How misunderstood are Good and Bad

I had the misfortune of watching styxhexenhammer666's vlog on being an ex-satanist and his attempted interpretation of Satanism as being a non-spiritual practical ideology of liberty.

Indeed it is. And the traditional view of God is also that he is a tyrant who seeks absolute obedience from his subjects and only the brave have the guts to rebel and seek freedom, as indeed did Lucifer the shining angel of light. So the religious view is in accordance with the secular view completely. Whether you want to believe in God/Devil or not does nothing to change the ideology: it is about personal freedom. And if you think that God/Devil are just metaphors then you can continue to think in terms of them without bringing in the whole irrelevant discussion on whether they "exist" or not. I will use God/Devil as metaphors without getting involved in any irrelevant questions of ontology... Lets stick to the point: liberty and evil.

So what is wrong with that? And here is the confusion. Remember the "Devil" has no power other than deception. People like to use mystical images of the devil, and associate him with various supernatural powers, and believe he can get you what you want, and he is associated with "Evil" and all manner of fantastical stuff. And this is in fact all true. But the whole point of spiritual power is that it doesn't come from the "deity" you worship, it comes from You. "gods" have no power themselves, it all comes from the Central Power of the Universe which is the same as You. If you worship a certain type of "god" you are simply strengthening your own resolve and power. In the secular world we see it all the time in "positive" thinking movements and being in the "zone", being focused and resolved to do things. When the Self is focused and resolved to do things its power is hugely magnified. If you really believe things then there are no limits. In Buddhism this is fully recognised and understood, which is one reason I respect Buddhism so much, it gives an extraordinarily full account of all these processes. Chanting, which even Jesus dismissed as the "pagans babbling" is, if done with sincere faith and belief, a way of generating mental focus and resolve. Meditation even more so. So whether you chant Guan Yin and seek to manifest her fearless love for all mankind within yourself to overcome obstacles and fears, or you chant the name of the Devil to generate strength to pursue your personal goals, or whether you pray to Jesus and ask the Holy Spirit to enter you so you can carry out God's destiny for you in fact they are all doing the exact same thing which is empowering You.

So all spiritual practice is about self-empowerment regardless what branch you follow. So how is Satanism different from the others? What is this Liberty that appealed to styxhexenhammer666? And how does Good/Bad fit into this.

SO the key difference between the types of Self Empowerment are whether they empower you to follow your own desires or whether they empower you to respond to other people's desires too. This appears to be the single source of confusion. Should we pay 100% attention to what we want only, or should we find time for other people.

Put like that lots of people will think. If I give 10% of my time to other people then I only have 90% for myself and who is going to give me that? I can only be sure of myself so I'll take 100% for myself and other people can do 100% themselves. It all works out. You can't go anywhere from here, 100% is taken by everyone and that's it.

But in reality this is not how things are. I go to a party and there are 5 friends there, and we all make an effort to find time to be together and we have a great time. This is impossible if we all stayed at home. When people get together the result is more than if they are separate. Indeed the Satanist knows this, being in a group of Satanists generates more power than if they did it alone. There is an extra bit. This in fact is why Satanists form groups. But how in a world where the self is 100% can there be more? Where does the extra "good time" when you get together come from? How when 5 people put there rents together to move into a big house, do they all get a share of a big house? When alone they would each have a small flat? There are obvious things going on in the world where the sum of parts is more than the parts. If you take a sacrificial human and break them apart into organs you have less than when you started, they for example cannot hold a conversation anymore - this is the most noticeable change possible seeing how the parts of the body in a dead person are not the same as the functioning whole.

So examining this way in which people actually fit together in a bigger entity, and how our lives are actually the result of this interconnection to other people is the way to better things than can be achieved by the I AM 100% view. This is the lowest possible view, the common denominator, where you descend when everything else fails. But the Devil being the ultimate Hoaxer makes this seem like a safe place to hide, where we think we have power. It is an illusion. This god is actually the only god who makes things worse off in the long run. You may initially feel you have self power and you embark on a I AM 100% road, but as the world around you starts to do this you realise how much you gained from parties and the interaction with other people.

Finally "desires" are real, regardless who they belong to. Examining this we see that there is actually no reason why "my" desires are more important than others. True if we don't attend to our own desires we will die, but we won't accidentally ignore our desires (tho a lot of us actually do - see below!) cos when we feel hungry that hunger often gets notified before other people. But in reality there is no difference between 2 hungry people. How do you chose who to feed? Well you work together to solve your mutual hunger. The key to solving desires is mutuality, and thoughts that think "I'll just do it myself" while successful are the least powerful thought. The Devil's goal is actually to crush us, it is always worth remembering this. He is 100% himself so why would he give even 1% for us?

