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How Should Humanity Steer the Future? Essay Contest (2014)
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How to Hack Human History by John Brodix Merryman
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Author John Brodix Merryman wrote on Feb. 11, 2014 @ 15:35 GMT
Essay Abstract Are you kidding? The essay is the abstract.
Author Bio John Merryman has been at least moderately disturbed by the way the world is run his entire life. After sex, drugs and Rock’n Roll proved to be an inadequate solution, he turned to philosophy.
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Vladimir F. Tamari wrote on Feb. 13, 2014 @ 00:09 GMT
John
This is an extremely well-thought out manifesto for the residents of spaceship Earth.
One can call it Das Energieinformationen
I agree with everything you did mention, but worry about its practicality - for one it is very well to prove by physical arguments that God cannot exist, but tell that to the large proportion of humanity whose life revolves around the belief that she (as you put it) does! Madame Curie once said something that she would not say anything to believers about of their faith.
Best wishes
Vladimir
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Author John Brodix Merryman replied on Feb. 13, 2014 @ 01:20 GMT
Vladimir,
Thank you.
To a certain extent, the clue is in the title. No one is going to listen to what I have to say, but simply getting it out as something to consider and let it seep into the conversation and when the various systems finish blowing themselves up and crashing into each other, then people will be looking for new 'code' to operate by. It's not atheistic, but rather a bottom up theology, rather than a top down theology. Historically top down theologies have been promoted as political validation of those dominating society, from divine right of kings to George Bush saying it's God's will to put him in charge. I think that a lot of people who are not fanatic, but simply spiritual, would be fine with a bottom up theology, but it's just an idea that needs to seep in naturally and not be in your face, like the overgrown cults most religions seem to be.
In this contest, it's probably the irate mathematical platonists and atheistic materialists who will be giving me the most grief. The irony is platonism is a top down belief system and materialism is nowhere near explaining consciousness, so the logically simplest tactic would be to assume an elemental basis for consciousness and pare it down to its most essential state, which is what I'm doing.
Joe Fisher wrote on Feb. 14, 2014 @ 15:50 GMT
Mr. Merryman,
Once upon a time there was a book called HUMAN ECOLOGY. This book has long been out of print and alas, I cannot recall the author's name. The book explained how the Bank of England actually worked. When the Bank of England made a loan say of 100,000,000 pounds to the government, it created for itself an identical credit of 100,000,000 pounds for its own use. The books balanced. The bank charged interest on the loan, which made the loan irredeemable. All banks worldwide do this. The only function of government is to produce debt. CERN cost 11 billion pounds. The lending institute that put up the 11 billion pounds probably credited itself with 11 billion pounds and the books balanced. CERN seems likely to squander all of the 11 billion pounds leaving the lending institution 11 billion pounds of clear, untaxed profit.
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Author John Brodix Merryman replied on Feb. 14, 2014 @ 17:52 GMT
Joe,
They don't teach you much about how the banking and monetary system works, in school, because they really don't want you to know. The Federal Reserve isn't really entirely a function of the Federal government, so much as it is one of those public/private enterprises and is conveniently designed so that much of the profits of banking accrue to the private sector, while most of the liabilities are on the public purse. You could start with Andrew Jackson and his fights over the Second Bank of the United States, or even go back and examine the Bank of England and the Rothschilds. The fact is that there isn't much objective reporting, because the 'the powers that be' don't much care to publicize the relations and those outside like to paint a dark picture. The fact is that it is a necessary economic function and has been a major factor in creating the world as we know it and if those running it did cater to that necessary civic utility function a little more assiduously, they could be taking the situation 'to the bank' for a long time to come, but the business has been taken over by a bunch of short term thinkers and they are trashing it.
Jayakar Johnson Joseph wrote on Feb. 16, 2014 @ 09:17 GMT
Dear John,
As time paradox is inevitable with the current developments in Physical sciences, Carbon dating cannot reveal past time in reality and thus the human evolution history is not confirmatory. Thus
restructuring of atomic analogy is imperative for the Humanity Steer the Future.
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Author John Brodix Merryman replied on Feb. 16, 2014 @ 16:52 GMT
Jayakar,
The question of time is one I addressed in two previous contests;
The Nature of Time and
Questioning the Foundations We exist as single points of perception and so experience change as a sequence of events. Thus we exist in this state of progressing from prior to subsequent events, ie. past to future. Physics, in its obsession with the measurable and with reductionist patterns, distills this to measures of duration and how they relate to measures of distance. Given our existence as mobile points, this is a natural relationship. The problem is that in the big picture, it is the physical dynamic creating and dissolving these events which we experience. So from this view, time is not a single vector from past to future, but the dynamic process by which future potential coalesces into events and recedes into the past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday because the earth spins.
Now this makes time an effect of action, quite similar to temperature. As a comparative analogy, time is to temperature what frequency is to amplitude. Unfortunately so much of physics is built up on this speculative foundation of time as some underlaying physical property in which all events exist in that fourth dimension, yet the basic process mitigates against it. In order for change to happen, those prior manifestations do have to give way and dissolve. They cannot physically exist.
Now I did try to only allude to this issue in this essay, since the whole stringy, inflating multiverse mess is based on time being that metaphysical dimension and hopefully this contest doesn't get lost in the endlessly arcane fights over everything from non-locality, to firewalls, to multiverses and all the rest of the mathematical speculation overwhelming physics today. Given the problems actually facing the world, it all seems extremely delusional.
Jonathan J. Dickau wrote on Feb. 19, 2014 @ 02:07 GMT
Hello John,
I'm happy to see you have an essay here again this year. I will comment further once I read it, and I'll have my own essay ready to share before long.
Good luck!
Jonathan
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Author John Brodix Merryman replied on Feb. 19, 2014 @ 17:19 GMT
Jonathan.
Thanks for the consideration. Given all the political and even religious implications of the contest question, it should be an interesting contest. Hopefully one which sheds as much light as it will heat.
Regards,
John M
Wilhelmus de Wilde de Wilde wrote on Mar. 18, 2014 @ 15:20 GMT
Hi John,
Good to meet again in this essay-contest.
I read your essay with great interest as i know that you are a multi-interested individual.
The COOL God is a nice phrase but I think it is only one aspect of the Total, the ultimate other side is ultra-hot and , yes in-between are ALL the other possibillities. My description of GOD is the "TOTAL SIMULTANEITY".
The ALL knowing is inmy perception only meaning the all knowing of humans, which may be a little part of he whole story.
About erasing Old info and adding New: it is our consciousness that is every moment creating a new history/memory adapted to new found information. The "spiritual" energy you are mentioning is in my perception the non-causal part of our consciousness.
The linearity you are mentioning is the causality I think.
About your approach to economy there are lines that are congruent with my own opinions.
I liked your essay very much, if you would take some time to read
my essay and perhaps comment it or even rate it then thank you.
I wonder if you agree with the two others who rated me on 3 and 1, if so okay I accept it, but perhaps don't understand it.
Wilhelmus
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Author John Brodix Merryman replied on Mar. 18, 2014 @ 17:20 GMT
Wilhelmus,
Thank you very much. Yes, the theological argument I posed here is a but one sided and brief, but I think a large part of presenting an argument with any hope of affecting the course of history, is that it has to be very focused on as few key points as possible. In basic terms, as soon as any bottom up process starts, it will begin to develop top down structures. I do, from personal experience, think there is more to spiritual development than just its biological forms, but I understand the human audience well enough not to go too far into that swamp, or it will create more than enough static and blowback to obscure anything else I wish to say. Which is to say I have a good deal of understanding of where your essay comes from, but that it fails the topic at hand, because it is too broad and deep to coalesce into that sort of hard little knot of an argument that you can really hit people over the head with and get their attention. So when I do get around to scoring, which I'm not doing until they are closed, I will probably give you a 6, or maybe a 7, or maybe a 5. Depends on the curve. It's a topic I take very seriously, even if this entry was a bit satirical.
Regards,
John M
Wilhelmus de Wilde de Wilde replied on Mar. 19, 2014 @ 15:16 GMT
thank you very much John,
You really hit the nail on the top.
The score(s) you gave me is whet gives me more confidence, you don't even have to realize it here in numbers, for me it is perfect, because after the "1's" I began to loose the mentality and thought that my thinking was inappropriate.
I understand that the so called "realists" cannot accept my way of thinking, but in my turn I say that also the "realist" way of thinking is an availability in Total Simultaneity, they only have their own "program" or available explanation. And... In Total Simultaneity they are also represented, so if they they do not agree, they do not agree with themselves.
good luck and thank you
Wilhelmus.
