Is being Jewish antiquated?

As the world progresses one thing from the ancient Past remains in high profile: the Jew. I struggle with this idea, as this blog makes very obvious. Whether you consider yourself Jewish or not how can this make any sense?

One of the big issues for me is whether the Jews are a group or not, and whether this group membership is supposed to confer anything on individual Jews. And what if it confers something bad on the members?

One classic example of this is what happens when there is a Good Jew? It looks to me like all the Jews give themselves a pat on the back and share that achievement. But this type of thinking is always a double edged sword.

Would the writer of this piece have done so had he known that Melvin Calvin had nothing to do with the discovery of the chemistry behind Photosynthesis and in fact completely eradicated the real discoverer, a Swede called Benson, from history and stole his place. Never having the honour to ever acknowledge the truth. All the worse cos Benson's discovery of a cycle complete disagreed with Calvin's own theory. He not only didn't discover it, he even opposed it leaving his once collaborator Benson to work alone. 

Now Jews believe in God too and God knows perfectly well that Calvin is a fraud, and so Calvin was even more deluded. What a completely irredeemable person! In fact this is the definition of Evil: a person who puts themselves before God. So there are bad Jews because there are bad people. Being Jewish does not protect you from this.

Now this is the question: if Calvin was a bad person, are all Jews tainted by this? If not then Jews do not benefit from all the good Jews either... including Abraham.

Which ever way you twist it, being Jewish ultimately amounts to nothing. This kind of tribal thinking has no place in the modern world. As pointed out before a very obviously example of Tribal thinking is White Supremacy. It is widely acknowledge that there is no such thing as a "white" tribe, and even if there was it is irrelevant to politics. Why then do the "Jews" still think tribally when everyone else is so much more advanced? I put "Jews" in quotes cos obviously there is no objective thing called a "Jew" its just a designation that "Jews" give themselves. In that sense it is circular. SRH?

Ah perhaps this is the problem I noted before.

Can a Gentile define a Jew? I think not. Its a common thing in Identity Politics that only a Black, or a Homosexual, or a Rape victim can truly speak about the matter.

So only a Jew can really talk about being Jewish. It is something that a Non-Jew would never understand. Jewish conversion is possible, but I wonder whether Jews really view the convert as a true Jew? This is kind of critical to this argument.

Anyway lets get rid of one avenue here:

Somebody somewhere must be able to determine who is a Jew (else we have no Jews). And if that person must be a Jew we have:

∀x∃y | I(x,y) ↔ J(x)

OK not sure about the logic here, but if I(x,y) is true if x identifies y is a Jew and J(x) is true if x actually is a Jew. So together it means: For everyone, there is someone who x identifies as a Jew iff x is a Jew. In other words if x is not a Jew then no way what they say can be true. That means even if I identify Abraham as a Jew, because I am not a Jew that opinion does not count. What actually identifies Abraham as a Jew is based upon other people, who are Jews*.

* I realise problem here. The Nazis sent Jews to concentration camps. Now if the Nazis were not able to identify Jews then they did not send Jews to concentration camps. So the Gentiles must be able to identify Jews. Either that or the Nazis took the self-identification of people as the test. If someone said they were not a Jew then the Nazis would ignore them. Not sure that is true. So it must be that Gentiles can in fact decide who is Jewish and who is not. That is quite interesting and needs to be considered some more. But assume this is not the case, Lets go down the other avenue cos its interesting.   

But we can see the tautology here. If I reject the idea of "Jews", then as far as I'm concerned it does not matter if people keep calling each other Jews, it's a fantasy. But on the other side, because I am not a Jew those who call themselves Jewish will ignore my opinion too. This needs to be fleshed out but if the only definition of Jews depends upon the opinion of Jews then its circular. You should be able to get a really neat contradiction out of this by SRH.

The way out is to open up the definition of Jew to non-Jews. Interestingly the Nazis thought they knew what a Jew was. But it turned out to be much more complex than they initially envisaged. Some say that even Hitler had Jewish ancestry. How quickly would history have changed course had the international community realised you can't really define a Jew! In many ways the "Jewish" insistence that such a thing is rock solid has been the foundation of much politics both positive and negative!