Now there is Nietzsche, and there are negative emotions which some would say are actually the positive emotions and they would say we are brainwashed by Christianity and Slave Consciousness into denying ourselves our desires. The only problem with Nietzsche from a factual point of view is that the idea of denying yourself did not come from the Jews in Slavery. His idea here is that imprisoned by the Egyptians the Jews came to reject the freedom of their captor Pharaohs and instead justify and internalise their own lack of freedom. From this came the religion of subservience to an all powerful captor (God) and the virtue of being obedient slaves from which came Protestant Work Ethic and ultimately Capitalism where we live in a world completely subservient to paying off debt held with the rich and powerful.

Now don't think I am not 100% sympathetic to this view, but there is a problem. In India there is the exact same idea. And while India experienced the Aryan invasion which enslaved the Southern Indians it is the Aryan religion which speaks of self-mortification! (and which probably became Judaism anyway). Tapas is the energy gained from self-mortification which leads to all kinds of supernatural powers and mental abilities. The whole idea of spirituality in opposition the physical materialism has just as rich a history here as in the West. Altho it is important to make a point here. In the post Platonic West oppositions are seen as absolute: in the fight there can be only 1 winner. Before Plato and elsewhere in the world while one fight may end with a winner and loser, "Fighting" itself is endless and so it is not the winning/losing that matters but seeing the eternal struggle between opposites bound inseparably in the Battle - as Kierkegaard put it "try and separate the dancer from the dance" may as well have been separate the "spirit from the body" or "the winner from the loser" or the "capitalist from their possessions." So the Resistance of desires vs the Embracing of desires is an eternal battle with no winner of loser but the very nature of being a desiring being is wondering whether to obey our desires or reject them. So the matter of desire is not as Nietzsche put it in freedom to pursue ones desires, but in the battle to manage ones desires at all. I forget the film but someone says to a King "but you can have anything you desire" and the King says forlornly, "but who gets to choose what he desires?" We are all slaves to desire unless we can master them. Sanskrit literature points this out, "It takes a great man to command an army, and an even greater one to master themselves." The hardest person to be in charge of is our self, and this is the Tapas that the Hindus speak of. If I have decided to run a marathon, but in the morning I decide to sit in and watch TV it is hard to see whether we are doing what we want... however really we know full well we have let ourselves down and the watching TV was not what our true wish - we just did it to avoid stepping up to do the run. And that is it in fact, the goal of this blog entry: Our "True Wish" is the hardest thing to obey. We are always tempted away from our true wish, and the weak man is easily dissuaded from their true path, easy to distract, easy to weaken the resolve of, easy to manipulate, fickle and unfaithful to themselves. This is the whole point of Religion to give us icons and a focus for our True Wish so that we may find support in not being distracted.

But with all that said, who even knows their True Wish. It takes a special form of honesty to admit that we have failed our self, that we have not been true to our self, that we have not given our best. I think for Satanists what they gain from congregation with other Satanists is mutual hiding of this recognition that they have failed themselves. This type of freedom, the freedom to let oneself down--and I don't mean let other people down, and their expectations of you, which is just personal weakness also-- I mean inner-eye to inner-eye let oneself down and ones own True Wish.

There is no easy way to finish this blog, because in the end it is so personal. You cannot tell people their True Wishes. As Kierkegaard puts it, the Divine Madness is not the same as the Aesthete even while being a personal experience. It does not rely upon social justification and ethics, and it does not rely upon private motivation but is a hybrid of personal experience which never-the-less has universal significance. When the True God speaks to us (in whatever form you wish to see Him) he does so privately but what he says effects the Universe. To weak minds this might give a sense of megalomania, but it's complete mundane in fact. Seeing the True God in the simple drinking of a cup of tea is what makes us Our True Self. Doing so without distraction, in the full knowledge that this is what we have chosen to do, and it is our wish, not coerced by others, done simple and perfectly, without hidden motives, without desire to impress or hurt others or be showy or achieve some effect other than what it is: this is True Wish and True Action.

I wonder whether a suicide person ever gets taken over by a type of Divine Madness, where suddenly the road of their destiny opens up and they see it is as a fitting final page of their life. But I doubt this very much in fact. I think acts of destruction like this are always secretly motivated by wishing to hurt other people, and they are never a True Wish from our own Hearts. How ever things may seem today, we know that tomorrow is a completely different day, and if we are ready to step up onto our old selves and let them go admit not pursuing our True Wish, tomorrow is then a completely different Self also - indeed everything can be different tomorrow. But the problem with huge acts of destruction is that tomorrow is very likely to carry the impact of that act and be very hard to get away from so really we are simply making it even harder to move on. Dying is never the end, it is just the Start. When we die (or others die), sadly we do not leave ourselves behind, we only destroy the body, but the Wishes and the Destiny still spread out before us, and we just add problems to something we are only putting facing until the future. Like with God/Devil at the start lets not get into a ontological discussion of whether souls really exist or not and whether there is a real afterlife etc, it is irrelevant to understanding how things are: point is whether they exist or not has made no difference to whether i can live of not so it doesn't matter for everyday life of which I am talking. When I am confronted with people who say they want to hurt or kill me, I always accept it, but ask them a simple question "I can't stop you, but can you tell me how this will help you?" Acts of violence are never True Wish, negative wishes and emotions, abuses and hurt are never our Deepest Wish - they seek only to enact revenge, or make a huge display so others notice us, respect us or in some way get other people to do something for us. It is better not to expect from others, in this at least the Satanist is right: be 100% yourself, never expect others to help, support or make you feel good: this is not in our power no matter who we pray to. Think about it: if everyone is 100% themselves then we can't change them or expect anything different from them than what we get. This is correct. But where the Satanist is wrong is that this doesn't stop us from being better than that our self. Help others, support them and make them feel good is very much in our power! And if we think it through there is no reason not do this. And, while The Devil will say all manner of negative things like, why bother, they're not worth it, I deserve more than them, I like to hurt them more than make them feel good, they never did anything for me, I am hurting so why should they feel good - despite this onslaught of negative stuff our True Wish is to feel and be Good, and we know this is a universal wish shared by all, and so the True Wish is that everyone feels and is Good. If we pursue that purely selfishly and diligently we will gain the greatest power that exists in the Universe and which the Devil is trying his hardest to blind us to because he does not want us to Shine more than the angel of light.