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Wilhelmus de Wilde de Wilde wrote on Mar. 20, 2014 @ 16:54 GMT
Dear John
Thank you for your encouraging words.
I posted this answer also on my thread, but now you will know thet I reacted.
Of course the what we call BB , a something from nothing , is not my favorite explanation of reality ether, you are right when yoy say that a dynamic universe without a zero point is more understandable as a deterministic ad infinitum till zero. It is...
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Dear John
Thank you for your encouraging words.
I posted this answer also on my thread, but now you will know thet I reacted.
Of course the what we call BB , a something from nothing , is not my favorite explanation of reality ether, you are right when yoy say that a dynamic universe without a zero point is more understandable as a deterministic ad infinitum till zero. It is nice to think of the heartbeat of the universe, the only thing is that this comparison has one default , there is a beginning and an end to the heartbeat but just because of the fact that we humans see ourselves as causal and so mortal. Once we leave the causality that is the origin of the arrow of time we are FREE.
You mention a very important thought : “The present seems to move from the Past to the Future, it is actually changing the future int the past” of course this is pure logic, because “every future” will be a “past”. Which means in my perception that ALL possible FUTURES are available in TS as Pasts, so future memory , so available as a future past in our time/life lines. Your energy coupling in this perception is something I have to think about, but when we are regarding e=mc2 , and in this way trying to achieve that our reality is non destructible, so real real and not just a thought or a creation of our consciousness, then I am tended towards the thought that this energy/mass problem is also only a deduction to try to explain our reality (one of the infinity).
Each human being has a “bubble of awareness” as you are citing. Indeed this bubble is referring to my SSS, the Subjective Simultaneity Sphere ( see http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/1370 “The Consciousness Connection”. You see consciousness as an energy I see it as a field that is like a catalyst for the mergence of excitations of the matter field, but both views are a form of “energy”.
And indeed John, people are explain everything with data that they receive from their bubble of awareness, which in his turn is limited by the horizon of his observations, once we thought that the earth was at the center of all, but for those people it was “real”, now we think that our bubble was inflated (BICEP) but we are only still observing a little part of the whole shabang, like people before us. Imagine the heartbeat of your universe but then expanded to an infinite amount of bubbles...beautifull isn’t it ?
Wilhelmus
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Author John Brodix Merryman replied on Mar. 20, 2014 @ 18:01 GMT
Wilhelmus,
I'm a bit in Joe Fisher's camp, about the importance of the singularity of perception. I know when I, as an individual, start trying to multiply my perception, that signal of my own awareness would be quickly lost in the cacophony. It is possible to take a generalized view, but that also is refined and defined to a particular range of input, frequency and amplitude, with much of the detail of incorporated foreground and background edited out. The problem with science these days is that it tends not to take the general view, dismissing it as shallow. This leave professionals very knowledgeable about a small range and often divorced from context. While people with a broad view tend to be remiss in many of the details.
As I said, this is because knowledge is a function and consequence of definition and so by its very nature, has to be limited. Thus I'm only really concerned with the conditions and how to improve them on this planet, not what could theoretically happen across a range of other planets, galaxies, universes, etc.
Regards,
John M
James Lee Hoover wrote on Mar. 23, 2014 @ 18:04 GMT
John,
I like the way you take such an arcane subject as money, credit, banks and such and successfully relate it to energy, information, religion and money's antithetical roles.
You paint through metaphor and analogy a clear picture but unfortunately I fear it's lost to the biased perceptions of those with power and control - "like monarchs who could not see beyond their self interest to understand their larger role and function in society."
Your apt description perhaps dooms us until the collapse you mention. But even then, I wonder. The last collapse seemed to do little to foster sane "awareness."
Jim
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Author John Brodix Merryman replied on Mar. 23, 2014 @ 21:43 GMT
Jim,
Thank you very much. I think the collapse is not only inevitable, but natural. As individuals, nature determines it most efficient for us to die and fresh versions to be born. The big reset button. Complex systems have a way of creating too much 'bad code' and this world is certainly full of it. It's essentially a wave pattern and we have been on the up side for a long time. The last time, in 2008, they simply used a bit of electro-shock therapy to revive the patient, but did nothing to change its behavior. The consequence being the bubble is only larger, with fewer safety valves. They are risking the viability of the currency to save a corrupt banking system and inflated stock markets. It's little more than an addict doubling down on bad habits.
We really won't know what will rise from the rubble, but I'm naturally optimistic. As I point out, the larger issue is that the earth's resources can't sustain the current economy indefinitely, so having what amounts to a self induced heart attack will be a serious monkey wrench in that process and who knows how it ends up.
This contest question just allowed me to express some ideas I've been thinking over for a long time and I had fun putting it together.
Regards,
John M
James Lee Hoover replied on May. 26, 2014 @ 22:53 GMT
John,
Perhaps a financial collapse is natural with little or no regulation when the Clinton administration lead efforts to rid us of the Glass-Steagall Act. It assured stability for some 65 years.
Time grows short, so I am revisited those I've read to assure I've rated them. I find that I rated yours on 5/20. Hope you enjoyed mine.
Jim
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Author John Brodix Merryman replied on May. 27, 2014 @ 01:28 GMT
Thanks, Jim.
That was a major fracture in the banking framework, but it was one in a series. Given the purpose of capitalism has degenerated to the point of merely producing capital, at the expense of virtually every other facet of society, the force of this notational value has burst all bonds.
Regards,
John
PS, Either it doesn't look like I developed my argument very clearly, or a fair number of other entrants don't agree.
Turil Sweden Cronburg wrote on Mar. 27, 2014 @ 13:41 GMT
“Biology deals with this wave pattern of increasing and collapsing complexity by having individual organisms die and pass on their genetic code.”
I found this fascinating, but confusing. Are you saying that human minds (and bodies?) get too complex for the universe’s good, and so they have to be “edited” through the process of dying, thus leaving only their DNA (and memes) behind for the next generation to use as ingredients with which to sort of start over? That sort of makes sense to me.
Also, I think you might be interested in an idea I’ve been promoting, which is creating a global brain database that collects and shares (freely) all the ways individuals have found to “use X to get Y”, with X being excess resources and Y being needed resources. (It would be categorized using Pascal’s triangle, with “matter” and “energy/information” as the top two elements, and then breaking the possible combinations of those two things down for each level of detail, to eventually, theoretically, cover everything in existence.) Having such a simple, searchable, bottom-up (emergent) database of proven results/solutions is a way to organize all the “conflicting interests” that you mention.
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Author John Brodix Merryman replied on Mar. 27, 2014 @ 16:40 GMT
Turil,
I think it goes much deeper than just biology.
One of the contentions I keep making in the blogs here at FQXI is that time is not so much the present moving from past to future, but the process by which future becomes past. To wit, the earth is not traveling some fourth dimension, or Newtonian flow, from yesterday to tomorrow, but rather tomorrow becomes yesterday because...
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Turil,
I think it goes much deeper than just biology.
One of the contentions I keep making in the blogs here at FQXI is that time is not so much the present moving from past to future, but the process by which future becomes past. To wit, the earth is not traveling some fourth dimension, or Newtonian flow, from yesterday to tomorrow, but rather tomorrow becomes yesterday because the earth rotates. Current Physics treats time as a real dimension, called 'blocktime,' where all events exist on that fourth dimensional universal narrative and our sense of the present is as subjective as our point in space. Since I've had this argument many time here, I didn't go into it extensively in this contest, but have presented it in two prior ones;
The Nature of Time Essay Contest and
Questioning the Foundations;
Which of Our Basic Physical Assumptions Are Wrong?.
The problem with it being considered is that it means time is an effect of action, like temperature(Time is to temperature what frequency is to amplitude). This not only seriously would upset much of the physics applecart, but would eventually have serious sociological implications, since the concept of memory, history and thus human civilization is based on that narrative assumption. In a sense, we would start to think of life and action more in terms of a thermodynamic medium, in which many of our actions balance other actions and vice versa and understand time as a singular effect of individual motions, encountering a sequence of events.
Therefore information is constantly being created and dissolved, as the physical activity constantly changes. Our lives are very much a manifestation of our actions. When we think of living forever, it is in some ideal situation, where we are physically young, but mentally experienced. It just doesn't work that way. Our lives are meant to be spent. Yes, there is lots of pain, but pain is the price we pay for being able to feel in the first place. Ideals are illusions, produced by our mental process of editing out all the complexities. Currently religion assumes the spiritual absolute is some form of moral, intellectual and judgmental ideal, but absolute is basis, not apex. The zero state where all detail is balanced out. So a spiritual absolute would be the essence from which we rise and positive and negative emerge, not some ideal state from which we fell and seek to return.