Why do we need dugongs?

Why do we need dugongs?

"Wherever they survive, dugongs play ..." from the WWF Australia webpage.

It's the classic bad question.

Why do we need Humans?

Well I may need humans, if for no other reason than to hang out with and breed.

So on the same logic Dugongs need other Dugongs for the same reason.

But the bigger question "Why do we need Humans?" has no answer. The universe would be fine without humans. It would make no difference whether we existed or not. And the same is true for Dugongs.

So what is this question supposed to mean? It's not clear.

For some reason WWF Australia has given an answer. But I think that is misguided. Just ignore the question.

Another similar question is "what is the use of wasps." Well wasps are really useful for other wasps just as humans are really useful for each other. But just like Humans, Wasps have no absolute use. They just are. We respect the world just as it is before asking for secondary usage.

Self is a simple fact, but we make too much out of it

Now the original post I wanted to make.

A                                                                                                                                B

Here is a camera obscura pointing at a tree. Now from our perspective outside we can see the tree outside and the image inside and we can clearly see that it is pointing at a tree (A). Turn it around and point it at a house and hey presto a house appears as the image. Voila. We on the outside see the image as a result of the object pointed at.

But from the camera's perspective it is slightly different. It is just seeing a tree (B), and then it is seeing a house. Then it is seeing something else. For the camera it is always "seeing" something, and has no other perspective: what it sees is what it sees. That outside perspective of having "real" things that are seen as images is missing. There are only the things seen, these are reality. There is no distinction between "real tree" and "image of tree" for the camera itself. The outside observer can see that for the camera the image is now more important than what it is pointing at! Indeed the Camera seems to holds all the tricks.

Is this not the World/Self dichotomy where we feel that we exist separately from the world and are more important than the world. While people on the outside see it the other way around? A hardened Nazi prison guard can kill people without even really noticing, or a US bomber pilot can nuke Hiroshima and be completely oblivious of all the cameras frying below. From the outside the camera images are very much secondary to the reality.

If nothing else how extraordinary that what seems like a complex and profound metaphysical thing can be expressed simply in terms of things and images! That is very much the insight I wish to express here.

But nevertheless we add all kinds of metaphysics to this dualism to back up the two sides of our view of the world. We add consciousness and identity and souls and self to the camera images to make it seem different from the world. To give us some greater standing in the face of "objectivity."

Okay it is true the analogy is not complete and camera is not conscious. But suppose for illustration that it is. Subjectivity is just a more sophisticated image isn't it? A new piece of technology that doesn't present the image for the outside world to see, but which processes its own images and comes up with wishes and desire. 

Not getting bogged down in the complexities of as yet still unknown consciousness, the point is that whatever features of the camera we wish to add they never become more than just features of the camera. And the camera can get stuck in the same idea that somehow it is more important than the image.

The other thing to note, and the real motivation for this blog, is that the camera can never not be itself. It is always the camera. So during its life it has many images get created on its screen. It seems to the camera it is an intrinsic part of its own world. Accompanying everything it has ever seen is itself. The screen on which the image falls is always its own screen. The camera seems to be the fundamental part of its "life".

And this is true. Its a contradiction to say that the pin hole and the screen of this camera are not intrinsic parts of itself. That is actually trivially obvious. If this camera is forming an image everyone can see the pin hole and the screen must be present. But the added thing that the camera cannot get outside its own screen, it always only ever sees the images formed on its own screen is also trivially obvious. The camera that forms images on another screen is another camera. So these intuitions of the camera (if it could have them) that it is intrinsic in its own existence are all correct. That is the nature of existence.

