Pooh, Woozles, Owls, Mirrors, War, Self & SRH

[Warning 2338 words]

My fave story as a kid was Pooh’s search for a Woozle. After some searching he finds a set of tracks which he believes are those of a Woozle. Soon, that Woozle is met by another and then another and so on. Eventually Owl who is sitting in the tree points out to Pooh that he is simply following his own tracks. Eureka to me as a child: this is the difference between another and oneself.

So we need take the perspective of an owl to avoid the looping path that occurs with dogs chasing their tails. In psychology this ability is often tested with the Mirror Test. Animals who attack their reflection as a peculiarly hostile stranger, are quite distinct from those that eventually treat their reflection with interest. Animals which pass the test include expected creatures like apes, elephants, whales and dolphins but also surprising animal like magpies and even a study provides evidence that ants can distinguish between their refection and another ant behind glass. Humans gain this ability after about 18months, so it is not innate and obviously some humans are better than others. Some may never get to this stage.

Sadly owls do not pass the test. But, perhaps this makes sense in the analogy as in the story we need an owl in the tree to see we are following our tracks. If they could pass the test they would need another owl in the tree above them to point out they were following their tracks. Owl sitting in the tree cannot see his own tracks! This is the essence of SRH again. I return to this later.

It is to be noted that animals that fail the mirror test often show hostility to themselves. What is notable about this hostility is that it quickly escalates. To the mirror unaware creature both animals are the same size so there is no reason to back down, and both animals attack at the same time so their opponent appears to show no fear. The more they try to beat their opponent, the worse their opponent seems to get. Obviously with an owl in a tree above we can be alerted to the deep futility of this conflict. We may wish to fight our image for fun thereafter, but a deep “ontological” connection has been formed between the reflection and ourself. The illusion of “another” is broken: we know it is “our” reflection and we can own it as ourself. Such escalations of conflict are a positive feedback, but with a higher perspective of an owl we can break the feedback and deescalate to a nature state of peace.

It is worth noting that battles between animals and their unrecognised reflection and battles between an opposing creature are identical. To owl watching the battle the animal is behaving as though the reflection is a stranger. What ends the battle for good is not material, no shaking hands, no backing down, it is simply a change in perspective. I’ll use that word “ontological” to distinguish a battle that ends in exhaustion or defeat from a battle that is fundamentally, ontologically ended. Once ontologically ended there can be no conflict.

Now there is a second mirror that isn’t recognised in modern psychology. Two individuals can get locked into exactly the same positive feedback that they would with their reflection. One gets injured somehow and escalates, which the other takes as an act of aggression so they in turn escalate and if no-one backs down the cycle of violence escalates. To creates that pass the second mirror test there is an owl watching the cycle of aggression, and even while owl sees two separate organisms, owl never-the-less sees that the two organisms retain the same characteristics as their reflections. You step forward, I step forward. You raise you hand, I raise my hand. I grab a weapon, you grab a weapon. So in the second mirror we realise that another person is actually the same as myself.

Returning to “ontological” again, there is an important point to make at this stage. We can empirically note that other people behave as ourself. We punch them, they hurt and are likely to punch us, or at the very least get angry and seek to harm us in return. We can form an empirical acknowledgment that other people are like us, but it isn’t deep. That is the same as an animal empirically learning that there is this strange other creature (owl knows is created by the mirror) which unlike other creatures happens to be identical to it. Yet the animals never makes the step to understanding that this strange other animal ontologically “IS” it. I’ll call this a “smart mirror failure” (SMF). In the world of a SMF there is itself, there are other creatures and then there is a third type of thing: the identical other. This is the same fallacy as Plato’s Third Man Fallacy. When we have “Three Things” it is good practice to have alarm bells ringing. In the mirror graduate (MG) who passes the test properly there are 2 things: themself and the other. The mysterious third identical person is actually a mirror image of themself: an illusion. Ontologically (that is: regarding things that “really” exist) the MG makes a deep connection between the mirror image and themself so that they become “one thing” in reality, but with two different images or appearances. This is exactly what is meant by “illusion”. It is often found that appearance, also Form, is separate from what really exists. In an identical way there are two beings that pass the Second Mirror test. The “smart second mirror failure” (SSMF) and the “second mirror graduate” (SMG). The SMG makes an ontological connection between themself and their combatant, while the SSMF makes only a superficial recognition.
People who pass the mirror test are common. However people who pass the Second Mirror are extremely rare. Most people are Smart Second Mirror Failures. This includes myself. The Second Mirror I recognise intellectually, but deep down I still think other people are separate from myself. This illusion is unfortunately engraved in the stone of Western Society, which makes its that much harder to gain a perspective upon it.

