to “levels of description”: that is what I have missed. It is true that a “splatter” is a short hand way of describing the unimaginably complex interaction of lower order things that creates the splatter. There are 2 levels of description. Now I understand at last why people (especially in MIT that has championed this Revolution since the 1960s) get so excited by this idea. This I believe is the revolution that gives us writers like Fritjof Kapra. This links with the fractal work that it creates “levels of description”. While fractals repeat in a simple way they illustrate the issue of Scale and Level of description that is a profound feature of the world. Which comes first: Scale or Fractal? Does the universe have scale BECAUSE of its self-creating iterative nature or is it the other way around? That was the interesting message I took home in a recent previous post.

Finally in this post the questions that were being discussed at the end are exactly what this blog has ended up focussing on. It is mentioned a few times that such questions are not good for our “survival” but this blog is a question about Life in is broadest understanding of which survival has proven to be a rather trivial aspect. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (which appears in the lecture) seems more and more inadequate every times I see it now. Does he really mean that the more you eat then the more security you will be able to get and the more self-realised you will get? Self-realisation starts even while you are building the pyramid as does esteem, love, friendship, etc. In economics you even get paid and food for building the pyramid so its hopelessly confused. I think I’ve completed a more realistic understanding of "needs” in this blog so won’t revisit.

The one issue that occurs again and again in the lectures and which makes me cringe is also quite strange because we are all talking about Holism and trying to get away from Reductionism but in a Reductionism mind set. I even realised I was doing the same. Here are my thoughts…

I disagree with Emergent Properties because you can’t get something from nothing. But I had to agree that the emergent property level of description couldn’t be described within the terms of the simple agent rules – a new term had to be introduced to describe what was going on. The problem to solve is how to describe the properties of a simple system – how much more complex is the new system. That was my quest since 1995 and I’m back on course altho its low down on the 2do list. The idea then is that self-consciousness is a very high level new-term to explain what is going on as a system becomes more able to refer to itself. (Altho I reject this now that is the idea that i reject). But from my Buddhism training I am aware that all “things” are nothing but their components. So I suddenly realised that I have been holding two completely opposed positions. When Buddha says that “things” are illusions what he is saying is isomorphic with saying that higher levels of description are Emergent from lower levels. That is to say that a “chair” is an emergent property of its components – this I have examined at length in this blog many, many, many times before. So why am I against emergent properties then? They are the same concept I already hold!!!

What emerges from this is my issue with the whole class and the lecturers: none of them realises that everything is an emergent property of something else. When the lecture says again and again atoms/brains/neurons etc as the building blocks of the body and the mind he doesn’t seem to show awareness that these are just emergent from lower levels (quarks etc). But worse than that it is a strange loop and the lower things are affected by the higher levels of description. The point is that you can start anywhere, take that level of description as your axiom and then see higher levels as emergent properties of that level. Computer science is one place to start but it is no more “fundamental” than politics or anything else. This links with logic because we can chose any axioms we like – that choice lies outside the system.

The error made by everyone is to hold onto the idea that for something “exist” it must have some “existing” thing inside it – some homunculus like thing that renders it “existing” in isomorphism with the error in thinking that there is a person inside our heads looking at the world through our sense… how does this explain “looking” since it uses “looking” in the definition. This is the problem of self-reference again and worth investigating…

Reductionism thinks that this “emergent property” emerges from real agents that underlie the emergent property. The discussion of how software runs on a computer assumes that the computer is somehow more real than the software. But the computer is an emergent property itself as are the atoms and the quarks etc. Every”thing" is an illusion as Buddha discovered a miraculous emergence from suitable conditions (suitable being circularly defined - tautological): just levels of description. Interesting that no-one in that lecture seems to even suspect this – this is the problem of Materialist doctrine and Self which plagues the West. The existince of reductionist and hollistic thinking in the West is the result of this error in our thinking and this is why I personally dislike Fritjof Kapra’s books because as far as I know they don’t acknowledge that they themselves are only a product of the sickness that they seek to reflect upon. As I suppose is Zen and the Art of Motor Cycle Maintenance and their ilk.