Category Mistake in brain science

So I think it would be nice to do some experiments on my own neurons... and then I realise it would be easy I just need to touch something to stimulate a neuron and feel the response... and that the rub in Ryle's terms we have a category mistake.

When we "touch something" there are 2 ways of talking and thinking about the event.

(1) There is the usual I have touched something and now I can feel it.

(2) But then there is the scientific view: some neurons have just been stimulated and transmitted a signal to my brain. It is interesting that Buddhism uses this type of thinking to drive a wedge into sensation and ask us to see it as a constructed process that is not inherently "real."

It is worth noting that type (1) thinking, the unreflective, habitual mode where things are just things and we get on with life without introspection - we pull that cup of tea near until we feel it touches our lips and take a sip - is considered an illusion. It takes things to just be and takes sensation to be things themselves. When we see a car coming for us on the road, we step out of the way to avoid being hit by that car. Yet in type 2 thinking that is not a car, it is the sensation caused by a car in our eyes... it is a process.

At least seeing these 2 way so thinking side by side is a great achievement... cos it is a third way of thinking that is neither and can examine both.

=== Update 30/09/2018
While pushing one idea here I have got the Buddhist bit completely!!! wrong. Reality in Buddhism and Hegel et al. is just what is in appearance, and the "what is behind the appearance" is the illusion, which occurs in thoughts and imagination. So "thinking" that neurons are behind my sensations is the illusion: it is the occurrence and appearance of sensations/phenomena that is the thing we can actually observe and so it is real. So the cup of tea touching our lips when we drink is as real as you can get: the appearance of that sensation IS REALITY. If we subsequently think that this was a cup touching our lips, or a neuron firing this is a story/narrative which is never real and the reality here is the fact we have the occurrence of the thought.

So returning to the original post, the division is between 2 ways of thinking only. In reality there is only 1 way anyway.

Instructive issues with a trading simulation

It is basically poker. All traders buy bids in the market and get an equal share of the winnings if they are right.

I want to game to be infinite so I can look at the time series, but very quickly someone goes bankrupt as the unlucky finance the lucky. This is the first observation of economies with a closed amount of wealth (like a gold currency): since the amount of gold never changes all that happens is that people lose wealth to other people.

To create new traders to replace bankrupt ones a few decisions must be made:
(1) What to do with their debt.
(2) How to finance the creation of a child.

(1) I've chosen to apply a universal tax so that national debt is recovered as a percentage of your wealth.
(2) Again this could be via national taxation, but the question arises which child to create?

In this sim traders have DNA strings which decide their bidding behaviour. So the question is which DNA string to replicate for the children.

If we adopt universal taxation then we could create children from random DNA to be impartial. Alternatively we could create children from the DNA of the most successful traders to improve the trading skill of the population.

The most realistic is not to tax but to ask traders if they wish to create a child. If they spend too much on a child they risk redundancy themselves, so their is a risk involved. So the question then arises what is the reward for a trader to have a child?

In terms of the population this has the great benefit that it will evolve a better population. But from the point of view of the individual trader what gain is there in having a child?

One benefit in the real world is that you have a loyal helper. But how do I encode that in this sim without making it overly complex.

The goal is just to create time series for study that reflect populations of competing bidders. But the question of how to replace the bankrupt seems to be quite a huge one.

Panic Disorder

So I have had a panic disorder for most of my life. Its just been a part of my life. Has been worse and better at times, but has always been there and been a worry. My life has been controlled by avoiding situations that may lead to panic and being anxious always that it may occur. Social situations, enclosed spaces, transport, relationships, even talking to people have all become situations to avoid. I never bothered to get it diagnosed but parts of it are very OCD. So recently I put together all my learning on this problem and solved it. Here is the solution.

There are 4 stages to combating my panic disorder. They rely on ideas primarily from Buddhism and Psychology. Starting meditation is the important preliminary as the stronger your mind the easier to implement what follows. But meditation alone is only a helpful part. In the past I have "got over" my panic disorder and been strong enough to throw it away, but I have never solved it before and it has come back. This is the solution.

