Context/content *

Context/content
Like use/mention, form/content . . It is a division based on levels that derive from the relationship between that it outside/inside. Now this is what t SRH says must always exist n so a system can never be isolated n without inside/outside designations. Maybe it is tt once there designations can be made in a system they can be got rid of without setting up new levels?

Beauty is in the eye or the eye

Had a nice little argument with a (12 yr old) student yesterday on images being inside eyes. He very wisely understood the nature of the puzzle.

A scientist may argue that we see the image that falls upon our retina (viz. all those diagrams of eyes in science books). It is true that if the image is not there we don't see, and whatever that image is we do see... so you can see the source of the argument. But if we link that to our common perception that "we see what is there" then we must conclude that if the scientist is looking at me, then he sees "me", so "me" must be the image in his eye.

But if I'm looking at him also then he is the image in my eye also. (This all only works once you make the link between images in eyes and the phenomena of consciousness.) So it means that his eye is in my eye, but that my eye is in his eye as well. Reflections in reflections in refelctions... kind of how the world of meaning is.

The usual escape from this is to make "me" and "you" physical single entities which cause numerous images by reflecting light. But then you have the Noumenon problem of how do we ever see or know about a noumenon?

As argued recently all we can say is that various descriptions are just various names and predicates that apply in place of one another or not.

I accused Hofstadter of thinking in terms of "real" entities when we started talking about the brain. I still think he is making this mistake. You can tell he is U.S. educated from the 1960s; American academia stinks of this materialisms; it still saturates that M.I.T. lecture on you-tube and interesting it is the point the lecture ends up having to vigorously and quite painfully defend! I wonder how many American students start open minded and end up being indoctrinated into the materialism mould? It is quite probably this dogma which is driving the resurgence in religious thinking.

Vague thoughts after the tennis

Watching Isnet and Mahut today complete 10 hours of tennis and still not find a resolution pushed me to think about the SRH. It was being discussed by McEnroe that tennis might have to change its rules... ah ha I thought...

It seems that in any system of rules there is always the white elephant which pushes the system beyond what was meaningful. Is this like a reverse Godel? He says that there are statements that are grammatical but can'tbe proved while here we have a situation that is proven in the sense that it has been arrived at by playing out the rules yet it no longer has any meaning. The logic is just to keep applying the rules (i.e. a new game until one of the players goes 2 ahead) but it has entered territory that no-one has ever seen before, or even ever thought about before, and terrtory that everyone is convinced will never be trod again.

On one hand nothing is happening at all - unless you accept the rules and the meaning and value that has been arrived at by accepting those rules.

On the other once rules are accepted the game has been pushed outside the envelope ever imagined in the 137 years since tennis was invented. This is almost a Turing Halting problem because conceivably there is a tennis game that never ends. This possibility means that tennis is flawed altho in reality this game is extremely unlikely to happen.

Now for the SRH it would be great if there was some kind of reason why all games will always have their achilles heel... some kind of paradox that means that all systems of rules are incomplete. Godel showed that some kind of Godel numbering was required before his paradox could be constructed. But aren't there an infinite number of possible isomorphism - most not so meaningful and anthropocentric as Godel's - which can play havoc with systems? What is the limit to isomorphism?

Just as few vague thoughts after the tennis.

Capitalism = Economic Contraction

This seems to be a good argument that skimming money off into the pockets of capitalists rather than workers reduces the size of the market and therefore the jobs available etc etc. Einstein’s argument apparently

http://www.investmentandbusinessnews.co.uk/china/at-last-chinese-wages-rise-is-this-the-end-of-bubbles/

God in Man’s Image

So God created man
in his own image,
in the image of God
he created him;
male and female
he create them.
[Genesis 1:27]

Doesn’t this mean that if man knows himself then he knows God? Sure this is documented in the blog already but just making clear.

It also means that God is in the image of male and female… which historically I think is wrong since Yahweh had a wife originally.

Afraid to be nothing

My sister was commenting on her experience of the wedding and said that at one point she had done barn dancing and socialising and was going to just sit down but was caught by the feeling that if she did nothing why was she there at all? Very valid point. Isn’t a lot of what we do just to justify our existence? What if we just do nothing? That is my plotted path…

Property

Seeing that this Question began with that realisation on the walk to John O’Groats in 2003 (will find the place name and give this idea a name).

The gentleman had the most wonderful mansion and gardens. It was heaven on Earth. Yet unexpectedly after 30minutes walking it was just a tiny spec of green dwarfed by the vast expanse of land, sea and sky. It was then that I realised that altho he was in a wonderful place as far as his eyes could see, as far as he could see was a prison that cut off the outside world. Me on the other hand because I refused to have a wall around me had the indescribable vastness of the unlimited world at my feet. It was not that one was better than the other more that they are incomparable. You cannot easily or logically get the complement of “property thinking” just as those who are used to the wandering life cannot easily complement the infinite to find the concept of property and boundary. I didn’t realise what an impact this idea has had.

This thought came from another contemplation about yesterday which is also linked to ego. After a year of preparations the wedding has evaporated. There is almost nothing left just the certificates, myself and the others as witnesses and some photos. From an egotistical point of view however all this was to create an objectivity to my friend’s relationship with his partner. They now have this but everyone else has nothing. It is impossible to complement the “nothing” that we have to get an insight of the relationship. Likewise they in that sealed relationship cannot logically deduce the emptiness of those who were not married. There are many other ways to think about this I’m just focusing on this dialectic.

