Form v Process

It’s an old Buddhist teaching but was clearer to me at the weekend… the rose growing on the pile of shit (or more usually the lotus flower growing from the pond mud).

The simple point is that the rose is made from the shit, yet in particular its smell is appealing while the shit is unappealing. How remarkable that what is horrible can become what is desirable. This is the teaching of emptiness.

It is sensible to think that something substantial passes from the shit to the flower, and this would not be entirely wrong, but what is that “thing”.

In scientific terms it is the atoms of the shit and its bad smell that can be transferred and reorganised into the atoms of the rose and its pleasant fragrance.

But as has been discovered the quarks in atoms can be reorganised to produce different atoms so atoms are not the real building blocks. And, as will be discovered (if Buddhist theory is correct) there are no fundamental building blocks and whatever we take as the fundamental untransmutable base will always be changeable as its components become reorganised.

So what began as an Democritic (after Democritus) reductionist analysis to explain the qualities of things by find the components which bring those qualities into the mix rather flounders as we discover the nature of reality. Indeed a flower is made of nothing different from the shit, but it is never-the-less different. The flaw is thinking that the nice flavour of a sponge cake is somehow a mixture of the flavours of flour, butter and sugar. But these when mixed taste horrible. Something new has emerged that wasn’t there before, an illusion that is caused in our senses by these raw materials.

This is a slightly simplistic version because it is not that something nameless passes between the shit and the flower. The rose needs nutrients but also sunlight, water and carbon-dioxide. Like the cake the ingredients alone are not enough, it requires heat in the oven to help reform the structures of the ingredients. This is the full picture that when the correct conditions all come together then and only then does the emergent property appear. It is not that something nameless passes from the ingredients to the product, but that the resulting “form” is entirely new depending only upon the interaction of its component conditions.

One may persist in the view that something is present in the conditions that is passed and reformed into the product, but then one may observe that the conditions themselves are only emergent properties caused by as the result of preceding conditions. So we can always rewrite the ingredient list as an infinite series of prior conditions and never have need to mention a root and core substance.

One however should not attach to the idea of emptiness and of flux and change only. It is only the less common side of the coin. The common side of the coin is still valid which views station stops of emergent properties linked together by the railway tracks of processes. It is just that this view lives side by side with the view that sees the station stops as simply momentary hiatuses in the endless cycle of train services.

Mass of Higgs Particle

For a while I thought that physicists had explained the origin of Mass by describing it as the interaction of particles and the Higgs particle.

By the SRH then the Higgs particle can’t have the quality of Mass: that is it can’t have either a zero or non-zero mass.

It turns out that the Higgs Particle has mass, and that interaction with the Higgs explains only the masses of other particles but not the Higgs (obviously by SRH). But assuming that the theory proposed that the Higgs gained mass from interaction with itself, reveals the very fine distinction required for the SRH.

Borrowing the terms “inner” and “outer” from Hofstadter we can examine the situation where a particle. Suppose it gains mass by interacting with itself. Now the “inner” quality of the particle, the nature of the particle that enables it to give mass, must be mass-less. This would mean that mass is simply an “outer” quality, a superficial veil draped over the core nature of the particle.

Returning to sentences this distinction enables a better analysis of the sentence: “This sentence has five words.” The inner nature of the sentence is indeed a reference to itself, but it refers only to an “outer” quality that has no intrinsic relationship with the essence of the sentence. Using Google Translator into Chinese gives “這句話有五個字" which in the “inner” sense is the same, but clearly the outer quality is very different. Thus the sentence escapes actual “inner self” reference and so escapes paradox.

So just as Use/Mention is a distinction, so Inner/Outer are distinctions just as Hofstadter argues. I need now re-read that chapter of GEB to understand the 3rd distinction he makes and whether that is relevant also.

I AM

I'm bike riding with an mp3 player these days which I put loosely in my pocket. I'm often finding myself thinking whether it has fallen out, only the realise that if I'm still listening to music it must still be connected.

Yesterday this thought was a bit deeper. Exactly the same is true of our eyes, and is the basis of the arguments in this blog against brain science. We may factually wonder whether our eyes are still working, only to be reminded that if we are seeing then they must be (and everything else in the process of seeing also).