1. Panic is caused by a sense of Danger. Danger is the key. If you think about every situation in which you panic you can see that actually there is very little danger. You know this because other people can breeze through your situation without any concern. What is different between you (and me) and other people in that situation, is that you think about it differently from them that is all. The Danger lies in the way you see things not in the situation. Not much help when you are panicking but this is the key. Careful consideration of this in calm private moments must be undertaken to develop a deep belief that actually there is No Danger to your situation.

As an example: one side of my panic makes me think that inside me there is a evil side that will automatically, at any moment, do something bad and I must guard against that. It stems from a few bad things I remember doing as a kid, and I rationalised this as me having an evil side which my good side must control. This belief I must be on guard developed into a continual anxiety and loss of ease and sense of Danger that I was going to do something terrible like shout out in a theatre, or push someone under a train on a packed tube platform (a million little worries). Any bad thought became evidence of my evil side plotting a horrendous crime. I have read about OCD and that the obsessive sense you are imminently going to do something is not real, that is very helpful in convincing myself that I am not in Real Danger. Meditation is also extremely helpful. If you can meditate into the "Present Moment" you can see clearly even when panicking that there is actually No Danger. Danger is things like a Tiger running for you that you need to run away from. Bad thoughts and fears of being trapped or being socially excluded etc are not real danger they leave you completely unharmed and you don't need to do anything. I went to a lecture where it was explained that the epidemic in childhood anxiety and mental health can be attributed to us never experiencing real danger anymore so our panic response gets over active. I used to go caving and climbing to tackle my fears and I found being in really dangerous situations really helped to reset and over active panic response.

The Panic response to Danger I understand is caused by a part of the brain called the Amygdala (it doesn't really matter the point is to see panic response as a distinct thing we can study). This is designed to respond to danger and override the brain to run away or fight. It is useful for protection from tigers but of no use at all with 99.9% of our modern anxieties. A panic disorder happens when our Amygdala gets a bit too trigger happy. I call mine Maisie, she is a bitch. The key to fixing Maisie lies in persuading her there is no danger. But before that we must reject her insistence to run away or fight. So stage 1 when panic happens is to just remain seated or where we are and remind our self that actually there is No Danger At All. Maisie has got it wrong. Much easier said than done when you have been listening to her robotically and panicking for more than 30 years. I have tried this stage before but without the next stages the panic just gets worse.

2. Stage 1 explained in a lot of depth how we arrive at the belief we are in danger. It is all to do with the story we tell our self that convinces us we are in danger. I call this "The Book". In my case there are a ton of stories in particular the story of a hidden evil side that causes me to do all the bad things in my life. It's a silly story now I review it in later life, but as a kid it was compelling and I habitually still read it from The Story book all the time. Unfortunately so does Maisie my Amygdala. She likes that Story book cos it gives her all the ammunition she needs to step in and shut my brain down and panic. Stage 2 then it closing the book. There is simply no need for stories when we are panicking. A quick survey of the situation will tell us if a tiger is about to consume us, there after we Shut the Book. No more ruminating on stories of how we are in Danger, or remembering why we are panicking. Just close the book. There is No Danger full stop, end of. We must be strong with Maisie she nags and nags and asks to open the book and start reading all the tell tail signs that we are in impending doom and need to get out. Its all a trick served up by an over eager part of our brain.

It is important also to avoid a further trick. How many years have we been writing and exploring that Story book. Was there ever an end or does it go on forever? OCD is like that, we get locked in a thought and can't escape. It just goes around and around with no way out. We get tricked into the Book cos we believe we just need go around one more time and we finish the book, just one more page and we are there. It is endless... Just Close The Book! For this meditation is the most helpful approach. Close the book and enter Present Moment / Mindfulness (same thing) is the key, but will take a lot of daily practice to get good at.

3. Once we have closed the book Maisie the Amygdala is all alone. She doesn't have ammunition, there is just the feeling of panic. It is horrible, it is dreaded, it is what we have been trying to avoid perhaps for many decades. We are very unused to looking at panic because with The Story behind her Maisie has always dressed up Panic to mean the end of the world. But, we have a quick look around at other people being calm in our most feared situation and see there is no real tiger pouncing and we know Maisie is playing her attention seeking trick again. Once we feel that feeling of fear isolated from The Story we then ask Maisie to give us more. Crazy but this is the last thing she expects. We want as much fear as we can get. Feel it flowing through us, let it come, bring it on. We can be a bit crazy as we know there is no real danger! Ask: how much can there be, how bad can this get? Without The Story we know there is no Danger here, there is just a feeling caused by an overactive part of our brain. That feeling, that fear itself, can do us no harm. Our body may feel it is about the explode, our heart racing, sweating, blood draining but no harm is present and we perfectly safe. It was only ever The Story that made us believe there was a threat.