What you propose is a medium of exchange. That is a concept that will have to be extensively re-imagined, when this current capitalist notion of money as some form of commodity eventually blows itself up. It would be useful to begin to develop a network of people to begin to develop such a model.
Ellen Brown of Web of Debt seems to be the only one really focused on this, but more in terms of promoting public banking, which would be a part of it. I am more of an idea person, than someone with a large network, so any efforts you see fit to try to start, I would be happy to participate, but I don't have much in the way of organizational talents. Professionally I work with racehorses in a family situation and while it is quite educational in understanding how nature works, isn't particularly networked to any larger intellectual community.
Regards,
John M
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Alexandre de Pomposo wrote on Mar. 29, 2014 @ 01:07 GMT
Dear John,
I appreciate both your paper and your beautiful reply. I mostly agree with you and what you say made me stop for a little while in my job, walk out and start considering your concepts, one by one, under the trees of a park. The result of those thoughts are expressed in the following lines.
Basic sciences have shown, from their very beginning, the greatest interest to...
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Dear John,
I appreciate both your paper and your beautiful reply. I mostly agree with you and what you say made me stop for a little while in my job, walk out and start considering your concepts, one by one, under the trees of a park. The result of those thoughts are expressed in the following lines.
Basic sciences have shown, from their very beginning, the greatest interest to understand the world as well as the laws governing it. They have assumed again and again that knowing reality and predicting its behavior, both aspects are the same thing. Nobody doubts, even building on such oversimplified basis, that sciences have provided numerous and overwhelming examples of their validity; one can find at the present time that most scientists uncritically accept that the initially unavoidable assumptions, made in order to go straight ahead in research, those assumptions are in fact the immovable principles for the functioning of the world. The initial breath of fresh air that signified the birth of science, quickly vitiated and today prevents us from seeing with new eyes the complexity of the world, of human beings and their becoming. Science has betrayed her own consciousness.
This is why it is absolutely necessary to review, with a critical sight, what we mean by knowing, by doing and by knowing what to do. Hence the false choice between theory and praxis, forgetting that every theory finds its justification in experience; abstraction, as the explanation of reality by means of the impossible, the search of universals as an extension of the strictly local, towards the global, and its summit, action, developing a response ability for our movements at the interior of existence, all that needs the resources of humans. And, on their side, humans mustn’t be alienated by a science being stubborn about considering the world as if we weren’t there! I think it should be quite the contrary, namely, as science is one of the main achievements of human thought, provided she ennobles man and makes him living with responsibility.
The “antidote” to prevent the inability in considering men as integral part of the stuff developed by sciences, a spiritual blindness, is the implementation of an integrating discourse without leaving anything outside which concerns humans. The old disjunctive between the ideal and what actually happens in the flowing of time, between necessity and contingence, between universal and particular, puts the solution not at the decision point, but at the enriching fusion of both branches. That’s the way the universal particular and the particular universal emerge as the solution to the contingence of the laws of nature. Reality manifests as a play of contingence, Yes, man can take himself into account while knowing and describing the world by fusing the contraries, in a never ending and never complete hug, because whatever is touched by human beings turns into an enigma, as he is himself one.
What can we do? Even though science is not the only possible answer, she certainly is a privileged path so to structure the human intellect; this is so because of the direct projection of the structure of human intellect that mathematics actually is. In other words, science, which is a product of human mind, goes back to man in order to draw him once more. Nonetheless, this is not a consistent lie undistinguishable from truth; it rather is the helicoidal construction, which cannot go on a straight line, since straight lines are the product of induction, which hardly fits into natural thought, unless mathematics becomes integrated to the structure of the spirit.
Concluding, sciences shall accept that the only possibility for them to keep their consciousness intact is… being willing to change (i.e. to inspect their basic assumptions) whenever is necessary. Like seeing is the function of view, believing is the function of childhood, and only children know that the horizon, even it looks like a border line, is the mark of the beginning of the invisible. From the horizon as the limit of knowledge (Kant), up to that treat with things, fixing the horizon (Zubiri), passing by a construction of a vital horizon (Ortega y Gasset), human beings surely roam through their lives thinking, acting, dreaming…Capable of the highest ideals, as well as the worst nightmares, man will always be a god while he dreams, but a beggar while he thinks (Hölderlin).
Best regards,
Alex
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Alexandre de Pomposo wrote on Mar. 29, 2014 @ 16:14 GMT
Dear John,
I thank you very much for your openness of thinking. As I already told you, I completely agree with you and I celebrate that you like to watch from a distance: open spaces are essential to have an idea of the entire landscape. So, after that, you deserve that I widely open my heart to you in a matter as fundamental as time is. But before that I must prevent you that, as it seems...
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Dear John,
I thank you very much for your openness of thinking. As I already told you, I completely agree with you and I celebrate that you like to watch from a distance: open spaces are essential to have an idea of the entire landscape. So, after that, you deserve that I widely open my heart to you in a matter as fundamental as time is. But before that I must prevent you that, as it seems to me is your case, I am not a draft animal, I mean that I usually don't react after whiplashes, on the contrary I frequently resist: I have payed a high price for my freedom in thinking, and I'm sure you know quite well what I'm talking about. I am convinced that a construction of scientific knowledge without taking into account that science is nothing without scientists who, before being scientists, are humans, is a ridiculous, irresponsible, absurd and even monstrous and grotesque task.
We often mistake considering time as equivalent to duration. Starting with the works of Galileo, the isomorphism between time and the line of the real numbers, stablished once and for all that instants in time are points on a straight line. This, of course, banishes us from the whole panorama of the description of nature. That is a consequence of pretending that things are as they are independently of our presence or absence from the cosmic stage. Certainly not, and quantum mechanics, dipping in the same deterministic point of view, still had to recognize that the observer was there for a reason, and he couldn't be innocuous in knowing reality, whilst measurements are on the way.
Well, that is the reason why I've been thinking since almost thirty years ago, when I talked a lot with my supervisor in the PhD in physics, Professor Prigogine, that all this story about multi-dimensional, multi-cosmic, "reality" is nothing but a projection of our deterministic brains. In fact, all we know, all we experience about reality is always past: we cannot see the present, we usually suffer it, one way or another. So the things, in one occasion I said to Prigogine, "well Professor, then there exists only one dimension, namely, TIME, and what we actually call SPACE is nothing but the trace of time, this is to say, past". Professor Prigogine looked pensive after my statement; few minutes later he said that my idea looked a little bit extreme, however I might be right since I was young... I am not young any more, but I still think the same. The only way one can dip into the present is dying. Time is not duration and that is why practically all the equations of physics are perfectly indifferent about the sign of "t": if you change t by -t you will get exactly the same result in all the differential expressions based upon classical mechanics. Even Schrödinger's equation is deterministic, of course, as well as the mathematical characterization of Boltzmann's theorem. That is why time cannot be either a parameter nor a fourth dimension: it's got to be some sort of "operator", comparable with momentum, position and total energy (hamiltonian) operators. Only then Heisenberg's uncertainty relations will have a real meaning.
So, speaking frankly, I think we have really missed the mark from the very beginning (i.e. more than four centuries ago!). The amazing thing is that we have said few things not so stupid. But it is time now to rethink the role of mankind in the generation of knowledge. Self confidence is a good thing as far as it doesn't lead us to be arrogant: you say well, our knowledges and movements in the cosmos are so "viscous", slow, clumsy, naive, that we should be extremely careful about the range of our achievements. In the scope of time, past is space already done (faith, oblivion), future is space not yet done (hope, ignorance) and present is time itself (love, knowledge). Forgive my pseudo-theological allusions, but what I want to say is that we should take seriously all human nature, not just the part that suits me.
I am sorry, dear John, for I've been too long in my reply but, I feel good "talking" with you by this means. As a matter of fact, besides the contest, which is pretty interesting, the "colateral effect" of these communications among the different authors is the best part of it. Thanks for your patience and I hope all this be of some usefulness.
Best wishes.
Alex
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Author John Brodix Merryman replied on Mar. 29, 2014 @ 23:20 GMT
Alex,
Thank you for your forthrightness. We have much to argue over. I see space as irreducible and time as an effect of action, no matter how fundamental it may be to our actions and mortality.(So is temperature.)
I agree what we perceive is past events and not only that, but static framings of otherwise dynamic processes. Yet it is because the perception of those events requires...
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Alex,
Thank you for your forthrightness. We have much to argue over. I see space as irreducible and time as an effect of action, no matter how fundamental it may be to our actions and mortality.(So is temperature.)
I agree what we perceive is past events and not only that, but static framings of otherwise dynamic processes. Yet it is because the perception of those events requires information to cross space and be carried by the action of light, that we don't perceive them instantaneously. Duration then is a function of how this information travels.