Returning to the the Sierpinski triangle quickly we have to chose to stop out of the recursion and create a pixel otherwise it would never render anything since its area is zero. Isn’t this the problems of axioms. We have to chose some fixed level of description as a starting place else we can’t see anything at all. Maybe this is how something comes from nothing – it’s in the fixing of a level of description.  An “attachment” is ignorance that things only look this way because of the fixed level of description we have got. Now I must be careful not to get too stuck in this way of thinking, but have a long way to go until I get some satisfactory proof that self-reference is impossible. Some useful quotes from the lecture:

>A book “Programming the Universe” is mentioned. The universe needs another universe to model itself. One direction I was looking at lat year was using Turing machines to show that there are limits to self-computation: need to pick up this.

(Student) Latiffe - “I am the one being observed” - [my thought, yes so I can't be the observer in SRH]
”When you start talking about yourself you are talking nonsense” … “Self reference is not a well formed thought.” END.1.22

[basically how does reference work? What level of description is necessary for reference? This is the new approach to the SRH]

(Assistant) Kieran: "This structure cannot introspect upon what it is made from because then it wouldn't be itself anymore". 1:31:31
That is the essence of the proof I’m looking for. However I do accept now that a stable situation may arise through iteration – and may have some fractal structure.

Rules, Law and Lore

More word play but was thinking that maybe the word "lore" should be resurrected.

The point follows from the long running investigation into "law". A "Law" cannot be contravened - by definition. Thus we have the "Laws" of Nature which state that a man cannot fly. We can't get around that. Yet the legal world uses the same word - but it is different. No-one enforces the Natural Law because it is a Law (some argue that God does the enforcing = complex argument) . The legal law, by contrast, must be enforced because it is not a "Law". In this sense the legal-law that murder is wrong is no different from the off-side rule in football - both are rules that must be enforced - and precisiely because they are enforced they are arbitrary and not Laws.

The legal system is thus the lowest point of human existence to date. Before the legal system the world was governed by Laws - which now that people have forgotten them have been replaced by Rules. Murder is Wrong - it is a Law. It is wrong whether there is a legal system to capture perpetrators or not. It is wrong in the jungle as much as in the city. Why it is wrong? because there is a Law that punishes those who murder: but this is very hard to see for those indoctrinated with the concept of "legality".

I chanced upon a copy of the Tao Te Ching yesterday (Book of the Way, of Life) given by a friend a while ago. It occurs to me reading it that this blog is seeking like a man in the dark toward the Dao, which i realise is the same "place" that both Buddha and Jesus spoke. In our core we know the Dao, or at least we recognise it, but we have lost sight of it. We are exactly like the child who perceives that the teacher is asking them to do something, yet as they can't work out what it is, they feel belittled and "out of the loop" and so like that child we egotistically escape the pressure and diminusion by rejecting "whatever it is" as nonsense and unimportant. The Dao is like this. It is unfathomable to the childish mind - even Confuscius is supposed to have been confounded by the Dao. We would rather it wasn't there so we can continue to believe that everything is at it seems and we are in control.

Buddha will remind us this is the illusion. Jesus will remind us to hang on the cross for a few hours and wonder what death says about us. And Lao Zi will simply remain quiet as the Dao is eternal, but hidden in everything.

Yet most of what we call legel law is really just customs that have become accepted. Like driving on the left hand side, paying taxes, accepting the soverignty of the queen and the power of parliament, education, money exchange etc. These things are not God given and differ from culture to culture. Indeed murder is cultural since we accept murder of enemy combatants in time of war, and some cultures accept murder of criminals. Other cultures have famously accepted human sacrifice. They are all murder, but cultures (and hence laws) view them differently. I was asked recently why gold is considered valuable. There are physical reasons, but the "value" has its roots in culture (i.e. law). When the global culture was rewritten (when Bretton Woods was abandoned) gold lost a good deal of its value, altho cultures as deeply engrained as gold take a long time to be forgotten (as the current battle in the markets demonstrates).