We can add a twist to this which links to stage 4. Often panic makes us very shut down and enclosed. We feel we are alone and this actually helps Maisie the Amygdala take control of us. Without other people we can really get stuck in The Story and dig ourselves as deep as we like with no way out. Other people are really important to break outside the boundaries of our self. It is after all watching other people being cool in our worst situation (maybe a plane or a meeting) which gives us one of our biggest clues that it is only our problem we are facing and not a real danger! Metta meditation is a truly healing practice which everyone should do regularly. It is the key to happiness, but will take daily practice to really get to work. In this meditation we wish ourselves and other people well being and happiness. It takes practice, especially if we have a negative approach to our self or other people which we probably do with all Maisie Amygdala's anxiety and fears around. When we feel panic it is very useful to become a bit of the hero and imagine we are feeling the fears of everyone who is struggling with our problem. Imagine there is only so much fear in the world and someone has to feel it. Since we are panicking we may as well be the one who is emptying the pot of panic so that other people can be freed from the problem. This works. Perhaps it works because secretly by helping other people we are actually stepping beyond our self which helps us get one up on Maisie the Amydala who only has control over our own brain and body. We can go beyond that and connect to other people - we are really infinite but get trapped inside our very narrow view which helps Maisie enormously.

4. The final stage is not really necessary but is a very nice end to a panic episode. We are panicking. We are stubbornly just taking it, sitting there with the storm flying off all around us. We want to open The Story and read about how bad this situation is and how much danger we and other people or in, but we are keeping the Story firmly closed. We can quickly check for tigers if we must and see that actually everything is safe, but really we should be just knowing stubbornly that we are safe full stop and not checking. We are feeling that panic feeling that has been so terrible before as just what it is a feeling, with no danger associated. We are just over reacting. We are exploring just how much fear is there, asking our Amygdala to give us it all.. what is really behind this door of fear we have run away from for so long. We are also beginning to link to everyone else who feels fear and helping them by letting their fears run through us as well. Together we are beating this. I am beating this not just for me but for everyone.

And then quite remarkably in the midst of panic that seems like it will crush us, with thoughts of "I can do this" "I can make it" "I'm about to give us" "this is the most awful thing anyone has ever experienced"... and through it all we just sit there and want more stopping intrusive thought that try to confirm our worst fears holding The Story book firmly and stubbornly closed... trying to connect to other people through the wind and driving rain that is obscuring our view... suddenly we realise that we are ok. The situation that seemed like the end of the world, that we needed to escape with such desperate urgency and dread is now just ok. We are like other people again sitting peacefully in our worst situation. It won't last Maisie the Amygdala will have another go, this is her reason for existence after all. But we go through it again. Don't run away, close the book, ask for more of that feeling until there is none left, drain the world of panic so that other people can be free from this soul destroying dread. And within a week of sitting through panics we learn very fast that really there is nothing to be afraid of with Maisie the Amydala. She is just an organ like any other and she has this effect, it is no longer the end of the world. We can panic and be left unharmed by it. Next then when we are calm if we want to start reading The Story again and exploring it, but never again will we let Maisie take that story from us and start driving the show. we are in control of The Story and we decide when things are dangerous Not our Amygdala!

Good luck.

Functional, Imperative, Declarative, Monads, Abstraction, Decoupling, Dependencies... Delegation

A lot is written about all these things but there is just one goal: delegation.

A block of code will often do many things and have many effects and side effects including raising exceptions. This means the code becomes deeply embedded in the life of the program having links to many things... and the spaghetti starts making future changes, debugging and general understanding of the code exponentially harder as the program grows.

The goal of beautiful code is to create units which can be isolated, unplugged and replaced from the program easily. This means in the future, understanding what the unit does, debugging and changing it become a matter as simple as unplugging a light bulb regardless how massive the parent program is.

And this is achieved by delegation. In other words the unit does only what it is required to do and can leave all other details to the outside world. The USB socket being a great example: by abstracting serial communication the hardware of plugging devices into computers has been completely separated from what those devices are.

In React programming for example the issues of actually generating a page are left (delegated) to the rendering engine. All the individual units have to do is work out how they should look, but they never do any actually page building in real time... perhaps the engine won't ever need them... they don't need to care about events and the world of real world display any more than the engine of an HTML page has to worry about the details of internet packet transport.

Delegation is usually used to refer to dependency injection and typed wrappers for function pointers... but it is the same thing. When we encounter a delegate in this sense we can ignore what the delegate actually is in the "real" live world we just know what it should be by the function (type) definition. It is up to the user of our code to supply the actual delegate code, so we have delegated all responsibility to them... we can forget about it.

Encapsulation in OO is the same in reverse. Users of our objects can ignore the implementation, they can delegate those worries to us, exactly as how our objects are used we don't care about either... whether they never even get compiled into a final program or whether they end up controlling a space craft.

Functional programming is the same... a piece of code does one thing that is well defined.. the function user can delegate all responsibility to the function writer, all they know is that the function will transform their data in one way and one way only with no side effects.

In all these ways a block of code does just one thing, completely ignoring its context, and completely independent from its single (if possible) dependency... delegating in both directions all responsibility apart from what it is supposed to do.