Our actions are part of the whole process and the more constructed they are, the necessarily more the momentum of prior form will define subsequent form. I don't have a problem with the concept of determinism and that what is past is determined, in which our will, conscious, subconscious and group conscious plays its part. To will is to determine. The term 'free will' is a bit of an oxymoron. We don't make distinctions between good and bad decisions and then decide. The decision is part of the process of making the distinctions. Then it becomes past, which is determined.
The problem with determinism is that while all the laws governing interaction might well be deterministic, otherwise they wouldn't be laws, the input cannot be fully known prior to the occurrence of the event in question. Otherwise the information and light carrying it, would have to travel faster than C. The event is the only sum of its input.
Meanwhile empty space has no features and properties which require a cause. Nothing physical to limit, move or bend it means it is inert and infinite. Consider that C is the speed of light in a vacuum. What is this vacuum, other than empty space? Currently Big Bang theory argues the entire universe is expanding and eventually those distant galaxies will be so far away their light will no longer reach us. Now that means more units defined by the speed of light will be required to cross this space. Presumably then it is being denominated in lightyears, which means the expanded space is the numerator. That's not expanding space, but an increasing distance in stable space, as measured by C.
When we measure time, we measure actions, but when we measure space, be it distance, area, or volume, we are measuring space.
So we have this void filled with cycles of radiation expanding and mass contracting. According to theory, this balances out to overall flat space and this is explained by inflation blowing the universe up so far that it only appears flat, but what if it really is flat? When we see light that has traveled billions of years, it has had to thread its way between all those gravity wells of galaxies. Not only that, but it's redshifted proportional to distance. Since I don't see how they can really use relativity to say space itself expands, when the speed of light doesn't increase proportionally to maintain C, so there really is only increased distance, then we would appear to be at the center of the universe. Now we do happen to be at the center of our view of the universe, so an optical effect would explain this quite well. So then the light in a basically gravity free environment expands, much as that in a gravity zone contracts. Think of space as the rubber sheet over water. Then when the ball pushes it down, the water pushes the rest back up proportionally, so that the overall effect is 'flat' and we only see light that travels the 'high ground.'
Convection cycles of expanding radiation and contracting mass in empty space is all we see and all we need.
Regards,
John M
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Alexandre de Pomposo replied on Apr. 1, 2014 @ 21:57 GMT
Dear John,
Thank you for your reply. Your arguments forced me to have a look on some texts that came to my mind while reading you. Namely, I though about some of the ideas of Spinoza as you argued about space and time, for the Dutch philosopher thinks that thought and extent are the attributes of the one substance (which is infinite in itself, with an infinite number of attributes, each one...
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Dear John,
Thank you for your reply. Your arguments forced me to have a look on some texts that came to my mind while reading you. Namely, I though about some of the ideas of Spinoza as you argued about space and time, for the Dutch philosopher thinks that thought and extent are the attributes of the one substance (which is infinite in itself, with an infinite number of attributes, each one of them being infinite), so that nothing is “outside” of it since, in fact, there does not exist any “outside”. Well, I suppose that your own idea of space as an irreducible entity gets very close to Spinoza’s conception. And referring to the concept of time as pure action, Spinoza says in the same tenor that action is the deployment of the substance (as a matter of fact, God, in the philosophical system of Spinoza) by means of the temporal unity of man. Ergo, time precedes existence, and human action needs time as a backdrop.
Indeed, information travels not at infinite speed, as we have a limit, c. Now, this reminds me that whatever we say, we pretend to know or to describe, we must have an irremovable referent, i.e. a frame of reference with respect to which we can say whatever: Ptolemy (Earth), Copernicus (Sun), Protagoras (man), sound (air), light (ether…or light itself), many human beings (God), etc., even this writing I am doing right now needs the referent of alphabet, language, syntax, and so on. Apparently infinite can only fit in human spirit; I think that is so for simultaneity as well. To will, more than to determine, is to get an idea of possibility: reality is the complex of possibilities. You remind me, once again, Spinoza when you say that free will is a sort of oxymoron, and I agree with you: we are not simply actors on the stage of space-time, but we rather create the stage being there and acting. But once this process begins, not only do we make the stage, but the stage makes us too. The main problem I see with determinism is not being simply false, because it is not, but that it pretends that everything is exclusively fixed by previous conditions, not allowing the appearance of novelty, of the radically unexpected, of emergence. Now, in fact, nature provides us with so many examples of emerging systems, proving that structures are not the ensemble of parts, but the collection of possible correlations between those parts, so far that even after the disappearance of them, correlations stay (e.g. fossils). That is why I think space as the trace of time (which is not duration), not as an effect coming out from a cause, unless we accept this view as the price to pay for our particular way on perceiving the phenomenal world.
About expanding universe, I do agree with you, provided they are not confused space and time as simple degrees of freedom. Physics has very often assumed homogeneity and isotropy of space, in an attempt to fulfill the conditions for solving non-linear equations, and that’s understandable; however, we in general forget pretty soon that such conditions were exceptional and oversimplifying, so we entangle the feet with our own games. This is why I would like to talk about your phrase: “when we measure time, we measure actions, but when we measure space, be it distance, area, or volume, we are measuring space.” What measuring is? Measuring is comparing couples of systems, assuming that one of them is, at least for a while, fixed. The “landing” or “shoulder” not in time, but in our understanding, are an indispensable condition for measuring anything. When we measure time we compare actions and when we measure space we compare historical moments, this is to say, places of the past. Of course, void is not the carbon copy of nothingness, since the former is actually something whilst the later cannot simply be, otherwise it wouldn’t be nothingness. Light needs a propagation medium, which is light itself. Einstein spent almost twenty years before he realized that although it is true that ether as such doesn’t exist, light does need a medium. I think that medium, light, is a direct property of the geometrical structure of space, this is to say, of time (from there the particular metrics of space-time).
I don’t think there is a single center of the universe, i.e. it is nowhere or, equivalently, it is everywhere; as you assert right, each one is a fortiori the center of the universe; I’d rather prefer to say that each one is the center of his or her own universe. I am not quite sure though that either the presence or the absence of gravity is the only explanation of contraction or expansion, respectively, of space. I suppose science still has a very long way to go. However it is puzzling too the fact of remembering those old models (Greek atomists like Democritus, Descartes, etc.) praising vortices organizing reality; I am afraid that, for the time being, these are more philosophical than scientific subjects. Nevertheless, I hope scientific thought will eventually dig in them.
Thanks John and excuse me for the delay answering your deep reply.
Regards,
Alex
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Author John Brodix Merryman replied on Apr. 2, 2014 @ 02:43 GMT
Alex,
You have infinite, but how do you have absolute? Like absolute zero and the state where that infinity of everything balances out. The vacuum without fluctuation. The void that is the medium for C.
Space may be infinite, but it is also that state of inertia. The motionless stability of everything pulling and balancing everything else. That 'geometrical structure' is vibrating, fluctuating, changing, yet because it is infinite, it also is balanced by the infinity. Energy radiating away in all directions is replaced by energy radiating in from all directions.
Change happens where structure is weakest relative to energy. Emergence is where energy exceeds order. The ice breaks, the bark splits, the flower blooms, the light escapes, the atom splits, etc. The problem with determinism is there is no way to objectively assemble relevant information prior to the event. It happens where your information is least. The pot boils faster when you don't watch it.
What seems to me to be the more useful relation is between information and energy. Energy is like time, it has to move and change, while information is the form it tries to manifest, fleetingly static. Like the absolute, a balancing of opposites, freezing the universe for a moment. The temperature of the fluctuation that creates change and time.
So space is both infinite and absolute. Like energy, stretching out to infinity, or a few billion lightyears. Absolute, as it tries to pull the ends back together and balance them in that larger medium of all. So we have these vortices of contracting form and radiating energy.
I know this is overly philosophical, but math and science are manifestations of form and see all as deterministic information. It is form falling into the vortex, not the energy being released.
Regards,
John M
John C Hodge wrote on Apr. 6, 2014 @ 20:45 GMT
Your first three paragraphs hit the nail on the head. The outline also has one problem – I think the solution cannot be intellectually comprehended by a vast number of intelligent people. The vast numbers need comprehend only how to function within the solution. The solution must increase the complexity of society.
I like to think my paper presents a possible method to the Tower of Babel...
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Your first three paragraphs hit the nail on the head. The outline also has one problem – I think the solution cannot be intellectually comprehended by a vast number of intelligent people. The vast numbers need comprehend only how to function within the solution. The solution must increase the complexity of society.
I like to think my paper presents a possible method to the Tower of Babel syndrome.
