Modernity and Progress are irrelevant

Let us assume that Progress is a real thing and the Modern world is "better" than what came before.

If there is a Modern, there must be an Ancient and also a Future
Progress says that the Modern world is better than the Ancient. Can we also propose the Future will be better than the Modern? Progress would certainly suggest this, and the idea that the Future will be better than the Present is what motivates Progress today.

Progress is Altruistic
Will we live to see the Progress in the Future? Most of it no. First thing to observe then is that Progress is an altruistic act that our children and their descendants will benefit from. In the same way as Modern people believe they have benefited from the Past and enjoyed things their descendants made possible but never realised themselves.

An Endless Progress, Relativity and One Myth Of Progress
Will there be a point when we can't improve on things any more? In other words is human desire satiable? This question is more complex. People today are not happy until they have a mobile phone. A generation ago people were not unhappy with not having a yet-to-be-invented mobile phone. So desire changes, and Progress actually creates desires as much as it satisfies them. This is the essence of Economic Growth; to keep growing an economy must discover and create new markets and desires for people. This is obvious looking into the Past. In the Past people were satisfied with acquiring stone tools; it never crossed their mind they didn't have power tools. This is one of the key misunderstandings of Progress: people in the Past didn't want what we want. But it is argued that is because they didn't know about what would become available. Luckily Satisfaction is very trivially met. We can be happy with something like a precious gift for ages in ignorance of some fact that it was stolen. But were we to show stone age people power tools they would be instantly hooked because we can argue there is an unchanging law that people want to get things done easily. In the Past we got slaves now we get power tools. But then what to do with power tools? Ancient people would continue to make wattle and daub round-houses and live like they always did. Their culture and "ethnotechnology" would need to change for them to develop a taste for new things for example stone houses (odd that stone age people never lived in stone houses? -- it's cos they didn't have a concept of fixed territory so never settled in one place for long enough to make permanent settlement. That is a desire that has developed!). Desire and Progress are complex things. For this reason you can't actually say of people in the Past: they were impoverished compared with the Modern day. For this reason we don't need to view ourselves as impoverished compared with the Future. Each age defines its own goals and provides the means to achieve them. So while Progress may or may not be endless, it is irrelevant to the people of any age because they do not yet know what the Future holds and work within the confines of their own age.

Progress has an Evil Twin
If we argue that the people of the Past were poor and unhappy compared to ourselves, then we must also argue that we are poor and unhappy compared to the Future. To Proudly stand above the Past, is to be Proudly stood upon by the Future. This clearly isn't true. While we may work for a better future we are at the moment happy. Likewise our ancestors may have unwittingly worked toward a better future--discovering language, cooking, agriculture, wheels, maths, money, &c--but they were happy within their technology, knowledge and existence.

Absolute Progress
But there must be absolute desires that all people have. All people want to live and be healthy so medicine has to be an absolute Progress. That is true until we think again that in the Future people may not get old or die at all: how impoverished we and all our Modern progress now seems. When things becomes spread across an endless line of time they are relative and there is no absolute. If there is anything absolute we know that it isn't spread across time: it is true in each age. Progress by its nature s relative. Indeed the central argument of this blog post is that the relative is irrelevant, what we should seek the absolute.

Political Modernity
The story of things getting better also has a political element. Each ruler, in order to encourage support, has always rewritten history to make his predecessor seem vile, villainous, dishonourable and their times as ones of poverty and oppressive. Most famously when the Tudors took the English Royal lineage from the Plantagenets they completely rewrote history to make the mediaeval period seem one of abject poverty. This is a complete fiction. Mediaeval times were ones of great literacy, social cohesion and prosperity. They were of course blighted by the infamous plagues and ended with the bloody civil war (one of the most bloody conflicts on Earth) and came from the oppression of the Normans but compared with Tudor dictatorship people had considerably more freedom and self-determination. History however thinks of "Mediaeval" like Monty Python incorrectly records it in Search for Holy Grail (except for the Anarcho-Syndicalist Commune bit... Particularly if we think of Watt Tyler leading a revolution to overthrow the ruling elite in the C14th foreshadowing revolutions 400 years later.) Progress also inherits from Christian piety and evangelism being seen as a justification for political expansion to "undeveloped" or "primitive" (read Pagan) parts of the world. Flying the banner of "Progress" modern armies feel as justified as Religious Armies feel when on Holy War. It has a very dark underbelly justifying any amount of excess and brutality.

