Polar Marine Survey results coming in soon...

I'm a bit behind here. International Polar Year 2007-2009 ends next month look forward to the findings: http://www.ipy.org/

Part of larger Consesus of Marine Life http://www.coml.org/ which should go along way to opening up the final frontier of Earth's life.

The homeless in Reading

Got chatting to some ex-drug users here in Reading earlier in the week and I was gobsmacked by what I heard!!

One is selling big-issue to get some money together to try and get off the street, get a job and house and make a fresh start. The other is waiting till his divorced wife and child can move out of his house, but remains homeless in the mean time.

What I could not believe is that these guys who were fit and healthy and seemed in good spirits already had everything they needed to be completely happy yet they still had their eyes set upon the standard images of houses and jobs.

The system has failed them more completely than I can believe. They have no reason to be anything up happy, but they are brain washed by an unforgiving and uncaring system into thinking that they must attain a standard of living, even against all the evidence of their senses.

They have solved the real problems of moisture and cold (which I am happy to say I've achieved also) have enough money for food and I presume can rely upon the good nature of the health professionals if they fall seriously ill. Yet they still view themselves as "bottom" of the pile. That is appauling and serves as the single biggest failure of our "society". I've never seen the dark side of "Progress" so blatantly before.

The destruction of the environment that comes with Progress is more subtle for most to see and I can understand why most city people don't get it. But to see the blind mindless way in which people think they "have" to attain the standards of living before they can be satisfied is insane.

However I realised an important thing also. These drug addicts have to believe that having a job, car and house is a type of nirvana as an inspiration to get them off drugs. If someone was to say you will be as happy in your "normal" lifestyle as you are on the street they may lose the incentive to give up drugs.

What is it that we are all running from, that we need to believe that "Nirvana" will happen if we carry on working, or shopping, or even being good, or bad, or starting drugs, or giving up drugs? What is this deep unease about life that keeps us all running, even those who were so close to stopping but have been encouraged to carry on?

I found their attitudes the most depressing thing I have witnessed in a very long time.

To change economics I must first appreciate it.

The more I read on economics the more I appreciate the wonderful nature of the changes that have occurred. When one criticises modern economics it cannot be the dismissing of a weak and feable foe, but only the engaging in battle of a valiant and glorious opponent. It is becoming easy to see the attraction of the work of economists which explains why their ideas have become so captivating - it also raises the bar on how good the alternatives have to be!

A note to check up how the BOE can blatantly lie about "I promise to pay the bearer the sum of ..." without being sued. Never has there been in the history of humanity a more wilful and unashamed deception of the common man. Everyone of us carries a piece of paper with the signature of Andrew Bailey undersigning a direct and undisputable promise. Yet it is a lie! because we are in a fiat money system and that paper actually is the money. The signature and promise are carried on to try and imbue the paper with the old "feeling" of wealth which is held by gold.

Either Keynesian economics works in which case we accept fiat currency or it doesn't in which case why not have the gold standard back? In which case do away with the promise or keep it as it was. What beggars belief is that the fiat system is so insecure that it must lie to confidence trick people into using it! What kind of people are these? It is no wonder that the economy is collapsing under unpaid debts, frauds, dodgy building scams when the very people who run the system are themselves liars! Truely extra-ordinary. That we are expected to take the "system" seriously and the people who take up positions in the system seriously is ludicrous... and the system had failed to impress me before even thinking about this!

Start of Self-reference proof?

The hypothesis is that

No statement can be made whose locus of reference includes itself

It is a very powerful tool in argument and serves to puncture any statements that claim to encompass a "whole". All statements are thus to be understood as dialectical in nature and exist in opposition to others. This is also why notions of an "Absolute", "God", "Buddha" or "Noumenon", "Self" cannot be expressed because such expression would entail self-inclusion.

The only exception that I am aware of is this, "All rules have exceptions". This is unique because it allows for its own exception and so remains true for all rules!

The latest approach to prove this starts as follows:

Suppose we have a system with 4 states. It can occupy only these states. Analogously in logic there is a grammar which determines the form of wff.

This system may be so designed as to express a "null" state, or default state, or reference state, for example in electronics we set "ground" in maths there is the "0" in set theory the "{}" null set etc.

Any value is state "of" the system.

Now construct a meta system, a system whose states refer not to the elements in other systems, but to other systems themselves. Thus we may have a system whose elements are all the possible 4 state systems (the example above being one).

Now there is a difference between a system being at "null" and that system not existing. It may be a null and still can be referenced in the meta system, but if it doesn't exist then it can't be referenced in the meta system.

Consider hearing. Silence is an essential part of hearing. But if we are deaf then not hearing anything has no "suprisal" value, there is no information in not hearing anything, it is no longer silence. Silence has no meaning because the meta-system doesn't include the system of sound.

This is the classic distinction between being/not-being and nothingness. Not-being and nothingness are different.

But there is not just one level at which this happens. Consider music as a system within sound. In music silence is essential notated as rests. In C20th music which is often quite precussive it is as important as sound. But one would not describe the "silence" in the auditorium before the performance starts as part of the music.

The difference between meaning of these "nulls" reflects the deep issue of bi-levels between being inside and outside a system. [It has a name in semiotics - look this up]

What is interesting about "null" values is that they have no content so it highlights the play of this heirachical feature. Is this the same as Russell and Whitehead envisaged to escape paradoxes?

Happy Birthday Mr Darwin!

Here's a question... did the idea of "Evolution" evolve?

From the self-reference paradox (stilllllll unproooovveed) the answer is no. Dawkins take note.

something to think about today...

