Archive for category Science
The Mythical Constant of the Universe – 137
Posted by Kim Graae Munch in Esoterics, Kabbalah, Science, The Three Logoi on January 29, 2022
The most mystical and mythical number in the universe, both within science and esotericism.
Esoterically it defines God and man as we are created in the picture of God. It shows God as one, as three in the Trinity or body, soul and spirit, and the seven Elohim or seven human spiritual bodies.
For physicists, it describes the universe. It’s called the fine-structure constant and is one of the key physical constants of the universe.
“This immutable number determines how stars burn, how chemistry happens, and even whether atoms exist at all,” as Michael Brooks explained in a New Scientist article.
If this value was changed just a little the universe would end in chaos that would not have been habitable, where life, as we know it, couldn’t have evolved.
From Wikipedia:
Since the early 1900s, physicists have postulated that the number could lie at the heart of a grand unified theory, relating theories of electromagnetism, quantum mechanics and, especially, gravity.
The fine-structure constant, a dimensionless physical constant, is approximately 1/137.
Lederman expounded on the significance of the number in his book The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question?, noting that not only was it the inverse of the fine-structure constant, but was also related to the probability that an electron will emit or absorb a photon—i.e., Feynman’s conjecture.
He added that it also “contains the crux of electromagnetism (the electron), relativity (the velocity of light), and quantum theory (Planck’s constant).
It would be less unsettling if the relationship between all these important concepts turned out to be one or three or maybe a multiple of pi. But 137?
The number 137, according to Lederman, “shows up naked all over the place”, meaning that scientists on any planet in the universe using whatever units they have for charge or speed, and whatever their version of Planck’s constant may be, will all come up with 137, because it is a pure number.
Lederman recalled that Richard Feynman had even suggested that all physicists put a sign in their offices with the number 137 to remind them of just how much they do not know.
At the range of 10−15 m (1 femtometer), the strong force is approximately 137 times as strong as electromagnetism.
Feynman on 137
“Immediately you would like to know where this number for a coupling comes from: is it related to p or perhaps to the base of natural logarithms?
Nobody knows. It’s one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by man. You might say the “hand of God” wrote that number, and “we don’t know how He pushed his pencil”.
We know what kind of a dance to do experimentally to measure this number very accurately, but we don’t know what kind of dance to do on the computer to make this number come out, without putting it in secretly!” ~ R. P. Feynman, QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter
In Religion
The Bible says that Ishmael, Levi and Amram all lived to be 137 years old. The three appearances make it the most common lifespan of individuals in the Bible.
Kabbalah
The Hebrew word קבלה (Kabbalah) has a Gematria (numerical value) of 137.
Kabbalah is generally taken to mean “the received tradition”, which conveys the continuity of a tradition that has been passed down from generation to generation. Nevertheless, the earlier nuance of meaning is seen in the first appearances of its root in the Torah (Exodus 26:5 and 36:12), where it means “parallel” or “corresponding” rather than “receiving”.
It is used to describe the “corresponding loops”, which, when clasped together, enjoined the two sections of the Tabernacle’s ceiling. These loops were suspended directly over the veil that divided the Holy Place and the Holy of Holies.
Symbolically, this is the threshold between the physical dimension and the utterly spiritual dimension. In other words, at the boundary line of the physical world, the number 137 emerges. The wisdom of Kabbalah is to find correspondences between the mundane and spiritual levels of reality.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/137_(number)?wprov=sfti1
and https://science.howstuffworks.com/dictionary/physics-terms/why-is-137-most-magical-number.htm
Guide to disprove the Flat Earth Theory
Posted by Kim Graae Munch in Conspiracy Theories, Science on February 9, 2018
Multitasking versus Tunnelvision
Men and women think differently, and it’s the force of humanity. But the younger souls have problems spanning the gab, where the older souls have both kinds of thinking, although their own genders capabilities is supreme.
Woman think in space where men think in time, woman have wide-angle lens where men have a zoom objective, or as seen from women: multitasking versus tunnel vision😃
It means that women are much more detail oriented than men, or at least put more emphasis on details, where men have a tendency to overlook details. Men are much more interested in consequences, in planning, and it may have been men who created the Spanish word Manyana.
In old societies it was usually the woman who took care of the village, where the men were hunters or fighters. The men could hunt a large animal for days or weeks until it was tired enough to be killed. When they returned to the village with the prey, they didn’t do anything before the next hunt was necessary or a skirmish with their neighbor village. The woman took care of the daily details of the village, and each day were as the next.
Today the woman in Africa start small shops and business, as its a natural continuation of their previous care taking of the village. The men have more difficulties finding their place in a materialistic society.
Life is easy, why do we make it so Hard? On Education.
Posted by Kim Graae Munch in Esoterics, Politics, Rosicrucianism, Science, Thinking, Wisdom on February 25, 2017
This is maybe the most important video in our time, he is pinpointing the main problem of materialism in a very practical and usable way.
In many ways the life before the seventies was in this way, although the state had made life somewhat complicated, but most people still managed their own time, and the children wasn’t put into institutions and few worked in public administration, they were their own masters or had much influence on their work. My father used much time building on the house, and generally lived a very little organized life with lots of freedom.
About Jon Jandai: Jon is a farmer from northeastern Thailand. He founded the Pun Pun Center for Self-reliance, an organic farm outside Chiang Mai, with his wife Peggy Reents in 2003.
Pun Pun doubles as a center for sustainable living and seed production, aiming to bring indigenous and rare seeds back into use. It regularly hosts training on simple techniques to live more sustainably.
Outside of Pun Pun, Jon is a leader in bringing the natural building movement to Thailand, appearing as a spokesperson on dozens of publications and TV programs for the past 10 years. He continually strives to find easier ways for people to fulfill their basic needs. For more information visit http://www.punpunthailand.org
And on Ecologic Sustainable Farming.
Pun Pun (meaning ‘thousand varieties’) is an organic farm, seed-saving operation, and sustainable living and learning centre based about 50km North of Chiang Mai, Thailand in Mae Taeng district.
Peggy and Jo – the two founders of Pun Pun.
I just saw this quote by Rudolf Steiner, and I had to read it more than once to understand it fully.
But it is sensible, only what we do out of love is fully our doing, if we don’t do it out of love, something else have ‘forced’ us to do it, desires, opinions, public opinions, regulations, laws, and so forth.
So to be truly free is to live in love, but it’s of course not some hallelujah kind of love or a sentimental one, it’s a genuine state of mind, being in peace in the soul.
But it’s impossible to live that way in a materialistic society, there is not much room for compassion and care in a society build on things and consumption.
We need a society build on Jon’s experience, a decentralized society, with local sustainable production.
Problems of our economic and political systems of today
Posted by Kim Graae Munch in Materialism, Politics, Science, Thinking on April 28, 2014
Centralization is the problem of our current economic and political systems, evident in political decision-making, public institutions, companies and capital. The mantra ‘Big is Beautiful’ is wrong: The productivity per employee drops with the increasing size of the organisation, and that is because the single employee has less possibility to influence his own work and is too bound by rules. Also the large organizations are difficult to manage.
Centralized decision-making, for instance in the distance between government and population, increases the damage by wrong decision. The same goes for large corporations: the bigger the organization, the greater the danger for wrong decisions and for catastrophic results. However, this is only a small part of the danger of centralisation. In the following paragraphs I will look at its implications, which will be seen in greater aggressiveness, fewer social skills and decreasing possibilities to control our future. In other words, there are less possibilities to make decisions on a large scale as well as in our own lives, at home and work.
The danger of centralization works through various mechanisms, as
- Materialism, a purely physical view of the universe,
- Pervasive Politics, proliferation of the political system in daily life,
- Groupings, emphasis on group, race, and ethnicity, us and them,
- Orthodoxy, literal and “simple” interpretation of the Gospels,
- Superstition, spiritual beliefs without foundation in thinking skills,
- Abstract Thinking, cultivating abstract theorization,
- Quantitative Thinking, purely quantitative (statistical) observation.
Combined with a dualistic worldview where everything is black and white, these will increase the strife between people all over the world.
Dualism
Dualistic thinking sees everything in opposites, and this is one of the greatest dangers today: “If you are not with me, you are against me”. This is a widespread sickness, especially on the internet where you can hide under anonymity. However, orthodoxy of any kind – religious, atheistic, or political – moves our future in a dangerous direction. What makes it so dangerous are that both sides believe that they fight on the side of good, but the reality is that they both fight for extremism, whereas truth is always somewhere in-between.
The deception is not to see the full picture, to understand both sides in any relation!
The challenge is to find the golden mean between the extremes.