Now, the question is this: What is the extra information that I have as a result of hearing the music, that I don't have by doing an examination of my pockets to find the mp3 player? It is clearly very significant knowledge because it tells me not only that the mp3 player is there, but also that the headphones are still in my ears, and that the cables are not damaged, and that the battery is still active--all deduced from the simple observation that I hear music! Imagine how hard it would be to determine all this otherwise.

Even if I did take the mp3 player down to a laboratory for testing to ensure that it was working, the data by itself locked in a cupboard would not be sufficient: I would need to see that data and understand it. In other words the critical feature of "hearing" the sound would have just become "seeing" the data.

So this key feature is what is called "subjectivity". It is what is missing from the scientific view. It is also the underpinning of the scientific world: raw data is not in itself meaningful (altho some like Hofstadter have argued for data having some intrinsic entropic existence).

Now the idea that I can tell I have eyes in tact by virtue of being able to see, and that I have a brain in tact by virtue of being able to think that (which the close to the most recent progress on the SRH), and that I have the ability to reason and be cognisant by virtue of recognising that very fact is basically Descartes. And one can extend this to realisation that the fact that there are things at all, and a universe (a Brahman) shows me instantly that I AM (Atman or Yahweh). Thus the creation of the universe is done so by the I AM and they are sides of the same coin. The Tat Tvam Asi.

What we can't argue and where the problems occur is that as seeing proves I have eyes, and cognisance is proof I have a brain, the presence of a universe is proof that there is some thing called "me". The presence of the "I AM" is not thus proof of a thing called "I AM".

What is More

• What is "More"?

  29 minutes ago · Like

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  Alva Gosson in brief answer it depends only upon what we have now... which means that we will always be seeking more, and once we find it we will always feel we have less. This is the force that leads into the brick wall of suffering.

  28 minutes ago · Like

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  Alva Gosson So we want "more" fish, but sadly it will mean "less" fish. That is the problem.

  24 minutes ago · Like

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  Alva Gosson A friend who was very happy with his new house a few years ago said recently he needed a bigger house. Its a systemic problem, the solution goes to the root of human life and our understanding of existence itself. "More" government, or "less" government, "more" policy or "less" policy: its all framed within the very problem itself. I read all this btw its freely available and people have been talking about it and living it for millennia, its just unfashionable since Plato (at least) onwards.

  21 minutes ago · Like

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  Alva Gosson I could go on (as you know ;-): here's the question that puzzled me - who is richer the starving man who finds a half eaten burger in the bin, or the man who ate that burger in the first place? To me (after some considerable thought) it's clearly the starving man, while the other man didn't even finish the burger so it meant very little to him. Now economics is the science of creating more wealth... clearly it's a complete jumble of rubbish! I believe that a new fashion in politics is waking up to this "Science of Happiness" but maybe too late for the oceans and the forest and the land anyway.
  Another question that puzzled me for much longer. Is the person in a concentration camp waiting to die in actual poverty? Well we are all waiting to die so we can remove that from the equation. I believe that an identical structure of wealth and poverty would develop here just much as anywhere with people having better and worse bunks, and more or less sleep, and better or worse jobs etc.

Close Distribution Difference from Normal

Here are the actual difference from Normal for the frequency distribution of change in Ln(adjusted close prices). The y-axis corresponds to %s of the population, and the x-axis is the size of the move in Standard Deviations from the mean.

Unlike the original approach the purpose now is no longer to model this, but rather to understand it so that it can be incorporated into a fractal system.

If we assume that the markets are random (from the standpoint of the market there are random events in the industries) then the pattern here is due to investors (a feature of psychology, and interactions between markets).

There are 2 noticeable shortfalls in this chart which mean that events of –1.5 STDEV and +1.4 STDEV are far less likely than expected. The events that would have fallen into these are mostly pushed to the centre (-0.5 to +1) and to the extremes (<-2.5 and >+2.2). I explain this as follows. Small drops in the daily price (>-1.5) get bought into returning the close price to near or slightly above the open price, and likewise small daily rises in price (<1.5) suffer from profit taking causing the price to fall.