Now I see that my attitude to life is becoming exactly this. I have much at my finger tips right now but I am to resist building a wall around anything to call it “my own” seeking to exist outside boundaries. Now it doesn’t mean I can’t wander over the territory inside the wall but I am to ignore walls rather than use them. Problem is that the walls actually create the landscape through which we wander in “human” existence. The human world we talk about is constructed in walls.

My mistake I think is to follow the walking analogy too absolutely. What happened after wandering through this mans gardens was that he told me I shouldn’t be there. This is what created the sense of finitude and infinite after I had wandered out of the gardens. For a true wandered a wall is like a mountain just hard to walk over. For the rest of us it “represents” a boundary which is harder to get over than just the physical wall. My problem is that I am trying to stay out of all walls which is hard in a human world where everything has a name and a place. Anyway this is the direction it seems things are going and so relationships, contracts and jobs etc are impossible.

Interesting I see that my friends children 2 and 3 year are so innately property oriented. They organise things according to a world view with them at the centre. Maybe this is just a cultural or linguistic effect or maybe it is a necessary stage that the mind must pass through in order to understand the notion of separatedness and togetherness. Either way I find it very boring to play with them on this level knowing that these games are going nowhere.

The destination or the route?

 

Occurs to me as I rework the wedding speech that one of my great problems is staying on the path. I’m much more adapted to wandering and streams of conscious. The speech isn’t bad but I would like it to have more backbone so the audience will know exactly where they are and why. Still I’m growing tired of changing it all the time. Time to rehearse and memorise for Saturday.

So the question here is:

Does the path lead to the destination? or Does the destination lead to the path?

There seem to be two attitudes, two people with the latter by far being the dominant in this teleological culture we have. It seems that without a reasonable destination these days no journey is worth it. Is this true? Can the journey justify the destination?

I think yes because this is my way. But am I right and has our culture made a decision between possibilities that it didn’t need to. Shall think more…

Evolutionary Biology

 

An “Evolutionary Biologist” was arguing on Skinner’s Opinionated on Friday night that the male who spreads his genes furthest will be the most successful. Ergo males seek to mate with as many females as possible. Females on the other hand being only able to conceive ever 9months at most and investing a very great deal in their offspring can’t afford to be so carefree. They must be choosy. This is the origin of “female choice” which this blog has investigated before I think. The female has a dilemma. Does she sleep with the Lethario to ensure that her children become Letharios as well. Or, does she form a bond with a more reliable male who can support her children.

The genetic evidence is that a few men are Letharios and the majority are faithful, while most women are unfaithful with those Letharios. Now this fits the logic in 1001 Nights (Sheherezard).

What seems to happen the Evolutionary Biologist was arguing is that females form a bond with a reliable male and then sleep around to ensure that they get genes in with the successful Letharios too. This does seem to fit the reality.

However he has forgotten something. For Mallard ducks, in which extra-pair copulations are most prevalent, the males end up guarding the females from impregnation by other males. This is exactly the logic argued later in this blog for males protecting their women from unfaithfulness so that they can be sure that their children are theirs. This leads to the institution of marriage. As best-man in a few days I am traditionally there to fight off other men laying claim to the bride.

In Hero terms the institution of marriage – which the Legend of the Battle of Troy brings out too where the failed suitors of Helen formed an alliance to protect her – forms to end the state of war with males fighting each other endlessly for breeding rights with women. A species that fights itself this much to breed would just go exitinct.

There seems to be a belief in today’s society that “marriage” is an outdated institution. Maybe as I always argue with revolutionaries we should understand exactly why things are the way they are before we try to change them. Most revolutionaries become revolutionary because they are too stupid to understand – look at me ! as I seek to understand even the most basic reasons for why things are the way they are. Once we understand why things are the way they are then we are likely to not want to change them!

A circular argument previously noted in females opens up because whatever female choice dominates (by accident) in the next generation will becomes the choice that females need to make. There is no reason for what a female chooses other than to follow the crowd genetically.

So males actually guard their females to ensure that they produce their children. This is why females feel that marriage is an abusive construction. Yet at the same time they welcome support for their children because the children of supportive families will be less but prosper further than those of single parent families with half the resources. The evolutionary biologist then was making a social point in the end then by suggesting that there was reason in “free love” when actually this is a strategy that ends up with capital retribution for both wife and lover. There is no greater sin for a woman than to be seen to be untrustworthy by men – for who is going to have children and spend time with a woman who cannot guarantee that they are your children! Such women become out casts and their children the lowest social level. The men who sire those children are equally failed therefore and as a result it is not a good strategy at all it seems to me.

So there are reasons for why things are exactly why they are.

Peace = Liberation

Had a thought that an important part of pornography is the sense of “wow! he got that girl to do that”. So it occurred to me that actually (and discussed this before) the point is ego.

Another thought entered my mind looking at a girl yesterday. She was beautiful but my new consciousness would not recognise this beyond what I could see. Analysing that I saw that to me she represents trouble. Analysing that I saw that really this trouble lies in the process of competition that exists with attractive women. They are commodities and one must fight to own them. So actually they are like everything else in the world that to “have” them one must push other people off them and prove ones ability to do this. Attractive women are normalised to this process and sit at the centre of male fights and competition… as indeed do handsome men.

With regards the Peace argument – there is no peace in this world and the value of things that are competed for are only relative and diminished.

This it would appear is the quest. To seek that authentic experience where things just are. If there is competition between individuals then actually it is the source of allegiance and friendship rather than quarrel and fight.