The following paragraphs will look into different areas where dualism endangers our society.
The deception is not to see the full picture, to understand both sides in any relation!
The challenge is to find the Golden Mean between the extremes.
The following paragraphs will look into different areas where Dualism endangers our society.
Materialism
Science is seen as the absolute truth against black superstition represented by religion. The latter is not seen as having different and complementary views on the same reality. It has become a kind of atheistic religion in itself, attacking spirituality and moral values. Darwin is their prime god, and their Messiahs are the sentient robots they hope will come and save the world. The problem are that most of the atheists don’t really understand what they are preaching, and they don’t accept scientific evidence if it’s against their own beliefs. See Is it possible to make Intelligent Machines?
Science can’t make decisions or take responsibility, as Science in itself has no morality per se. Science is always used by others: more dynamic groups in society, by players on the market or in politics, whose morals aren’t better than that of the courts or the voters.
“Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.” Martin Luther King Jr.
“I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy.” Richard Feynman
“As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise, human science is at a loss.” Noam Chomsky
Pervasive Politics
You see dualism in politics, especially in two-party systems, where there is no space for other views. Politics dominates today everybody’s life, in contrast to forty years ago, where politics was talked about at the elections every fourth year. Back then, the laws gave rules for the relation between citizens, whereas today the laws regulate the relation between state and citizens.
The political invasion of the private sphere destroys the natural equilibrium of society. The economic system today is an example of this: the equilibrium of that system ends regularly in chaos, as the system is made for speculators, not for companies, nor for the country and its citizens. Today the decisions are taken via regulations or laws on behalf of groups, whereas in earlier times, the decisions were taken on behalf of individuals by those who were familiar with specific cases. Wrong decisions had only small consequences then, whereas wrong decisions today have far heavier consequences as more people are dependent on these decisions.
This is a problem all over the world, and it gets worse the more laws and rules people have to follow.
One of the biggest lies of today: We need more regulations as a result of society’s complexity. Wrong, it is more complex as a result of all those regulations. Computers take the complexity out of complex tasks, and prefabricated goods take the complexity out of manual work, so what is complex today, except the laws?
Groupings
There is a tendency to split up in groups, instead of seeing mankind as one: people split up according to race, religion, language, land, locality, sex, or whatever. There is a lots of hate in this, not least on the Internet.
Orthodoxy
There is a tendency to read religious texts too narrowly. For instance, the Jehovah Witnesses and other religious groups who take their holy books too literally. Durban Two, where the Islamic countries tries to prohibit any criticism of religion, is a typical example showing that discussions of religious content is unwanted. New religious movements like Scientology, Atheism, the Moonies, and so on, are also too rigid.
Superstition
Another trap is to accept words of religious, esoteric, and scientific origin without thought. The spiritually-inclined are in danger of reading spiritual literature without conscious understanding, but that includes also atheists reading scientific texts without understanding.
Abstract Thinking
In contrast to real understanding, abstract thinking is seen everywhere, including the previous subjects discussed. Man is seen as a thing, not as a being. But reality is not abstract, and every decision based on abstract thinking is wrong, especially if living beings are involved.
Quantitative Thinking
This involves statistics, but without understanding. Let us say a politician want to make a law, and it will make 0.123% of all families go bankrupt, but as the percent is so low, nobody sees it as a problem. Nobody understands that there are real people behind those figures. Quantitative thinking always works through abstractions.
Big Mother
The development moves in a direction where we can expect that our personal ‘I’ is assimilated by the masses, the collective. In the western world we talk about freedom: that nobody should tell us what to do, and we fight (duality problem) against conspiracies, against CO2 pollution, against many other things, but we don’t define and work consistently for a world worth living in. At the same time, our capabilities to decide our own destiny are diminishing, regulated by law, organizations, computers, and infrastructure. The result may be that everybody just follows the paths with least resistance, which are built through directives, regulations, computer capabilities, ending in a situation where nobody thinks or makes decisions any more. And it’s all made for the good of the citizens by Big Mother.
Political Correctness
Political Correctness is sneaking in everywhere, without any conscious effort by any conspiratorial agency, but because of the path of least resistance.
No Childhood
Many of the restrictions and laws are made because of poor parenting: children no longer learn to live in a community; they are each and all small kings and princesses, who don’t understand that others don’t see them as such. Their understanding of scientific, historic or creative endeavors is as small as it has ever been. Children of olden times learned more at the campfire than the children of today. As they don’t know how to behave, more and more laws are created to remedy this deficient parenting.
The central problem are that children aren’t allowed to be children any longer, or as Michael Jackson says:
“Childhood has become the great casualty of modern-day living. All around us we are producing scores of kids who have not had the joy, who have not been accorded the right, who have not been allowed the freedom, or knowing what it’s like to be a kid.
Today children are constantly encouraged to grow up faster, as if this period known as childhood is a burdensome stage, to be endured and ushered through, as swiftly as possible.”
…
“Love, ladies and gentlemen, is the human family’s most precious legacy, its richest bequest, its golden inheritance. And it is a treasure that is handed down from one generation to another. Previous ages may not have had the wealth we enjoy. Their houses may have lacked electricity, and they squeezed their many kids into small homes without central heating. But those homes had no darkness, nor were they cold. They were lit bright with the glow of love and they were warmed snugly by the very heat of the human heart. Parents, undistracted by the lust for luxury and status, accorded their children primacy in their lives.” Michael Jackson, Speech at Oxford University(2001)
Complicated Structures
You can’t make tax-systems as complicated as they are today without computers, and you can’t control the many citizens or employees, as we can today, without computers; the amount of data is enormous. They make it possible to create structures which are difficult to manage without using computers, and computers don’t know HR.
GM and the American Automobile Industry are good examples of these gigantic companies, who would be impossible to manage without stiff administrative structures and computers, and it’s extremely difficult to change these structures if it were needed. But modern software organizations have the same problems, with their software bases: Microsoft with its operating system, and Office system, Yahoo with it’s big software base. There are also problems with reduction of labour, and new organizations such as Google with its extreme growth, will quickly get into the same problems. The only way out is to regularly rebuild old systems from the ground without any application reuse, to keep different applications separated on application level and to use methods which make the programming as simple and cost effective as possible.
These big organizations are extremely susceptible to the Peters Principle:
I believe computers can be a boon to mankind, but we have to control how and what they are used for, not letting their possibilities decide our future, as their strength can be used both for good and evil purposes.
Management and Computers
You can use computers for many things: they can plan routes for transport, or decrease energy consumption, and many other useful things. This sounds good, but if we don’t take care, it could mean that it makes the knowledge and experience of man superfluous or even dangerous: man’s role can become degraded to that of a machine.
The need for knowledge is diminishing everywhere in society, except within the computer world. Many jobs which needed educated craftsmen can now be done by unskilled labor, as building materials don’t need special skills any more, and the computer has taken over a lot of paperwork and decision-making. This turns everyone into secretaries except the secretaries: Even executives write their own letters and calculating sheets on their computers, instead of using secretaries, so they don’t do what they were hired and paid for – manage.
The term “human resources” is in itself a degradation. People are no longer individuals: They are a kind of commodity. See “Human Resources” by Scott Noble.
Large Structures
The physicist Geoffrey B. West studies large structures like cities and corporate organisations, and has found that cities increase their productivity and also their problems, while corporate organisations decrease their productivity as they grow.
Public organisations have of course the same problems as the corporate companies, they don’t trust their employees.
Cities are good examples on how the unstructured principles works, how the size of the city increases the production per citizen.
No Competent Leaders
What makes it so frustratingly absurd is that we are giving away our independence to a system, a network of directives and conventions, without any persons being in charge. There is nowhere you can go to say that it’s wrong and it should be otherwise. Everybody will tell you, “That’s how it is and it has always been that way, and it can’t be in any other way, as it’s too costly to change the computers programming just because of you!” Of course we have leaders at the top of the state or the corporate companies, but as the decision-making is moved up through the hierarchy (following automatic rules,) it therefore becomes more and more difficult to manage big organizations, as everything becomes dependent on one decision- maker alone, and few can, or know how to, change the course. It’s more difficult to change the direction of a state, organization, or company than a supertanker. Consequently, organizations becomes automatons, and companies go under in the event of unanticipated events, when structural change is what is actually needed.
GM and the American automobile industry are good examples of this inability to change: They had known for decades that they should change their models to compete with Japanese and European manufacturers, but they couldn’t.