Meaning of Life is The Present
What if the meaning of our life becomes Progress itself. I live my life in the service of the Future, ensuring that things get better but never sampling that myself. We might say this is noble, but what if Progress is Endless. It means that Humans stop living and become slaves to a Future that is always out of reach. Indeed when Progress itself becomes the meaning of life we stop living. Altruism is very noble, but what do we teach the future if all we did was work for the Future? Don't we just teach our children to work for their future? If we all copied Jesus exactly we would all just commit suicide by cop (or Roman Authority). This was not the teaching. Helping others at its root is to bring people, who are lost, toward Life: not toward empty doctrine, or hypothetical Progressive Future, or imaginary Shangri-La but toward Life as it is: as God made it and rejoice in what God has given us. This indeed is what people did before the invention of Progress and Modernity.

Conclusion
Yes Progress exists. Yes Modernity exists. But they are irrelevant to us because the basis of life, that which we must teach our descendants is to be happy with what they have got, to appreciate each day for it is all they have. If we teach that to the Future then the Future will be far richer than if we hand down the roots of a new ever changing technology. And in that we see the dissolution not of Monasteries this time but of the whole Modern Project. Finally Modern man can rest from chasing the carrot and join arms with the ancestors and their progeny to sit down and appreciate the simple fact of the world as it has been, as it is and as it will always be. Although the search for Progress is actually an illness that may indeed cost us not only our happiness but our world.

War is Nonsense

Hard to believe that something that millions of people have given their life to is complete nonsense. But sadly for them their life was wasted. It only take a small bit of thinking to save oneself from this folly. Sadly millions never stopped to think.

Firstly for a war to occur you need someone to fight. So before you even take arms you know that someone disagrees with you, and you with them. As you fight know that you are simply mirroring their actions. If you don’t like what they are doing, they won’t like what you are doing. If their aggression is making you fight more, yours will make them fight more. It is no different from an animal fighting its reflection. Those who seek peace actually stop fighting. If our enemy stops fighting and shows us kindness then so do we. If we stop fighting and show kindness so do they. But it takes real bravery to stop fighting, and actually fear and cowardice to fight.

The most trivial start of war begins with “they started it.” History is regurgitated to prove some grievance that needs revenge. Of course if the soldiers stop for a second they will realise that this grievance has probably been around for centuries and is only being brought to life now because one of their leaders wants a war. Smart soldiers who value peace won’t look at the history but the person who is raising it. War raises history, history never raises war.

More complex starts to war are that we are being threatened and need to fight. But if we look these are almost always exactly the same as above. You should never look at the reasons for war but the politician who is raising those reasons. Churchill is the most famous war mongerer of recent times. A million reasons have been presented why WW2 was needed – most of them invented after the war! But in the beginning it was that Churchill engineered the idea of the “Threat from the Hun.” Of course we remember this threat never materialised and the “Phoney War” lost much credibility for his war machinations. In the end the Hun cost the UK a total of 10,000 casualties. To put that in context that is far less than a single allied bombing raid against Germany toward the end of the war. In reality there never was a threat from the Hun but Churchill still fooled millions into dying and killing 10s of millions more. Iraq war is similar. There was no clear reason to start the war, but books have been written to invent reasons afterwards. Hitchens paramount in this post-match analysis to rewrite history and pretend that it was a reasonable war. Again millions died but again not from reasons, but from war mongers who fight first and look for reasons second. I can think of no reason ever for any of the modern wars.