Daily moves below 1.5 lead to worry in speculators and they sell causing a larger than expected move. Once the rot sets in investors will follow and cause the fat tail.

Daily moves 1.5 lead to euphoria which seems to happen in two waves. Closing prices 3 STDEV from opening price are less likely as a second wave of euphoric buying pressure pushes the price higher. There after irrational exuberance stretches the price upwards.

This chart is for the majority of events (speculators). Another chart can be produces to study the behaviour of the extremes (investors).

V for Vendetta

Finally got around to watching this film… In a land far, far away… it depicts aspects of contemporary society and has its good points but its main premise is for me a bad point. I’ve certainly missed many points on a first casual viewing but the fundamental premise that by somehow destroying the haze of illusions that masks people hiding them from each other and themselves—by creating a world of genuine love—we would make a better world. Well in one sense of course this is true and it is the religious dream of reuniting people with God, cleansed in the rain of his love; but, what makes V think that after he has set things back on course, people won’t drift back into inauthenticity? You won’t kill the devil that quickly. I’m not being negative. Each one of us, exactly as V intends, can see through the illusion and gain enlightenment. Indeed V says that precisely because the illusion is created by ourselves we are the ones to over come it. The “totalitarian state” here is not meant literally but symbolically for our own failure to master ourselves which leaves us slaves to our own whims and fancies and like leaves in the wind. Obviously those disaffected by totalitarian states are projecting their dissatisfaction with themselves onto the outside world. It is interesting how popular this film seems to be and I suspect in those circles that take it to be a literal representation of the control exerted on us by modern governments. Certainly such mechanisms of control as shown in the film  are thoroughly pervasive but as the film shows we don’t have to be susceptible to them. Happiest time of my life was the 2 years I didn’t have a TV and didn’t follow any external official narrative, I fell in love (‘my muse’), and followed my own inner narrative. Problem with that approach is it doesn’t work because wisdom means awareness of both the outside and the inside! Wisdom of the external narratives on TV and the papers is the easy part; what about wisdom of ourselves: that is almost impossible because it is different for us all. As V says he can show us the fear of death that leaves us helpless to control but he can’t actually make us face it as she does. It’s the blue versus red pill in the Matrix: how many of us would really throw away the comfort and fake peace of our lives to pursue a path that goes beyond our own death? Put more directly, if we were prepared to within ourselves why do we need a film like V to persuade us! Anyone persuaded by V needs to look very deeply at why they weren’t being authentic anyway! Isn’t being inspired by V just another mask—one we can’t remove at the end because it is the film itself!

But I don’t want to dissuade from the purpose of the film which as an instruction to ourselves to be themselves and to treat others with unique respect and love is excellent. It also raises a point for me: what was she prepared to die for? Until we have something we are prepared to die for, or better we are not afraid to die, then we can’t live. This has been a point in the blog before but the film raises the point excellently. But what do I have that I would die for? That would be a suitable answer to this whole blog: at the moment there is nothing!

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Just in SRH style fun would I die to save myself? Need to think up a plot (a lying fiction ;-) where this actually happens.

Stock Market Distributions again

THIS MAY BE FLAWED

I’ve returned to this problem again. Working out the expected distribution of votes at random in the Eurovision song contest (which will be biased because countries get to vote against themselves!) I noticed a similarity with the stacked charts I had produced for stock market data (simply ordering the raw data). In the Eurovision the game is simply dropping in one of the 10 scores to the pigeon hole of your chosen acts and then adding the scores up at the end. A variation I used for this stock market simulation was repeatedly adding a line of bricks of random length randomly along to a wall. The result is very like a stock market chart but has a more normal distribution (essentially it creates a random walk – this remains to be proven). However by fortune I made a mistake and forgot to reset the array I was using to hold the daily change data before producing the frequency histogram. The result was that over time the array became very large and the distribution narrowed and became more like the stock distribution.

The area of the green normal is the same as the blue FTSE data but the size of the peak and the squeezing is very pronounced.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Why this particular game should lead to this distribution I cannot explain at the moment. A similar game of repeating a unit with a percentage of Gaussian random changes produces the expected result that only certain events are produced more often depending upon when they enter the unit and how long they survive in the repeating unit. Need to look at again.