On Dawkins … again

 

Been toying with these ideas for years. It occurs to me yesterday that there is this potential problem in Evolutionary theory. Evolution is usually considered one dimensional. It is about the gene frequency in successive generations. But actually it can be considered as binary i.e. survival or not. The common garden worm is a form that has survived as is the human species. In terms of evolutionary success there is nothing between them. They each occupy their niche stably. People might argue that humans were superior because we command control of so much of nature. The problem for us is becoming ourselves – can we command ourselves? I personally fear not – there is a contradiction in commanding oneself (SRH). So the human race may indeed be out lived by the worms. This makes the worms more successful than humans. Yet we know in another sense that humans are “superior” to worms. Humans for example can codify and discuss this issue… can even gain liberation from material entanglement. It is blatant then that against the yard stick of evolutionary success most of what humans are about does not get measured. Even those individuals/species that go extinct have qualities and values that evolution does not respect.

The argument can be put this more interesting way. Dawkins has an idea that gene frequency explains everything – call it Selfish Gene. He even extends this idea to the spread of ideas themselves. Suppose there was a gene which corresponded to an interest in the idea of Selfish-Gene and another gene that lead to bearers rejecting the idea. It may sound absurd to say a gene exists for such a specific trait – that is exactly one of the weaknesses of this thinking!

For the gene to spread there has to be selection in favour of the Selfish-Gene gene, in other words those who bear the gene that stops them from believing in the Selfish-Gene suffer some increased mortality as a result. How can this occur? It can’t. There is just as much chance of the people with the anti-self-gene gene winning and those with the selfish-gene gene. This is the problem noted before that there is no selective advantage to Evolution Theory. It is not the product of evolution itself! Which would run foul of the SRH anyway.

Both these points taken together point to things that are fundamental to human experience which transcend survival and existence – things which transcend evolution, chess and game theory. Death as is oft noted in religious circles is not the end, not even a concern of true mankind who see that survival and existence are just a diversion of reality and not its basis. The problem with Dawkins is that he is so blinded by his own dogma that he will never see “the light” it seems.

p.s. I need to look up the official game-theory/computability approach to chess. Is chess a formal system?

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.

On Butterflies

 

Just sitting here in a field at the university and I see my favourite butterflies: first a female orange tip and then about 5 minutes later a male. Some 30 minutes after that they are fluttering aro und together. To my left there is a long-tailed tit with food in its beak just resting and scanning the area before heading to its nest to feed the young. The male orange tip just lands on a flower right next to me. It is so like clockwork this breeding thing; it is ubiquitous. The long tailed tit flies back from the nest over my head. I think for a moment as I see that pair of butterflies together of my muse and myself. I wonder whether they experience the extraordinary quality of it, as I did or is it as I see now just plain and simple. I tried at breeding I say to myself and it didn’t work. So I imagine a conversation with an adversary who says that I should just try again, it will happen. I reply that making it happen isn’t the interest for me. I look at the birds here who will fledge their young in a few weeks and I look at the human responsibilities. I suppose we invest equal amounts – birds produce broods every year that take a month to fledge but only live a couple of years, we on the other hand produce just one brood which take 2 decades to fledge but live for 80 years. It is not the making it happen that is the point I think again, it is the cost. An advert in the paper I was reading says get paid to do the thing you something you enjoy most. Two thoughts enter my mind. My first ever realisation about the nature of “work” was that you didn’t enjoy doing it. True this isn’t universal but the most important jobs like cleaning and manual labour are not the things we chose to do for enjoyment. My mother calls them chores – this means they are not things we chose to do. Fact is work is mostly that assignment of things that have to be done but no-one wants to do them so they get a salary attached. Another way to see that is if doing something is so enjoyable then why would anyone pay you to do it, wouldn’t they just do it themselves? Labour and reward this is at root why I am reluctant to make it work. In a Malthusian, Efficiency-of-the-markets way if something has great rewards then the cost will go up (either in price, or in population) until the cost balances the rewards. Fact is having a family is extremely costly and the cost just keeps going up. My cousin is renovating a new home at the moment and I am utterly bewildered at the sheer complexity of planning regulations and the like. With each generation the amount of work required to provide an environment of nurture for children increases. Time was like the animals that you simply grew what you needed from the ground. Now with increasing population pressures and the ratchet of capitalism (increasing efficiency requiring greater complexity to create jobs) the environment is becoming chocked and there is simply no space for anyone. I made a half resolution today never to own any property: it is abhorrent I have decided, not because of what I shuts in but because of the principal of shutting people off land which I consider an act of violence against my fellow man. We go to all this trouble to ensure safety and security for the next generation at the cost it seems of the current generation. Space and Land quite evidently precedes the act of partitioning spaces – enjoying that primary Space and Land cannot be affected by the trivial creation of spaces. Of course people are welcome to divide the world up into little properties but it is a petty and trivial activity. Looking at the butterflies again the overwhelming sense is that breeding and property are actually petty and trivial activities. Not that this perspective is easy to reach. I have realised with great humility recently that the path I think I’m treading is difficult, at least as difficult as a good marriage – it is not the easy way at all. Up here in the cold mountains there is great perspective (occasionally when the clouds shift) but the going is most certainly harder than for the folks in the valleys. This must be accepted. So the sense grasped today is that there is clear space beyond the confines of the concepts of sexual relationship, marriage and breeding.

I forgot to add a central point to the discussion on work. There is an assumption in this society that “doing” is a given and we simply need to decide what flavour of doing we will be employed in. My genuine question since the outset has always been “why?”. Maybe a childish question but I don’t see the source of the premise that we need to do. Doing is always in response to something: a need or desire in ourselves or in someone else. Without need or desire what doing is there to do? Folding that into the question of breeding produces the other flavour I missed out.

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.

11th Hour

Watched this yesterday – wished I had seen it ages ago would have saved me thinking out a load. It shows at least that a good deal of thought does exist in the right direction it just hasn’t seen made very popular.

Interesting ideas throughout. This was quite revealing:

The annual work done by nature was roughly estimated at $35 Trillion dollars compared with $18 Trillion done by humans. The only difference was that humans did all that work in an exchange system, while Nature did it all for free! Doesn’t this more than anything else throw a grenade into the concept of “exchange value” and “price”. It is like Structuralism arguing that nothing exists “outside” language because everything has to be communicated for “proof” – so you can’t by definition “prove” that anything exists outside language. I need to get that SRH sorted out after this wedding! The same is true with the paradigm of “price” they say how could anything be valued without an exchange system? We know perfectly well that it is, just it can’t be proven – though well done to the people who did the study in attempting to cross the boundary!

Thinking aloud: the way they did it was by asking how much it would cost for mankind to generate all the services that nature currently performs like fixing sun energy in plant material, bio waste breakdown, CO2 recycling, water recycling etc. I can’t believe it would not be more myself given that every heart beat would have to be performed by a human… SRH showing its head!

So maybe a similar question works for Structuralism and the SRH? Need a break from writing…

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.