For those intellectually however it is easy to see that the second mirror is passable even if we cannot graduate ourselves yet. We spend most of our life hovering very near the pass mark. With friends and family we often lower our barriers so far that our owl in the tree above makes no distinction between ourself and people close to us. We tolerate all sorts of transgressions that we would not tolerate of a stranger. We make mistakes, but we would make mistakes if we lived with ourself! We are watching a film and a hand goes into *our* popcorn, which for a second we don’t realise is our own and pull the popcorn away. Likewise we may be watching a film with our kids and a hand goes into “our” popcorn and we withdraw the popcorn only to realise it is “our” kid and we return the popcorn as though it was our *own* hand. Prince Harry once had had though about it shares his popcorn, but the instinct your’re not me is natural for almost all humans.

 

If we were watching “Oblivion” we would have an interesting blurred case not mentioned in this essay or clones: Tom Cruise treats his clone as himself, and sacrifices himself so his clone may live with his true wife. In Oblivion the clones are not even reflections, but are individual people who only share superficial resemblance. If Tom Cruise can do that, he is a tiny step from sacrificing himself for a completely separate person. We are familiar with these ideas from Jesus’ teaching of “love ones’ neighbour as oneself” and this is echoed throughout the world and history as the universal truth. But it is difficult for beings that fail the second mirror test to ever come to ontological peace with other people, as they have with their reflections after passing the first mirror.

Other intellectual ways of seeing this are more philosophical. It is worth focusing on what really separates people. We are all made of the same “stuff”, all born, all will die. To prove this I can eat another person and make them into myself – what more proof is needed that we are the same stuff. Or if I want to avoid thoughts of cannibalism I may let a person rot in the ground, let worms take up their material, let chickens eat the worms and then eat the chickens. We are all drawn on the same identical canvas of the world. Charles Darwin dedicated his life to showing the similarities especially theorising that all organisms descend from common ancestors. All humans, at the very least, he argued are part of the same family if you go back far enough. This was argued in the mid 1800s yet even today there are groups who think they have a special origin amongst other people. But this is the “genetic fallacy” of thinking that we entirely dependent on our origins or make up. Recent studies of epigenetics reveal quite literally that I may indeed inherit a gene from my parents, but I can choose whether to express it.

One persistent ignorance that exists with people who fail the second mirror test is the idea of a soul. In Indian philosophy the usual state of people is believing in an self or soul and also an external world. There are 2 things in their world so we know they have passed the Mirror Test (where there are 3 things), but failed the Second Mirror (where there are 2 things). Second Mirror Graduates have just 1 thing and this is called “Tat Tvam Asi” (Tho Which is Art) in India. This is the realisation that the Other person is identical with Myself. It is the deep ontological passing of the second test. “Soul” is an illusion exactly like a mirror image. It exists like a mirror image, but we avoid giving it real significance just as we do with our mirror image. Science cannot find a “soul” any more than it can find a “mirror image.” Yet we acknowledge that both exist. Just as “soul” is an illusion, so is “self”. They are actually interchangeable. But as a mirror image is a fascinating thing for animals that fail the Mirror Test, so self is a fascinating thing to animals that fail the Second Mirror test.

Returning to conflict it is of note that animals that fail the Mirror Test avoid dangerous conflict. Body counts from conflict in the animal are low. Humans who pass the Mirror Test, but fail the Second Mirror test have huge body counts. It is as though recognising oneself in a mirror strengthens the power of allegiance, but at the cost of make Other creatures greater foes. Creatures that pass the Mirror Test it seems are more likely to lay down their life for their own kind, and thereby escalate violence against their foes to a much more brutal extent. This no-mans land of illusion caught between the ignorance of having “no owl” to watch out tracks, but having a myopic owl that only sees our own tracks, and still lacking a True Owl which sees all the tracks appears to be a horrific shadow of death that mankind must pass through toward true ontological peace. Indeed the horror of such violence has often been the catalyst to encourage people to find the True Owl.

Finally I return to the issue of SRH. Now suppose Owl sitting in the tree could see how own tracks. This is clearly problematic since we cannot both be in the tree and seeing ourself going around in circles and also believe we are still pursuing Woozles. Owl and Pooh must be separate beings. But let us still suppose we can occupy both positions as one unified entity. What it would mean is that this entity has no need for any other entities, since it can both be itself and know itself at the same time. It can happily pursue a Woozle in the full knowledge that it is a Woozle. It is a self justifying being. I will call such a being a Monad. It is a universe in itself, and a greater universe must be full of such Monads although each Monad is only pursuing itself: it has no care for other tracks. Happily we know this is impossible. Each Monad will eventually meet their owl who is watching them happily skip around the tree following their own tracks aimlessly and without meaning and point out the futility of their enterprise. The Monad will dissolve interestingly into a giant single Monad that contains Pooh, Piglet, Owl, Tigger, Eeyore and Christopher Robin and also every other being mentioned and not mentioned in that world of the Pooh Stories and beyond. For just as the Pooh stories forms a Monad, we are another Owl watching from our tree, be that tucked up in bed or where ever we read the story, and indeed any reader who got this far in this huge essay is another Owl peering down into the world and watching all the world skipping along pursuing Woozles with varying degrees of insight.
SRH remains unproven, but it is the recognition that there is just one world, both in reality, in thought, in logic, in stories and in time. Each attempt to close down into a Monad as Pooh tried when we went in search of a Woozle will always eventually be broken by an Owl who will interject a perspective from outside the Monad and break it once again to a greater Monad. Of course Owl has his own Monad sitting in the tree watching Pooh, but we the reader start watching him very closely as he also breaks us out of our own Monad of chasing the words on a page in search of a Woozle and see the tracks we have written.