So I would go as far as to say that all Legal Law is really culture. And as culture its proper name is thus Lore.

So Three (3) distinctions can be made now.

Law is immutable. They are true in all times and all places for all people. That is the meaning of Law. Law requires no enforcement. For this reason all man-made laws are excluded. The idea that anything man-made could be a law stems from arrogance as discovered by King Knut. Laws are the realm of God, or Nature whichever you prefer. That is they are Spirituality (cf Religion in next paragraph) or Science whichever you prefer.

Lore is historical. Lore is mutable, but society resists change. Anything which is the way it is because "that is the way it is done, or always been done" is Lore. Often Lore immitates Law so that it seems that Lore is immutable. The test always is Law requires no enforcement, while Lore must be socially enforced. The arising of Government, the writing of Lore and the creation of central Power to enforce Lore required a change of language. So there is also "lore" with a small "l" to denote the child of Lore which is enforcement of culture decided by the social subset of "ruling" authority. Lore is actually the largest part of Religion including all the traditions, customs, festivals and values. British lore (Law) is generally accepted to be based upon Christian Lore (which crudely matches the real Law in places).

Rules are arbitrary. Rules are highly mutable. These must be strictly enforced because they are arbitrary. The existence of "Rulers" suggests that actually they enforce "rules". Maybe "lore" with the small "l" is actually just Rules (to be considered). Examples of rules are the change of try value in rugby from 4 to 5 points in 1992. Another example is the change of VAT from 17.5% to 15% this year in UK. Another example was the deprication of capitol punishment in UK in 1969. It is odd to think that people have lost their life just because of arbitrary rules! This is more the attitude we have to cultures that allow sacrifice - yet sacrifice is often Lore and much more deeply engrained and authorised in the minds of the people who accept them than rules. Invading Rulers discover that the closer their rules mirror the native Lore the easier it is to govern. Consider Thatcher challenging ancient UK taxation lores in 1990 - the Lore won, the rules failed even under a strong right wing government. In Tibet however it is different because it is one Lore versus another.

So there is a revised and improved examination of the notion of Law split into 3 quite separate elements.

The reason for the analysis is to examine the only Real one more closely - that of Law. This blog is about Life and its nature and characterists. Life is characterised in essence by Law not Lore or Rules. In UK we may have turkey on Christmas Day (this is Lore) and we may be limited to one wife (that is Lore and Rules) but if we live at this level we will never know what the Real nature of life was. Personally I think that eating turkey violates the Law so I reject the Lore, and I think all murder violates the Law so I reject the Lore and the Rules in places. This is the foundation of conscience and why I am arguing at length that it is not good enough to follow "orders" (rules) or perform one's "earthly duties" (Lore) to be correct. If we ever doubt this we need only remember the Nuremburg trials and the claim by so many Nazis that they were following "orders" - a robot yes, a human with freewill?

Just to attack the other side of the argument we might do well to remember Peter Sutcliffe (the Yorkshire Ripper) who said that God ordered him to murder. One might argue that he was following his conscience and he rejected the Lore and the Rules. A better example is more famous - Abraham who went onto a mountain side to murder his own child! (see the Bible or Koran). Kierkegaard examines this in depth in "Fear and Trembling". Abrahan is the father of faith precisely because he so blatantly rejected both the Lore and Rules (Ethics) and his own desires as a father (Aesthetics) to perform some higher duty (the Religious) Law in the present analysis.