History books say that the real reason (not so popular with the people who aren’t so motivated to waste life for bits of paperwork) was the German violation of the Versailles Treaty. Britain made the arbitrary decision to protect Poland. And declared war seemingly reasonably when German broke its borders. But it’s considerably more murky than that. Russia broke its borders and took the other half of Poland at the same time. If Poland was the point why not declare war on Russia also? And if Polish freedom was the point why give all of Poland to the Russians at the end of the war? The reason here was that Russia was too powerful to argue with, and the Versailles agreement with the Allies was the point. 80 millions people died not for freedom but to enforce a piece of paper limiting German power. Perhaps behind closed doors the Allied strategy was to break the Russian treaty with Germany and make Russia a valuable ally. Certainly Russia as an enemy was unthinkable. The goal since before 1914 was always to remove German power from the European map. So “reasons” for war usually become very murky and rather arbitrary in the end and get replaced with propaganda and myths by politicians to actually motivate people to war.

Perhaps the only real reason for war is when you are actually invaded. When an army like the Normans lands its ships at your shores and you need repel them. People like to mythologise now that this will be the result if we don’t have a war abroad – a pre-emptive strike. Again this is Churchill’s Threat from the Hun: if we don’t invade Germany now they will invade us. But of course people forget that we are then just becoming that invading force our self. Not much good asking other people not to invade us if we are going to do the invading our self. We see that with the Terror threat in UK now. Had to ask people not to invade us when we have military operations in half a dozen countries at the moment. When you get seen as an aggressor your call to Peace becomes meaningless and you will attract aggression. As Jesus put it ‘He who lives by the sword shall die by the sword.’
The problem with the “invading force” argument is that for a war to start you need only one unjustified invading force (or coalition) and one justified defending force (or coalition). A war can be started unilaterally since it takes only one side to invade. Thus anyone who invades, even for the “reason” that they are pre-emptively striking, is actually starting the war. The other side is thinking exactly the same of course and they may actually invade not for invasive reasons but simply to defend themselves from yourself. The US and Allies always say that their invasions are pre-emptive defence and their enemies are offensive attack. But in reality I think all attacks against the US in the last 100 years have been pre-emptive defence. Who has ever actually planned to conqueror USA except the British? There have been few recent attack but the most famous, Pearl Harbour, was clearly a Japanese realisation that war with US was unavoidable and their best strategy was to strike first. Japan would never have attacked US had peace been an option. Likewise when Hitler declared war on US it was after years of direct (illegal) US support for the UK. He realised that the US was as good as in the war and Germany could never win with US support for UK so there was literally no choice but to declare war in US even if it sealed their destruction. Indeed some argue that Germany would have signed for peace after 1941. Peace was never an option in Allied minds. But none of these famous “attacks” at the US started a war, they simply defended the Axis from Allied manoeuvres. The start of the war - when the world went from Peace to War - was Germany invading its neighbours.
My father used to argue that the war would have been avoidable had we armed ourselves to deter Germany in the 1930s. But I think WW2 actually was not the real start of war. That began in 1914 or even before. WW2 began with Germany rejecting the WW1 peace agreement – that everyone at the time agreed was inevitable – Lloyd George came away from Versailles saying that there would be war in the next 20 years. Peace was only temporary either deliberately or through French stupidity and vengeance. Before 1914 there were continual battles with the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Prussian Empire before that, the Ottoman Empire over the thousand years before. In the bigger picture WW1&2 should be taken together as the culmination of centuries of battle for power in Europe and the Near East. Put this way when did the war start? The actual problem we can crudely call Imperialism. I won’t handle that here, only to say if soldiers wish to fight to develop the borders of an empire that is a different question and one I will leave them to decide on for now.

IS Imperialism inevitable? There are a number of options.
(1) Pax Romana. During the Roman Empire there was considerable peace because Rome crushed any rebellions. There were no power struggles in countries either internal nor external because Rome was the power.  Its not really peace tho but fear to argue. This is what the US is working on at the moment: Pax Americana. We saw in Iraq what happens when power vacuums occur. The moment ruling powers like Hussein are gone every local war-lord who fancies their chances gets their mates together and fights for a patch. You have civil war. Civil war ensues until there is agreement on a leader. This is how the English Civil war ultimately ended when after Cromwell died all sides decided that a King was better than entering back into civil war. Hobbes writes Leviathan to express this fear of the horror of civil war and that the brutality of a Monarch is far preferable. English civil war was the bloodiest conflict in history. 5% of the entire population were killed in just one battle. Whatever England has today it was bitterly fought for. Something I think all countries should remember. If they want to avoid Pax Romana and want a strong internal system they need to undergo the process of inner transformation that requires incredible resolve.

