Intrinsic/Extrinsic Self-Reference

Almost certainly blogged this before but its clear at the moment:

One type of self reference (extrinsic self-reference) involves a system being able to select itself from amongst others. This sentence has five words. The previous sentence has selected itself from the rest of the text and in particular distinguishes itself from the next sentence. This sentence has five words. It is as though the system looks out into the world, identifies itself and then looks back in again. In reality it is using us, the reader, to do the looking and the thinking and we lie outside the system - or at least we are not the sentence. However I am unimpressed with external self reference because what is the real difference between the second and third sentences of this paragraph, or even this sentence here. The second sentence refers to itself and the third also refers to it. Both sentences are selecting one of the sentences on this page, in that they are the same. So the fact that the second sentence "happens" to select the sentence that is also itself is quite unmiraculous and is just a trivial feature. There is no "self" here other than that which a reader may infer when (or if) they realise that the sentence is referring to the same sentence they are reading.

The other type of self-reference, and the one which I'm saying is logically impossible in the SRH, is intrinsic self-reference where the entity refers to itself within itself. Now this is non trivial and quite miraculous if it exists. It is the situation monists believe is true within humans where somehow we have a secret mirror in which we can see ourselves, and know our own thoughts and wishes. This they believe would be true even on a desert island or in a world where nothing else existed but them. I used to hold this view and it is through failure to actually find consciousness or a self and after being given a push by Buddha that I changed view.

The idea that somehow self-refernece and recursive feedback in the brain causes consciousness just doesn't go anywhere. Recursion does indeed creates a many leveled intersecting fractal structure (which is Hoffstadter's brilliant view) but that anything would be mysteriously "created" is untenable. What "I" am would be just be phantoms in the swirling mix of data (the hall of mirrors as it is called in this blog). What I am careful to avoid however is the suggestion that the "world" is any less a phantom. The belief in material entities like brains that somehow mysteriously underly the "self" or consciousness implies some special knowledge of "reality" which I am yet to see myself! After all if it was so easy to escape the hall of mirrors why hasn't everyone other than Hoffstadter and Dennett!

Intrinsic self-reference involves not having to identify oneself from other things by "external" features but involves having an almost tautologically connection to oneself - and inner bond to oneself. The "I think: I am" bound into ones existence. I'm not taking sides and saying that outside is better than inside (though the Western Materialists side totally with the outside while Buddha said that inside/outside is just part of the illusion) , just looking for an immanent problem with holding the inside view.

The power of the blank

Quote from 'Black Books' comedy sitcom.

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

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

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

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

Why do humans need to do things?

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

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

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

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

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

=== Update 27/1/2011

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

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

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

Planets, Fractal, Phi and Stockmarkets

Following up on the Ouroboros stuff from ages ago, which is related to the SRH thread, and through an article on Alchemy I came upon the presence of Phi in the planetary orbits. Odd I think and am trying to explain that becauise it is also used in charting stock markets. It is commented already that stock markets show fractal geometry, and Phi is the limit of the relationship between adjacent numbers in the Fibonnaci Sequence - a sequence that is gained by recursion i.e. fractal! Consider two systems A and B which proceed by adding the value of the other system - this is the Fib sequence. A and B can start at any value (as long at they are different).

A 10 24 etc
B 14 38

They will come into Phi relationship ... why? Algebraically it is obvious:

B(n) / A(n) = [ B(n-1) + A(n) ] / A(n) = B(n-1)/A(n) + 1 (ok not quite I've got this in notes will update)

Anyway looking further this is interesting and I note it for reading later:
http://www.cyberalley.com/G-Home/R&D/R&D5/FofL12.html

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http://www.ermanometry.com/

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Funny how everything appears to fit together ... or is this an illusion because I want it so? Actually I don't want it so because if Phi is this fundamantal then it will end up explaining things rather than being explained!

http://www.miqel.com/fractals_math_patterns/visual-math-phi-golden.html

So it seems that in iterative processes the repeating units come into Phi relationship *for some reason*. This link describes it as "self-reference" - I don't call it self reference because it isn't. A large structure being composed of structures "similar" at many scales is only "self" in the sense of "similar". Altho I must conceed that a set which is made of copies of that set at a smaller scale is more extraordinary than one that is made from dissimilar material. This really questions what we mean by "self". What we don't mean (a la Buddha) is a material existing thing called self. Fractals actually illustrate this "self" that is built from "copies" of "itself", and so not self and self at the same time.