It is more complex if we consider the Bhagavad Gite where Krishna explains to Arjuna that his duty as a soldier is higher than his duty to his family. This reminds us of Sophocles' Antigone also where she is torn between obeying the King's order not to bury her brother and her family duty to entomb him. She follows family and is killed by the state. Arjuna follows God and wins the battle.

There is much to pick through here and I've run out of time, but 3 types of Law is progress.

Economics, Life ...big summary attempt

A summary of economics...

With Adam Smith came the view that labour was the origins of wealth - not as has been previously thought the physical mass of the commodity gold. This realised that the more people worked the more wealth there was.

Yet labour alone is not enough - a country of Sysyphine workers rolling rocks up mountains is not producing wealth. Labour needs to be mediated by an exchange system that ensures that rewards are produced for that labour which meets demand, and useless labour goes unsupported. This way the energies of labour are evolved en mass to meet the demands of need en mass.

En mass is important because it is through the divison of labour, economies of scale and co-operation that labour is increased, not only through increased working hours. Working hours have increased with industrialisation, but the vast increases in production come more from the efficiency of the system. Reference always to Smith's famous pin factory.

But a problem is also introduced: that of fair wages. In the medieval system wages were set by tradition. Different guilds charged set rates. What changed was the realised in the Classical period was that the market place could get you a higher wage. So wages became open to negotiation. I believe the black plague's decimation of the population was the impulse for discovering this. Workers found that employers were so desperate for labour that they could raise their prices considerably (old Malthusian economics). Division of labour means that labour becomes unspecialised. This means that the available workforce for a job is everyone. The competition drives down wages. Yet the division of labour increases productivity. Who own's this surplus wealth, this profit. Unfortunately this question has never been satisfactorily solved. In default the owner of the capital has earned it - it is their reward, or incentive, for investing in the hardware of the industry. But quite a reward it is! especially when there is little risk (since the hardware can be liquidated) and the wealth that is invested was unlikely to be spent (in the rich). Compare this alleged risk with the risk of employees not finding a job and starving - a risk which carries no returns. The idea of owners being entitled to returns on their investment remains unintuitive and unjustified to my mind.

Capitalism - as this distribution system came to be called - created a division in society between those on the investment side of industry and those on the labour side. The investors gaining huge wealth for little or no labour and little risk, and the labourers receiving little wealth (in comparison) from free-market labour. But wages have been higher under capitalism than they were in the medaeval system - this is how people were often pursuaded to give up their land (they were also forced off the land by law which suggests a less than fair exchange). In the 1980s in UK the climate changed as everyone was encouraged to become capitalists. Capitalists of industry, houses and anything and everything. Risk became spread amongst the masses and with this buffer it became highly expanded and evolved. Now we get to where we are today.

But in this neat convincing picture there are vast and gaping holes. The actual increase in productivity has not been through human labour at all but through machines and the use of fossil fuel. Human energy where once it competed with animal energy (like horse or oxen) now competes with fossil energy in an industrial system. Fossil energy is enormously cheap and extremely flexible. Four times as much energy is fed into the American grain industry than is returned. If this was human labour 3/4 of the population would die of starvation at each harvest. But, it is fossil energy which is so cheap as to make this incredible inefficiency economical. Yet this drives down to extinction the value of human labour in many industries and the results is Unemployment.

Unemployment never existed in the past for if there was no work to do then you were free to amuse yourself. By definition there was enough to eat, because if there wasn't then you had a job to make some! While rents were often paid to invading rulers, the land ultimately belonged to the people. What would an invading people actually want the land itself for! They only wanted a share of the fruits. People thus had access to income at all times and were free to work as they needed.

Famine may have occurred where for some reason labour on the land became unproductive. In this case people would have migrated and competition would have existed in other places. Conceivably people may have accepted slavery in return for food in times of difficulty, or been forced into agreements to return wealth in future times of difficulty. We have the example in the Bible of Egypt storing grain under Joseph (of the technicolour coat) and selling this off at great gain. Such famines only occurred when massive agricultural failures occurred - and note even in ancient antiquity a system of distribution occurred to avoid mass starvation. Outside famines labour was utilitarian. The common sense rules prevailed that excessive consumption would create more work, and exploit resources, and ultimately lead to poverty. Conversely that saving would make what you had go further. It was a system in harmony with the Laws of nature.