Empires, Wars and Conflict

Some basic rules of conflict

Wars are between sides. When you fight you must chose a side. Even if you defect you are thinking in terms of sides.

Sides can be small as in terrorist, guerilla, mafia or criminal cells right up to massive empires.

In each group there will be a heirarchy and a leader or group of leaders for whome subordinates fight in return for protection, rewards or favour.

When one side loses the leaders of the vanquished are executed and the sub-ordinates are either enslaved as sub-sub-ordinates even below the status of the winning sub-ordinates. Either that or for loyalty to the new rules they are shown mercy.

War today

The significant battles of the last few centuries have been between empires. In particular the British Empire has been at the heart of most battles.

One misunderstanding of World War 1 & 2 is that they were moral crusades against evil regimes. In fact they were a final battle between British Empire and 3 old adversaries: The Austo-Hungarian Empire, the Ottoman Empire and the threat of a resurgent German Empire.

The Holy Roman Empire was the winner when the Germans defeated Rome 476 and they maintained that empire for 1330 years until 1806 when the Napoleonic Empire defeated them. A century later Germany was trying to rebuild its empire and influence in Eastern Europe against British wishes. Anyone who is against the British becomes Axis and all that was needed was something to light the touch paper.

By 1815 Napoleon had been defeated by the British Empire at Waterloo. But that left the other ancient empire the Turkish Ottomans. Founded in 1299 it has always been a target for the Britsih Empire and naturally became Axis as well. World War 1 gave the British the perfect cover to deliver the final fatal blow and it eventually collpased in 1922 to be taken up not explicitly by the British Enpire but by a new confederation of countries loyal to the British named the League of Nations. This was the predecessor to the United Nations fomed after World War 2.

As the British Empire grew it became too large to run for an imperial centre. Just as Rome had to split into 4 separate capitals so the British divided the empire into the new structure of teh United Nations that assumed the legitmacy of a global democratic government but which was in reality governed in such a way that it would never rule against the interests of the British and always against the interests of the Axis.

During World War 2 Britain was usurped by the expanding American Empire and since 1942 London has been entirely subsumed by Washington.

Empires and Conflict

Rory Stewart makes an interesting observation of conflict zones that they are not composed of people particlarly war like. Rather these people are the victims of the opposing political forces that meet at borders. The conflict and social breakdown is caused by the conflicting power structures.

As we look at the world today and history and we see people fighting and turning violent invariably because of competing power structures in their region.

Absurdity

How odd it is then that empires pretend to help by sending weapons to war zones with the official intention of ending the violence through superior fire power. What is actually happening is that empire seeking to gain control over their neighbours create tensions in border regions that cause the fighting. As Rory Stewart says the people become victims exploited in proxy wars.

Peace

For peace to exist this absurdity of feeding weapons into border regions with the self-serving goal of winning influence must end. Peace in border regions is only possibly when powers find agreement, and that depends upon politicians doing their job. And for politicians to do their job, the people who tolerate those politicians must hold them accountable.

When internal politics breaks down, as it has in the American Empire, and before it the British Empire, and politicans are free to expand the empire then conflict in border regions begins and conflicts start.

The American Empire as I write is in the middle of taking this spark of conflict along the borders of its empire and fanned it with huge military investment under the label the “War on Terror.” The ultimate goal is a global empire ruled from Washington. The dream of every empire from the Babylonians onwards.

Personal Responsibility & Consciousness

Ultimately conflict depends upon weak individuals joining in the conflict. But as we saw in World War 1 & 2 there are many tens of millions of weak individuals who are happy to beat each other over the head on the border zones without any apparent awareness of what is going on. A broader consciousness of the nature of warfare and conflict is desperately needed throughout the human race. Hopefully in the future people will start to seek to extinguish the causes of conflict rather than join in and make it worse.

Modernity and Progress are irrelevant

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

War is Nonsense

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meaning of Life

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

The Senses

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

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

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

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

The Way To Freedom

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

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

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

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

So What is Reality?

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

The Meaning of Life

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

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

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

Fixed Points and God

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

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

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

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

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

PI does not contain itself

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

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

pi = 0.141592654...

so pi(5) = 9

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

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

Such a sequence can be expressed as a fraction:

For example:

0.12345612345612345612345612345612... = 123456/999999

So pi would be:

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

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

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

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

This means that:

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

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