The incompetence of these organizations gives rise to conspiracy theories as Hanlon’s Law warns about:
In World War II, the firing of a general was seen as a sign that the system was working as planned. Yet now, in the rare instances when it does occur, relief tends to be seen, especially inside the Army, as a sign that the system has somehow failed. Only one high-profile relief occurred during the American invasion of Iraq, and the officer removed was not a general but a Marine colonel. Relief has become so unusual that even this firing made front-page news.
Automated Decisions
Buying and selling on the stock market are for a great part based on automated decisions made by computers, but as we have seen, it can go terrible wrong when some unanticipated events shows up. What’s worse, the stock market was made to foster strong and sound companies: not for computer-controlled gaming, but for intelligent investment.
As fewer and fewer managers can make decisions, these decisions will be automated as rules in computers, and it will be impossible to make decisions based on individual concerns.
Decreasing Social Intercourse
Computers are very effective for entertainment: you can live your whole life on the internet, without any direct social contact. You can play games and do your work through the net if necessary. You can also discuss, shop for sex/ books/ programs/ random data on the net (It can be like a drug in itself). You can book your food from a local pizzeria, book escort girls, men, and boys, eventually finding mates on the net if you really want to live together with another living being. The film Matrix is a plausible destiny, not by force, but semi-freely. It’s not Big Brother, it’s Big Mama.
Less Social Skills
In the old days, children, teenagers, and adults learned by living in a community, and there was room for everybody, even the village idiot. These and other unusual persons were educated by their social environment which were mostly normal. We are today living more and more on the internet, learning our social skills through social applications and computer games. The old community’s influence is replaced by the internet friends, and as like seeks like, they can only increase their phobias or other disorders. Examples are numerous: pedophilia, school killings, terrorists, all kind of surrealistic interests, and so forth. The Law of Sayre’s is relevant in many of these cases:
No Privacy
Children and teenagers can be reached by mobile and GPS always and everywhere, followed on the internet through Twitter or Facebook by their parents: no privacy. The same goes for the adults: no privacy and always available for state officials, economic institutions and employers. Password protection, pseudonyms, and like precautions are no hindrance, Cyber-Investigators will find everything, relevant or not. You cannot even go to the North Pole or to the Himalayas in peace: they can always reach you, and you them.
Where’s the remotest place on Earth?
In our hyper-connected world, getting away from it all is easier said than done. New Scientist.
Conspiracy Theories
The frustration has to go somewhere, and while there are no one responsible for our situation, and no one with enough insight, determination, and power to change the situation, we invent some god-like powerful conspirators who in all secrecy, with hundreds of employees, stands behind all the bad in this world. The truth is that most leaders are so incompetent that it hurts. Just look at Iraq: The military invasion was well thought out, but the rest was incompetence par excellence. And that is not an exception, it’s the rule. Of course, there are conspiracies and secret operations, but if more than one participant knowing about the conspiracy is alive a year later, it’s just a question of time before the world know. Another reason to use few people is that really competent people are difficult to find, and the more people involve, the bigger the risks for failure. Moreover, the bigger the consequences of a possilble failure, the less interesting the project becomes. The best way to check if a conspiracy theory is viable or not, isn’t to examine the technical evidence but rather the psychology and the necessary resources that would be needed behind the scenes, also how big is the risk, who gains, what’s their gain, how many participate, and what expertise is necessary.
A sober view on conspiracy theories from the left:
Noam Chomsky on Conspiracy Theories
In case the video is not functioning look here
Literature
Thomas Piketty
The Independent: The French economist forcing America to wake up to the end of The Dream.
Out of America: Thomas Piketty’s tome which skewers the idea that anyone who works hard can make it in the US seems to have hit a nerve
“Capital In The Twenty-First Century”, all 685 pages of it, is the No 1 best-seller on Amazon – apparently the first time that anything published by the venerable Harvard University Press has attained such dizzying celebrity. No self-regarding dinner party in Washington or New York is worth its salt without a discussion of it. Last Friday, came the ultimate accolade of a multiple coronation on the op-ed page of The New York Times.
The Huffington Post: Economist Thomas Piketty Explains Why Income Inequality Is Just Getting Started
Michael Lewis
Wired: Michael Lewis on Exposing Wall Street’s Biggest High-Tech Swindle in the book: Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt
Flash Boys explores the world of high-frequency trading, a scheme in which traders use ultra-fast network connections to sniff out the intentions of other, slower traders, thereby acting before others can respond. Critics of the practice–Lewis chief among them–argue that high-frequency trading creates something akin to insider trading: a predatory environment for less advantaged investors. WIRED spoke with Lewis at an event organized by Live Talks in downtown Los Angeles.
Elizabeth Warren
A Fighting Chance (Apple, Amazon)
An unlikely political star tells the inspiring story of the two-decade journey that taught her how Washington really works—and really doesn’t.
In this passionate, funny, rabble-rousing book, Warren shows why she has chosen to fight tooth and nail for the middle class—and why she has become a hero to all those who believe that America’s government can and must do better for working families.
New York Times: Book review of A Fighting Chance
A good review, also giving a good idea about who she is.
Adam Curtis
The the Bafta-winning film-maker Adam Curtis:
Allan Bloom
The Closing of the American Mind, Simon & Schuster Inc.
Christopher Lasch
Haven in a Heartless World, 1977, Basic Books, Inc.
In the American political vocabulary, “family” and “family values” no longer simply evoke pictures of harmonious scenes; they also push our buttons (left and right) about what is wrong with society. One of the earliest and sharpest cultural commentators to investigate the twentieth-century American family, Christopher Lasch argues in this book that as social science “experts” intrude more and more into our lives, the family’s vital role as the moral and social cornerstone of society disintegrates – and, left unchecked, so does our political and personal freedom. Haven in a Heartless World is a trenchant analysis of the plight of the family. Lasch takes a clear-eyed look at the institution in which America’s future generations are being raised and finds it faltering.
Geoffrey B. West
A Physicist Turns the City Into an Equation:
A New York Times article on his work.
Growth, innovation, scaling, and the pace of life in cities:
Describes the mathematical background for his work.
Atticannie’s Blog
Why Teacher Drink, the sequel: Natalie Munroe speaks out
Huffington Post – The Psychology Of Materialism, And Why It’s Making You Unhappy
Matt Walsh:
That’s our entire economic system: buy things. Everybody buy. It doesn’t matter what you buy. Just buy. It doesn’t matter if you don’t have money. Just buy. Our entire civilization now rests on the assumption that, no matter what else happens, we will all continue to buy lots and lots of things. Buy, buy, buy, buy, buy. And then buy a little more. Don’t create, or produce, or discover — just buy. Never save, never invest, never cut back — just buy. Buy what you don’t need with money you don’t have… Buy like you breathe, only more frequently.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
have written a little book called “Night Flight” which describes man’s fight against the Materialistic docility to keep man competent and responsible.
Rudolf Steiner
The Social question from an esoteric view, in German and in English.
Political Correctness
Political Correctness is sneaking in everywhere, without any conscious effort by any conspiratorial agency, but because of the path of least resistance.
The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum – even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.
Noam Chomsky
The Philosophy of Materialism
Posted by Kim Graae Munch in Computers, Materialism, Politics on November 17, 2013
All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace
The Bafta-winning film-maker Adam Curtis have made a documentary series called “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace”, describing the philosophy of materialism. He says about the background:
“about how we have been colonised by the machines we have built. Although we don’t realise it, the way we see everything in the world today is through the eyes of computers. My underlying argument is that we have given up a dynamic political model of the world – the dream of changing things for the better – for a static machine ideology that says we are all components in systems.”
This is the best description of the materialistic problem of today, the film is pure art, making the viewers stop and think.
Adam Curtis shows how this “machine ideology” have entered the thoughts of man up through time, starting with ideas of the economic policies of Alan Greenspan and his fascination with the philosopher Ayn Rand; the “selfish gene” popularised by Richard Dawkins; the “self-organising” dreams of hippies in the 1960s; and utopian visions of the internet preached by cyber-nerds in Silicon Valley.
His point is not that computers are worryingly ubiquitous, or that machines are enslaving us, but that we have fooled ourselves into believing that every sphere of human experience – from the democratic nation state to the global economy and even the natural world – can be thought of like a computer, as an ordered network of millions of individually insignificant nodes (i.e. us) whose only achievable goal is to maintain order and stability within the system. Andrew Pettie
And, Curtis says:
“One downside of this machine organising principle,” he says, “is that it undermines something really important: the old Enlightenment idea that human beings have the power and the imagination to change the world, to make it what they want and bend it to their will. [This] can be dangerous, but it can also be wonderful.”
Wikipedia have a good article here.
