SRH more

There are 2 sources of work. Old jobs not completed and new jobs.

Now the formulation of this system creates a new job and problem: how to improve the processing of jobs. So it adds a new problem to the stack.

Now since the consideration of jobs and problems is itself a job and a problem it means that we can never revolutionise this level of reality. It is a normative given that we must accept within the paradigm of problem/solution.

So any model of something (a diagram so to speak of the component parts) can only be about itself if it agrees entirely with itself. A tautology in other words.

A statement can be about itself positively or negatively. If the statement is always positive then there is no problem, but there is no truth either as it is a tautology. If at any point it is negative about itself them there is the liar paradox. Now the liar paradox is famously odd. I suggest for now that its nature is the opposite of a Tautology which if it is Always True or False is Always neither True nor False. This is a non-logical statement with no truth content but so is a tautology in this argument since Always True or False has no truth content either! The only non-value in Logic is the contradiction which forces re-examination of assumptions, so maybe Tautologies and Paradoxes work like contradictions also.

I realise there is a confusion here between types of Truth. Deductive Truth works by tautology e.g. "¬(A & B) === ¬A v ¬B" (equivalent). While Inductive truth depends upon the possibility of falsehood. "Ducks === Ducks" has no information value.

OK need to think that thru...

So the SRH suggestion is that any existence of self-reference forces us to abandon Truth Content leaving the statement/system vacuous.

Meme Theory - the proof (finally)

[Response to Facebook].

Agreed as long as we stick to truth. I personally agree with Meme Theory (think he based it on mimesis) it explains why Mozart never wrote Schoenberg ;-) It is demonstrably "right" (I had the same idea at school so it's pretty obvious). But I also think that God is "right" (ironically for exactly the reasons involved in this argument!) Now the problem with RD here, it seems to me, is that he has slipped into dismissing some ideas as popular simply because of Meme Theory (e.g. God) and doesn't regard their truth value any more. They do the same thing with Terrorism: it is spread by Radicalisation; but I have never heard anyone discuss it rationally. All all Terrorists just sheep? 'Personally I think suicide bombers are as clueless as the people who are trained to shoot at each other by governments' - at least that is a clear discussable point of view unlike the Meme Theory approach. With Meme theory so clarified it can then be seen as a sophisticated marketing tool which can be (and is! see MIT research) used to engineer society which for a Libertarian principled society is quite sinister; it is what the Nazis started - but that contradiction is a different debate.

Anyway with this abuse of Meme Theory in sight then follows the argument above. Religion may go extinct in people's minds but that doesn't make it wrong so why is RD using Meme Theory in his arguments then? That's how we know he is a fascist bigot :-)

Thought of a purer reformulation of the problem. Meme Theory, if taken as a measure of validity (e.g. 'God' idea is only around because the idea spreads well), makes claims about its own truth value. Then we have the liar paradox. If we model the conditions for the extinction of Darwinism and Meme Theory (maybe a rise in Religious Fundamentalism) then on one hand we are taking the model to be true (the model results), but on the other hand the results say that the model is invalid because it is extinct. Contradiction so ergo we can't say that Meme Theory can ever make claims about something's validity. So the prevalence of Religion tells us nothing about whether it is right or not... (which proves Meme Theory's fascist roots also) QED.

SRH - is this it?

SRH:

A statement that refers to itself is either a tautology TT or a contradiction TF.

The most famous example is the liar paradox.

TT: "This statement is True."

TF: "This statement is False."

My favourite object of contemplation from a few years ago doesn't actually refer to itself!

T = {T}

Makes an equality between T and the set containing T which are different objects.

So SRH is not about Impredicativity. To define something in terms of itself is to enter a "temporal" version of the SRH which is a loop. One is then left with a different question of starts and ends which is not an immediate problem. Loops are the root of the Halting Problem, and I have speculated isomorphic with contradictions. Induction is maths famously has survived this problem.

I'm busy on other stuff so this will have to wait for further thought...

Memes

On Dawkin's again, after Facebook discussion...

Darwin first introduced the world to a natural selection based evolution theory (NEST - apt since it's the home of species creation ;-) in his explanation of the diversity of species. From this huge revolution in thinking the idea has found application in everything. I have just built a model of the solar system which evolves by NEST from dust (to look at the emergence of Phi in dynamic systems). It is everywhere. It was the biggest shift in thinking since Renaissance clockwork universe Mechanics and before that the idea of Divine Order. It is that massive an idea.