But why Phi?

Web site here were the writer seems a little carried away with the patterns. If there was no pattern that itself would be amazing. It is Wolfram versus Caitin on whether the universe is full of information or whether the apparent diversity has underlying rules. I part company on ths page and this statement "There is no natural explanation for these unusual relationships" [http://solargeometry.com/34power.htm]. I reckon there is a very good reason. 2 options. Either:

(1) the planets formed in this relationship and it is a feature of the fractal collison and amassing of dust in the emryonic nebula + the expulsion of massive rocks that were too excentric and out of phase with the system. OR

(2) over time the planets have evolved into this relationship. Evidence for this would be that the inner planets (with more revolutions and periods of evolution) have tighter relationships.

Some things to note. All the planets bar Earth are in a 2*Phi relationship. Mars is the most deviant. And there is a missing planet (from the pattern) between Mars and Jupiter, where instead is the asteroid belt.

Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus are massive and it seems likely to me that the planet that formed immediately inside jupiter's orbit suffered some catastrophe and either never formed properly, was broken up by the gravity of Jupiter or there was some massive early collision creating the asteroid belt. Mars, which is incredibly light, will be hugely affected by Jupiter and aided by early collisons from the drama in the asteroid belt has a distorted orbit.

However such speculation leads no closer to why Phi.

The inner planets are in almost circular orbits. This is most likely the influence of Jupiter which I understand would accentuate any eccentric orbits and eventually fling the planet from the system. By simple evolution only circular orbits exist. Given radius from the Sun, and assuming nearly circular orbits, the possible velocity and therefore orbit period are hugely constrained for the planets. I need develop my calculus a bit before describing that in detail.

Then it remains only to find out why only certain radiuses from the Sun are favoured for planet formation and stability.

I expect the iterative dynamics to be something of the form Sqrt(x+1) = x or x = 1/(x-1) both of which converge on Phi...

Then I have a demonstration of my hunch that a similar iteration exists in the Stock Market game mentioned a few posts ago. After all the stock price is what speculators base there trading on, and their trading affects the stock price so there is an iterative system and ergo it will show fractal geometry (with patterns feeding back through the system at scale) with stable points existing at solutions to these interations ... like Phi.

Do Big Caps Pay?

A revealing look at two large caps. Above is Tesco and below is BP for data between 2003 and end 2010. The Magenta line is the actual stock price.

The Blue line is data corrected for percentage change in the FTSE for that day:

C(n+1) = C(n) * S(n+1)/S(n) * F(n)/F(n+1)

= S(n+1) / F(n+1) * F(0)

C(x) = corrected price for day x
S(x) = stock price for day x
F(x) = FTSE price for day x

Assuming that the FTSE grabs the general economic data, including growth and inflation, then the remaining graph is the actual performance of the stock. What is surprising is the low return of only around 50% in 8 years or 5% per year. This is admittedly growth on top of inflation (which the FTSE data ought to remove) but it isn't impressive given that a careful trade can gain you 5% in a day. There was 9% just today on an oil stock in my portfolio (RRL) that I have held for only 6 months; that against the FTSE of only 2%. That's equivalent to 16 months investing in Tesco! I must thank a friend for alerting me to the potential of oil stocks at this time.

Essence of Trading

Just writing a very simple sampling program to test various trading strategies on actual stock data: this seems the most productive way forward at the moment - characterising the "nature" of stock movements is a bit to complex for me at the moment!!

Ideas stripped down look like this.

Trading is a game which involves stepping between two side-by-side conveyor belts, which constantly change their rate and direction.

It is simpler to consider one (money) as static and the other (stock) as moving (though this makes the difference a more complex function). We step from money into stock, travel a bit and then step back.