In an enforced exchange system however it is famine every day. To get food you are enslaved to an owner of capital because you yourself have nothing to work upon. You cannot decide when to work because you must first pursuade an owner to allow you to work. Quite contrary to the view that capitalism encourages labour, actually it puts up blocks to labour. If you cannot find work then you starve.

In theory you do a Joseph and save while there is labour so you have cash to exchange when labour dries up - voluntarily or involuntary (this is what I am doing). In naive theory the total goods produced should equal the total cash savings - so when all the cash is spent so are all the goods bought and jobs are thus created.

This equation doesn't work however. People can earn a lot more than they will ever consume, and they can consume a lot more than they will ever produce. Both valid solutions to the exchange model. Consider someone who inherits a sum of money and lives off the interest for their life. They have actually contributed no goods to the system at all, yet have somehow gained the right to consume goods. Someone else has thus produced goods that they will never have the right to consume.

As mentioned above a logical construct of the exchange system is unemployment: a completely new concept. In the past the concept was work. A problem, a need, requires a solution and labour. No problem, and no need, then no work. It is a temporary utilitarian event. Human life while certainly largely involved with the maintainence of itself, like all life, is not dominated by labour. Normal human life is a social event involving family interactions, community interactions, shared cultures, arts. It is not utopian to picture communities meeting at sunrise and going to the fields singing and chatting. The labour is not the point, it is circumstantial, it is the stage for a social event. This is (was) existing mountain rural life in Nepal for example.

In the exchange system however everything is turned on its head. In a way this is the genius of the Classical economists. Once upon a time spending would have utilised resources and created more labour so it was frowned upon. The Classical economists changed the rules so that consumption actually stimulated jobs and because jobs were needed to get exchange value this fuelled productivity. Thus consumption actually created wealth. (I see here that maybe the Classical system limits productivity so that it is only allowed when exchange is possible - c.f. Veblen). However massive surpluses could be created with no-one allowd to consume them. The problem now was not making food, but finding something to do to earn a right to that surplus. Even when everything has been harvested and all the houses built we may still be looking for a job because everything is done by machines these days. With things on their heads all the other rules change also. Where modesty in consumption was a way of making resources go further, now modesty in consumption is bringing about economic collapse! we need to spend more to avert economic catastrophy we are told, but we need to exploit less to avery ecological catastrophy. I know which is more important, and I know which is real also.

This absurdity of the exchange system is what has logically mushroomed into the Through The Looking Glass World of modern economics. A planet in the latter stages of destruction. A population still set to double. A world inundated with technological solutions to every problem under the sun. A society which burns billions of tons of oil year to create energy to run labour saving devices and yet we are still expected to work for our living and we still do more work than any other primate (with the possible exception of Chimpanzees) and more than at any time in history (except for the last two centuries). And yet we are still expanding the economy and still increasing our consumption. We still believe that increasing GDP relates to increasing Quality of Life even while the mechanisms and understanding are a shables.