Genetic thinking and game theory don’t really recognise this because they restrict the starting conditions. I will need to explore this in a lot more depth. But between higher individuals where starting conditions are infinite and unrestricted or dogmatic this way of thinking is fallacious.

The path to Peace is I suggest the same as the path to Liberation.

Property is War (Republic of Minerva)

 

Found the Republic of Minerva whilst looking for stuff for the wedding speech. Interesting that it was claimed by the Republic of Tonga.

According to Glen Raphael, "The chief reason that the Minerva project failed was that the libertarians who were involved did not want to fight for their territory.” [Reference: http://www.impel.com/liblib/NNLFAQ.html#12]

So if ever proof was needed that property means war here it is. If we claim anything as our own we will need to fight for it. So if we have property we have war always. Hence the absurd oxymorons produced by Nations like fighting for freedom and fighting to bring peace.

A priori then and now it is clear in my mind “peace” can only exist when we have abandoned our claim on anything.

Anyone who speaks of possessions or nations at the same time speaks of war. It is these people who have blood on their hands using these very words.

On Peace and Security

I sit on King Henry’s Mound in Richmond park. I first came here three days ago and as I walked into the poets corner was impressed by the energy. The mound is built on an old burial mound which I then concluded was the source of the energy. So I come here to meditate. It is a lovely spot though a shame it is such a tourist spot. The Vista Line runs from here to St Paul’s Cathedral which can be seen through the eye hole shown in the picture to the right. My feeling about all the history here when I first visited was a bit like being shown around a kids bedroom – there is an amateurish and unbalanced seeking to find more worth here than is actually present. The poem at the entrance to the gardens with its worthy theme of celebrating nature and the poet who used to come here, is not a good poem. Amazing that it has survived for almost 3 hundred years. There is just this clawing feel in the vistas to Windsor Castle and Runnymead etc that the area is seeking too hard to connect itself to the ”heart” of England and its royalty. This blog doesn’t believe those things are more than mytholo gy like King Arthur but what reason has Richmond to have some central place even if it were real? I compare the area to poorer areas which are necessarily marginalised if Richmond gains some central status. It is such a shame that humans are so stupid. Richmond is no better that Whitely in Reading yet the atmosphere here is peaceful while in Whitely the locals turn it into a dump. It is because they believe it is marginalised and the Richmonder’s believe that here is important and central. Actually there is no difference – ask the squirrels running around the tree in front of me!

Now the point. This morning I woke up considering this issue of “middle path” and comfort. I am tired. I have been working till 10.30pm the last 2 days with a student, followed by the 1h20m journey back to London. I am getting no pay now from either students due to money troubles – though I expect money from at least one when their father returns in a month from visiting his poorly mother. I am due to visit the doctor on Monday with a acute bowel pain – though I realise this is just a development on something I’ve not paid attention to for over a year. Probably an ulcer with the stress I feel and the amount of chillies I consume, though worst case cancer – at least I’ll have an early chance to face that most fascinating of things called death (mean that sincerely). I have this best man speech to give in 2 weeks and the stock markets have gone chaotic (as expected) and I’m busily trying to keep up with the crazy stock trends. The builders wake me at 7.45am each morning so no chance to make errors with sleep. Not much really but enough to make me consider “well being”. My cousin is moving into this 5 bedroom house. It will be an amazing place when the builders finish and it makes me think about “middle path”. Certainly I do not need or even desire such an extravagant place but there is no doubt that living in Richmond and having a house and place to stay peacefully is a good thing for body and mind. I feel better for sleeping in this house and visiting the park each day which I have not been able to find in the garage where I have to sneak around like a criminal avoiding unwelcome attention that could lead to having to move out. Even on my long walks sleeping rough carries some stress because there is the worry of rain, of mosquitoes, and being woken by a disgruntled local. I used to argue with a friend at the temple the exactly placing of the “middle path”. It seems that I am not quite there, I am a little too ascetic for the middle path. Not completely certain but my feeling now is that I would be better with just a bit more security. So this morning I consider this: how can Buddha and his monks have had security living entirely off alms and sleeping (initially) rough in the forest? They could be attacked, they could starve if people didn’t give them food. There is risk of illness, snake bite, tigers, mosquitoes carrying disease – very many things that it seems upset the mind/body system enough to diminish its power to peace and clarity (or so it seems to me now). So how to find a bit more security without owning, or paying someone to own, a property?

Of course the worry is that too much security and one forgets and becomes complacent and lazy. Certainly all those people who find like a bit flat have simply forgotten how much they have. Ideally I believed that non-self would give security but it seems that security is needed to get the peace and clarity to find non-self… maybe.

While writing this what I imagine is a robber fly has just crashed out of the sky with its prey of black fly and is doing battle to contain its breakfast. Shocking how brutal but equally amazing.

Resource Allocation

The idea was first put in my mind by a girl I lived with at college who commented on the regimented rows of houses that make up suburbia. I could see what she meant but didn’t understand. That thought has grown.

Here is the view from my window this morning as I stay with my cousin. Beautiful in one sense but completely absurd in another. Mathematically exact delineations of space everywhere. This is the beautiful part until you realise what it means – every single identical patch of land is a single human being (or genetic line i.e. family) marking out its territory. As though we were barnacles on a floating stump of wood in the ocean, is this only as far as the human race has got?

I don’t understand it yet but what has got into us that we who share a language, a conception of the world, a culture, a knowledge, we even look the same; that we can’t even work out how to live together and default to rigid absolute cut boundaries that mark out the influence of neighbours. I saw myself and my family as dysfunctional and unable to resolve conflicts and reach agreements – it seems it is a pathology that is assumed in the fabric of our very culture!