But what the camera can't then do is deduce from this a "self". Its a fact that each camera has its own components and forms its own images. But we don't deduce from this that each camera has a soul. Well traditionally in fact we do. Animism which is the oldest form of thought says that existence comes from having a soul. That has become the idea of essence where things embody some substance which makes them the way they are. Essentially its the physical manifestation of the "name." In modern thinking we only give True Names to humans and pets, and some big machines like boats and planes, oh and we do houses as well like the Red Fort in Old Delhi or Buckingham Palace in London or World Trade Centre once in New York. And the demise of the WTC was very much seen as a physical death and loss of a soul to the Americans. So we still think like Animists. But originally everything was like this from a camera to the Sun to our child. Everything had a personal soul. Its actually a very respectful and truthful way to think and we've been on descent into the impersonal and the brutal ever since so that millions can die in warfare now and just end up as uniform printed names on stone memorials. No soul at all. But I digress while we can (and should) give the camera a soul in one sense, the specific thing that leads to trouble is to put a *separate* soul inside things like the camera.

For the animist when a thing breaks or an animal is killed that soul returns to the world. This is direct analogy to modern recycling, and in Judeo/Christian practice the "ashes to ashes and dust to dust" we all come from one world and we return to one world and one creator. There is no separate soul that lives on as separate*.

* but if this is true how can we be judged and suffer after death? Okay that requires some reading about the original ideas. It could be that suffering was achieved by becoming a ghost. But being a separate soul somehow without a body is clearly problematic.

Somehow and I need to look into how and when this happened mankind started to think that individual identity continued after death. The animist is truthful. A camera has a soul while it exists, and that soul is what makes the camera what it is. But when the camera no longer exists what use is the soul?

I would guess it is to do with Capitalism. Once ownership happened, souls became more permanent to do the owing, and eventually so permanent that they survived death. So the camera continue sto be a camera even when it isn't a camera. Queen Victoria continues to be Queen Victoria even after she is dead. Well in one sense yes. Who commissioned the Prince Albert Memorial in Hype Park. Correct answer Queen Victoria. She still has a name, and that kind of suggests she still has a soul. But you can search the universe and you will not find Queen Victoria and she is no longer commissioning statues. Her soul strictly has gone back to where it came. Queen Victoria now refers to history, not to a living person.

But the camera may disagree. While it is working and filling with images it has this sense that "the whole world" depends upon it. That is the "whole world" as it knows it, falling on its screen. It naturally seems to be the centre of the world simply through the physics of being something, in a place, with a pin hole and a screen. That "self" that is all critical during its life it may think can't possibly suddenly stop when I break. It is everywhere. I look this way and the images falls on MY screen., and that way and the image falls on MY screen. Everything is MINE. How when I break can I not exist?

This is the interesting thing I wanted to highlight in this blog, the facts of what seem a "self" are set in the very physics of existence, or having and eyes and senses and a brain and even thoughts and consciousness. All this like the camera we have. And as a result quite naturally all this is the centre of our world, because we depend upon all this framework to live and exist. This is a very reasonable animist like soul that we have. And all is good. If we lose our sight obviously the images stop just like the camera getting a rip and losing its pin hole. This is all simple and obvious. The problem though is that we tend to add something else to these simple facts. A soul inside all this, a soul that somehow is greater than all this framework, that is bigger than the camera and the images, the eyesight, all the things we are. A soul that is disconnected from all this. Like the previous post a soul that can leave the plane to see what flying is like. This is a fake soul. It has forgotten that it is built 100% from the camera and the eyes and the body and thoughts and consciousness. When these things fail so will it. They are the same!

Oh woe on woe this self thinks. I am not immoral, I will die. I must struggle to keep healthy and stop this body dying because I depend on it. Wrong! This body is you, these sights, sounds, thoughts, consciousness ARE YOU, They are your soul. There is nothing else. But woe on woe I am dead already then, the fake self cries out. Except you remind it that  the real self was born of the world and will return to the world. Just like the camera, it may become broken and no longer form images, but nothing really has changed. The atoms are all there, perhaps someone will give it a new pinhole and it will work again, or perhaps it will be broken down completely and used for spare parts. And now the fake self is struggling. Is it still "me" if I get a new pin hole? Where does "me" go if I am broken into parts and go to make up 10 other cameras? Am I now 10 "mes"? These are all problems for the fake self. The true soul is just what is. You fix the camera and it has a new soul. You might give it a new name, or keep the old name. The camera doesn't care it is working.