(2) Like the British accepting a King eventually in favour of fighting the world has accepted the UN. But the UN must be strong else you end up with member states like US acting like an Empire. A “US coalition” is a violation of every UN principle, and ever principle of civilisation. A US Coalition is simply an empire. It must be a UN coalition and the US sadly must tolerate the decision of the UN – where it sits in on every council anyway and effectively governs.

(3) Education. The thoughful have concluded that there is never a reason for war. Even if there is, it is a choice whether we fight or not. You can always chose not the fight. War can only happen when people chose to have war. No war has ever been inevitable. The problem is that society is historically geared up to fight, there are deep problems with the way people think so that the person who seeks not to fight may actually be attacked by his friends and family. If you will not attack the enemy then you are our enemy is the common logic used by everyone from Lenin to Bush. As mentioned before the choice not to fight and seek peace is actually the hardest. To become Peaceful may indeed mean that we are seen as an enemy of all sides. To be Peaceful is actually the walk the hardest and most courageous path of all. But realising this we then realise than when we actually meet the enemy landing on our shores the chances are we are simply meeting a coward who was too weak to say NO to battle.

And then there is Evil. At root we think we must defend ourselves from evil. People are always tempted to be greedy, to be hateful, to be selfish. We will always meet those people who want to take from us, who want to hurt us, and who will trample over our wishes as they seek their own. But when we handle them we must first be sure we ourselves are not being tempted by greed, hate and selfishness. Too often what starts of noble as an attempt to right a wrong becomes a wrong itself. The Devil is exceptionally cunning. No matter how noble WW2 may have started out as, in the end it itself was the greatest evil the world has ever known and that evil was committed as much by Allies as it was Axis – it was all committed by ordinary soldiers.

So when we meet a greedy person what do we do? We can be generous at first. It is hard to teach a greedy person what a generous person is like unless we can do that ourselves. And when we see the greedy person not learning and getting more greedy we can point to ourselves and say do you see I am being generous. And so the education begins.

And likewise when we meet a hateful person do we hate back? If so we can be sure they will get more hateful. They need to see a loving person who can absorb that hate and help them learn love. If ever war was a folly it is here.

And when we meet a selfish person with no regard for others this is the one where war has some value. A selfish person often doesn’t notice until they have reason to. We can remove what they want by sanctions. We can obstruct their progress by threats of power. But most importantly we can isolate them until they join in discussion. But this is the most tricky of the evils because who can operate without thought for their own gain? The US has emblazoned across its departements “Working for US Interests.” The US by its own admission is a selfish organisation committing one of the 3 evils. For this reason it cannot lead resolution to this international problem. Again we are left needing a coalition of nations committed and strongly working in a global interest with mutual support, generosity and kindness both respecting the coalition and respecting each other.

For this reason no person should ever put on the uniform of their country when they are fighting for their country alone. This is the old imperial system. When your country has UN authority then you put on the uniform and fight for UN interests. Fighting with UN backing has its advantage because it means that were you in need of defence you would have the world behind you. But who would ever need to fight in such a world? Who would be able to withstand the wishes of an international community like this? Pax United Nations was the original goal.

The problem has been the rise of a single global super power -  the US. They had/have a think tank called Project for the New American Century which explains the problem. The US has seen the chance for global supremacy, to mould the world in its interests. As a result the world has lost the model it had of mutual respect and cooperation and replaced it with US interests. The fault has been a series of weak nations forming a coalition not with the UN but with the US to form a break away Empire that has continued the old Imperial goal of global domination that the British began in the 17th Century. British had gained control of the seas by the 18th Century which meant it controlled global trade. This gave it enormous power which it held onto until WW2 destroyed it and the US took over. Now the US continues this goal of controlling global trade both at sea, but now the air and also space. This is in direct violation of the principles of Peace. It is greed and selfishness at least 2 of the evils.