Maybe I ask too much but I' don’t accept second best. We want the best mp3 player, car, house, wife and kids, why not start with the best way of life?

Have been arguing further on the “culture of violence” on facebook. Logically it follows that man needs to put Peace before all other delineations. Thus at its limit Peace requires that we put people before even family. It makes sense intellectually: what reason have we to put our wife and children, mother and father “before” another person who is also a mother, father, wife or child. True we owe the debt to our parents – but everything is interconnected and we owe that debt really to everyone. If a friend were to repay some of my debt to my parents on my behalf and me to his on his behalf is anything the less? Maybe some egos are dented because “my” son didn’t respect “me” – my mother might think – but this is exactly the thinking that founds the culture of violence. So my mother gets resentful at a friend helping instead of me and doesn’t see the human value of that person. And so it propagates throughout the culture right up to the Nations. The hidden violence that comes from affiliations and organisations. I commented in Facebook on the absurd situation we have internationally where US senators have a mandate only to their own people and yet whose actions affect the whole world. Precisely because we are all inter- connected it is meaningless to delineate so absolutely as we do. Above all must come the value of Peace that lays over all delineations. Like the churches of old: if a man is thirsty and needs water then give him a drink before you ask who he is, what money he has, why he is there, has he a passport, is he a criminal etc. If you believe in God isn’t it Him who does the judging and we who are reminded not to judge lest we be judged ourself?

Argument went towards “Ubuntu” – that African concept of friendliness and the observation that there is a pathology in being “sociable”. I mean that in the sense that famous, popular, high profile people have something wrong with them if they seek objective measures of their sociability – like being members of groups etc. A sociable person is just friendly to the “people” they meet irrespective of what societies they have joined or belong to. In this sense, exactly, societies are actually antisocial because they exclude as well and include people (been argued before). Social delineation is actually an antisocial structure that puts a barrier between men and women that doesn’t need to exist. Looked at like this our organised modern “society” is actually the most pathological and unnatural structure of mankind. When you meet someone there are so many layers to get through before you see “them”. The job, class, sex, race, family, politics etc. All these are trivial compared with “them”.

And so returning to the picture; altho there is no easy alternative, to comprehend there is a pathology also in this exact replication of unit of living one for each person as though we saw ourselves as replicates of each other with boundaries around each other rather than the more realistic view of us all living together in an inter-connected world where we share everything from the sky above us to the air we breathe and the language we think and write about all this in.

I should use the words on this page as a metaphor for the notion of individuality, separatedness and interconnectedness. True the page can only become a page of meaning because each word is separate and occupies its own place in each sentence and on the page. It is that separatedness that enables the words to come together as a whole… and I need join the others down stairs for breakfast rather than be separated up here with these words… shall think about that more.

Testing Non-Violence

OK remembered the ultimate test of non-violence from Tour of Duty series. The pacifist doctor is faced with the classic situation where he has a chance to shoot an enemy soldier before that soldier takes his comrades life. He stumles and his friend is killed. The enemy solder is then shot anyway... what did his pacifism achieve?

A biger example just to leave no doubt of the problem. Imagine that the enemy soldier had been heading toward a village of known innocent women and children to commit a massacre. After the masacre he was going to die anyway would we shoot him to save all those lives?

Traditional wisdom is actually a bit more complex, it runs like this: those women and children have more reason to live than the solider heading toward the massacre. Why people would ask should he live given that he is going to commit such a terrible action. After the massacre that turns into the argument he has no right to live given that all those good people just died at his hands. Leaving him alive feels like an insult to all those who died. They have lost their lives while he still has his - it is basically unfair and unjust. Probably simpler in terms of property: if someone takes money from everyone it seems that he has lost his right not to have it stolen off him. We steal it back Robin Hood style and feel justified. So in convential wisdom it is not just a matter of stopping him in his tracks, it is also a second layer where his desire to commit massacre means that he forfits his right to life himself. Both these end with him being "justly" shot.

A true pacifist has a hard problem here. However now I'm a bit clearer on this idea the solution is simple.

We lay down our weapon (if we are even carrying one). This is the 1st absolute imperative of Peace. We then have no choice but to approach the gunman, unarmed with hands above head and intervene. Now chances are we will be blown away and just add another body to the body count of the massacre. The reason however that this is not a problem is that the second argument above is invalid. The women and children do not have more right to live than the gunman! It sounds odd. The point is that the gunman is wrong to be bearing arms. In some ways the pacifist is being cruel in not shooting the gunman because he is allowing him to commit an action that will ultimately hurt the gunman far more. Dying is easy it won't take more than a day at most from mortal wounds. Trying to balance a mind that has commit an atrocity is virtually impossible. How can we know happiness in a mind that has experienced the hatred of violence? It is impossible. Such a person enshrines themselves inside a dungeon of unhappiness for a very, very long time with no way out! When the pacifist takes action it is to stop this type of suffering, not the death of the women and children: after all we struggle through to keep them alive and come back in a 100years and they are all gone anyway.

What is also worth bearing in mind is that the assmption that the pacifist will be blown away is important to assume, but it probably won't happen. The reason is that sacrifice is a very, very powerful weapon. The reason is where is the point in shooting someone who has evidently accepted death and who poses no threat? We shoot because we are either afraid or we are takng revenge for another death. There is no fear in someone who has submitted their life to you, and there is no debt for death when you see that someone can give their life away so cheaply. Sacrifice destroys violence. It uttely cuts the tree down. I have seen this to some extent myself when faced with dangerous people I offer my life - it wakes them up out of their hatred.