So hopefully done a bit of teasing of the know of self. And in particular the feeling when things are happening, because they are necessarily being sensed by us, that they are happening to an "us"! Everything that we sense is obviously happening, its being sensed. But that sneaky trick we add of it happen to a soul hidden inside all this, that is the sneaky trick which is unnecessary and needs to be called out. Why can't things just happen, and the "to us" become just a necessary fact that these particular senses, eyes and brain are involved on this particular occasion. 

The World is Relative, custom/thoughts are Absolute

 In the modern world we are spoilt with the number of analogies to the human cognitive framework. We have a plethora of machines all based upon humans with which to think about this. But the camera is a great starting point for vision.

The pin-hole camera (camera obscura) has been known for centuries. Anything the camera is pointed at will appear as a relatively focused image on the screen behind. Relatively upside down.

Upside down is an unusual side effect that throws the casual observer.

So it looks like we see the world upside down. And yet it looks the "right way" around?

Well that is simply about Relativity. What we see is that everything has the "same" orientation. We have no Absolute point of reference like the stop sign. There is a subtle logical problem in the diagram above. If the "stop sign" on the retina (Retina-Stop) here represents what we actually experience, then the "stop sign" outside the eye (World-Stop) cannot then be what we experience. The stop signs although linked by light are different stop signs. The question for the viewer of this image is that if we now conclude that everything we see is upside down then actually the World-Stop here is upside down, and the Retina-Stop here is the right way around. But World-Stop was our initial reference to decide we see things upside down. Turns out we see them the right way around, and the world is what is upside down.

Its the same as the World Map. There is no reason to have the North Pole at the top. Its just the people who drew the map were from the North and with the Pole Star above them they thought in terms of North as going up, and South as going down. But it could just as easily be the other way around.

All we know in both situations is that the World-Stop and the Retina-Stop are opposite orientations, and the North Pole opposed the South Pole, that is the relative structure. But you cannot apply an Absolute to this and declare either the World Upside Down or the North the top of the globe. You may "adopt" an absolute to remove ambiguity but this is just convention ands custom. But it makes no difference what you chose.

Now its interesting that in everyday life we literally never run into any ambiguity about what is "up" in the world. The only time would be in opticians and people working in optics where images get inverted.

The reason is that everyone has the same world inversion going on. And because it is constant it almost never shows up in the human world. we are all looking at the world the same way and that is all that matters. The actual orientation has NO MEANING.

It looks like orientation should matter. We can clearly see an "up" and a "down". I mean people say lets go upstairs, and we dive or jump we know all about where is up and down. But it is relative. We deduce the down from what we see, not from some absolute reference. It is "immanent" to use a fancy word. The "up/down" we use in daily life is deduced from within the world. It not deduced from an absolute.

So in actual fact the Retina-Stop and the World-Stop are both pointing up, just in different worlds!

The paradox arises cos we are comparing them in a novel way that we never normally do. The idea of "getting outside your head to see the world as it is" is a contradiction. It is like getting outside the plane to see what flying is really like. You get outside the plane you stop flying! You get outside the head you stop seeing! There is SRH in here, because we are always looking for an absolute, but forget that what we have is built upon a scaffold of conditions. You step off the scaffold you change a lot more than you assumed.

Someone I know once said, "do you realise you've never had a break from life." Thing is "realising" is built upon the scaffold of life. You get a break, you stop realising.

Now unfortunately recent musing show that f(g, h) where f is a function that can deduce whether the function h() is a component of function g() leads to contradiction. So at the logic level the idea of working out the scaffolding upon which we stand is impossible.

It is like we are flying in a plane, that we can't deduce we are flying upon, wondering what flying is really like.

Now this all starts to gets very ungrounded and destabilising for the psyche. With no firm place to stand, and no way of even knowing exactly what we are standing on, the world seems very insubstantial and uncertain.

But STOP. What a load of nonsense. And here is the problem of "thinking." Famously Wittgenstein infuriated Russel by arguing in such a way that Russel could not disprove that there was an elephant in the room. "Thinking" can do strange things when we get absorbed into it.

There is a stanza in epistemology, that I realise I have forgotten, about all the doubt of even the university quadrangle existing but it ends with the searing pain of stepping on a pin and the lack of doubt in that.