I offer some suggestions on a view of money. Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose is a good reference. There is a difference between money and currency. Currency is the medium of exchange. Its advantage is people can trade for useful goods without having to possess the useful thing the other wants. Currency can be hard (gold or gold redeemable, etc.) or paper (backed by government fiat). Money can be currency or actual goods one trader wants such as in barter transactions. The US dollar is by government fiat and backed by force of arms. Therefore, the dollar is subject to government’s fickle nature. The government is responsible for the vicissitudes to which you allude. Of course, the government wants to blame someone else. Banks and financial institutions must act as government desires. Otherwise, the government by force of arms will shut them down. Wealth can be stored by holding the useful items. Other ways of dealing with government currency crash are moving the money, people voting with their feet, preparing such as the doomsday preppers, etc. The more recent innovation of the bitcoin offers a way to a type of currency set by the market and not by the government. The bitcoin is enjoying some popularity but the world governments are disadvantaged and, therefore, will probably take a hard line against it. Also, the government has taken a regulatory line against barter and cash transactions, which easily avoids taxes (another form of money).
Today, religion seems to not include science. Indeed, when a tidbit of the universe becomes science, it ceases to be religion. However, science still fails to define morals to run a society. My paper offers a way around this. So, religion and science must coexist for mankind to advance.
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Author John Brodix Merryman replied on Apr. 7, 2014 @ 00:42 GMT
JH,
To a certain extent, my argument is that by viewing money as a contract, rather than a commodity, it would be viewed in fundamentally moral terms, as a force that holds society together and makes the parts function as a whole. Which is what the essence of morality is, the principles by which society can function. Essentially it is the economic blood flowing through the system. As it...
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JH,
To a certain extent, my argument is that by viewing money as a contract, rather than a commodity, it would be viewed in fundamentally moral terms, as a force that holds society together and makes the parts function as a whole. Which is what the essence of morality is, the principles by which society can function. Essentially it is the economic blood flowing through the system. As it is, treating it as a commodity makes it morally neutral. Rather than a broad public contract which is dependent on its economic fungibility, it is treated as personal property. While the average person likes this principle of freedom, it also applies to those who run the system and feel it their right to be able to skim off as much as they possibly can. Many people get quite offended when I make this point, as though I am trying to socialize their wealth, but I try pointing out that it is in the interest of the government and the banks for people to think of it as personal property, because then it insinuates itself into every possible exchange and this allows the banks and the government to control and tax society to a much deeper level, because they control the flow and value of this medium. So if it was thought of a medium, similar to a road system, then people would much better understand its uses and limitations and hopefully better appreciate far more organic relationships, than ones processed through and dependent on these global systems.
Yes, few people will be willing to really see this now, because it is radically different than what we are taught to believe, but at some point in the not too distant future, that particular belief system is going to implode on a massive scale and every current effort to prevent that will only make the eventual crash that much bigger.
Both gold and bitcoin are commodities. They are morally neutral. Should the market forces controlling supply to demand break down, so does their value. A national currency is a reflection of faith in the durability and integrity of a particular nationstate. That is not personal property.
Regards,
John M
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John C Hodge replied on Apr. 7, 2014 @ 01:28 GMT
You seem to agree that currency by government is morally evil. The result is inflation or the low interest rates fostered by government in an attempt to have their cake and eat it without tax.
How would you change the system to have currency or money be viewed as a social contract that government could not abuse?
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Author John Brodix Merryman replied on Apr. 7, 2014 @ 02:00 GMT
JH,
You are not going to find perfect. What you are looking for is balance. The point I make in my entry is that just as the body reflects the dichotomy of energy and information, so is society, so as we reached the point where government no longer worked as private business, ie. monarchy, we are now finding limits on banking as a private practice. This is not to say it's bad, think Jimmy Stewart in It's a Wonderful Life. But the point which needs emphasizing here is that government and finance are as separate as the nervous system and the circulatory system. We don't want short term executive type thinking running our heart rate, though it does affect it. Then again, systems do get old and corrupted, broken etc. So we need to keep that deeper understanding of the physical dynamic and do what we think is best for those we value. In nature, some of it is completely local and some is light coming from a billion miles away and water coming from a thousand miles away.
Personally I live on a farm and exercise and break racehorses. It doesn't make me much money, but the farm doesn't have any debt beyond the bills and I find the more you have, the more you have to worry about. So I'm putting up a sort of vision thing and figure time will decide otherwise. Most people who know me thought I'd die young, but that didn't happen.
Regards,
John M
Author John Brodix Merryman replied on Apr. 7, 2014 @ 02:24 GMT
Also I usually prefer discussing more elemental questions, because of all the emotional issues attached to politics, economics and religion, but this question was one I couldn't resist.
Here are some of my entries in previous FQXI contests;
What is Information The Problem: We See Time Backward Comparing Apples to Inches Explaining Time Not that you would want to read them all, but it gives some insight into how my mind thinks and what I find interesting.
Regards,
John M
John C Hodge replied on Apr. 9, 2014 @ 04:29 GMT
JM
I think I’m beginning to see our difference. Reading between the lines, I think you are following the Keynesian derived doctrine (political/government). As the essay suggests, the Keynesian derived doctrine predictions have not only failed, the opposite of their forecasts has happened. I have limited understanding of economics, but I can recognize Friedman’s predictions were correct. Therefore, I think his model (monetarists) is the better model. I argue this without real economic understanding, but based of the science that the model that predicts is better regardless of how weird it sounds.
I suggest your next step should be to get Free to Choose. It is a book and a 10 part TV series (DVD) (comes in 2 series – the first/older is much better, the second is nearly worthless). The end of each segment has his opponents asking questions and making statements with Friedman replying. As near as I can tell, everything you are addressing is in the series. You may know more than I at the end of the series as you have a real interest in the subject. BTW part of Friedman’s solution was to abolish the Federal Reserve.
I left a copy of this on my site, also
Friedman’s view of the 30s is different than your’s.
As a teenager on a farm, I had a pacer. Her foals helped finance my college.
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Author John Brodix Merryman replied on Apr. 9, 2014 @ 09:49 GMT
John H,
While I haven't made economics an obsession, I do have some idea what has been going on. The monetarists have pretty much been one half the cycle all along. The problem, as I've pointed out, is everyone wants to save piles of money and so excess money becomes necessary to keep things going. Presumably Volcker was the big monetarist to bring the supply of money back into line, after the 70s, but it only really worked when the Reaganites started borrowing hand over fist. That's Keynesian borrowing the piles of excess wealth back and running it through the system and now we are where we are. Like I said, it's really mostly politics and the two sides balances each other and no one is going to do anything different until it finally blows up.
The reason there was a shortage of capital in the 30's was because the credit bubble blew up and Hoover and the Fed at the time were looking at what inflation was doing to Germany and refused to pump alot of extra money into the system, like they did in 2008.
Regards,
John M
John C Hodge replied on Apr. 9, 2014 @ 20:11 GMT
I think Friedman’s view is different. The start of the depression about the end of 1929 was a normal correction. What the government did was to restrict or stop the flow of gold (the currency backing). This amounted to the opposite of using debt to increase the velocity of money. That is, it acted like deflation by taking money out of the system. This caused the normal (3 year) correction to become a decades long major catastrophe. I think Friedman’s analysis has been accepted but repressed by the politics for it blames the government action for being the bad guy. Enter FDR. He attempted to get the money flowing but didn’t fix the core problem.
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Author John Brodix Merryman replied on Apr. 10, 2014 @ 00:06 GMT
John H,
You forced me to wikipedia
that. Yes, you are right and so is just about everyone else. There were an enormous number of factors. Primarily, as the Austrians said, lots of debt in the 20's and as the monetarists said, insufficient money creation after the bubble popped. Apparently the Fed was limited by regulations to 40 percent gold to cash and was reaching its limits. I would argue the credit expansion prior to the crash was a lot bigger than any previous, so it likely would have been a significant depression anyway. Especially given the various external, weather, WW1 issues. It was a big mess!
Regards,
John M
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Jonathan J. Dickau wrote on Apr. 13, 2014 @ 02:43 GMT
A thought provoking essay John..
But I guess we should expect that by now. I hope you do well, and that your message gets across. In this particular contest; I think your ability to editorialize issues benefits you and us more than your scientific knowledge and insights. If not for the ability to move people emotionally, nobody could communicate certain points adequately to give humanity the wake up call it needs to survive.
I think you went off the tracks a bit, extemporizing about the role of God as either limited in scope or of distant concern for humans. I assure you that it is easier to know everything at once, in some regards, than it is to have a detailed knowledge of all individual things. But the ability to immerse oneself in that state of consciousness does not preclude the possibility to examine details of things, if that is one's proclivity. The example that comes to mind is this.