Now Dawkins has taken Darwins idea and revamped it for the Capitalist Free-market 80's generation telling the tale of individual successful in free competing genes. Then he observed the process in ideas also and dubbed them memes.

At which point the SRH kicks in because Meme Theory (MT) is an idea and a meme itself. I have struggled to turn this into a fully fledges problem however (as with the SRH also). It is more revealing however to take NEST as a Meme also. Now if NEST fails then MT (as a subset of evolutionary theory) must fail also. Now there are many theories about the origin of diversity in the world not least the idea that things are immutable, don't evolve, and have a design or blueprint, an essence, imparted to them by The Creator. Now it is quite reasonable that NEST, which was unknown to the world for many millennia might once again fall into obscurity. It is this threat which has made Dawkins so animated. This in written into the rules of MT. Now if MT can envisage the extinction of NEST from the human mind then it envisages its own extinction from the human mind.

Now a theory is true when it can provide an answer under certain known conditions. There is no Universal theory yet (I have pages in this blog trying to argue that it is a fundamental contradiction - an argument which must be as close to a universal theory that there is). An incomplete theory has a problem because it must be able to define when it is not applicable. Quantum Theory is not applicable for gravity (as I very crudely understand it) and Relativity fails on the small scale and the other 3 forces. Each theory is incomplete, but that incompleteness is unknown to the theory. Relativity doesn't predict that it can't apply to the small scale we just know that it doesn't. Being complete and incomplete are meta statements about a theory. A Universal Theory, being Universal, must account for all its own meta statements... that is the root problem captured by the SRH but I can't quite see it yet. Now MT predicts a possible future when NEST will no longer be a meme of sufficient frequency to really be used in constructing the world... Dawkins' huge effort is proof of this possibility. The world will be thought about in different ways. This means that MT will no longer be relevant and applicable. Yet this contradicts the assumption by MT that it is relevant and still explaining this event! So if MT goes extinct which is it: is it still relevant but in hiding, or is it no longer relevant.

What this argument reveals is the dogmatism behind Dawkins position that fundamentally he believes that he is right and the NEST is true. I don't disgaree with him (I have a model right here of the solar system evolving by natural selection) but I do have a problem in the theory making claims about its own validity!

Boundaries

I asked someone over Xmas, a manager for Bechtel, whether they thought that management was necessary, or whether things could manage themselves. Her answer, obviously, was that management is essential; quite rightly also because certainly things wouldn't function without some level of management. But looking deeper no-one manages the course of history or human development, or love or wars, and more fundamentally no-one manages nature; and, yet these things have their own passage and logic; something sufficiently benevolent and orderly because we somehow "manage" to survive. This I have commented on before as being the "wheel of the world", it is one of the fundamental ideas that Mankind would seek to forget in His drive to supremacy. Mankind is at best obedient to Nature and at his most foolish ignorant of Nature. More importantly this illustrates the breadth of influence of whatever lies at the heart of the SRH. It is obvious that "management" can never be a complete world view because what manages management? So last night and this morning in bed I transform the problem (once again) into topology and the notion of regions enclosing one another.

In this diagram there are 3 regions. Region A, region B and the black ring. Region A is separated from region B by the black ring through which any path from a point in A to B must pass. The ring encloses region A and "excludes" or "excloses" region B.

Region B depends upon the context. In this case we are in the real plane R2 so we know that B is simply the rest of this plane. If we were to define "swan" then it is harder to say what not-swan is, because the field is not clearly defined. For example if someone was to produce the skull of a swan, is that swan or not? It is true that it is not "a" swan because we assume here that we are talking about actual animals. But in a physiology class where skulls were the topic we might agree that this was swan rather than goose.

Exclude/Exclose: Region B is defined in terms of the ring just as is region A, but the ring is enclosed by region B. Exclude illustrates that region B is subject to the ring, and it gives the ring the active part of the sentence.

Now two issues arise from this. Firstly the "Dual Nature" of definition and secondly the question of whether something can define itself.