Its a rather brutal illustration of the heart of Buddhist meditation. Thoughts are just thoughts, and the mind is so wide and great that it can observe thoughts crossing it like clouds across the sky. Yet humans have a tendency to get absorbed into these phenomena and ride those clouds as though they were real. Soon we can end up even doubting the ground on which we stand. But we don't stand, do we?, cos we are just riding clouds!

However the above analysis is an immanent analysis of thought. That deep within thought we like to think we have grasped some solid absolute and we "know" for sure the way things are. This leads to all the bigotry and confusion of the world. It is good for the searcher of truth, and the bigot to feel groundlessness at times cos it reminds us that we are just in the realm of thoughts.

To feel grounded again we simply put the thoughts down and return to the world "as it is." We observe that we are thinking, we observe that we are not thinking. We observe that we are seeing. We observe that we are not seeing (perhaps we close our eyes). Obviously observing that we are not thinking is a very special moment indeed! It means the mind has finally broken from the chains of thoughts. RIP Descartes. I believe some psychologists say that ALL mental illness begins with not being able to master our thoughts. It begins small, but gradually takes over and changes our brain chemistry and becomes a full blown psychiatric condition. True all people are different and some more susceptible than others, so it may appear that some people are string and can survive very unhealthy mental worlds, but that doesn't make attachment to solid thoughts good.

And so when we feel that things are grounded and we really know what is "up" we need take a break and reflect on the fact it is relative to some other things we are holding on to, and that we can't ever know how much foundation we have stood upon to get there. We just stop and look at the world again with fresh eyes.

The World is here whether You exist or not

Its a strange thing in the complex Western World that we build up lives so high when we still haven't sorted out the foundations.

Its weird that we have an ambiguity. We know the world existed before we were born. Unless we lived forever or somehow spawned our self, obviously our parent must have been there before us (SRH). And this is the Big Existence that no one really disputes. Its not a fruitful dispute either so lets leave that.

But there is the World According to Me as another existence. "I'll believe it when I see it" comes from this very valid existence, that unless we are witness then it doesn't really exist. What happens to me is REAL.

So we have 2 ways to think about existence. In Hinduism, respectively, its called Brahma and Atman.

Now both modes of existence have something in common: they both surround what we might call the fundamental truth. In both cases we are looking for some "origin" or "foundation" or "solidity" for the world. Holding one of the theories we have our feet on the ground. The world has some heart or soul.

But we end up in conflict, We want to believe in some objective reality AND we want to believe in our self. But you can't have both. Ultimately it boils down to the world telling you something versus you following your own way.

Now there is a way to marry these, but it depends upon first working out why the two are not compatible.

Its down to that desire for "solidity" and "foundation" above. The world is already here, why should we want to "add" any foundation to it? Indeed what can we do to make it any different from what it is? If the world doesn't exist as it is then we are already doomed. But we can argue Anthropically or Descartes like that if it didn't exist then how can we even be disputing the fact (SRH again). So we know there is a foundation before we even start. 

That fundamental strength is that there is a source, and no getting away from it.

Within this world we then try all the manoeuvres above. We do exist, but as all the religions try to tell us this is by the grace of God. Which is another way of saying our source is the same as the world. We don't have our own separate Atman and soul.

But if we are not separate from the world how then do I end up in "my" life? If "my" life is the same foundation as "your" life then how are they different?

We aren't looking deep enough.

We are all sitting in old fashioned toilet cubicles. The ones where if you stand on the toilet you can almost see over to the next one. All the cubicles are in the same toilet but it still gives us privacy.

That privacy and sense of self, it part of the amazing creation of the world. We have the same origin as everyone and everything else. There is only once source. That source even made the privacy, that we think is down to our self existence.