The three documentaries are comprised of:
1. Love and Power.
This is the story of the dream that rose up in the 1990s that computers could create a new kind of stable world. They would bring about a new kind global capitalism free of all risk and without the boom and bust of the past. They would also abolish political power and create a new kind of democracy through the Internet where millions of individuals would be connected as nodes in cybernetic systems – without hierarchy.
The film tells the story of two perfect worlds. One is the small group of disciples around the novelist Ayn Rand in the 1950s. They saw themselves as a prototype for a future society where everyone could follow their own selfish desires.
The other is the global utopia that digital entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley set out to create in the 1990s. Many of them were also disciples of Ayn Rand. They believed that the new computer networks would allow the creation of a society where everyone could follow their own desires, yet there would not be anarchy.
They were joined by Alan Greenspan who had also been a disciple of Ayn Rand. He became convinced that the computers were creating a new kind of stable capitalism. But the dream of stability in both worlds would be torn apart by the two dynamic human forces – love and power.
2. The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts. This is the story of how our modern scientific idea of nature, the self-regulating ecosystem, is actually a machine fantasy. It has little to do with the real complexity of nature. It is based on cybernetic ideas that were projected on to nature in the 1950s by ambitious scientists. A static machine theory of order that sees humans, and everything else on the planet, as components – cogs – in a system.
But in an age disillusioned with politics, the self-regulating ecosystem has again become the model for utopian ideas of human “self-organising networks”, with dreams of new ways of organising societies without leaders and in global visions of connectivity like the Gaia theory.
This powerful idea emerged out of the hippie communes in America in the 1960s, and from counter-culture computer scientists who believed that global webs of computers could liberate the world.
But, at the very moment this was happening, the science of ecology discovered that the theory of the self-regulating ecosystem wasn’t true. Instead they found that nature was really dynamic and constantly changing in unpredictable ways.
But it was too late, the dream of the self-organising network had by now captured imaginations…
3. The Monkey in the Machine and the Machine in the Monkey. This episode looks at why we humans find this machine vision so beguiling. The film argues it is because all political dreams of changing the world for the better seem to have failed – so we have retreated into machine-fantasies that say we have no control over our actions because they excuse our failure.
At the heart of the film is Bill Hamilton, a scientist. He argued that human behaviour is really guided by codes buried deep within us – a theory later popularised by Richard Dawkins as the “selfish gene”. It said that individual human beings are really just machines whose only job is to make sure the codes are passed on for eternity.
This final part begins in 2000 in the jungles of the Congo and Rwanda, where Hamilton is to help prove his dark theories. But all around him the Congo is being torn apart. The film then interweaves the two stories–the strange roots of Hamilton’s theories, and the history of the West’s tortured relationship with the Congo and technology…
The title is borrowed from a poem handed out on the streets of San Francisco in 1967 by the writer Richard Brautigan:
I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.I like to think
(right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.Richard Brautigan
Literature
Problems of our economic and political systems of today
Other places with videos: topdocumentaryfilms.com
Quantum physics and Consciousness
Posted by Kim Graae Munch in Esoterics, Quantum Physics, Science on July 24, 2009
A friend of mine have just made me aware of the physicist Amit Goswami:
Quantum physics, as well as a number of other modern sciences, he feels, is demonstrating that the essential unity underlying all of reality is a fact which can be experimentally verified. Because of the enormous implications he sees in this scientific confirmation of the spiritual, Goswami is ardently devoted to explaining his theory to as many people as possible in order to help bring about what he feels is a much needed paradigm shift. He feels that because science is now capable of validating mysticism, much that before required a leap of faith can now be empirically proven and, hence, the materialist paradigm which has dominated scientific and philosophical thought for over two hundred years can finally be called into question.
And
Consider instead the possibility that the entire story only existed as an abstract potential—a cosmic dream among countless other cosmic dreams—until, in that dream, life somehow evolved to the point that a conscious, sentient being came into existence. At that moment, solely because of the conscious observation of that individual, the entire universe, including all of the history leading up to that point, suddenly came into being. Until that moment, nothing had actually ever happened. In that moment, fifteen billion years happened. If this sounds like nothing more than a complicated backdrop for a science fiction story or a secular version of one of the world’s great creation myths, hold on to your hat. According to physicist Amit Goswami, the above description is a scientifically viable explanation of how the universe came into being.
And
Goswami is convinced, along with a number of others who subscribe to the same view, that the universe, in order to exist, requires a conscious sentient being to be aware of it. Without an observer, he claims, it only exists as a possibility. And as they say in the world of science, Goswami has done his math. Marshalling evidence from recent research in cognitive psychology, biology, parapsychology and quantum physics, and leaning heavily on the ancient mystical traditions of the world, Goswami is building a case for a new paradigm that he calls “monistic idealism,” the view that consciousness, not matter, is the foundation of everything that is.
He is not the only one, Martin Rees:
“In the beginning there were only probabilities. The universe could only come into existence if someone observed it. It does not matter that the observers turned up several billion years later. The universe exists because we are aware of it.”
From the interview (it’s simply filled with Goodies):
WIE: In your book The Self-Aware Universe you speak about the need for a paradigm shift. Could you talk a bit about how you conceive of that shift? From what to what?
Amit Goswami: The current worldview has it that everything is made of matter, and everything can be reduced to the elementary particles of matter, the basic constituents—building blocks—of matter. And cause arises from the interactions of these basic building blocks or elementary particles; elementary particles make atoms, atoms make molecules, molecules make cells, and cells make brain. But all the way, the ultimate cause is always the interactions between the elementary particles. This is the belief—all cause moves from the elementary particles. This is what we call “upward causation.” So in this view, what human beings—you and I—think of as our free will does not really exist. It is only an epiphenomenon or secondary phenomenon, secondary to the causal power of matter. And any causal power that we seem to be able to exert on matter is just an illusion. This is the current paradigm.
Now, the opposite view is that everything starts with consciousness. That is, consciousness is the ground of all being. In this view, consciousness imposes “downward causation.” In other words, our free will is real. When we act in the world we really are acting with causal power. This view does not deny that matter also has causal potency—it does not deny that there is causal power from elementary particles upward, so there is upward causation—but in addition it insists that there is also downward causation. It shows up in our creativity and acts of free will, or when we make moral decisions. In those occasions we are actually witnessing downward causation by consciousness.
WIE: In your book you refer to this new paradigm as “monistic idealism.” And you also suggest that science seems to be verifying what a lot of mystics have said throughout history—that science’s current findings seem to be parallel to the essence of the perennial spiritual teaching.
AG: It is the spiritual teaching. It is not just parallel. The idea that consciousness is the ground of being is the basis of all spiritual traditions, as it is for the philosophy of monistic idealism—although I have given it a somewhat new name. The reason for my choice of the name is that, in the West, there is a philosophy called “idealism” which is opposed to the philosophy of “material realism,” which holds that only matter is real. Idealism says no, consciousness is the only real thing. But in the West that kind of idealism has usually meant something that is really dualism—that is, consciousness and matter are separate. So, by monistic idealism, I made it clear that, no, I don’t mean that dualistic kind of Western idealism, but really a monistic idealism, which has existed in the West, but only in the esoteric spiritual traditions. Whereas in the East this is the mainstream philosophy. In Buddhism, or in Hinduism where it is called Vedanta, or in Taoism, this is the philosophy of everyone. But in the West this is a very esoteric tradition, only known and adhered to by very astute philosophers, the people who have really delved deeply into the nature of reality.
…
AG: Yes, it is. Henry Stapp, who is a physicist at the University of California at Berkeley, says this quite explicitly in one of his papers written in 1977, that things outside of space and time affect things inside space and time. There’s just no question that that happens in the realm of quantum physics when you are dealing with quantum objects. Now of course, the crux of the matter is, the surprising thing is, that we are always dealing with quantum objects because it turns out that quantum physics is the physics of every object. Whether it’s submicroscopic or it’s macroscopic, quantum physics is the only physics we’ve got. So although it’s more apparent for photons, for electrons, for the submicroscopic objects, our belief is that all reality, all manifest reality, all matter, is governed by the same laws. And if that is so, then this experiment is telling us that we should change our worldview because we, too, are quantum objects.
…
AG: We all hope so. Now this is called the “quantum measurement paradox.” It is a paradox because who are we to do this conversion? Because after all, in the materialist paradigm we don’t have any causal efficacy. We are nothing but the brain, which is made up of atoms and elementary particles. So how can a brain which is made up of atoms and elementary particles convert a possibility wave that it itself is? It itself is made up of the possibility waves of atoms and elementary particles, so it cannot convert its own possibility wave into actuality. This is called a paradox. Now in the new view, consciousness is the ground of being. So who converts possibility into actuality? Consciousness does, because consciousness does not obey quantum physics. Consciousness is not made of material. Consciousness is transcendent. Do you see the paradigm-changing view right here—how consciousness can be said to create the material world? The material world of quantum physics is just possibility. It is consciousness, through the conversion of possibility into actuality, that creates what we see manifest. In other words, consciousness creates the manifest world.
