On Community

Why do we need context? Determine that and you have the SRH.

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Heraclitus says “Only the waking share a common cosmos; each sleeps alone.” Indeed Human existence is one of community, from which extends the whole issue of being-in-a-community and so therefore being-an-individual and then the fear of being-outside-a-community.

Humans mediate their being-in-a-community in many ways from socialising, to having a family, to talking, to working. The latter is of particular interest to me as I prepare to write a book because it forms the basis for economics while the others do not. Work I will argue is simply a social phenomenon; unrecognisable from the activity of survival animals are engaged in (in particular the impact of work by machines, and productivity arising from ethnotechnological efficiency will be examined).

Just listening to Kick-Ass sound track and reminded of the long discussion on Facebook (ironically a community website) about the riots. I was arguing for social inclusion of the rioters; everyone else arguing for social exclusion. Why do some people like Kick-Ass exercise their freedom by fighting for social justice, while others do so by becoming the criminals? (Essentially the problem of evil). Briefly if some people just “are” evil then they have no choice in what they do, so technically they are not evil. If they chose to do evil then in some way they don’t see it as evil. Viewing from a social perspective I suggest that they do evil because they believe it will lead to social inclusion in their peer group, or they are dreaming not realising that social inclusion was their goal.

Last night I dreamed I was a mass-murderer; today am I a mass-murderer dreaming I am sane? After reading Raymond Tallis’ discussion of Zhuangzi And That Bloody Butterfly it is clear that the answer is “No”. It also reveals the problem with the mass-murderer because he might be fooled by this puzzle! If I am a mass-murderer who is dreaming then who today am I talking to, or writing for here? If I am simply dreaming all these words, then the mass-murderer will awake and remember all this and then who is he remembering it all for; the people he wants to kill? Thus whichever way I turn I recognise that the desire to remember my dream and its words are inspired by an audience (an unspecified audience, implicit in the existence of language) and so the murdered finds himself in a community, one that he wishes to annihilate or at least alienate himself from. Why would he do this? I suspect, as with all crime and violence, it is ironic. It is because his desire to be in-the-community is so great that he ends up being-outside-the community, just as people whose desire for peace is too great end up creating wars, and people whose desire for non-crime end up committing crimes as do Kick-Ass and his partners.

Been having a discussion with friends upon the whole nature of private and public funding, that is between Capitalism and Socialism. Read Hayek’s “Road to Serfdom” and then started Jim Collins - Books - Good to Great and the Social Sectors. Hayek argues that putting power in the hands of all powerful people leads to abuses of freedom both by implication of giving up freedom, but also because powerful people have to get used to hurting a minority in every choice and so lose compassion. Big planning he says is thus anathema to freedom and so free-markets and individual competition is the best of a bad world. Collins argues that business thinking revolves around money as both input and output, while social services has money as an input but needs other measures of its output than money. The Cleveland Orchestra is used as one example of how other measures than profit were used to chart its progress to the #3 orchestra in the world. Collins’ articulation of the point that there are other measures of success than profit cuts to the root of the debate about Capitalism for me. A profitable organisation may have unmeasured costs on the community and the welfare of people, even amounting to more cost than profit when viewed against other baseline measures; something which a purely monetary economics can’t stop. Private funding ignores the impact on the public; public funding ignores the impact on the private. Thatcher, and other post-Hayekians, would say there are only individuals and on the level of man to man they cannot be wrong (in Kant’s terms each man is an end in himself), but like the dreamer they ignore the a priori necessity of a community that ought—if they awake—to inform their individual choices as leaders. Clearly there is room for a dialectic, as indeed we have!

Death implies Other

Further to the post on 25th Sept 2007 "Notes as I read..."...

The chicken egg problem means that a system can never be the "exclusive cause of itself" (XCI) because if it was then how was it created in the first place.

Thus a system is either Eternal and XCI or it is not Eternal (mortal) and not XCI.

To be not XCI a system must be caused by something other than itself (even if it can also be caused by itself). Thus no mortal system can exist independent of other systems. Death implies Other.

Now the SRH (which states that referring to oneself is impossible) is based on similar logic. To refer to oneself we must also be in existence, for if we were not existing then how could we be referring. Equally if the statement is a self-referring statement, then it must be referring in order to exist (as a self-referring statement). So we have the chicken and the egg again, albeit rather loosely:

If the statement fails to refer to itself it is still an existing statement so we can say that the existence of the statement is prior. The fact of whether it is self-referential or not, is built upon the statement existence. So the SRH is complaining that the reference is apparently to something which somehow embodies "itself", as though failure to refer would destroy the "self". The reference to a statement is thus not strictly self-referential:

"This statement has five words." could refer to the existence of a statement alone which is independent of the further judgement that the statement referred to is itself. This wouldn't raise the chicken egg problem. Yes, there is a statement here which has five words, it happens to be itself, it could have been any statement on the page, it just happens to be the same one as we are reading. Very boring.

However to be self-referential it would have to be taken to mean that "This statement has five words." is really the statement we are reading. This exciting possibility is why these statements are so alluring. This is the feeling we have of ourselves, it is more than one person amongst billions who just happens to be us. This means that "this statement" is only true when there exists this statement which also refers to itself. This raises the chicken and egg problem. There is only a statement with 5 words, if there is a statement with five words.

Put another way if the statement is "really" and "essentially" and "necessarily" self-referential (EN-SR) then it must refer to a self-referential statement. It is not good enough to set up reference to any old statement and then notice that this statement is itself. That is only partial, secondary and non-essential, non-necessary self-reference. This point has been made before in this blog.

To further illustrate. Suppose this page forms an ordered set of statements, P. We now have a statement "Statement x of P" where x is a free variable. Now I could list on this page random versions of this general formula with random natural numbers substituted. Eventually one of these statement must be numbered with the same number as its position in the page P. Alternatively I'll just cut to the chase with the next statement. "Statement 37 of P." Now this happens to we statement 37 on the page because I just counted all the current statements and added 1. Now I added one because I knew that once the statement was formed it would be a new statement but I did this before it was formed, before there were 37 statements, done in anticipation of it being the 37th statement. Before I typed it out and put the full stop at the end it wasn't true. Thus I built a system by other means whose self-reference only became "switched on" when the full stop was put in place. Thus it was built without self-reference being in place. As above if self-reference was needed to build the statement then it would have to be immortal. But because it is created, there must be other ways to create the statement other than itself. So we know that the real nature of a self-referential statement is actually just a statement and this is what is referred to. The statement does not refer to a self-referential statement, so it is not really self-referential! This is the SRH.

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).