Dual Nature

The ring performs a dual function. By enclosing the region A it automatically excludes the region B. This has been commented on before in this blog in connection with the dual nature of "false societies" that exist by including some and excluding others; any structure with a name, description or definition has this dual, false character. I say false because true Society is about people, but if it exists by excluding some people then it is self-contradictory. Regions of space are not so elevated and self-contradictory. That space within A is separated from that space in B. Without the process of separation of A from B then we cannot define A, so to define A we have to define B. B is often termed its negation, ¬A or not-A.

Now it is because anything we wish to define and name equally defines its negation that we have problems if we try to define something in terms of itself (the problem flagged by the SRH).

If something could define itself then it could define what was not-itself also. So we might have a function that defined a family of functions, for trivial example y= a*x where a is an integer. So the function y = 2*x is defined by this rule and y = 3 + x is not defined.

…

Other point is that about boundaries. If we say ¬A then we include B and we include the ring. So the ring seems to be included in the negation of what it defines. Let us assume to begin with that this is a real world example and the ring is a wedding ring. Region A is the space through which a finger can pass and the ring begins with the gold atoms whose structure holds the ring on the finger. Region A is thus clearly defined with gold atoms on one side and something else on the other. An imaginary line exists between the various atoms. Now in which region is this line? It is actually between the atoms. We shift now to maths.

If I was to say that point (2,0) was in region A and (3,0) was in region B what would we know? If I was to add that this was integer space then we know that the two regions are side by side at these points. The points could be defined/selected by the rule for the circle of radius 2 centred at (0,0) in integer space:

{ (x,y) | x,y are integers & Sqrt(x^2 + y^2) <= 2 }

(0,-2)

(-1,-1), (0,-1), (1,-1)

(-2,0), (-1,0), (0,0), (1,0), (2,0) …. (3,0)

(-1,1), (0,1), (1,1)

(0,2)

What is not clear here is the notion of a boundary. We simply have a set of points A and a set of points B with nothing in between and nothing relating them. However we have defined region A to be those points at a distance from the centre with a limit of 2. This is clear in the definition but not in the areas. The areas do not contain the definition.

In the ring above the black region is supposed to be the definition of region A. Negating region A then creates the region including Region B and the ring! The ring seems to define itself!

...unfinished...

Colour Cube

Saw this on a BBC documentary last night but with a single explanatory line that gave much greater insight than I have heard before.
The question is to determine whether the blue squares in the left picture are the same colour of different from the yellow squares in the right picture.

Now it would seem an easy question to answer, after all the question has given away that they are different by referring to them as blue and yellow squares. But not everything is at it seems.

The thing to notice for the discerning aesthete is the setting, or the context, of the two pictures. The left picture is apparently under yellow light, while the right is under blue light.

As a result of this seeming triviality our brain is forced to make some rather deeper than usual decisions. Yellow light (a mixture of red and green) lacks any blue light and so nothing will look blue under yellow light: it will simply be a shade of grey. As a result there is ambiguity and the brain cannot tell whether in thi context there is a blue or a grey square. It could be either. Faced with this problem and presumably because of the other bright colours, and also because it is comparing with blue squares in the right picture, it it reasonable to decide it is a blue square.

The blue illusion is not so good because we know that there is red and green light present because we can see the red and the green squares, it is quite possible that yellow is present. However in blue light (lacking in red and green) it will be a much duller tone more similar to grey. It is easier to bust the illusion in this picture which is why we look at it second.

Now here is the point. With the context removed this is the actual colour of those squares. The Blue on the left are actually the same as the yellow on the right. With two piece of paper held close together to create a slit over the picture above this can be verified.

What was so good about the casual comment in this BBC documentary was the recognition that it was the context that fooled the brain into making the logical deduction.

In a sense the squares on the left (if they were real squares under yellow light) would indeed "be" blue. The grey squares on the right most likely would be yellow and not grey.

This goes to show however that what we "see" is not early in our visual processing but actually after a good deal of assumptions have been made by the brain.

Here I agree with the science. Where I rapidly fall out with the science is this. It has taken a good deal of study beyond the visual system for mankind to deduce this feature of his own visual processing system. That is to say that where the visual system does some study to work out what it is "really" seeing, mankind has now done a lot more processing to show up the visual system as not always consistent. Thus we can fill gaps (with considerable time and difficulty) where the primitive system fails. We now claim to know "reality" better than the visual system, and this I have a problem with.