Now Tibet seems to challenge this argument. I thought even the Dalai Lama was questioing non-violence these days. I would say his weakness (if I should be so bold as to suggest he has one) was that his first premise was "Tibet". I don't know the history of Tibet but I assume that it arose like China from conflict. The Dalai Lama has been reborn to wield the hidden swords in his nation state. This is what has fuelled the hatred from China (which also has its hidden swords) and so there is violence without end. Tibet should submit to 'China' as Hero argues, exactly as China should submit to the U.S. - it is their argument ;-) Ah we see another weakness of the Hero (Violence) argument that it is great to submit to Chin (when you are Chinese) but not for the Chinese t submit to U.S. I should have put this in the last blog for it supports my suspicion that the Hero argument only really works retrospectivel after Chin made China not before.

This is another version of sacrifice. The Chinese (if they were really without violence) should submit to the U.S. and become Americans. Why would the Americans (converted Chinese) possible be annoyed at being American? Violence is all absurd when you look at it from a few angles.

So sadly the pacifist has to reconcile the massacre of the village in his world view. Pacifists have to accept that the world is a really bad place and that violence is truly horrific and that people will do obscene things to one another in the name of hatred. This is the way of the culture of violence. We cannot take up arms to stop it, only sacrifice on the cross of non-violence along side all the other innocents and know at least that we lived and rest in Peace and didn't live and rest in Violence.

Non-Violence

Facebook comment quoted:

The non-violence paradigm isn't to do with other people, that is the violence paradigm - for example if other people behave well then so will I, if they pick up swords so will I... non-violence means that we never pick up a sword or even think like that. If we get killed this is bad, but better die peacefully than pick up a sword ourself and make things worse - that is how wars start and the whole cycle kicks off again leading to Chin and Nation states. In any case the only reason most (all) people pick up a sword is because they are taking revenge for some hurt they feel... hurt is hardly cured by picking up a sword ourself! The non-violence paradigm has to be personal choice. If we live in a society dominated by the violence paradigm (which we do) then it makes life hard to be peaceful but to those who see that fighting really is harder it is just a sad fact that must be endured. Hopefully people will see the peaceful way and make their own choices - but not while every politician, film, newspaper and knife carrying kid worships violence.

Was thinking again about Gandhi … think i commented before on him not really being an advocate of non-violence. I think I still agree with that. It is true that he didn’t pick up a sword but he still fought and it is what he fought for which lets him down. Basically he swapped white rulers for brown rulers. Now how absurd is that! This is the let down. How can you build non-violence on something that is basically hatred based on skin colour!! If not skin colour then he was gripped by the concept of “nation” which I’ll explain is based upon violence.

The Facebook discussion began with the film “Hero”. In a nutshell Emperor Chin unified the warring states in what became an empire named China after him. As far as I can see the argument is the same as Hobbes in Leviathon that in terrible war people eventually realise that endless attrition is worthless and they settle for being ruled. The cycle seems to be here that at first people pick up swords to be free, or to avenge death (as with the assassins) but when retribution comes from other people with swords it turns messy and everyone loses. Eventually everyone sees that endless retribution is self generating and the swords become internalised and the ruler can rule without violence (the film’s conclusion).

I saw something else though. I don’t accept “China” (or any Nation) as an axiom (after discussion held in this blog). “Nation” has to be explained which is what the film tries to do (and many political philosophers have). The argument here for China is based upon the assumption that people will fight without a mutual contract to keep the peace. Exactly the same as Hobbes’ state of nature “nasty, brutish and short”. It is as though people are cellular automata and follow the same solutions as game theory predicts. I know from watching that MIT course that people working in emergent properties are using game theory (solutions to prisoners dilemma, Nash equilibria etc) to understand and predict mass behaviour (a study started by the Nazis) and to evolve a new type of warfare (the Joint Vision 2010/20 US military stimuluses). Certainly these forces exist but the idea that humans behave as mass entities simply isn’t true. However this presupposes that humans have an element of socio-pathology – I met a borderline sociopath during the week and it got me thinking. If people who are averted to social interactions are considered to have a pathology, by symmetry isn’t there another pathology which is people who cannot separate themselves from social interactions? This is hard to understand given that “self” is constructed within society “us” – but a sociopath has a self that is Socially constructed! There are two levels of society – the true level that constructs even the mind of a sociopath and the superficial level of game theory based on individuals. My argument is that violence is a process that calculated on the superficial level between “egos”. But those egos that either do co-operate and are peaceful, or do not-co-operate and fight, are constructed within Society which is Peaceful because you can’t get outside!! So why the contract? Why the game play? So what if people just chose Peace in the first place before they started fighting?

Things to clear about with True Peace however is that it cannot be “enforced” and it can’t be punished – these are within the violence paradigm. Forces enforce peace through violence, nations work by violence because as pointed out in Hero the sword is still there it is just “not in hand or heart” anymore. We just need to look at Tibet to see the violence inherent in the concept of China. Indeed anyone who speaks in the language of “nation” speaks the language of war and violence. National authorities like the police are also the language of violence. It is totally obvious when you see the activity of police and armies they are the epitome of violence – this is one of those realisations that was always there under my nose but never saw it.