When playing complicated musical passages, one focuses on the start notes of phrases, rather than each individual note, then you fill in the gaps. If one does try to play fast and focus on every note, it falls apart. In a Piano improv workshop, Alaudin Bill Mathieu suggested that one could free up the mental capacity for right-hand improvisation by focusing on what the left hand is doing, and keeping that regular. In some regards, it is the very distraction from the difficulty of the complex task that lets it proceed automatically.
It is known that sometimes Mozart would deliberately distract himself with billiards, while transcribing music, which would still his mind's internal chatter by tying up the part of the brain that would otherwise get in the way, so that again this work could proceed automatically. I guess that's all for now.
All the Best,
Jonathan
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Author John Brodix Merryman replied on Apr. 13, 2014 @ 17:12 GMT
Jonathan,
I did go into a bit of a spiel there, but something like what you are saying is where I'm trying to go, that the essence of that universal being is also necessarily elemental, rather than lots and lots of information based and that in fact lots of complex information is part of that dynamic cycle of creation and dissolution, which does then lay down those layers and create more...
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Jonathan,
I did go into a bit of a spiel there, but something like what you are saying is where I'm trying to go, that the essence of that universal being is also necessarily elemental, rather than lots and lots of information based and that in fact lots of complex information is part of that dynamic cycle of creation and dissolution, which does then lay down those layers and create more interactions.
To a very real extent, we have many 'voices' in our heads and life can often be a process of deciding which to listen to, when. Whether they are background chatter, or that idea just hiding right out of sight, or those rude comments which offer themselves up, or even the dark fears, or the happy little pops.
Often my work tool is an eleven hundred pound animal and I have to completely zone out and lose all focus and simply let the pieces fall together, with what is my executive function as little more than a cloud of awareness, with a checklist of what needs to be accomplished. The horse itself doesn't focus on much of what its body and legs are doing and so like any hand tool, I have to keep it balanced and going at a proper rate, etc. Then I'm trying to essentially get the horse zoned out and relaxed at it as well. Not to mention there are usually several other horses and riders and have to keep them all in some degree of order and sense when things might be going wrong, such as one horse planning to kick another. So there is both the bottom up detail and the top down strategy, as one whole process, even in that.
Part of the problem is that modern society requires individuals to be focused entirely on specific jobs and not question the top down strategy, yet when those actually at the top and making the decisions start doing things that are shortsighted, self-centered, corrupted, etc, we don't necessarily have effective feedback loops to correct them. How often do people at the top ignore feedback? Sometimes it's necessary, but sometimes it is ignorance. I think in this contest, we need to consider how those feedback loops function in society and ways they can be fixed. Right now, I see the obsession with monetary gain as the loudest voice in the collective head and since it has created an enormous bubble of notational value that looks like it might pop in the not too distant future, then finding ways to lasso it when it's down this time, is a necessary goal and that is sort of why I take my entry in the direction that I do.
Regards,
John M
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Jonathan J. Dickau replied on Apr. 14, 2014 @ 00:04 GMT
Thanks John,
I appreciate the time taken for such a detailed and thorough response. We are, in many ways, on the same page with how society needs to change, to support human survival and the evolution or development of a better way. First we need to survive long enough for that positive change to happen, which is by no means automatic.
More later,
Jonathan
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Author John Brodix Merryman replied on Apr. 14, 2014 @ 00:38 GMT
Jonathan,
That there are no 100 percent guarantees is a fact of nature and in some ways, is a good thing. That reset button is part of the process. It makes one go under the surface, so to speak. It makes you get into that sense of all. The spiritual DNA.
Regards,
John M
Gene H Barbee wrote on Apr. 13, 2014 @ 03:34 GMT
Hi John,
Your essay shows deep thought about our current human condition. Although you say some may be offended, it is better to question and correct rather than wait for disaster. Your comments on the need for balance between opposing forces is right on. Society depends on meeting the needs of people and we can expect conflict as more people with powerful communication tools start to...
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Hi John,
Your essay shows deep thought about our current human condition. Although you say some may be offended, it is better to question and correct rather than wait for disaster. Your comments on the need for balance between opposing forces is right on. Society depends on meeting the needs of people and we can expect conflict as more people with powerful communication tools start to suffer in-balances. You are right, the original concepts and functions of our institutions have indeed been corrupted. Government and banking are intended to serve. They work well when people know and care for each other, but as you point out money is no longer an exchange medium. It is an end unto itself and a symbol of power. Community bankers used to know people and lending was an exchange of trust to help people. Originally government didn’t even have the power to tax because that was not its primary purpose. Representatives used to represent but they lost contact and see us as a vote to get to keep their jobs.
Thanks for reading and commenting on my essay. I see some small differences in our thoughts but we totally agree on information and energy being two sides of the same coin. I proved (at least to myself) that information and energy are fundamentally related. The June 2012 essay is now: Barbee, Gene H., A Top-Down Approach to Fundamental Interactions, FQXi essay, June 2012 and vixra:1307.0082 revised Mar 2014. Also, I also proved to myself that life is a consequence of quantum mechanics operating in an information based reality. That essay is now: Barbee, Gene H., Life from Information, vixra:1311.0124v1, FQXi 2013 essay contest.
We think a little differently in the following regard: I view the laws of nature as information transitions and energy as the result so I tend to believe that information is pre-eminent. I believe in creation from zero energy (a flat cosmology demands this). Several authors, one being Charles Seife, have made the statement “the universe appears to be a giant thought”. I tend to agree but I also agree with your thoughts about absolute knowledge. If she exists, can’t she just be a devine friend?
If you have time: Barbee, Gene H., On the Source of the Gravitational Constant at the Low Energy Scale, vixra:1307.0085, revised Feb 2014. Prespacetime Journal Vol. 5 No. 3 March 2014.
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Author John Brodix Merryman replied on Apr. 13, 2014 @ 18:02 GMT
Gene,
In some of my other essays I make a basic point about time, which runs significantly counter to most conventional thinking, that it is not the present moving from past to future, which physics distills to measures of duration, but the process by which future becomes past. For instance, rather than the earth traveling Newton's flow, or Einstein's dimension from yesterday to tomorrow,...
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Gene,
In some of my other
essays I make a basic point about time, which runs significantly counter to most conventional thinking, that it is not the present moving from past to future, which physics distills to measures of duration, but the process by which future becomes past. For instance, rather than the earth traveling Newton's flow, or Einstein's dimension from yesterday to tomorrow, tomorrow becomes yesterday because the earth rotates. Now not only is spacetime based on measures of duration and so much of current cosmology, but history and thus civilization is based on that narrative vector, so I know I'm going against the flow with this. Yet if time is an effect of action, it explains alot. Rather than trying to figure out how to transition from a determined past to a probabilistic future and assuming the future must already be determined, since the laws of physics only yield one outcome of many possibilities, or taking the opposite tack and considering the past remains probabilistic and branches out into many worlds, with every option, we can just accept the fate of the cat is determined by actual actions and then recedes into the past.
Now this makes time an effect of action, similar to temperature. While we think of temperature as a cumulative effect, it is based on lots of individual actions. With time we measure lots of individual actions, but wonder what the universal rate is, ie, Newton's absolute flow. The problem is there really is just the cumulative effect of these separate actions. Thus it is like temperature, lots of particular actions adding up to a larger effect. One is rate of change and the other is level of activity, so time is to temperature, what frequency is to amplitude.
Now you may not agree with this, but suspend judgement while I tie it into our current discussion;
Cosmology is flat, as the positive curvature of gravitational contraction is balanced by the negative curvature of universal expansion. So where is the additional expansion for the universe to grow, if this effect is balanced by gravity? We can only measure the light of distant galaxies that hasn't been drawn into gravity wells, so it only travels the 'high ground' of 'expanded space,' not the gravitational 'low ground.' Not to mention that Big Bang theory says those distant galaxies will recede over time, but that implies the speed of light is not affected by this expansion, so it can't be a relativistic effect, since C is not maintained relative to this expanded space. Thus it's only increasing distance in terms of lightyears. Now we are at the center of our view of the universe, so it makes more sense that redshift is an optical effect and in essence is the cosmological constant to balance the effect of gravity and so explain why space is ultimately flat.
What this means, is that rather than the universe beginning 13.8 billion years ago, with all we have to explain, from how it began, to inflation, to dark energy, it is instead a cosmic convection cycle of expanding radiation and contracting mass.
Among other things, this goes to the relationship between energy and information, as well as past and future. Energy is that light expanding out, radiating away from old forms and eventually coalescing into new ones, as the information/structure becomes ever more dense and defined, eventually to break down and radiate away, or be shot out the galactic poles.