It is correct that we have shown that what we are conscious of is not reality. An easier way is to wonder what a dream was "of". We were certainly conscious of something: we can tell people what happened and we can sometimes even describe colours, smells, touch, sound and tastes. I once dreamt of eating a banana and the unripe texture and taste was so bad I was put off eating them for years! But what was the "reality". We seem fine about dismissing this as make believe. Now in this illusion we are seeing/dreaming colours that are not there - that are created so it seems not by "reality" but by our personal "brain". Yet to prove the illusion we turn to another picture where we see "grey". Now are we dreaming that also? Why scientifically are we allowed to consider the "grey" in this experiment as reality and the dreamed colours before as illusions.

It is only because of logical inconsistency. Our thinking mind is referring to memory and within the framework of language, culture and history. As if to prove that point see this entry in the online etymological dictionary for blue [http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=blue]:

c.1300, bleu, blwe, etc., from O.Fr. blo "pale, pallid, wan, light-colored; blond; discolored; blue, blue-gray," from Frankish *blao, from P.Gmc. *blæwaz (cf. O.E. blaw, O.S., O.H.G. blao, Dan. blaa, Swed. blå, O.Fris. blau, M.Du. bla, Du. blauw, Ger. blau "blue"), from PIE*bhle-was "light-colored, blue, blond, yellow."

Blue comes from the root word for pallid, light coloured, blond and even yellow. Our thinking mind claims this knowledge that the visual system is inconsistent as proof that colours are not reality, and that it is closer to reality. A scientist will pull out a spectrum analyser and measure the bend of electromagnetic radiation to find our exactly what wavelength it is. That is reality he will claim, "I can tell you more about this light that even your own eyes". And this is fine he can. But can he claim that he could do without his useless error strewn eyes then and just use his spectrum analyser? After all, the eyes, it has been proven, don't show us reality at all only colours that we have made up with our brains. This is the problem because in fact he can lose all his senses because they are all prone to errors but what else has he got? Maybe he can invent some new senses that are more accurate; Terminator or Robocop senses; but they will still be imperfect. And exactly what are we to make of the "consciousness" of these new dreams through new senses: are they just made up also? It is a mess.

The point is that consciousness is about sensing. But sensing is not some useless telescope that lies between our pure thinking minds and some pure reality. And our pure thinking minds can somehow exist free of this telescope and can even examine it quite objectively to discover that really the "blue" and the "yellow" in the telescope don't "really" exist... but somehow the "grey" does "really" exist... and then discard the telescope. It was with the telescope that they ever "saw" anything in the first place. All the thinking that surrounds colours, spaces, dimensions and the language of all this exists inside the telescope... you can't escape it. And what we are looking at is not outside the telescope either... if it was then how would we ever know what it "was" apart from just light. A man limited to looking at the stars with only a telescope will never be able to tell if they are just holes through the cosmos letting light in or whether they are actual material things. What was the illusion for our eyes above, of deciding between grey or blue, becomes the equally intractable illusion of deciding whether the stars are just pin holes or material things. Thus matter and reality itself becomes an illusion of our mind just as colour was an illusion of our eyes. There is no outside the telescope.

So when we discover that indeed we are tricked, we do indeed discover something about our visual systems... namely that they can be tricked and we can learn the ambiguous circumstances. Just as an illusionist will make us "think" that the ball is in one hand when really it is in the other. The mind is as trickable as the eye. But while scientists don't like to dismiss the "ideas" as dreams when they are caught out, they are happy to dismiss the colours as dreams when they are caught out. And worse the scientists will say that colours are created by the brain, and not realise that the "brain" (which is just an idea) must therefore be created by the brain also which is an absurdity (a la SRH).

The conclusion is that either everything is an illusion and a dream (which I used to believe) or nothing is. They amount to the same thing! because if everything is an illusion then what does the dreamer who dreams the colour experiment above think is happening when he makes up the colours blue and yellow?

Humpty-Dumpty

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less."

Lewis Carroll -- Through the Looking Glass, Chapter 6

Excellent and laterally this is the problem with "internal" self-reference.