…
AG: I mean that literally. This is what quantum physics demands. In fact, in quantum physics this is called “delayed choice.” And I have added to this concept the concept of “self-reference.” Actually the concept of delayed choice is very old. It is due to a very famous physicist named John Wheeler, but Wheeler did not see the entire thing correctly, in my opinion. He left out self-reference. The question always arises, “The universe is supposed to have existed for fifteen billion years, so if it takes consciousness to convert possibility into actuality, then how could the universe be around for so long?” Because there was no consciousness, no sentient being, biological being, carbon based being, in that primordial fireball which is supposed to have created the universe, the big bang. But this other way of looking at things says that the universe remained in possibility until there was self-referential quantum measurement—so that is the new concept. An observer’s looking is essential in order to manifest possibility into actuality, and so only when the observer looks, only then does the entire thing become manifest—including time. So all of past time, in that respect, becomes manifest right at that moment when the first sentient being looks.
It turns out that this idea, in a very clever, very subtle way, has been around in cosmology and astronomy under the guise of a principle called the “anthropic principle.” That is, the idea has been growing among astronomers—cosmologists anyway—that the universe has a purpose. It is so fine-tuned, there are so many coincidences, that it seems very likely that the universe is doing something purposive, as if the universe is growing in such a way that a sentient being will arise at some point.
Connie: We think science and spirituality are mutually exclusive but lately it seems that the two ideas are moving closer together.
Amit: The division happened because of a quirk of history: that classical physics was discovered before quantum physics. If quantum physics had been discovered first we would not have these separations between science and spirituality. Carl Popper coined the phrase “promissory materialism.” Materialism will always remain promissory in those areas of spirit, soul, mind, meaning and what life is all about. Science based on materiality will never make total sense. It fits some questions that have a reductive tendency. Some things we do are materially oriented. If you need a job you learn a skill. But on the other hand if you want to be happy, to think money or work will make us happy is foolhardy. One becomes happy by connecting with wholeness. This wisdom has escaped most scientists.
I am finding a shift among budding scientists who want to find real answers to questions like happiness, soul, reincarnation and the meaning of life. All those questions that science thought it could never answer. It’s clear that if we continue our present direction, the decline of the stock market and business ethics are just a few of the symptoms of the disease, which is leaving spirit, ethics and values out of the equation. If you understand reincarnational philosophy, you’ll know that we come back again and again if we are unethical. No one would ever dare to be unethical. You do come back and you have to answer for those propensities. So there’s no sense in building bad karma, bad propensities.
Video’s
Video 1
Video 2
Video 3
Biography:
Amit Goswami: Amit Goswami is a theoretical nuclear physicist and member of The University of Oregon Institute for Theoretical Physics since 1968, teaching physics for 32 years. After a period of distress and frustration in his private and professional life starting at the age 38, his research interests shifted to quantum cosmology, quantum measurement theory, and applications of quantum mechanics to the mind-body problem. He became best known as one of the interviewed scientific experts featured in the 2004 film What the Bleep Do We Know!?. He is the author of six books including the successful textbook, “Quantum Mechanics.” Amit is a pioneer of science within consciousness “science based on the primacy of consciousness” which is developed in his books “The Self-Aware Universe: How Consciousness Creates the Material World” and “Science and Spirituality.” He has also authored “Quantum Creativity” and “A Quantum Physicist’s Guide to Enlightenment,” “The Visionary Window” and “Physics of the Soul,” and the upcoming “Integral Medicine.” Amit gives workshops in the United States, Brazil, Sweden, and India on the subjects of quantum creativity, quantum healing, physics of the soul, and science and spirituality.
Further
Also read-worthy The Universe, Quantum Physics, and Consciousness by Subhash Kak, Ph.D.
Max Planck
I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.
As quoted in The Observer (25 January 1931)
As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.
Das Wesen der Materie [The Nature of Matter], speech at Florence, Italy (1944) (from Archiv zur Geschichte der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, Abt. Va, Rep. 11 Planck, Nr. 1797)
From WikiQuote
Heal the Kids
Posted by Kim Graae Munch in Politics, Science on July 12, 2009
I have never known much about Michael Jackson, I think I first found out who he was after his problem with the face.
A newspaper commented on the Memorial Service at the Staples Center, mentioning that the family still had problems with commercialism.
There was a reference to a speech Michael held at Oxford University which were impressing. I have here an extract from his speech (Speech at Oxford University(2001)):
But I do have a claim to having experienced more places and cultures than most people will ever see. Human knowledge consists not only of libraries of parchment and ink – it is also comprised of the volumes of knowledge that are written on the human heart, chiselled on the human soul, and engraved on the human psyche. And friends, I have encountered so much in this relatively short life of mine that I still cannot believe I am only 42. I often tell Shmuley that in soul years I’m sure that I’m at least 80 – and tonight I even walk like I’m 80! So please harken to my message, because what I have to tell you tonight can bring healing to humanity and healing to our planet.
All of us are products of our childhood. But I am the product of a lack of a childhood, an absence of that precious and wondrous age when we frolic playfully without a care in the world, basking in the adoration of parents and relatives, where our biggest concern is studying for that big spelling test come Monday morning.
But while performing and making music undoubtedly remain as some of my greatest joys, when I was young I wanted more than anything else to be a typical little boy. I wanted to build tree houses, have water balloon fights, and play hide and seek with my friends. But fate had it otherwise and all I could do was envy the laughter and playtime that seemed to be going on all around me.
There was no respite from my professional life. But on Sundays I would go Pioneering, the term used for the missionary work that Jehovah’s Witnesses do. And it was then that I was able to see the magic of other people’s childhood.
I loved to set foot in all those regular suburban houses and catch sight of the shag rugs and La-Z-Boy armchairs with kids playing Monopoly and grandmas baby-sitting and all those wonderful, ordinary and starry scenes of everyday life. Many, I know, would argue that these things seem like no big deal. But to me they were mesmerizing.
Today, it’s a universal calamity, a global catastrophe. Childhood has become the great casualty of modern-day living. All around us we are producing scores of kids who have not had the joy, who have not been accorded the right, who have not been allowed the freedom, or knowing what it’s like to be a kid.
Today children are constantly encouraged to grow up faster, as if this period known as childhood is a burdensome stage, to be endured and ushered through, as swiftly as possible. And on that subject, I am certainly one of the world’s greatest experts.
Ours is a generation that has witnessed the abrogation of the parent-child covenant. Psychologists are publishing libraries of books detailing the destructive effects of denying one’s children the unconditional love that is so necessary to the healthy development of their minds and character. And because of all the neglect, too many of our kids have, essentially, to raise themselves. They are growing more distant from their parents, grandparents and other family members, as all around us the indestructible bond that once glued together the generations, unravels.
This violation has bred a new generation, Generation O let us call it, that has now picked up the torch from Generation X. The O stands for a generation that has everything on the outside – wealth, success, fancy clothing and fancy cars, but an aching emptiness on the inside. That cavity in our chests, that barrenness at our core, that void in our centre is the place where the heart once beat and which love once occupied.
Love, ladies and gentlemen, is the human family’s most precious legacy, its richest bequest, its golden inheritance. And it is a treasure that is handed down from one generation to another. Previous ages may not have had the wealth we enjoy. Their houses may have lacked electricity, and they squeezed their many kids into small homes without central heating. But those homes had no darkness, nor were they cold. They were lit bright with the glow of love and they were warmed snugly by the very heat of the human heart. Parents, undistracted by the lust for luxury and status, accorded their children primacy in their lives.
I would therefore like to propose tonight that we install in every home a Children’s Universal Bill of Rights, the tenets of which are:
1. The right to be loved without having to earn it
2. The right to be protected, without having to deserve it
3. The right to feel valuable, even if you came into the world with nothing
4. The right to be listened to without having to be interesting
5. The right to be read a bedtime story, without having to compete with the evening news
6. The right to an education without having to dodge bullets at schools
7. The right to be thought of as adorable – (even if you have a face that only a mother could love).
Friends, the foundation of all human knowledge, the beginning of human consciousness, must be that each and every one of us is an object of love. Before you know if you have red hair or brown, before you know if you are black or white, before you know of what religion you are a part, you have to know that you are loved.