Studies in Happiness show that GDP does relate to increasing happiness. But I suspect this hides a very subtle point about Happiness. When are we most happy? I imagine it is when we get something we want. I notice people very happy when they find a new partner, or especially on their wedding day: yet I know it is too good to last and as predicted that euphoria is short lived. Give a child a toy and its the same response... and you can guarentee that a few years later the toy is in the loft. This type of happiness is the prevanent one today and I suspect the one measured. Types of happiness that correspond to longer lasting satisfactions are subtle, and unconditional happinesses are out of discussion these days. Consumerist economics relies on the former short lived happiness because that is the motivation for shifting large amounts of stock and creating jobs. This is important because we need to work to get a share of excessive profits of the system, yet it runs counter to the fact that the planets resources are limited. A logical implication is that actually consumerist economics promotes Unhappiness because if we were all content and happy then we wouldn't need anything and we would stop working and shopping and settle down to enjoy life. Yet an advert, or our friend pulling up in the latest BMW, is sure to upset that contentment and so we are back at work and at the weekend down the car showroom. Now because we have normalised this process the effect of purchasing that car becomes the thing we celebrate - like the African slave being freed. Yet in both cases we shouldn't be enslaved in the first place, and so it is a hollow victory and I hollow happiness! The records of increasing happiness with GDP are actually records of the desperation and the enslavement of the people to satisfaction!

Another logical implication of the economic perversity is "built in obsolescence". It is cost effective to make products that break just outside their guarentee period to force the customer to buy again (that is if the customer isn't already bored with the product, and the ramping of models and styles and the need to compete with their collegues hasn't already forced them to purchase the same thing again!). The system is perverse yet we (the politicians, economists, and people) seem to think that jobs and shopping is reality! rather than an invented human game.

These are not real things, but logical constructs from the exchange system. Yet what alternatives are there? Someone needs a very clear days thinking to resolve this paradoxical mess.

One thing that has become endemic in the economic system is the exact accounting of value. Its reason is to stop cheating, but it has eliminated the concepts of charity, generosity, trust and helping. Once upon a time all labour was unaccounted. Did people cheat in those days? was it tolerated graciously? Did people even note it? Today DIY, self-grooming, most childcare, most domestic work, gardening, private transport etc are still unaccounted and unpaid. Yet even with accountancy we have seen enormous thefts so we are fully aware that cheating the system is at least today prevalent in humans. And, I suppose the accountancy system enables us to see how huge these thefts are - currently running at trillions of pounds. In a less organised economy these thefts would not have been so obvious. Just how much was taxed from the people of UK during the feudal system? We will never know. (At least it was their fault for losing the Battle of Hastings.) Quite what we did to deserve the current thefts is less clear... or was it our greed in backing high return funds?

People are talking about the resolution of the current depression. Crash Gordon says we need to keep up trade and spending to create the jobs. Yet I don't see people starving - people are quite naturally "tightening their belts". This means they didn't need the things they once bought. This means all those people being made unemployed didn't need to work. All that time and effort wasted and all those resources used up for nothing. If they are hell-bent on creating jobs then rather worrying about economic growth why don't they raise taxes on fuel to make human labour more competative? Or why don't they create financial incentive to employ someone instead of a machine? It is the same result! It just makes the absurdity of the system more acutely visible.

Adding the recent conclusions to the picture we see that the Alice in wonderland world has met a need however. Human beings are easily distracted from Absolute wealth by Relative wealth. As a child when faced with a plate of food that I didn't like my mother would always remind me of the "starving masses in Africa". A very complex cultural statement. Firstly there is the contraditory belief that Africa is both the cradle of mankind yet somehow unable to support itself. This stems from the belief that "we" are better and more advanced than Africa so logically they must have difficulties with survival. The statement is also reminding me that whether I like it or not, food is a fundamental need. That I like peas and not butter beans only makes sense when I am not starving: a plate peas instead of butter-beans is only a relative wealth. Yet almost all of mankind (with very few exceptions) has what he absolutely needs. This is true today, and was becomes ever more true as you go back in time. You don't find people lamenting the poor conditions that Chimpanzees and Gorillas live in - what conditions should they live in? What conditions "should" a human live in? Actually they are not very different in absolute terms (altho paradoxically an "advanced" human would not last very long in the jungle!)