So what happens when you ignore the systems of violence? Well you don’t dismantle the systems of violence that is just remaining in the paradigm of violence. You simply ignore them. If everyone ignored them the systems of control and violence would naturally collapse. Mankind would experience much greater freedom and something like Heaven on Earth. Now according to game theory chances are that many individuals would fail to understand this and would be tempted toward greed, anger, jealousy etc. In a non-violent culture they would seem rather odd and presumably the culture would have its ways of dealing with these pathologies like talking them out and seeking personal balance again. If too many people at once started on the path of violence again it would simply lead back through the warring states period and back to Chin.

What is important to understand however is that individuals don’t have to get involved. The sociopaths who make up society (small ‘s’) the ones who get involved in politics, social climbing and war, these are the ones who make and break systems of control and these are the ones who seek peace. Those who seek True Peace don’t actually “do” anything because there is no such thing as Non-Peace. How can a power attack itself through entities built from that power! This is the SRH… In contrast to the version “How can beings attack the conditions for their own power” which is possible. The only way to identify them is that they don’t see any reason to use state apparatus and see any reason ever to inflict harm. True that people who think in the violence paradigm will exploit and hurt people in the non-violence paradigm, and non-violence individuals will seem to lose out in situations that violent individuals see as conflict situations – but this is only an illusion. In conflict someone has to die and non-violent individuals accept that it will be them – the argue that it should be someone else (the reason we pick up weapons and become skilled in swordsmanship like in “Hero”) is the essence of violence and all the compromises and loss of freedom that it entails.

Violent individuals really are absurd creatures. We fight to preserve ourselves. This leads to endless war so be accept a nation state in order to survive… and then we end up having to die for the nation state when it goes to war. If violent people were prepared to die for their country why didn’t they just do this at the outset and resist the temptation to arm themselves and start the “state of nature” which lead to the creation of contracts and nations in the first place!? And if we die fighting and the nation wins we have only maintained the status quo that arose out of wanting to survive the “state of nature” – in other words we were only fighting to enforce the solution to warfare in the first place – how absurd and twisted is that!

Other absurdities of the violent paradigm are present in the film “Hero”. The most powerful man in the ancient world Chin who controlled the largest empire spent his whole life living in fear of assassins. In other words he never enjoyed the ”peace” that he was supposed to have created. As Lao Tze was to point out later opposites stick together. The more powerful you are the weaker you are. Another irony was that for all his power he could not defeat Death and even went mad taking mercury remedies speeding up his death. His violent path in life certainly is not a model for anyone! If he wanted to live unhappily and die young why didn’t he sacrifice himself for True Peace rather in the creation of a Nation which has confused the minds of people for thousands of years. In the West we have Jesus as an even more powerful individual who did exactly that and left no Nation behind. The attempt to create Christendom is the most embarrassing interpretation of non-violence yet, a sign that the Western mindset is just as stupid as the Chinese. In both cases we have excellent examples of non-violence: Christ, Buddha and Lao-Tze (true he was a civil servant) and yet no-one understands them.

Thinking of Cake

 

It occurs to me yesterday that I am embedded in my own thoughts. I mean this is the sense that we get engrossed in a story or film and follow its narrative as it unfolds. Our perspective and horizons are closed down to the limits of the narrative so that it becomes a self contained universe. This is essential in a film for example because we could not accept the film as real and at the same time accept our sitting in an auditorium as real. At the same time we read a text and we either entertain the reality that we are reading a text, or we immerse in the “meaning” of the text, but not both at the same time.

This is identical to the issue of language and meta-language which Godel circumvented by introducing the numbering system so that “texts” could be referred to meaningfully within texts: isomorphism that provide correspondence between the substance of a text and the text itself.

Considering functions the other day I thought about that computing theorem which states that it is always possible to find a new program which takes a certain program as a parameter and computes the same results as that program: in other words an interpreter. This means there are at least 2 versions of every function that we can write. It means that the “result” of a function must be separated from the “implementation”. In that MIT lecture they showed that the Sierpinsky triangle could be generated by Linden-Mayerhoff diagrams as well as by Iterated Function Systems. There is no apparent similarity in method only in result. This means that one cannot explain an emergent property by the (computable) mechanism that created it. This is really why is it called emergent in the first place. So we immerse into the workings of a program or function (become a Turing computer i.e. someone who computes) and we start crunching through the rules of the system. We absorb into the narrative and close our horizons down to the limits of the system. The result and what emerges from our immersion however is quite different from that lower level of detail. To appreciate the result, indeed for a result to be distinguished from the system, for it to output, it must emerge from the system and be distinct from it. This is all present within the ideas of output and result before we even begin. This occurs because of context. A computer object will conceal as private its working and only make available, in accordance with a prescribed interface, certain values of its operation. These are deemed important to the outside. It is the outside which determined what the function outputs. Now this is the essence of one approach of the SRH that the inside cannot determine what it should be available on the outside of a function. Now Godel seems to have put the cat amongst the pigeons here by pointing out that separate the inside from the outside as much as you might try you cannot eliminate isomorphism and meaningful parallels between the two levels… something that the observant Godels among us can pick up on to show how inside and outside are not really separate. My argument here is that we still need the Godels amongst us to see these things: isomorphism don’t come out of the mix by themselves. So the Godels introduce a new level to the in/out systems: a level presumably which has its own in/out. I need to think this through still…