With gravity as an overall effect of energy coalescing into mass, rather then just a property of mass. This explains why the outer parts of galaxies spin as fast as the inner parts, since it is a vortex of the radiation, far out into intergalactic space starting the process and eventually falling into this whirlpool and why the outermost stars lack heavy elements.
Now I do get lots of grief for this and prefer not to dig the hole any deeper than necessary, so think of it as a form of story of how all the parts might fit together and not all the ways it conflicts with established models.
I put this up to show we are likely quite far apart on some fundamental ideas, but the quest is the same, to try and fit all the pieces together and not have too many imagined elements, such as multiverses, to explain it.
I think a big part of the strength of information as a field of study, is that our knowledge is expanding exponentially, yet when you look at how society functions, those controlling the energy, control the information. Bankers and oilmen tell politicians what to do.
Now a bunch of horses need my attention, because most of the other people are doing weekend stuff and I'm the designated worker.
Regards,
John M
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Gene H Barbee wrote on Apr. 14, 2014 @ 02:19 GMT
The present state of cosmology is very confused so no one has a basis to give you grief. The problems I see are: No one really knows what space and time are. We only can see 4% of what is apparently out there. We really don't know what dark matter and dark energy are. The standard model has three sets of particles, not one. Many believe in inflation but where.why does it stop? etc. etc.
I spent a serious amount of time on WMAP results and primordial nucleosynthesis and find both full of constants that they don't admit to.
I wrote a paper proposing a fundamental gravitational theory but no one seems to care.
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Author John Brodix Merryman replied on Apr. 14, 2014 @ 16:00 GMT
Gene,
I originally got interested in physics as a way to make sense of how society functions, but then I found the rules of how society functions determine a lot of how physics as a field of study has evolved, what is understood and what can be discussed.
There has to be that conceptual foundation and yet prior knowledge is necessarily more limited than current knowledge, so these...
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Gene,
I originally got interested in physics as a way to make sense of how society functions, but then I found the rules of how society functions determine a lot of how physics as a field of study has evolved, what is understood and what can be discussed.
There has to be that conceptual foundation and yet prior knowledge is necessarily more limited than current knowledge, so these rules and models get laid down and then become the filter through which subsequent information is processed. Then the better the models get, the longer their flaws go undetected and the more committed the society of physics gets to them. So the process then has to get that much further off the tracks before it breaks down enough to do a complete enough review. As I keep arguing, we need to think of time, not in terms of the point of the present 'moving' from past to future, but the physical dynamic turning future into past. While it seems simple enough, it does undermine the physical premise of spacetime, even if the math still works, so I may as well be talking another language.
The math of epicycles worked quite well too, but the physical premise of giant cosmic gearwheels proved unnecessary.
I would have to say up front that understanding gravity is beyond my paygrade, so I tend to avoid discussions of it, because as with most topics in physics, one could spend a lifetime trying to learn all the details. My personal view of gravity is that it is an effect of energy coalescing into mass and as such is part of the broad spectrum of causes, not one particular force. Much as releasing energy from mass creates expansion and pressure, be it nuclear, chemical, structural, entropy, etc, the amount of energy occupies more space relative to the equivalent amount of mass, so put it in reverse; How does the energy go from intergalactic light to the black hole of crushing pressure. I suspect it's lot of things, from magnetism, to momentum, to structural order, plus all those relations between radiation and subatomic particles we are only scratching the surface of, all working along the spectrum which relativity models as the geometric contraction of space.
Then there is the topic of this contest, which is in physical terms, a very broad topic, as the diversity of the entries prove.
Regards,
John M
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Gyenge Valeria wrote on Apr. 15, 2014 @ 13:32 GMT
Dear John!
I liked your essay. It inevitably conveys essential well-formed thoughts which regard and can attract the interest of a broader audience. Your longer comments also are sympathetic for me, due to those also informatively express your wide-scale interest, knowledge and wisdom inside.
I welcome too, your mentioning the top-down bottom up 'logic', due to it is vital to...
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Dear John!
I liked your essay. It inevitably conveys essential well-formed thoughts which regard and can attract the interest of a broader audience. Your longer comments also are sympathetic for me, due to those also informatively express your wide-scale interest, knowledge and wisdom inside.
I welcome too, your mentioning the top-down bottom up 'logic', due to it is vital to understand also for the complexity of energy/information transfer in an organism either realized and may be controlled voluntary, consciously or operating only behind naturally balanced.
(Because I'm an IT expert therefore, this topdown problem much times turns up. When I was a young student in the University I had a heavy debate with my programmer teacher and I questioned: - How should be one able to sketch a plan of a program structurally well organized from top if he has nothing information which kind of basic elements are at his disposal from which he needs then build/write a concrete program? He answered me, that is not necessary to know when planning. I couldn't then agree, so I got fail '1'. Now, I can partially agree theoretically, due to a discretion of my insufficient information given in my question. I did not put there that clause - ... if I were the planner and the programmer in one.) I think, my teacher was partially right in his theoretical statement, and I failed my question. However I think, the fact remains that much problems are raised by this theoretical truth making which have been waving yet in the religious, political, scientific systems for governing successful group organizations. Surely, there need to be stratum of knowledge which ones should have to have to do their works at their proper places, not only for their self-interest but for a broader scale of goods and those works are can be structurally shared even so being been co-working. I think, a planner or leader need to know as much about the bottom up working of the system as how one be able to make a successful guiding plan from top to bottom. Otherwise one can plan system/systems which should work only from top to bottom governed albeit worked out by well-thought out planning systems somehow independent from or completely subordinating the bottom, so probably never fulfilling both can be balanced.
You also mentioned my favourite viewpoint written in
my essay pointing a comparison between a societal organization and a biological working of a human body.
I think, this similitude as a Universal model is vital finally (or as a renewed starting point)to recognize, however that is also very essential to apprehend and re-consider: - What are our cells pays to each other for their co-working to keep a whole organism healthy? What if when a group of cells or some individual cells not in their right place try to gain dominion over a whole complex?
At the moment albeit we should be at the start line to recognize the UNIVERSAL model, however until we do not apprehend that too, it is not a right goal (at least beyond reason to achieve ) to overcome ourselves! That is beyond reason to overcome a Universally and unconditionally given well-working, self-sustaining NATURE.
All what any religious message could convey - The LIFE, THE EXISTENCE IS UNCONDITIONALLY GIVEN AND IMMORTAL! NOT ONLY THE SPIRITUAL BEINGNESS, THE FORMLESS SELF IS IMMORTAL, BUT THE WELL BALANCED NATURAL PHYSICALLY ARRANGED NATURE from its bottom to top IS IMMORTAL! At which apex can be the UNIVERSAL NATURALLY ORGANISED MAN, who is able to recognize, apprehend himself, and can keep governed his existence from top to bottom well balanced! IT NEED NOT TO BE PROVED only EXPERIENCED!
The questions are not WHO is or WHO are the GODs! Whether he/she has male or female characteristic. Some religious interpretations really can be outdated and sometimes seriously goal oriented. But the real message behind unequivocal for every one of us!
As Aristotle ever said, and I can agree - THE GOD is - the self-thinking thoughts what ability is inherently and also unconditionally given for the MAN!
The utmost WISE one needs only to know - WHAT HE/SHE DOESN'T WANT TO KNOW and WHY!
So, I agree, and liked! "...So if God is in charge, she apparently dosnʼt want to know everything..."
I agree with you also the essential statements you exert such as are:
"..Information is dynamically complex and complexity tends to become unstable beyond a certain level.."
"..We frequently build out levels of complexity and then struggle to maintain them and manage their consequences..."
However, I should be in disagreement with you some of your statements or at least the deduction you made, concerning the 'Absolute', 'Void has no form' and
'We are fundamentally linear creatures.'
"..So knowledge is a function of the detail .." I think, depending on how one conceptualize the details. But, in that meaning the Absolute - as the unconditional existence itself - doesn't depends on the details those (I agree) '..lost for the absolute.."
"..The void has no form. Sorry Plato.."
I have some questions for you to test and answer for yourself:
Can you think on - nothing, no think, no thing, no signal, no noise - in the meantime you are inhabiting a form of your physical body? Try it! What can you sense, see when you contemplate the void? What does this experience mean for you?
"..We are fundamentally linear creatures.." "..we are linear, object oriented thinkers, .."
We are fundamentally NOT a linear creatures! Just you wrote much about the time flowing back and forth from past to future and backward too, and how " ..individual organisms die and pass on their genetic code.."