If you enter this world knowing you are loved and you leave this world knowing the same, then everything that happens in between can he dealt with. A professor may degrade you, but you will not feel degraded, a boss may crush you, but you will not be crushed, a corporate gladiator might vanquish you, but you will still triumph. How could any of them truly prevail in pulling you down? For you know that you are an object worthy of love. The rest is just packaging.
But if you don’t have that memory of being loved, you are condemned to search the world for something to fill you up. But no matter how much money you make or how famous you become, you will still fell empty. What you are really searching for is unconditional love, unqualified acceptance. And that was the one thing that was denied to you at birth.
Friends, let me paint a picture for you. Here is a typical day in America – six youths under the age of 20 will commit suicide, 12 children under the age of 20 will die from firearms – remember this is a DAY, not a year – 399 kids will be arrested for drug abuse, 1,352 babies will be born to teen mothers. This is happening in one of the richest, most developed countries in the history of the world.
Yes, in my country there is an epidemic of violence that parallels no other industrialised nation. These are the ways young people in America express their hurt and their anger. But don’t think that there is not the same pain and anguish among their counterparts in the United Kingdom. Studies in this country show that every single hour, three teenagers in the UK inflict harm upon themselves, often by cutting or burning their bodies or taking an overdose. This is how they have chosen to cope with the pain of neglect and emotional agony.
In Britain, as many as 20% of families will only sit down and have dinner together once a year. Once a year! And what about the time-honoured tradition of reading your kid a bedtime story? Research from the 1980s showed that children who are read to, had far greater literacy and significantly outperformed their peers at school. And yet, less than 33% of British children ages two to eight have a regular bedtime story read to them. You may not think much of that until you take into account that 75% of their parents DID have that bedtime story when they were that age.
Clearly, we do not have to ask ourselves where all of this pain, anger and violent behaviour comes from. It is self-evident that children are thundering against the neglect, quaking against the indifference and crying out just to be noticed. The various child protection agencies in the US say that millions of children are victims of maltreatment in the form of neglect, in the average year. Yes, neglect. In rich homes, privileged homes, wired to the hilt with every electronic gadget. Homes where parents come home, but they’re not really home, because their heads are still at the office. And their kids? Well, their kids just make do with whatever emotional crumbs they get. And you don’t get much from endless TV, computer games and videos.
They say that parenting is like dancing. You take one step, your child takes another. I have discovered that getting parents to re-dedicate themselves to their children is only half the story. The other half is preparing the children to re-accept their parents.
When I was very young I remember that we had this crazy mutt of a dog named “Black Girl,” a mix of wolf and retriever. Not only wasn’t she much of a guard dog, she was such a scared and nervous thing that it is a wonder she did not pass out every time a truck rumbled by, or a thunderstorm swept through Indiana. My sister Janet and I gave that dog so much love, but we never really won back the sense of trust that had been stolen from her by her previous owner. We knew he used to beat her. We didn’t know with what. But whatever it was, it was enough to suck the spirit right out of that dog.
A lot of kids today are hurt puppies who have weaned themselves off the need for love. They couldn’t care less about their parents. Left to their own devices, they cherish their independence. They have moved on and have left their parents behind.
Then there are the far worse cases of children who harbour animosity and resentment toward their parents, so that any overture that their parents might undertake would be thrown forcefully back in their face.
But what I really wanted was a Dad. I wanted a father who showed me love. And my father never did that. He never said I love you while looking me straight in the eye, he never played a game with me. He never gave me a piggyback ride, he never threw a pillow at me, or a water balloon.
But I remember once when I was about four years old, there was a little carnival and he picked me up and put me on a pony. It was a tiny gesture, probably something he forgot five minutes later. But because of that moment I have this special place in my heart for him. Because that’s how kids are, the little things mean so much to them and for me, that one moment meant everything. I only experienced it that one time, but it made me feel really good, about him and the world.
Almost a decade ago, I founded a charity called Heal the World. The title was something I felt inside me. Little did I know, as Shmuley later pointed out, that those two words form the cornerstone of Old Testament prophecy. Do I really believe that we can heal this world, that is riddled with war and genocide, even today? And do I really think that we can heal our children, the same children who can enter their schools with guns and hatred and shoot down their classmates, like they did at Columbine? Or children who can beat a defenseless toddler to death, like the tragic story of Jamie Bulger? Of course I do, or I wouldn’t be here tonight.
To all of you tonight who feel let down by your parents, I ask you to let down your disappointment. To all of you tonight who feel cheated by your fathers or mothers, I ask you not to cheat yourself further. And to all of you who wish to push your parents away, I ask you to extend you hand to them instead. I am asking you, I am asking myself, to give our parents the gift of unconditional love, so that they too may learn how to love from us, their children. So that love will finally be restored to a desolate and lonely world.
But it all begins with forgiveness, because to heal the world, we first have to heal ourselves. And to heal the kids, we first have to heal the child within, each and every one of us. As an adult, and as a parent, I realize that I cannot be a whole human being, nor a parent capable of unconditional love, until I put to rest the ghosts of my own childhood.
And that’s what I’m asking all of us to do tonight. Live up to the fifth of the Ten Commandments. Honour your parents by not judging them. Give them the benefit of the doubt.
That is why I want to forgive my father and to stop judging him. I want to forgive my father, because I want a father, and this is the only one that I’ve got. I want the weight of my past lifted from my shoulders and I want to be free to step into a new relationship with my father, for the rest of my life, unhindered by the goblins of the past.
In a world filled with hate, we must still dare to hope. In a world filled with anger, we must still dare to comfort. In a world filled with despair, we must still dare to dream. And in a world filled with distrust, we must still dare to believe.
Literature
Is it possible to make Intelligent Machines?
Posted by Kim Graae Munch in Computers, Science, Thinking on May 4, 2009
Intelligent Machines
I have had some discussions with engineers who had Intelligent Machines as their religion, and interestingly it’s the Atheists who dreams about thinking machines.
With background in the current computer technology I will analyze the feasibility of intelligent machines from three different scientific approaches: The Mathematical, the Physical, and the Biological.
It’s interesting that the believers in Intelligent Machines ignores the evidence, especially the stringent Mathematical evidence, this is also the reason I call them believers as they ignore facts, dreaming of a future with god-like machines a lot wiser and knowledgeable than man.
Mathematical Evidence
Kurt Gödel made the Incompleteness Theorems:
It is possible to have a complete and consistent list of axioms that cannot be produced by a computer program (that is, the list is not Computably Enumerable).
And
The incompleteness theorems also implies that not all mathematical questions are computable.
It states simply that there are problems which man can solve and machines can’t.
What he proves is that there are things in a system, like our physical world, that can’t be done within the system itself, which can only be done from something outside that system, but man breaks this barrier where computers can’t, and that means that man depend on something outside the physical world, like soul and spirit.
The BBC program `Dangerous Knowledge (part 9/9)’ looks at this Mathematical Prof. As the video is destroyed at Youtube from time to time there is another source here: Human and computer knowledge.
Other documentation
Roger Penrose shows with examples why they cant think in: “The Large, the Small and the Human Mind“.
In this Hard Talk interview about the recurring big bang Roger Penrose touches the problem.
Physical Limitations
When you look out into the room, you are sitting in, you have a picture or really a video of everything at once and constantly. It means that this view of your surroundings, and your thoughts about it, are in your Consciousness. Seen from a computational view it is really fantastic, and Computer Science today can only dream of something that seems to be Conscious! Even with future technologies as Quantum Computing is it a question if we can make Conscious Computers at all.
Computers are something called Von Neumann Machines, which again is defined through the theoretical Turing Machine, and Turing Machines can only work on one bit at a time, which is only a small part of the information necessary to make a single point on a computer or television screen.
The consequence is that Computers can only have a part of a point of a picture in what we can call their ‘consciousness’ at a time, and that is not enough to even contain the color information of a point. What they have calculated in one instance is forgotten in the next. It’s only when we see the result on the screen or on paper that it becomes conscious through our consciousness, that is, we see the screen as a whole, extracts the relevant information in all its complexity, and understands it’s implications.
A computer cannot be Intelligent however big and speedy it is.
Brain Science
Erich Harth in ‘Windows on the Mind’, 1982:
The brain presents two seemingly irreconcilable aspects: It is a material body, exhibiting all the physical properties of matter, and it possesses a set of faculties and attributes, collectively called mind, that are not found in any other physical system.
In his book “The Creative Loop,..” he elaborates further on how the physical mind functions, and why it’s superior to any known devices.
Literature
The book by Erich Harth’s “The Creative Loop, How the Brain Makes a Mind” gives an intelligent description of the physical working of our brain.