Linking to GEB (Godel, Esher, Bach) the inner message and the outer message are indeed separate. The outer message being the text or the code of the function and the inner message would be the meaning or the working of the function that we find when we immerse into. The pictures on the screen versus the story that is being told by those pictures. Vipassana Meditation in Buddhism specifically trains us not to get into the story being told so that we can see the pictures in their plain outer message way. The outer message is then the Truth and the inner message is the imagination that is an illusion. This I will investigate a bit further: my current understanding of sunyata (emptiness) is that the “form” or outer message is actually the illusion. An example being the bringing the components of a cake together and baking and being amazed at how this now delicious food came from what before was quite odd tasting. It is as though the cake has come out of nothing. We scientifically know the process that created it, like we know the processing of a computer function, but the result is an emergent property of that processing. Cake is not present in the original ingredients because if it was why do we need to make a cake? That refers to the blog on Making a few weeks ago. So the outer message is the illusion because it is quite separate from the ingredients. In Vipassana however it seems to be the other way around: the form is what we are sensing and the process is what we are thinking and so it is the illusion. This is Hegel’s view and that of Phenomenology for reference. Actually I see both views are the same. The point is that Cake is real. We eat it, we know it, we desire it. The process that creates it is something we learn and we imagine that it is happening. We don’t actually see it. Buddha uses cause and effect however to show us that that there is nothing in Cake that is not present in its ingredients to show us Voila! that the fixed form Cake (that we like) is empty and not itself “made” of something called Cake, but rather from things (we don’t like so much) called the ingredients. They are the same and our desires are for things that are ephemeral and substances less.

So returning to the start I realise that I am embedded in my thoughts. I find myself inside the story that my brain creates with all these words. Where I should try at will is outside these thoughts so that I do not take them to be too solid and Cake like!

Maybe this is the SRH. A function cannot identify its own output.

Adders 2010

Made a visit to Frensham Pond in Surrey on 24th April to see whether I could catch my first glimpse of an Adder in 25 years!!! I have looked for them on my walks but have never had the time to really track them down. I made a special effort to go to the right habitat and voila. Amazing. A male checking its territory I decided. I didn’t see any battling in the famous ‘adder dance’ so still have this to look for one lucky day.

 

 

 

 

 

They are fresh out of hibernation (late this year) and I saw two discarded skin sloughs too.

 

 

 

 

 

Also of interest was this Green Tiger Beetle… or actually many of them jumping all over the dry sandy soils of the heaths. I’ll be looking out for their grubs later in the year that lie buried in the sand in ambush.

 

 

Saw my first Brimstone of the year (very late) and heard my first cuckoo too.

Am I bothered?

Recently I have noticed that I can’t be bothered with most things. When angry I simply can’t be bothered to continue the fight. In terms of lust and relationships yes I would like them but it no longer creates a violent desire to possess: I simply can’t be bothered. Been an avid watcher of films in the last few weeks (most probably a displacement from writing this best man’s speech)… I am growing progressively more tired of films and narratives in general. Blood Diamond was excellent but you can’t help thinking as it unfolds – so what was the point again? Then I saw Pearl Harbour and again what a waste fighting a war when people seem to have it so good. Does the fact that the men and women prove themselves as war heroes… again what exactly was the point again? It makes the blood run and the testosterone pump through the veins and it is stimulating and exciting fighting a war … but we see the war being fought in that love triangle as well and there are winners and losers when we fight … as I have always felt instinctively and certainly: if someone has to lose then no-one can be a winner. So what is the point? Japanese fighting Americans fighting Japanese fighting Americans… not bothered. Harry Potter films are for kids and again one wonders what is the point. Goblet of Fire had some more depth in that Harry has to face an inner struggle within himself – was he bad? That is a fascinating question because if we are bad then we are hardly a good judge of our own character! This way once evil has taken root there is almost no escape. My mother makes me angry yesterday. She was saying that I should have a job. Everyone of my age has a job etc. I wanted to fight, and said some harsh things as you do when arguing, but inside I couldn’t really be bothered.

So I take a walk. Have I gone too far? I don’t feel depressed. I actually feel a deep sense of ease and happiness. I am getting free from the struggles of the world and simply don’t want to be involved anymore. I have always struggled with my parents view of duty that are we just machines that perform our duties without rhyme or reason? This was my view of life for a long time because this seems to be how people behave. Do we really want to work, build businesses, fight wars? Maybe some people do to which I say go ahead (as long as you don’t destroy the planet in the quest for your uncertain goals). But if they don’t and they are doing it out of blind duty then maybe I should join their ranks. But what is the point? If no-one actually wants to do all this stuff then why do we do it? I’m making my stand. It is worthless in my eyes and so I won’t do it. Simple. Yet the question remains is this the right path? Is this what Buddha meant? I thought this on my walk.

The sun was setting and I came to stand and watch the ball of embers reaching sunbeams out from behind the cage of clouds. It was mesmerising. First thought was how far I have travelled to see this before and here it is on my door step. Isn’t that a metaphor for life’s struggles! Another thing I have always felt deeply: everything we need for existence is right here, right now – there is no struggle, there is no journey. That which we need to posses and travel for we don’t need and worse is just a mirage which up close reveals its true identity as what we had before we moved.

A random quote from myself: Property is exactly like the offside rule in football: it only makes sense when you are playing football. That feeds back to everything discussed last year, but shows up the foundationlessness and conditionality of what we do. Which reminds me that last week I was realising that it is hugeness of the world, the fact that whatever undertaking we frame and pursue is itself framed by larger and larger frames of reference, each bring a new perspective upon our endeavour and undermining the reasons for it. For example I write this blog in my own little world, but I am sure someone else has perfected already what I write – why not just read what they have already perfected? Is the realisation that there is no underlying fixed reality the arrow that kills the demon of attachment and eternalism? Once we see all things as existing in their own little world, conditioned by whatever local events and conditions unfold, aren’t we freed from locality?