The difference is the result of 10,000 years of cultural evolution. And the impetus for all this evolution? It is status. Long ago humans ceased to be the victims of predators and became the victims of competition with each other. We had to fight for resources. But this is not Hobbes' "nasty, brutish and short" - he obviously didn't examine animals very closely who don't live nasty, brutish or short lives. You don't spend all your time fighting - you would die of exhaustion - you spend your time displaying and pick your fights with the most serious threats like any territorial or herding animal. Human displaying has become the occupation of our lives: from expensive watches, to big houses, to top schools for our kids, to qualifications, to salaries, to cars, to plastic surgery, to social titles, to life span, to space races (In the words of JFK, "we [US] want to go to the Moon because it is hard." - that is no-one else has done it, but we can!), to arms races, to technological progress, to cultural progress - anything you imagine has become aligned on the status scale. Pick anything, take 2 extremes, and you can say which carries the higher status.

Human's inexhaustable need for relative wealth compared with each other has fuelled the economy and drives our lives. Yet it is based upon nothing these days, and it is something that we can freely and without cost chose to ignore.

What is of enormous confusion is the West is this concept of Quality of Life (QoL). I will post soon a rerun of an analysis done years ago on life expectancy. Facts like Plato living into his 80's conflicts with the prevalent view that people live longer today. It is almost the exact oposite of the Medieval view that the ancients were closer to creation, were more perfect and lived longer. Noah, for example, living over 600 years I think, made perfect sense to them. Clearly how long you live is a matter of status. That people in "developing" countries don't live very long is as much fact as prejudice based upon the belief that we are superior. This is the origin of the lament in the Daily Mail that Jade Goody "shouldn't" die at such a young age. Facts are Facts, and Prejudice is Prejudice. Ignoring infant mortality life expectancy actually hasn't changed as much at we would like to believe... evidence to follow. Quite apart from this Quantity of Life and Quality of Life are clearly different things. I'm not completely clear on this matter yet but I'm prepared to propose that Life Expectancy is independent of Quality of Life. We can live a full life in a matter of years with no effect on our quality. A day well lived is better than a century poorly lived! Today in fact - if you follow your Zen Buddhism - is all that matters, be that at the end of a century of existence or just 1 week. The West makes a big deal of long life expectancy but imagine the gene for old age was discovered in China and they could instantly extend the lives of their children by 200 years. Would all us Western adults suddenly go from feeling happy about our life expectancy to feeling unhappy? Our own life expectancy hasn't changed, so why do we go from feeling happy about it to feeling uphappy about it? That is the nonsense of status. It may turn out that status really does 'colour' our whole world filling it with prejudices. Liberating from such relative wealth may be half the battle to liberation all together! Do we really care what other people think? Is it really worth wasting our time on?

So our huge brains (compared to body size), some thousands of years ago, have reached the stage where we can understand evolution. This also marks the moment where we have ceased to be controlled by evolution (the SRH - by self reference hypothesis). We can think outside the box now and take up our Life from the hands of mother nature. But its still a missed moment as people become ever more stuck into evolution struggling for relative supremecy.

For those who have seen the possibility of escape from the cooking pot of evolution we have the teachings that constitute spirituality. The lotus in the banner of this blog the eastern symbol for the rise of purity and beauty from elemental and base beginnings. Yet despite the open invitation to be liberated few have taken it. It seems that like a fledgling bird who has grown the wings to fly, we still wander around ungainly upon the ground in disbelief. Evidence has been published this year that Darwin was motivated as much by cold science as by the need for mankind to realise his common ancestory and brethernhood. Yet far from breaking down the social barriers and the development of an inclusive view of Life, religious societies still battle for supremecy with scientists, and I imagine the US military is trying to evolve ever better solutions to the problem of global domination. What maybe is missing from the theory is the understanding that an animal that can formulate evolution and see the unity of all forms is no longer subject to evolution, natural selection or competition! There is no longer need for status, no longer need for progress, no longer need for employment, and no longer need for economics. But maybe some still chose to evolve further before that day.
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what needs to be examined is the Invisible Hand of the Markets doctrine...