By transforming* programs into indivisible units which do just one thing (single responsibility principle) and exporting all other worries to other units, layers and platforms we create easily maintainable and usable code.

*Transforming programs may not be one dimensional. For a contrived example we need to calculate the standard deviation of a set of numbers and also the magnitude. Both these require summing the squares of the numbers. We don't know for sure what the best way of summing squares is so in each implementation we delegate to another function and let that worry about the problem. This would be simple one dimensional refactoring. More sophisticated might be delegating all maths operations to a whole math layer which interprets math strings. So we transform our problem from calling a chain of functions on a data set to building strings which we export to something like Mathematica or R. "x={data set};magnitude(x)" has completely transformed the problem for a different environment. Consider how easy to change the strings for the Mathematica environment compared with actually changing the function chain.

Declarative and Imperative seem to me to be a spectrum. Everything is imperative to some extent unless writing in machine code. An imperative programming language like C is actually a declarative language for a compiler which will make optimisations and may not implement the machine code like the programmer intended at all. At the other end even Mathematica, a functional language, still requires a sequence of functions (or instructions) to be performed on the data, and while those instructions don't need to worry about loops and byte by byte operations they still instruct the engine to do this. Perhaps a lot of the confusion in these terms is that they are not entirely distinct.

Who Caused the Holocaust?

History makes very clear that the Nazis caused the Holocaust with their racist ideology of treating people they considered inferior worse than animals.

History also makes clear that the method used to commit this genocide was swapping water for toxic gas in the showers of various death camps.

There is a type of war history revision that claims the Holocaust never happened which is clearly hugely problematic because it is highly disrespectful of the memory of the tens of millions of innocent people who were murdered in the Holocaust.

But there is another revision I never see expressed which in no way questions the Holocaust, which there is no question happened, but rather it asks who exactly was responsible for it. I do not have enough time to make this hugely comprehensive but the argument is simple. Let me review some simple uncontroversial facts.

(1) The main cause of death in the Holocaust was starvation. All the images we see of the Holocaust are pictures of horrendously emaciated survivors and piles of utterly starved corpses. We know that the "showers" was not used on starving people but were for new captives. These starved people died from starvation.

(2) Britain was struggling with starvation during the war. One of Germany's strategies--indeed a central military strategy in any war--was to try and besiege England. Even with the huge global empire trying to send in supplies Britain struggled with food. Every ounce of land was dug up and turned into farm land and yet we still had rationing for many years even after the war ended.

(3) Of course Britain used exactly the same strategy for Germany, which was much easier after Hitlers failed attempt to capture the Russian grain belt in Ukraine and the gradual cutting off of ties to any allies. By the end of the war Germany had no food. Tied in with hyper-inflation of the Mark, from emergency quantitative easing, everyone in Germany was starving by 1945.

So we know that prisoners in the concentration camps would have been starving by 1945 simply from Allied actions alone regardless what the Nazis did. But that is by itself proof of nothing, it simply points out that the war had these people doomed even if they survived the Nazis.

(4) We also know that the system of concentration camps was set up early in the 1930s. There were well in excess of 1000 such camps. At the time the German logic was to recall "Germans" to the Fatherland from the parts of the Empire they lost in WW1. In turn they made room for them by imprisoning "non-German" people. In Nazi logic Germans belonged in Germany, and non-Germans were inferior people who were best employed as slaves. Its shocking to see this in Europe in the 20th Century but its the same idea we see across the ancient world. Even in "modern" Democratic Athens 90% of the population were slaves, and only the Athenian men were allowed to vote. Germany also had an unpayable debt to pay to the Allies after WW1 and it was the economic reforms and creation of work camps that enabled them to create and economic surplus. In addition Europe wasn't complaining in the 1930s, itself suffering from the US Great Depression fallout, and the cheap slave made goods from Germany were very welcome. Germany indeed was the slave of Europe, and inside Germany they made "non-Germans" into slaves, people such as Russians, Polish and most famously Jews. The thing to note here is that for over 10 years there was no Holocaust just slave camps and "sweat shops" with people being offered for cheap labour and hire in places like Mercedes-Benz and Pfizer. Officially the Holocaust began just before D-Day and the start of the Allied invasion of Germany in 1942. Suddenly Germans racist policies switched from slave labour to extermination.
(5)There is another "fact" that I heard from someone who had studied International Peace Keeping and in particular the huge humanitarian problem that faces relief efforts after wars. Few people speak of it but liberation of the Concentration Camps and Death Camps was not the end of the war for the prisoners. They were obscenely malnourished. If we imagine that Germany completely ran out of food in early 1945 these people would have seen no meal at all for months. The Allies were faced with a problem never seen before of how to feed so many millions of starving people. The extraordinary "fact" is that more prisoners died after the end of the war than during or before. In the unmarked mass burials we see being filled by bulldozers in film, there are more people who died in freedom than in captivity.

This all points to the utterly devastating impact of the Allied invasion of Germany on not only the German people, but also the Holocaust victims. It is not a question of whether the Allies contributed to the Holocaust, but rather how much.