The only way to return to Peace is to reject the US as an independent authority and force it to rejoin the UN. But this will require generosity from its coalition partners who will have to lose some authority themselves. It is of the nature of politicians that they do not relinquish power. Instead it falls to the people who ultimately will be carrying the weapons to achieve political aims. And so we return to the folly of war. There is no actual reason to fight beyond the myths of politicians. There is no reason to attack if you are not being attacked yourself. And when you face an invading army is the most part the people you meet do not wish to invade but are too weak to stand up to their own politicians. If we could educate them to lay down weapons then we ave achieve the same goal as fighting them. So pre-emtively before it gets to air drops of hostile troops the goal is to educate people globally of the folly of war and how avoiding war at any cost is brave and noble thing to do.

Meaning of Life

Misunderstanding the senses leads us on the wrong path in life. Many who have followed this path have not seen the falasy and have ended up wasting their entire lives.

The Senses

The senses create a powerful illusion if we don’t understand them. Naively we think what we experience is what is there. Only partially correct. When our senses are intact we get an experience. So the experience depends upon our senses and so it’s not just the world straight and simple.

Eyes create sight experiences, noses smell experiences. We are well familiar. But its wrong to say the world is actually made of the things we see or smell. The sound of a tree falling in a forest with no-one to hear it obviously doesn’t make a sound. You need ears to get a sound.

If one doubts whether the tree needs hearing to make a sound we need only ask a deaf person what sound it makes. However the deaf person may well feel the vibrations. They may also see it, which a blind person won’t experience. So the tree falling creates many experiences in many senses, in many people. There is no single *experience* of the tree falling. Each person not only has multiple experiences themselves like seeing and hearing, but each person has a different experience. This is the source of the Great Illusion because we know in truth there is just one tree falling.

In the East there is a 6th sense in addition to the normal 5. This is the sense that experiences thoughts. When we experience something we may have a sight and a sound but we will probably also experience the creation of a thought about it. This is a source of much confusion. In the case of the tree falling the thoughst will be diverse. But in the context of this discussion one of them may be what is the Truth? What is the correct true thought? Did a tree really just fall? Arguments may break out as people challenge their various experiences. But it is really helpful to see that these thoughts are created by the events as much as the sights and sounds. Less mentally strong people may, like blind people, have duller thoughts but at root thoughts are just part of our experience.

The Way To Freedom

In our thoughts we may pursue this now self generaing snow ball of what “really” happened if our senses are interacting with the tree falling and creating lots of different experiences. What does a tree falling “really” mean. What we conclude after much thought is that a tree falling has no quality of itself. It needs to interact with the world to take on a form, and the form created depends upon what is there. The sound of a tree falling in a forest with no one there, like Schroedingers Cat with the box closed, is what is called Sunyata in Buddism. It can be either, but itself it is neither. It doesn’t mean that it switches between states, or that it is confused about what it is, it IS Sunyata. The confusion only occurs in our thoughts which by definition deal with things that are this way and that. Sunyata can’t be thought. Sunyata is the cause of thoughts! To the wise however they can see that the manifestation of concrete things is itself Sunyata. They are not to be separated. As the Heart Sutra says: Form is Void and Void is Form.

One doesn’t need this level of wisdom however to steer in the correct direction. Mistaking our experiences to be Real and Truthful, rather than created and relative we often attribute far too much importance in them. In particular we pursue a particular aspect of experiences which is whether we like them or not. A person who has not understood that their experinces as just their own, small, local, temporary and created puts a wall around themselves. They become trapped within their senses. In philosophy this position is called Solipsism. How do you prove that anyone else is real? The problem with this is that if start from the awareness that there are other people then how do you prove that your experience is real! If we become attached to our senses then we end up owning them. We are fully trapped and end up believing in a single observer and self experiencing these private phenomena and we end up reject the existence of others.