The book Stairways to the Mind by Alwyn Scott gives a broader overview of the area.
No Theory of a Conscious Machine yet
There have been talked about thinking machines for forty years, but there have not been a single theory for building one yet. There are a lot of programs running on super computers which can simulate some aspects of the mind, but the programs have nothing to do with real intelligence.
Computers are good at those things where we are bad, that is remembering and calculations, but they can’t think.
With the knowledge we have to-day, if it had been possible to program consciousness into our current computers, we would have done it by now.
Future possibilities
It may be possible to make thinking computers if its build on Quantum Computing, as the numbers of bits in the computer’s processing unit can be increased considerable above the one bit we have today, caused by entanglement, but I don’t think that it’s enough to create consciousness, but it is a requirement.
Literature
Hubert Dreyfus: What Computers Can’t Do: The Limits of Artificial Intelligence.
Quantum Consciousness: A Discussion between Stuart Hameroff and Alwyn Scott.
Tarjei Straume on the Technological Singularity.
The Trap of Materialism
Posted by Kim Graae Munch in Computers, Esoterics, Politics, Science on April 20, 2009
The Materialistic society we are living in have some build in dangers, which will draw our society in a direction of less faith or trust in man, giving more inhuman conditions for all, and the problem is that we may see it as inevitable.
Centralization is the problem, both politically, of public institutions, of companies and of capital. The mantra ‘Big is Beautiful’ is wrong, the productivity per employee drops with the increasing size of the organisation, and that’s because the single employee have less space to influence his own work, too bound by rules, and because the large organizations are difficult to manage.
In the following paragraphs I will look at its implications, which will be seen through greater aggressiveness, less social skills, and decreasing possibilities to control our future, less possibility to make decisions both in grand scale and in our own lives, both at home and job.
The Trap works through various mechanisms, as
- Materialism, a purely physical view of the universe,
- Pervasive Politics, proliferation of the political system in daily life,
- Groupings, emphasis on group, race, and ethnicity, us and them,
- Orthodoxy, literal and “simple” interpretation of the Gospels,
- Superstition, esoteric beliefs without foundation in thinking skills,
- Abstract Thinking, cultivating abstract theorization,
- Quantitative Thinking, purely quantitative (statistical) observation.
These combined with a Dualistic world view, where everything is Black and White, will increase the strife between people all over the world.
Dualism sees everything in opposites,
and this is one of the greatest dangers today: If you are not with me, you are against me. That is a widespread sickness, especially on the Internet where you can hide under anonymity, but orthodoxy of any kind: religious, atheistic, or political, moves our future in a dangerous direction. What makes it so dangerous are that both sides believe that they fight on the side of good, but the reality is that they both fight for extremism, truth is always somewhere in between.
The deception is not to see the full picture, to understand both sides in any relation!
The challenge is to find the Golden Mean between the extremes.
The following paragraphs will look into different areas where Dualism endangers our society.
Materialism
Science is seen as the absolute truth against black superstition represented by religion. It’s not seen as different and complementing views on the same reality. It has started the Atheistic religion, attacking spirituality and moral values. Darwin is their prime god, and their Messiah are the Sentient Robots they hope will come and save the world. The problem are that most of the Atheists don’t really understand what they are preaching, and they don’t accept scientific results if it’s against their own beliefs. See Is it possible to make Intelligent Machines?
Science can’t make decisions or take responsibility, as Science in itself have no moral. Science is always used by others, more dynamic groups of society, by players on the market or in politics, whose moral aren’t better than the Courts or the Voters.
“Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.” Martin Luther King Jr.
“I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy.” Richard Feynman
“As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise, human science is at a loss.” Noam Chomsky
Pervasive Politics
You see Dualism in politics, especially in two-party systems, where there is no space for other views. Politics dominates today everybody’s life, in contrast to forty years ago, where politics was talked about at the elections every fourth year. The laws gave then rules for the relation between the citizens, today the laws regulate the relation between state and citizens.
The politics invasion of the private sphere destroys the natural equilibrium of the society. The economic system today is an example of this, the equilibrium of that system ends regularly in chaos as the system is made for the speculators, not for the companies, nor for the country and its citizens. Today the decisions are taken by regulations or laws on behalf of groups, where prior the decisions were taken by those who knew about the concrete cases on behalf of persons. Wrong decisions had only small consequences then, where wrong decisions today have far heavier consequences as more people are dependent on these decisions.
This is a problem all over the world, and it gets worse the more laws and rules people have to follow.
One of the biggest lies of today: We need more regulations as a result of the society’s complexity. Wrong, it’s more complex as a result of all those regulations. Computers takes the complexity out of complex tasks, and prefabricated goods takes the complexity out of manual work, so what is complex today, except the laws?
Groupings
There is a tendency to split up in groups, instead of seeing mankind as one; people split up after race, religion, language, land, locality, sex, or whatever. There are lots of hate in this, not least on the Internet.
Orthodoxy
There is a tendency to read religious text’s to narrowly, as Jehovah Witnesses, and other religious groups who take their holy books too literally. Durban Two, where the Islāmic countries tries to prohibit any critic of religion, is a typical example showing that discussions of religious content is unwanted. New religious movements like Scientology, Atheism, the Moonies, and so on, are also too rigid.
Superstition
Another trap is to accept the words of religious, esoteric, and scientific origin without thoughts. Spiritual inclined are in danger of reading spiritual literature without conscious understanding, but that includes also Atheists reading scientific texts without understanding.
Abstract Thinking
in contrast to real understanding. It’s seen everywhere, and is also part of the previous areas. Man is seen as a thing not as a being. The reality is not abstract, and every decision based on abstract thinking is wrong, especially if living beings are involved.
Quantitative Thinking
and Statistics without understanding. Let’s say a politician want to make a law, and it will make 0.123% of all families go bankrupt, but as the percent is low nobody sees it as a problem. Nobody understands that there are real people behind those figures. Quantitative thinking always works through abstractions.
Big Mother
The development moves in a direction where we can expect that our personal ‘I’ is assimilated by the masses, the collective. In the western world we are talking about freedom, that nobody shall tell us what to do, and we are fighting (Duality problem) against conspiracies, against CO2 pollution, against many other things, but we don’t define and work consistently for a world worth living in. At the same time our capabilities to decide our own destiny are diminishing, regulated by law, organizations, computers, and infrastructure. The result may be that everybody just follow the route with least resistance, which are built through directives, regulations, computer capabilities, ending in a situation where nobody thinks or makes decisions any more. And it’s all made for the good of the citizens by the Big Mother.
Political Correctness
Political Correctness is sneaking in everywhere, without any conscious effort by any conspiratorial agency, but because of the path of least resistance.
No Childhood
Many of the restrictions and laws are made because of lacking parenting, children no longer learn to live in a community, they are each and all small kings and princesses, who don’t understand that others don’t see them as such. Their understanding of scientific, historic or creative endeavors is as small as it has ever been. The children learned more at the camp fire than the children of today. As they don’t know how to behave, more and more laws are created to remedy the lacking parenting.
The central problem are that Children aren’t allowed to be children any longer, or as Michael Jackson says:
“Childhood has become the great casualty of modern-day living. All around us we are producing scores of kids who have not had the joy, who have not been accorded the right, who have not been allowed the freedom, or knowing what it’s like to be a kid.
Today children are constantly encouraged to grow up faster, as if this period known as childhood is a burdensome stage, to be endured and ushered through, as swiftly as possible.”
…
“Love, ladies and gentlemen, is the human family’s most precious legacy, its richest bequest, its golden inheritance. And it is a treasure that is handed down from one generation to another. Previous ages may not have had the wealth we enjoy. Their houses may have lacked electricity, and they squeezed their many kids into small homes without central heating. But those homes had no darkness, nor were they cold. They were lit bright with the glow of love and they were warmed snugly by the very heat of the human heart. Parents, undistracted by the lust for luxury and status, accorded their children primacy in their lives.” Michael Jackson, Speech at Oxford University(2001)
Complicated Structures
You can’t make tax-systems as complicated as they are today without computers, and you can’t control the many citizens or employees, as we can today, without computers; the amount of data are enormous. They make it possible to create structures which are difficult to manage without using computers, and computers don’t know HR.
GM and the American Automobile Industry are good examples of these gigantic Companies, who would be impossible to manage without stiff administrative structures and computers, and it’s extremely difficult to change these structures if needed. But modern software organizations have the same problems, with their software base, as Microsoft with their operating system, and their Office System, Yahoo with it’s big software base and reductions in labor have their problems, and new organizations as Google with it’s extreme growth will quickly get into the same problems, the only way out are to regularly rebuild old systems from the ground without any application reuse, and keeping different applications separated on application level, and using methods who makes the programming as simple and cost effective as possible.