Full disclosure. As a pacifist I am biased toward the view that war does not achieve beneficial outcomes for anyone. Clearly it doesn't benefit the victims of war on either side, and it is hard to find anyone who isn't scarred by the experience of war. But the unspeakable horror of empires fighting it out in WW2 is always overshadowed by the idea that we ended Nazi horrors. But there is no doubt that most of the Nazis horrors are actually war horrors, horrors of starvation and deprivation, and indeed before the war the Nazi horrors were the still no less horrifying, but more "recognisable" imprisonment of people in slave labour.

I say "recognisable" because of course the USA was built by slaves and slaves were only freed across the country after the civil war was fought to free them in 1865. That means there were men retiring in Germany as the concentration camps were being set up who were born while there were still slaves in the US. It has taken all of human history to end slavery, and it is still a relatively recent thing. I personally wonder whether it was the arrival of the steam engine and even cheaper labour than that provided by humans that really motivated the switch from human to machine we see start during the 18th Century.

It is often argued that WW2 was a copy of the American Civil War and was fought by the Allies who opposed slavery against the Axis who wanted slavery. But there is one inconvenient truth that rather clouds these noble histories we have. The Bengal Famine of 1943.

In 1943 the UK was at the height of its war effort to defeat Germany, and Germany had its U-Boats criss-crossing the Atlantic and North Sea in a desperate bid to try and cut off Britain's supplies and starve the country. Food from all around the British empire was being sent home to support the war effort. And then Bengal's harvest failed. For a year Churchill, his mind beset by a desire to crush German, ignored the plight of the Indians and continued to order the export of food from Bengal
to Britain. Millions died. The reports started to come back to a horrified public of gentlemen having to step over the piled up bodies of dead Indians outside their clubs. Public protest eventually persuaded Churchill to stop and reverse some exports to aid the humanitarian disaster, but not before his exasperated statement that the "Indians deserved it for breeding like rabbits." You can sympathise with him at one level that his war effort was being upset by an unexpected catastrophe thousands of miles away that he hadn't banked on. But it takes a particular type of cold heart to keep looking away that long from a problem. Churchill hated Indians, he viewed them as a subordinate race. It was not such a rare sentiment before the end of WW2.

So now we look at Germany in exactly the same situation. They have millions of slaves, not thousands of miles away, but cooped up behind wire in camps across Germany and Poland. And they work these camps to exporting supplies for a war effort. Food starts to run scarce and like Churchill they have no choice but to keep working them and starving them to keep the war effort going. Unlike Britain however Germany was losing the war, and didn't have a huge empire to turn to to feed its starving people. After the camps starved the rest of Germany soon followed.

Given this it looks rather possible to me that the Holocaust the Hitler really caused was actually the Bengal Famine of 1943. He forced Churchill to mercilessly exploit the Bengalis for their food. True Churchill hated Indians, but I doubt he had a heart so cold that he would not have felt compassion for them under normal circumstances. And in contrast it is Churchill who caused the German Holocaust. He forced Hitler to exploit his slaves to death, and starved Germany of the food needed to support them. True that Hitler hated these people, but we know that before the war there were no exterminations, so we can assume without a war he would have continued to run his slave camps until perhaps such time as Germany had a economic surplus by means other than slavery. But this is pure unprovable speculation.

There is then an argument, of great interest to me, that had WW2 not been fought then no-one needed to die. No one needed to lose their father, or mother, or children. No one needed to see their house destroyed, or the historic country become annihilated. No one needed these horror and these memories. Indeed had WW1 not been fought Germany may never have needed to build concentration camps and create a slave class to fuel its crushed economy. It is my personal conviction that when ever war is avoided we have selected the correct leaders, and we have chosen the path of peace and happiness. But when ever our leaders choose war we have made a grave error in selecting them and have committed ourselves much sorry and hardship. In this Churchill as the main architect of the war actually stands above Hitler. But between them they share the blame for the deaths of 1 in 30 people of all humanity at the time. And this is the gravest mistake mankind has ever made electing these people (although Churchill rather surprisingly was not even elected!)

What remains then after this account is the Other Holocaust, the infamous one, the one metered out with Germanic precision in the hellish Death Camps after 1942. There is no question that this horror is a scars that forever marks Mankind, an unforgivable blemish of which we are all be ashamed of. But unfortunately what has clearly happened is that in the haste of assembling a History of the War this Secret Holocaust, witnessed by just a handful of people, never directly attested to in any remaining document, done behind closed doors away from the view of even most Nazis, from which there were no survivors (no one escaped from the showers, even Victor Frankl in his most famous account of the Holocaust never actually witnessed the showers), has been confused with the utterly vast humanitarian disaster that unfolded after the Allied invasion of Germany. In my own mind the careless, or even unwillingness to seek a true history of the War does immeasurable damage to the memory of the Holocaust, and the people who lost their lives in it. If indeed Holocaust deaths can be attributed to Allied action, and it seems impossible that German Concentration Camp victims were not affected by the starvation inflicted by the Allies on the rest of Germany, it is easy to understand why there is little appetite for a true history of the War. It is easier to heap all 80 million deaths onto Hitler and the Nazis. Unfortunately I fear however this absolving of the Allies of blame does nothing to wake people up to the cost of war, and nothing to prevent such a thing again (as indeed it is happening right now in the various theatres of war the Allies have opened up since 9/11 with millions displaced and hungry in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and North Africa from Allied intervention). Without proper Historical Accuracy then what do we Remember on Armistice Day, and what exactly are we trying to stop happening again?