It is interesting that as a kid I ended up proving the need for Sunyata. But because of a fundemntal attachment to my senses I ended up believing in a personal space in which experiences arose with indefinable sunyata on the outside. Only half correct. I couldn’t see the attachment to my senses that was driving this bubble, private cinema view of life.

Once attachment to senses is gone we live in a world finitely larger than the bubble of private experiece. It means that the worst experiences, while they are indeed happening to us, lose their finality and permanence, and are seen as just a part of the great world. When we see someone else having horrible experiences they are as important to us as our own. Even tho when we have an experience it is real and solid, we understand it in the context of the Great Infinite World of which our tiny bubbles of created experience grow and pop endlessly. We become truly freed from the trap of ourself. Some will say that we lose the intensity of pleasure and indulging our own likes. But do you prefer a comfortable prison or the infinitity of freedom? Red pill or blue pill. Although its not a fair comparison because expanding beyond the senses delivers us into a world without the pressing concerns for like and dislike.

So What is Reality?

So what is out there? The key thing is we uncouple from the endless drive for like and dislike. It is still there but isn’t totally absorbing. Instead we begin to switch to a more universal point of view. Other people become as important to us as ourself. Intellectually we’ve always been able to see this: what in reality actually separated us? Despite thinking we know, no one will ever find an answer to that question cos there is nothing there!

The Meaning of Life

So the Meaning of Life reveals itself outside our sense. It isn’t the endless pursuit of pleasure, or escaping the suffering and troubles of our life. It is freeing ourself from these concerns by letting go of the importants of our senses and putting them in a proper perspective of just momentary creations in a vast boundless universe full of endless beings and even more endless experiences. Once we begin to let go, then we will start to experience the fullness of existence.

Practically it means being brave, being bigger than we think we are, being a Hero and achieving what we think is impossible. Faced with difficult situations, or being blinded by bad experiences, we have that faith in the Bigger Thing, the thing beyond our apparent senses and thoughts. Doesn’t matter what that thing is, the issue is unattaching from the specific here and now that has us trapped. Each time we do this we become bigger, or more accurately we let go of the smaller self that has us trapped. Practically it means paying more attention to others, and learning to consider them as much as ourself. If we can serve another then we have truly unattched from our own senses. Of course we can do this too much, their senses are also not to be take too seriously. Perhaps if they are demanding we can help them serve more and unattach from the demands and perspectives of their own sense and thoughts.

What is interesting about this analysis is that it agrees completely with the wisdom of every age and time. Whether it is Jesus or Muhammad, or Krishna, or Buddha the core teaching is to avoid the small of Evil and open our hearts to the big of Good. It means being humble not arrogant, it means subservient not in command, it means listening not commanding, it means being a carer not a warrior. Those who get trapped in the senses gradually get cut off from the world, and while they may feel that they are large, it is because they have forgotten what is really great. By contrast those who know what is really great no longer get impressed by their own tiny existence and become very simple and straighforward. It is sad how often this is misunderstood. The Glory of God so often associated with triumph and success, and personal gratification and winning. You know when you have God on your side, and when you are a truely Great Person not when you win and celebrate, but when you lose and are content with that, because what can we ever gain that is even close to the grandure of the infinite reality that hosts our every experience and thought? When you see people celebrating victory you know you are in the comany of the small people, the servant of the Devil, the victims of the Great Illusion, too foolish (as yet) to escape the trap of their senses.

Fixed Points and God

A Fixed Point is like that point on a map of England that is right over the place where the point on the map is. Easy to see that the operation making a map (which is shrinking and moving it around) has a fixed point for any location of the map within the map area.

Fixed points remain invariant under an operation. Some geometric operation have one like making a map. But due to Kleene there is a proof that all logical systems have a fixed point. I believe a Turing machine has a fixed point. And since a Turing machine can perform every computation possible, and can emulate every computable system possible it means that every system must have a Fixed Point (that argument needs serious work).

It means that every system has an invariant. ow suppose there are systems we make which are designed to discover points of invariance. They cannot discover their own points of invariance because they cannot operate on them. Fixed Points represent “meta” data about a system. Possibility the basis of the proof I need to show that systems cannot be total, because they cannot encompass their own meta data.