These big organizations are extremely susceptible to the Peters Principle:
I believe computers can be a boon to mankind, but we have to control how and what they are used for, not letting their possibilities decide our future, as their strength can be used both for the good and the bad.
Management and Computers
You can use computers to many things, they can plan routes for transport to decrease energy consumption, and many other useful things. This sounds good, but if we don’t take care, it could mean that it makes the knowledge and experience of man superfluous or even dangerous; man’s role degraded to a machine.
The need for knowledge is diminishing everywhere in the society, except within the computer world. Many jobs who needed educated Craftsmen can now be done by unskilled labor, as building materials don’t need special skills any more, and the computer has taken over a lot of paper work and decision-making. This makes everybody to secretaries except the secretaries, even executives writes their own letters and calculating sheets on their computers, instead of using secretaries, so they could do what they were hired and paid for: Manage.
The term “Human Resources” is in itself a degradation, people are not individuals any longer, they are a kind of commodity. See “Human Resources” by Scott Noble.
Large Structures
The physicist Geoffrey B. West studies large structures like cities and corporate organisations, and has found that cities increases it’s productivity and also it’s problems, while corporate organisations decreases their productivity as they grow.
Public organisations have of course the same problems as the corporate companies, they don’t trust their employees.
Cities are good examples on how the unstructured principles works, how the size of the city increases the production per citizen.
No Competent Leaders
What makes it so frustratingly absurd is that we are giving our independence to a system, a network of directives and conventions, without any persons being in charge. There is nowhere you can go saying that it’s wrong and it should be otherwise, everybody will tell you, that’s how it is and it has always been that way, and it can’t be in any other way, as it’s too costly to change the computers programming just because of you! Of cause, we have leaders in the top of the state or the corporate companies, but as the decision-making are moved up through the hierarchy (following automatic rules,) it becomes more and more difficult to manage the big organizations, as everything becomes dependent on one decision maker alone, and few know how to or can change the course. It’s more difficult to change the direction of a State, Organization, or a Company than a Super Tanker. The organizations becomes automatons, and the companies go down in case of unanticipated events which craves structural changes.
GM and the American Automobile Industry are good examples of this inability to change, they had known for decades that they should change their models to compete with Japanese and European manufacturers, but they couldn’t.
The incompetence of these organizations will give rise to Conspiracy Theories as Hanlon’s Law warns about:
Automated Decisions
Buying and selling on the stock market are for a great part based on automated decisions on computers, but as we have seen, it can go terrible wrong when some unanticipated events shows up. What’s worse, the stock market was made to foster strong and sound companies, not for computer controlled gaming, but for intelligent investment.
As fewer and fewer managers can make decisions, these decisions will be automated as rules in computers, and it will be impossible to make decisions based on individual concerns.
Decreasing Social Intercourse
Computers are exceptional for entertainment, you can live your life on the Internet, without any direct social contact. You can play games, make your work through the net if necessary, discuss, hunt sex/ books/ programs/ random data on the net (can be like drugs,) book your food from a local pizzeria, book escort girls, men, and boys, eventually finding mates on the net if you really want to live together with another being:). The film Matrix is a plausible destiny, not by force, but semi freely. It’s not Big Brother, it’s Big Mama.
Less Social Skills
In the old days, children, teenagers, and adults learned by living in a community, and there was room for everybody, also the village idiot. These and other unusual persons were educated by their surrounding who were mostly normal. We are today living more and more on the Internet, learning our social skills through social applications and computer games, the old community’s influence are replaced by the influence of the Internet comrades, and as like seeks likes, they can only increase their phobias or other disorders. Examples are numerous: pedophilia, school killings, terrorists, all kind of surrealistic interests, and so forth. The Law of Sayre’s are relevant in many of these cases:
No Privacy
Children and teenagers can be reached by mobile and GPS always and everywhere, followed on the Internet through Twitter or Facebook by their parents. No privacy. The same goes for the adults, no privacy, open for state officials, economic institutions, and employers. Password protection, pseudonyms, and like precautions is no hindrance, Cyber-Investigators will find everything, relevant or not. You can not even go to the North Pole or to Himalaya in peace, they can always reach you, and you them.
Where’s the remotest place on Earth?
In our hyper-connected world, getting away from it all is easier said than done. New Scientist.
Conspiracy Theories
The frustration has to go somewhere, and while there are no one responsible for our situation, and no one with enough insight, determination, and power to change the situation, we invent some god-like powerful conspirators who in all secrecy, with hundreds of employees, stands behind all the bad in this world. The truth is, that most leaders are so incompetent that it hurts. Just look at Iraq. The military invasion was well thought out, but the rest was incompetence par excellence. And that is not an exception, it’s the rule. Of cause there are conspiracies and secret operations, but if more than one participant knowing about the conspiracy are alive a year later, it’s just a question of time before the world know. Another reason to use few people are that really competent people are difficult to find, and the more people involved the bigger the risks for failure, and the bigger the consequences of a failure, the less interesting the project becomes. The best way to check if a conspiracy theory is viable or not, isn’t the technical evidence but the psychology and the necessary resources behind, how big is the risk, who gains, what’s their gain, how many participate, and what expertise are necessary.
A sober view on Conspiracy Theories from the left:
Noam Chomsky on Conspiracy Theories
In case the video is not functioning look here
What’s the mechanism behind the development?
Literature
Thomas Piketty
The Independent: The French economist forcing America to wake up to the end of The Dream.
Out of America: Thomas Piketty’s tome which skewers the idea that anyone who works hard can make it in the US seems to have hit a nerve
“Capital In The Twenty-First Century”, all 685 pages of it, is the No 1 best-seller on Amazon – apparently the first time that anything published by the venerable Harvard University Press has attained such dizzying celebrity. No self-regarding dinner party in Washington or New York is worth its salt without a discussion of it. Last Friday, came the ultimate accolade of a multiple coronation on the op-ed page of The New York Times.
The Huffington Post: Economist Thomas Piketty Explains Why Income Inequality Is Just Getting Started
Michael Lewis
Wired: Michael Lewis on Exposing Wall Street’s Biggest High-Tech Swindle in the book: Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt
Flash Boys explores the world of high-frequency trading, a scheme in which traders use ultra-fast network connections to sniff out the intentions of other, slower traders, thereby acting before others can respond. Critics of the practice–Lewis chief among them–argue that high-frequency trading creates something akin to insider trading: a predatory environment for less advantaged investors. WIRED spoke with Lewis at an event organized by Live Talks in downtown Los Angeles.
Elizabeth Warren
A Fighting Chance (Apple, Amazon)
An unlikely political star tells the inspiring story of the two-decade journey that taught her how Washington really works—and really doesn’t.
In this passionate, funny, rabble-rousing book, Warren shows why she has chosen to fight tooth and nail for the middle class—and why she has become a hero to all those who believe that America’s government can and must do better for working families.
New York Times: Book review of A Fighting Chance
A good review, also giving a good idea about who she is.
Allan Bloom
The Closing of the American Mind, Simon & Schuster Inc.
Christopher Lasch
Haven in a Heartless World, 1977, Basic Books, Inc.
In the American political vocabulary, “family” and “family values” no longer simply evoke pictures of harmonious scenes; they also push our buttons (left and right) about what is wrong with society. One of the earliest and sharpest cultural commentators to investigate the twentieth-century American family, Christopher Lasch argues in this book that as social science “experts” intrude more and more into our lives, the family’s vital role as the moral and social cornerstone of society disintegrates – and, left unchecked, so does our political and personal freedom. Haven in a Heartless World is a trenchant analysis of the plight of the family. Lasch takes a clear-eyed look at the institution in which America’s future generations are being raised and finds it faltering.
Geoffrey B. West
A Physicist Turns the City Into an Equation:
A New York Times article on his work.
Growth, innovation, scaling, and the pace of life in cities:
Describes the mathematical background for his work.
Atticannie’s Blog
Why Teacher Drink, the sequel: Natalie Munroe speaks out
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
have written a little book called “Night Flight” which describes man’s fight against the Materialistic docility to keep man competent and responsible.
By Rudolf Steiner
Inkarnation Ahrimans in German/Deutch and in English.
The the Bafta-winning film-maker Adam Curtis:
Political Correctness
Political Correctness is sneaking in everywhere, without any conscious effort by any conspiratorial agency, but because of the path of least resistance.
The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum – even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.
Noam Chomsky