Meaning and the World exists in the Gaps

I am evolving a genetic algorithm to find a machine to play the stock market. What is remarkable about the inputs is that it doesn't matter what the numbers are. All that matters is that my machine makes lots of money, and it doesn't matter how it does it. It is a black box.

What is extraordinary about black boxes is that the inside is meaningless. Analogous to Schrodinger's Cat and exactly like Structuralist Philosophy what doesn't matter to the observer doesn't have any meaning.

So I have a SELL and BUY signal which I have set arbitrarily to 0 and 1. When the machine produces a 0 it sells, and when it produces a 1 it buys. There are millions of machines in the population and none of them actually know what a 0 or 1 is. As a result I could use any number. But which ever number I use, the genetic algorithm will gradually evolves a population that uses that number well to make money. Importantly without knowing what a 0 or 1 is. 0 and 1 is the meaning that we outside the black boxes assigns these characters. In the machines they have quite different meanings.

However regardless what number I use the winning machines will be isomorphic. That is to say that were the SELL/BUY signals equal to 100,150 then I could take a machine that responds to 0/1 and replace the 0 with 100 and the 1 with 150. Now if 100 and 150 were symbols already taken then I would need to carry on swapping symbols until every unique symbol was replaced by a unique symbol. The point is that 0/1 and 100/150 are just symbols and their meaning comes from their position in the system. The symbols do not in themselves have meaning, but only in the relation to the other systems symbols. The meaning is in the gap, not in the actual entities of the system.

This reminds me of Searle's Chinese Room argument. He is right that the meanings attributed to the symbols coming out of the room belong outside the room to who ever is reading the output. Meanwhile the meanings inside belong to the history of that machine--especially meaningful in the case of a machine produced by a genetic algorithm, but equally to a machine designed by a computer engineer with all their knowledge and expertise. A computer is a meaningless black box to anyone not involved in that history and training.

Were one take two Searlean Chinese Rooms and make them isomorphic by simply translating symbols we can see patently that the symbols themselves do not carry meaning but rather the way that they are used. Wittgenstein take a bow. But this extends then beyond any particular structure itself be that symbol, character, word, sentence. In Chinese a whole sentence of English might be expressed by a single symbol. The point is to entirely shift understanding away from seeing the units of a machine as meaningful in themselves but to see their meaning coming from their position in the system. Meaning exists in the gaps.

SRH can pop in here. The gaps cannot become new symbols! For then just move the meaning into the gaps between the new symbols. Gaps are not symbols, they are relationship between symbols in a dynamic and tight system.

This is the general problem with traditional Western Thought that it is materialistic and sees the world existing in "things" that are made from "atoms". Yes there are "things" and "atoms" but the world exists between them. That World is what in Buddhism is called Mind and in Hinduism is called Om and in other religions is called Abrahamic religions is called God. This is where energy, people, society and consciousness enter the picture of the world, which all seem oddly missing in the materialistic view.

It is an odd things that while academically the world is made from things we don't live like this. We live primarily in a world of people: what a sad empty existence it would be if we really lived in a world of things. The problem with Capitalism is that gradually this materialistic view is gaining ground and people are starting to live in a world of things. It is a very slow change tho, and for the most part we live in a world of people. Capitalist at the end of the day while dominated by property is still a system made of people and people exist in the meaning and the vast gaps between the things of this world.

Returning for a second to posts on the dark part of humanity it occurs to me with psychopathic killers that while they report having no care or empathy for other people and appear to live in a world of just themselves this is actually a self deception. Killers report the huge sense of power, satisfaction and achievement in killing. If they really lived in a world of just them then why not kill a tree or a stone? The killer understands fully that they live in a world of other people that is why killing is such a big deal to them, they fully understand what another person is. The problem arises in that they relate to other people unequally - they seek to dominate the other person. And this because they, ironically, perceive themselves inferior and feel the need to address that imbalance. So the darkest humans exist in the gaps as much as any person, but they do not see this themselves... which will annoy them hugely as they tend to be quite intelligent people. The brightest human beings also live in the gaps, but in contrast to the darkest they can fully let go of the "things" and enter that infinite space between things.

I once asked a Buddhist what meditation was and while I still don't fully agree with what they said it is very illuminating: if you slow your thoughts down and enter the gaps between them, in there are wonderful things. And so it seems to be: a fixation on the things of this world blinds us to the source of meaning that lies between them in how the world and God moves, and what we do with our time. Which at the moment is blogging and not exploring genetic algorithms.