Bt vast analogy Religions speak of the invariant nature of God or True Self. And also that this invariance is beyond the power of individuals. It is the given. The presence of Fixed Points in out Existence would provide exactly this experience. The discovery of the Fixed Points that Religion speaks of is not a process that lies within the system but is a feature of the system itself. Human Being may be systems but they belong to a world which ha just one Fixed Point. It is the invariance of that which enables the world to see that it is not a particular System as is the view point of Human Beings. Seeing the meta data releases us from the common system of being a Human Being. We are not ourselves in the system, but rather the whole interconnected system itself. That was the original insight anyway. But back to something concrete and intellectual.

A quine is a fixed point of a computer program. You input the text of a particular program to a computer and it generates the text of that program. So if this (SRH) hypothesis is true then a program cannot find its own quine. Well obviously. A quine must output the program itself. But a search is a program that goes through all options until finds something matching a criterion. So if the output is just a list of possibilities until matching a criterion then so must the program be. But is that a search. Anyway try to write a quine that is both the output of a search and a program at the same time… something obvious I’m missing here?

PI does not contain itself

If PI contains itself then its decimal expansion is a repeating set of digits. Lets just look at the fractional part.

So pi = PI - 3. And pi(i) represents the ith digit of the fractional part of PI. 

pi = 0.141592654...

so pi(5) = 9

Now if pi contains itself then at some value of 'n' it follows that pi(i) = pi(i+n)

pi = 0.pi(1)41592654...pi(n)pi(n+1)41592654...pi(2n)pi(2n+1)41592654...

Such a sequence can be expressed as a fraction:

For example:

0.12345612345612345612345612345612... = 123456/999999

So pi would be:

1415926..pi(n)/9999999..n times

But Pi is irrational so we know that Pi is not built from a repeating finite sequence and does not repeat after a finite n.

This leaves 2 options. Either Pi repeats after a countably infinite n, or it does not contain itself.

Let us supposed that pi repeats after a countably infinite n.

This means that:

pi = lim(n->inf) 1415926..pi(n)/9999999..n

As I understand it all Real numbers can be expressed like this so the question of "contains itself" starts to get rather ambiguous. Repeating after an infinite sequence of digits is the same as not repeating it seems. To be confirmed.

Death

This blog was an investigation of Life. My life. My disaster of a Life and questions that it raised. It is 11 years since it started and I realised today that almost no progress has been made. Blundering around wondering whether to form sexual relationships, whether to work, buy a house, become a monk, abandon myself to pleasure, find some magical Enlightenment that would lift me out. What?

But realising that almost no progress has been made is the result of considerable progress. I realised that I need go back to Death first to see what is this Life. So what is Death? I shall present some ideas, none better than the rest, but all insufficient to capture the miraculous nature of Death.

A common view is that it is lights out. Game over. Oblivion. But consider the smaller death of closing our eyes. The world goes out. There is nothing but blackness but we don't for a minute think that the world has ceased to exist. We can think ourself into confusion here, but that isn't productive, so lets step around that quagmire. With out eyes closed we know the world carries on as usual. Our body is still here, our heart keeps beating, the sun keep moving through the sky. So when we die what makes us think anything changes then? Obviously our heart stops, and our brain shuts down and lots of other changes, but nothing actually changes. The world goes on. So what is this "oblivion" people speak of in this view of Death?

Another view is that we remain aware and while our physical eyes shut and our mortal body shuts down our hidden eyes are able to separate and travel to other places unseen by the living. This is a comforting thought. I have witness from several people on their death bed of being visited by people to take them away. Near death experiences are scientifically recognised. There is much mystery here. But like Oblivion it doesn't quite capture the whole mystery. If this "spiritual" body is always there then there is no real Death so we haven't got any closer to Death.