Its when we get to consciousness that this is particularly subtle. I may be in the Matrix and everything I see and think is a lie and is all implanted and made up. But you can't make up that I am awake. I might be looking at a hologram and thinking implanted thoughts but I am awake and experiencing all this. And its "my experience." It looks like everything I am experiencing is mine, and that adds weight to a self existing soul "in here." Heideggar calls that brilliance of the world consciously existing as the "lighting up." But as argued already that lighting up that happens when we wake up, that ignites the flame in our consciousness and make us seem to come into existence. That lighting up, is the light of God. It does not come from us! I don't make the lighting of consciousness. No human even understands that yet. No one knows how something comes to be "seen by an individual" so that only that individual sees it. It's a complete mystery. And so no human makes that happen. It happens by itself,I have nothing to do with it. And so given that the world makes it happen by some magic why do I think its "my consciousness?" Surely its just consciousness. A gift from God. But then we think, well who is looking, who did God give that gift too. Well no one is looking, cos the gift it looking itself! And who received that gift? Well we are running out of room for this Atman in this world. What ever is left that we think is that secret solid self inside it all, that is actually made by the world, belongs to the world and has been given for free. And the world didn't need to give you a self in order to received these gifts, that would be pointless.

This length exposition achieves only one think. To remove that nagging doubt that inside us, is a self, like a ghost person inhabiting our lives. Nothing that we have, or that happens to us, even being awake and conscious of our own experiences needs any ghost or person inside us. We can just let go of it and carry on exactly as before but without hanging onto this belief. Everything carries on by itself exactly as before but free from any "me" inside it.

What does this mean practically. Well the mistake we make is to hold on to what we have as though it was a separate existence. We hold on to "what I see" as though it was made by me. We don't have the first idea how to see. We barely understand the eye and even the greatest brains in the world have no idea how the brain works (SRH). What chance to understand how we see, and even less to actually "make it happen." It happens by itself! It has its source not in "me" but in the world.

When we "see" we are watching God in action.

And this is the point We don't need to search for "our" self, or worry about "our" self, there is no self connected to us in any way different from everything else. We don't carry a self around like a baggage. The world makes all this by itself, and it worries about all this all by itself. There is nothing for us to do, cos there is no "me" separate from the world.

Now done properly this changes absolutely nothing. We still see, think, live just as before. The only difference is the nagging thought that there is some "solid" foundation inside us, or connected to us, that is private and ours is gone. We know that inside we are completely without anything solid that is separate from the solidity of what is already there in the world.

There is only 1 source. Its goo to look for that source, but it's a mistake to try and own it and believe it is mine, or chip a bit off all for me. That is the road to a lot of trouble. 

Women's Rights & Racism

Who would have thought these are closely related issues!

How do you get a Pure Race? One way is to stop your women sleeping around. Then a man knows who his children are and there is the possibility of pure inheritance down the male line. In this world the man can sleep around, cos any man who cannot control his women deserves to lose control of the lineage. Pure Paternal lineage also makes a Race. Interestingly this corresponds to the nucleic acid.  

The other way is to define the Race by maternal line like the Jews. Then women can sleep around and all their children count as the Race. Interestingly in modern thinking this corresponds to the mitochondrial DNA.

But what when a child is born to a Patriarchal father and a Matriarchal mother? Say a Israeli Muslim male married a Israeli Jewish female? The Mother will claim the child is Jewish and the father will claim the child is Arab. The child is actually both! Their Mitochondrial DNA is Jewish and their Nucleic DNA is Arab!

Anyway Women's Liberation is the process of eradicating patriarchal line and either removing the idea of race, making race depend upon female line. Women's Liberation very much suits the Jewish side of thinking. But perhaps in that Matriarchal world there should be "Men's Liberation"? 

So the idea about Gender Liberation especially Women's are intimately linked to ideas of race. Who would have thought!

JWST supports that Big Bang didn't happen

 Absolutely nothing to do with this blog, but the biggest news for almost a century deserves a mention.

If it is an expanding universe then things were much closer to each other. Which means they appeared larger. So the universe would have inflated a lot and the distances increased and the light taken a long time to arrive but they should be bigger. And they are not.

Apparently JWST images and redshifts can all be explained in a static universe. Amazing! Come to think of it the Expanding Universe always was an outlandish theory. But it does point to an eternal universe. 

https://iai.tv/articles/the-big-bang-didnt-happen-auid-2215