The object of the game is to get as far up the money escalator (to the right) as possible as this escalator is next to all the other escalators (can buy anything with it).

The optimum solution (to be tested) is to be in Cash as the stock escalator passes to the left and then to step onto the escalator as it changes direction and starts to move right. We leave a doughnut or something to mark where we were. We stay on the stock escalator until another hypothetical point H (the High) passes the doughnut and we step back onto cash escalator. This way we have travelled up the cash escalator.

Superficially I'm noting this is like a Turing machine. Turning machines have States which are like the stock and they travel up and down the data-tape or cash "register" ;-) Whether this similarity is of any use only time will tell.

It seems a game we can't lose on. However there is the problem that we have to pay to change escalator .. in other words we have to take a step down the cash escalator every time we step off or back to the cash escalator. It means that we have to be able to think head just a little bit to ensure that we will recover that initial step.

To ensure that we always move right we need to determine these H/L points and whether they are far enough apart to make shifting escalators worth while. That is all there is between being broke and making a fortune...

But the escalators do not move randomly. There are only so many people allowed on stock escalators and to get on someone must step off. We have to decide who to swap places with. If we think that someone is standing near a L then we are more likely to swap places with them so the escalator gets dragged up so we can cross over. They in turn get to step onto the cash escalator higher than where they were. The opposite happens also dragging the escalator down.

So the actual movement of the escalator is caused by these differences of trade. There is a strong feedback process where the response of players to previous movements is actually causing the current movement. This is most evidential in the fractal patterns in the market.

Fractal systems are iterative systems where a simple input data is fed through a system repeatedly. It means that the basic "motif" or pattern is very simple but by repeating it at different scales a very complex structure of repeating units is created. This is the stock price trace (SPT - my term) the price plotted against time. IN essence it is simple but the simple patterns are repeated in complex structures. I have lost it now but I had a wonderful plot of the gold price I think at 5 day, 3 month and 1 year and the three plots could be virtually over laid. There is certainly no way of telling from an SPT what the duration is... except perhaps the macroeconomic features like inflation and economic growth.

Boxes

To try and characterise SPTs I'm using an idea of Boxes. They are essentially the standard "candles". A box contains the SPT between two dates. How the stock gets from the entry point to the exit point is irrelevant (a black box). We only know its max and min prices (top and bottom of the box) .

The problem then is to replace an SPT with a succession of boxes the only variable between the width of each box. We want each box to not contain too much information about the SPT preferable a straight line between entrance and exit is best, but most importantly a box should start and end at an extreme or turning point. This way each box represents an optimal trading window or period, and that is all we are interested in.

Now because the charts are fractal we have to chose a scale, or trading scale. Apparently short trades are traditionally of period of months to a year and long trades many years. Day traders trade between days and weeks. From experience as a private investor with access to delayed chart data and high costs of entry and exit to the market I've only succeeded a few times in day trading. The advantage is however that through compound interest a small percentage each day compounds to huge gains a year. IgIndex and the like is perhaps a better type of gambling for this scale. Really I'm aiming at the short scale: months.

Anyway that is progress so far and now back to coding... end of Xmas holiday tonight so this may get stuck for a while...

Smart Dog Chaser

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/12/23/worlds-smartest-dog-knows-words/

It seems, and I'll assume, that there is a cognitive ability here and the dog isn't simply mapping a sound (sentence) to an action Pavlovian style. In which case are we to think that dogs in their natural social groups have this level of communication being able to code 1000s of different individual things?

We it seems obvious that to interact in the world (putting a bone here, picking up some meat etc) a dog must have this level of complexity in their world. Being able to link this complexity with an audio world (of command sounds) seems not so extraordinary. Why should decoding the audio world be any more important that decoding the physical world? A stone marking the place where a bone is, or a coloured button, or a researcher saying "go to bone" which both give the desired outcome. I'm impressed by the dog but not so much by the remarkableness of the skills which seem essential to any creature that can live "in" the world. That world becomes a human world and the creature simply adapts to human details rather than wild details and then we suddenly applaud their cognisance which was always there. Am I missing something here? I blog this so I am reminded to think about it again...