Emergent properties

This has been a long time coming! It has been discussed before but just want to provide a clear discussion...

It is obvious to anyone that miracles happen all the time. You mix flour, butter and sugar and put in the oven and somehow this inedible mix becomes delicious biscuits. Where does this "delicious" form come from? There is nothing in a biscuit except flour, butter and sugar yet with some heat these change.

I've argued before with chairs. There is nothing in a pile of chair parts that is not in a chair, yet the "orientation" makes one a useful chair and one a useless pile. What is "orientation"? Does it actually exist? Is it worth wanting?

We may pay a large some of money for what is essentially just wood and labour. Is labour anymore real than orientation? If so what is it made from?

We accept in normal every day thinking that most of the world exists but isn't made from anything. "Money" exists yet what is it made from? When someone is described as a billionaire, what is the stuff that makes him such?

We live therefore in an odd world. There are real things like food. And there are completely imaginary things like unicorns. And then there are the majority of things in between that are not real like unicorns, yet we use them every day. What are these things? In religions they are called "illusions". They look real, we use them all the time: yet when you investigate them you find there is nothing there.

The odd things is that absolutely evereything turns out to be an illusion! But this is a seriously profound point to take on board all at once if it is new - so don't try.

In science they are called as best as I can see: "emergent properties". Thus when you arrange a chair in a certain configuration the forces interact to create an upright structure you can sit on. Now when we claim this seat as ours and pay money for it: we are not actually owning the wood or the configuration but the emergent property of a seat. When it is stolen and we feel sad, we are feeling sad not for the loss of wood or even the configuration, but for the loss of the emergent property. Altho really we may feel sad for what the loss represents rather than the loss: like someone disrespecting us etc which are even more emergent things.

If we had a Ikea flat pack of a chair and someone stole that : again it is not the flat pack we will miss but the chair which is just the same thing in a different orientation - yet we do see a difference.

So our lives are governed not by real things, but the cinema projection of emergent "things" that we place on top of the world. Like in the previous post about animal "types" versus the individual animals: we see "types" everywhere even while in reality there is just an endless flow of reality.

So don't we starve if we don't eat. Food is not an illusion. Yes and no. Food as a nutrient is not an illusion. We can find food in extraordinary places like uncooked flour and even human bodies. But we overlay on top of food the emergent properties of cooked, uncooked and nice, nasty etc. Eating of human bodies is probably not a sign of enlightenment however unless it is done without preference, in which case there is plenty of other food about so it won't happen.

It will take me many years to let all this sink in, like it has taken the best part of 10 years to get this far! But certainly the issue of "things" being a part of mind and not being part of reality which is characterised by a steady timeless flow is becoming clearer... and hopefully as Buddha promised such understanding leads to liberation and an end to suffereing!

The Anti-Easterlin Paradox

Just reading 'A Farewell to Alms' by Gregory Clark: in the closing paragraph of his introduction comes this,

'The contented may well have lost out in the Darwinian struggle...' (p16)

This is the main paradox that seems to exist... one that I only hear in Buddhist circles because the vast mass of Western commentators on "life" seem to view struggle and consumption as the key to life.

Richard Easterlin famously published work in 1974 that suggested that there was a plateau beyond which increasing wealth did not correlate with increasing happiness - it even suggested a fall in happiness. This was dubbed the "Easterlin paradox" which reveals the prevailing culture in which he published. What has emerged since is evidence that contentment does increase with increasing wealth: now that to me is the paradox!

Why? because to gain increasing wealth one must work harder, and to utilise increasing wealth one must spend harder (in classical economics tho I've argued recently this is a myth). Either we perform these extra actions randomly or we are being driven to do them - and it is that drive which is the problem. What drives people to work and spend harder? The answer is desire and the cost of not attaining one's desire we know as unhappiness and dissatisfaction. So it is true that we are happier and more satisfied when we get what we want - which is what the data bears out. But, the solution to unhappiness and dissatisfaction is not to work and spend harder: quite the reverse! it is to relax and master those desires. That is true unlimited happiness and not only is this not tested for, I don't even believe that modern analysists are even aware that it exists anymore! for they are too busy themselves furthering their careers in the fields of social research.

A simple example is the mobile phone. We are very satisfied with our new iPhone, or we are very unsatisfied with our last phone. However a hundred years ago before even phones what was there to worry about? We neither wanted or didn't want phones - nothing to excite or dissappoint us. This is phone-happiness: being free from the ups/downs of phones. Now they always argue in Buddhism that one can be free and have phone-happiness while having a phone: but to do this one must "unattach" from phone which means we claim neither satisfaction nor dissatisfaction from the phone - and to do that is to undermine the whole import of modern thinking!

Using the self-reference argument (which remains to be proven :-( if wealth makes us happy, then where is the wealth in social-research? or are these researchers unhappy?

p.s. the arguments present recently in this blog for social structure being the primary force in human activity are seem similar to what I find is called the Hedonic Treadmill.

This leaves the paradox however that once one is truely content and happy then ones motivation shifts from limited personal desire to more global compassion. What I do not understand yet however is that biological processes then become purely survival in nature and no longer pleasure: which harks back to the days when reproduction was something done out of duty not out of pleasure. I understand we have a duty to eat, how can there be life without food? but it seems odd in this culture to engage in marriage and childbirth simply for the sake of generating more people.

Can it really be the case that the Human race is destined to solve the question that desire poses and then cease to exist? or remain tethered to the post of desire and driven to greater and greater need and subsequent satisfaction? and also greater and greater suffering in the process?

I really have no idea at present about this!