A common problem with ideas of Death is focus on the time and the body. We say of a child when they die what a tragedy that they didn't get to live their whole life. We know they are a child because their body is young. Older people look in the mirror and know that Death is approaching and accept it much more readily - I am satisfied with my life, or I have regrets. Although I know of some elderly who at Death were afraid by it, and others at younger age who were not concerned by it. We worry also about health and whether this body will last or give up on us. But our bodies, like our age and time, is not really connected to the question of Death. All these concerns are a side show to what is really going on in Life.

The key to the mystery of Death is linked to the mystery of Life. When do we Die is like the question when do we Live? Do I live yesterday? No. Do I live tomorrow? No. I live right now. In fact if I look at it, I always live right now. There has never been a moment in my life when I haven't been alive right now. And, I have never been alive yesterday, or tomorrow, only ever now. That sounds weird because I remember being alive yesterday and I expect to be alive tomorrow. But the point is those are only a memory and an expectation. If I had lost my memory it would be clearer: I am alive now and only ever now. That is where life happens. Our common view of Time is exactly like a wall calendar... it isn't time as it happens as we know it.

It's an odd way to see things to begin with, this "Present Moment" as it is usually called. But with practice we start to get the hang of it. We have many movies playing in the theatre of the Present Moment carrying all sorts of memories of the past, plans, thoughts. Often like with TV we get stuck watching them. But if we step back and survey Our Life as it stands we see that it is only what is happening that is Real. Everything else is a movie we are playing ourself along side what is happening.

So what of Death? If we look in the private movie theatre we see pictures of us as kids, and sketches of us as old people, and then perhaps brief glimpses of a funeral or grave, or perhaps a disaster where we die, or a peaceful scene with our loved ones around. Perhaps we play a film of us floating off to Heaven and being in the company of ancestors and God. But from the perspective of My Life this is all movie, a piece of entertainment. It isn't Death at all.

What emerges in the Present Moment of Life is that actually there is no exact thing called Death. The nearest thing to the opposite of Present Moment is day-dreaming on auto-pilot and we do that all the time. Indeed most of us spend most of our lives not in the Present Moment. We spend most of our lives not aware of Life, not actually Being Alive, and so in a way we are Dead most of the time! Ironically particularly when we are day dreaming about death!

If we return to our bodies for a moment. Or great fear is that the body will fail. But if we look at the body we have seen lots of bodies fail. It is on the news all the time. What we mean is that "our" body will fail. That is the one body amongst all the others that is our major concern. And now we enter the rabbit warren of the actual cause of the problem that Death poses. It is not Death itself, that happens all the time, it is "our" Death.

If for a second we ignore "our" Death and look at all the other Deaths. It is quite remarkable that they don't really make much difference. 80 million people died in World War 2. It is totally incomprehensible but every one of them was a person like you are I worrying about their Life, trying to stay alive and live a happy life. And all of them perished in a way we cannot even comprehend. And yet today for all that tragedy and disaster it makes no difference at all. The Sun still rises each day as though nothing had happened. Planet Earth is still blue. Its almost as though Death didn't exist!

What is surprising is the observation that a life ending is quite natural and normal. It is no great disaster. Every living thing will end its life at some stage. It is not really an event worth mentioning. Yet when it happens to us, or our loved ones then it is a matter for profound concern. I won't complete this now but I shall leave it here at the glaring contradiction between seeing so much death and destruction in World War 2 and it leaving almost no trace on the world, and the feeling that our own Death will be some cataclysmic event that will knock the stars out of the sky and cause Game Over or perhaps a celebration in Heaven.

Perhaps I will add one note that while I push toward a balanced and simple view of Death, this does not distract from the fact that in its reality it is a very traumatic experience for most, and thus always demands our deepest sympathies and support.

Death is certainly a mystery. One as great, deep and unfathomable as Life itself.

BBC Salaries do follow the market

BBC salaries follow a perfect inverse square root. This is what you’d expect from a pure free market. It seems unless they deviously had this is mind, they are simply following the market rates.

The take home from that this is that people compliaing about the salaries, are really complaining about Capitalism and Free Market valuation. Which interestingly is why the BBC was set up, and why it is wrong to force the BBC to start competing ina free market.

Load of nonsense isn’t it.