Returning to yesterdays walk. I felt as I was absorbed into the sunset that I was myself manipulating the clouds and almost reaching with my soul into the flames. Not a particularly profound experience I don’t want to give the impression it was a big deal. It made me analyse though the relationship between myself and the world. I have desires for this to be like this, or that to remain like that etc. The world has its own ideas – it just goes about its business as the world does. When the world goes my way I am happy. When it goes against my desires the force of those desires creates a sense that the world is actively going “against” me with a force. Like Newtons second law of motion however that equal and opposite force is all generated in my internal motion. I wish to go swim along the river bank but if the river is flowing against me then I feel a malign force in nature that is making things hard. If on the other hand I wished to swim the other way then I would see the river as being benevolent and I would be happy. Yet the river has no intention of its own. It being good or bad is created in the world by my own energy and motion. So I came to see the world as neutral and the sun setting just a simple event. Instead the up and down and coming and going I saw all originated within myself. Isn’t this half of the issue of karma? If I was blessed with the ability to desire that which was happening I would be always happy and peaceful! Alternatively if my desires were malleable and changeable, if they could not be bothered to fight the neutral world then all problems would cease. This is when I suspected that I have been living wrong. I do struggle. I do war with the world around me. This is my culture: both in the West but also within the family. Things are got by heroic struggle is the belief, against odds, through the power of one’s own self. This is the mythology that I have lived by. Yet actually as the saying goes the strongest reed bends in the wind. Some people think that this is insincere and weak. To simply go with events is for weak and slippery men. How can you trust someone who will sway when the going gets tough?

While I criticise the new approach something else. I lost all my emails for the last 5 years. Posted it in Facebook and a friend replies “impermanence”. True but I have a problem. If I just accepted impermanence then I probably wouldn’t have kept the emails in the first place. Indeed I probably wouldn’t have kept the friends. If we just accept the changing of the world then I would be dead by now, just accepting the fact that I am impermanent and will come and go. All that work my parents did to raise me would be wasted (my mums argument against me) and I would simply sit back and point out that they were too attached to me and they should realise that I was always going to die, just a bit earlier than they probably expected.

It is not that this stuff is profound but that it is exceptionally hard to know how to use it all.

Based upon yesterday however I at least felt I had an understanding. Being at ease and bending with the wind is not about giving free reign to evil. One does not obey the orders of an evil person. One’s life may actually become very hard in doing this. So it is not about being easy. It is rather not desiring things that one cannot have, or better desiring things that are extravagant, exotic, unusual or difficult to come by. There is humility in desiring what is ordinary. In so doing we free ourselves from struggle.

Now I still don’t get it. But just (re)-logging a stage for future reference. I say re because nothing is really new, I keep looking at the same thing “life” from different angles trying to work out what it is.

Tragedy of the Commons

 

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

Complement of a formal system

In set theory because it is easier for me.

I remember reading that Turing argued that a symbol set (alphabet) must be finite for the symbols to have meaning. Does this also apply to the complement of an alphabet? I may have a universal set E composed from the 3 members who I will name 1,2,3. I chose these from an infinite number of possible symbols (one for each counting number). So any universal set is going to be finite but with no upper bound to its possible size (maybe the number of atoms in the universe). The TransUniversal Set (T) will be the Union of all the possible universal sets. T will then also be finite! We can define the complement of a universal set E thus:

E U E` = T

Where E is formed by positive choice, E` is equally defined by negative choice. The same actions define E and E`.

Now I am deviating from standard set theory because I am dealing with meaningful symbols here. {x in N} is not allowed here. Need to work out details why.

So we can then construct our hierarchical system as the union of an infinite recursion with the Power set function. S = …P(P(E)) U P(E) U E. This set is now infinite.

Now if we use some system of Godel numbering then each set maps to a Natural number, and conversely each Natural number maps to a set.

e.g. I’ll use 2 bit bytes for simplicity. The = symbol means corresponds in the metasystem.
{ = 11
} = 00
, = 01

With an empty universal set we can then construct the natural numbers as cardinals of the sets as usual. Each set corresponds to the given code which can be interpreted as a binary number as given in decimal.
{}    = 1100 = 12
{ {} } = 11110000 = 240
{ {},{{}} } = 111100011111000000 = 247744
{ {},{{}},{{},{{}}} } = 11110001111100000111110001111100000000 = 259780452096

In reverse using the meta mapping, the number 15 = 1111 corresponds to the string {{ which isn’t a set in our system.

Worse the random number 267453 = 1000001010010111101 can’t even be mapped.

There are three levels then at which the system maps to Natural Numbers:
Level 1 – S1 – the set of numbers which correspond to valid set strings – this is S. {…,240,…}
Level 2 – S2 – the set of numbers which correspond to strings – which includes nonsense strings. {…,15,…,240,…}
Level 3 – S3 = N – which includes even numbers that cannot be mapped to strings at all. {N}

I imagine that S2 and S3 can be merged with a suitable “choice” of meta system. I’ll assume this and call it S*.

So the complement of S can be defined as:

S U S` = S*

So a system has a complement at two levels. The complement of the elements (character set) and the complement of the set of possible sets of these elements. And now I’ve run out of steam this morning… but can’t these two sets be put into correspondence?