Our present consciousness is conditioned to think that or so! I tried to give some mentioning in my essay - independently from our absolute existence -
We are fundamentally not living in time! Our present consciousness however need to some pre / post processing not to act and react just-in time. However how much it can be artificially delayed and over loaded our natural electric body circuits or that can be substituted with some kind of else basic material... s it in question yet, I think running by some kind of experiments?
"...while the larger reality is one of balance and process.." to understand where is the optimal boundary for us to know, what and why, and how to use it well. I hope at least, this is so, truly. :)
Best of all,
Valeria
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Author John Brodix Merryman replied on Apr. 15, 2014 @ 16:13 GMT
Valeria,
I'm trying to read your essay, but you say a very lot. It is like being in a large and complex building with no floor plan. You need to both organize and edit much more. Each of us is a world unto ourselves and yet the lines of communication between each other are very limited. Writing is like a telegraph wire in a fiber optic age. As I point out, too much information starts to...
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Valeria,
I'm trying to read your essay, but you say a very lot. It is like being in a large and complex building with no floor plan. You need to both organize and edit much more. Each of us is a world unto ourselves and yet the lines of communication between each other are very limited. Writing is like a telegraph wire in a fiber optic age. As I point out, too much information starts to cancel out and become noise. Personally I have been working all morning and have to go to a memorial for an old co-worker this afternoon, so like all people, my time and attention is limited and I'm overwhelmed with too many things to do. Obviously you have many thoughts and ideas about how the world works, but you need to focus them somewhat. Yes, we are not linear, but we have to communicate both linearly and narratively. So you have to incorporate that non-linear thermal effect as a narrative arc and not just as a bunch of thoughts winding around each other.
You have a lot to say, but keep in mind that life has spent billions of years creating this level of top down/bottom up complexity and we have just a few decades, if we are lucky, to figure it out. So I understand why you want to put so much into everything, but a lot of what nature does, is to organize and edit. George Gantz just submitted an interesting entry and while there are parts I don't quite agree with, given my thoughts on top down theology, it was a masterful job of presenting a complex reality in a way that another mind can absorb, without lots of loose ends that lead ones thinking onto other subjects, not following what you are trying to say. When I write something, I like to try and pretend I'm another person and read it through, to see if my mind will follow the logical thread to the end, or are there parts that are distracting. I try to cut out the parts that distract. If they are more important than your central thesis, then you need to write a on different topic. Focus, organize, edit.
You do express a lot of interesting thoughts, so make them sit down and take their turn.
Regards,
John M
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Gyenge Valeria replied on Apr. 18, 2014 @ 08:24 GMT
Dear John!
Thank you for your answer.
I feel, you are right in that, my essay cannot so clear way convey information (as your essay is truly transparent), which logically drives one's attention on a thread. It can suggest certainly thinking on many threads in the meantime. However, my essay was specially focused, and organized. Covering topics arisen here at Fqxi's previous contests, and long run behind involving truly vast amount of background information compressed into the possible here given 9 pages. It was 'edited' by my interpretation, as far as I can understand and absolve those information - dealing with questions which are not necessarily thoughts of mine!!! Those are complex thoughts yes, however those are also present in our reality in one's or ones' minds, even at many levels of every one of us, and those thoughts have been running on many threads. And you are also right, those information may be very confusing, noisy, distracting, and probably open ended, with 'no ground floor', or eventually cancelled, as you pointed out.
You are focusing on more concretely formed problems what urgent their resolution and stand near for the everyday thoughts. However, I felt writing my essay, quite because, I think those many threads of more complex thoughts I mentioned running yet parallel. May be focused, edited, 'hacked' or cancelled by one or ones (not necessarily personally by me).
I exerted my best effort and capacity to attract and catalyse ones' attention who are disposing of the possibility to bring those threads on a harmonics what a normal original human body can endure, and digest. (involving myself too) Supposing we want to remain - human - as naturally and unconditionally given! (This latter is my thoughts, truly! And I think, it is a very clear message, I also focused on this conclusion in my essay and some of my comments put here.
Thank you again for reading my essay.
Valeria
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Author John Brodix Merryman replied on Apr. 19, 2014 @ 02:16 GMT
Valeria,
We have to express the world the way we see it. You are you and you probably have a better memory than I. One of the reasons I have to focus and edit as much as I do, is because I am someone who does get distracted easily. Personally I mostly work outside, with horses and tend to view reality as much thermodynamically, as narratively. I just know language is a linear medium. Of course, it is old fashioned and now people use visual communications much more. Best of luck!
Regards,
John
Gyenge Valeria replied on Apr. 19, 2014 @ 11:41 GMT
Dear John!
Thanks again for your answer.
Yes, I agree basically with you! We can express thoughts about our reality on ways we are just experiencing it, mainly by sensual ways through an actual genetic make up arrangements - you probably call individual I'm. However, much depends on our previous personal experiences somehow stored we call - memory. Also much depends on what our...
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Dear John!
Thanks again for your answer.
Yes, I agree basically with you! We can express thoughts about our reality on ways we are just experiencing it, mainly by sensual ways through an actual genetic make up arrangements - you probably call individual I'm. However, much depends on our previous personal experiences somehow stored we call - memory. Also much depends on what our actual conditioned thoughts allow to apprehend. The latter generally means the actual mutual memory complex sometimes called social or group memory - noosphere. Furthermore, also much depends on the environment in which one actually lives. Also those thoughts are present non-locally and non-linearly which are not yet coherently probed, tested, but we call - future or probabilities. All incorporates I think, structurally, but factually neither in space nor time, but somehow there are things (e.g. sensing time and changeable environment/places artificially created or not) for us by some ones who are intentionally trying to steer the - larger reality processes. We should call - history.
What is the long time/short time, genetic, visual memory? How are our experiences both individual and collective stored? How far can those be got back and expressed by and through a naturally built organism? Or how far can our memory be bettered even substituted with synthetics to have bigger capacity, quicker etc.? (likened to as Turil said a kind of heterogeneous even extra or ultra terrestrial database). All revolves around in our presently seen reality - That is a huge topics, truly.
I think, my memory not better than you! Just, I have else capabilities 'riding' on the - threads -. I know much less about the thermodynamics, physics than you could express and quite clearly formulate here. Yes, I can understand too, riding a horse naturally requires to see straightforward and suggests very straight goal orientation. I've never ride a horse seriously, only tried it unhandy, they did with me what they wanted. They had known I was not not a satisfactory partner to steer them. I highly appreciate the horses they are very clever sensitive beings, close friends to man, I like them.
However, I got a thinking ability to oversee complex processes and putting the pieces into places where those better should fit by my right feeling. Albeit the processes can run parallel (as far as you wrote ..we have developed as physical organisms with very distinct information processing functions..and seeing same world severally expressed) even so I can keep my focus on a main thread. Probably this capability is required to do my profession when planning and creating a computer program.
I'd like to say too. Overseeing how a complex natural (or else) organism should work and applying that model for our societal complex organism betterment as you likened to - ...are government as society's central nervous system and finance as its economic circulation system - I think, an ageless trial experiment just in time running on many threads for even I truly hope the main thread goal is - let there be balanced.
You are just focusing on, quite straightforwardly and goal oriented, which is absolutely right in place and have crucial importance! How 'banking' or monetary system need to be 'edited', or should be put into an else context which better fit to a working of a healthy economical and ecological organism.
Perhaps, there is nobody at the moment giving the right answers and resolutions - How to substitute the money driven inventive presently exorbitant technological, technocratic development, as a blood vessel conveying proprietary laws, for domination over the natural law for every living being. The government unfortunately does what some ones finance - perhaps this kind of neural network system also need to be put into a right context, and cured.
Albeit the bottom up thinking and forces are growing even so the processes are controlled and planned yet from top to bottom. There are also much implication yet to be re-considered about the spiritual beingness too. We tend to think yet the spirit over the matter or backward - however, both need to be in balance.
I wish good luck for everyone of us.
Kind regards,
Valeria
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Author John Brodix Merryman replied on Apr. 19, 2014 @ 21:37 GMT
Valeria,
Living around animals and in the country, I see life and spirituality as pretty much the same. One of the arguments I frequently make here is that we look at time backwards. Since we experience it as a sequence of events, we think of it as the point of the present moving from past to future, but the reality is the changing configuration turns future into past. Tomorrow becomes...
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Valeria,
Living around animals and in the country, I see life and spirituality as pretty much the same. One of the arguments I frequently make here is that we look at time backwards. Since we experience it as a sequence of events, we think of it as the point of the present moving from past to future, but the reality is the changing configuration turns future into past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday because the earth turns. This makes time much more like temperature than space. One is frequency and the other is amplitude. Now my experience of life, from micro to macro, is that it is swarming, that it is much more of a thermodynamic medium, with everything as degrees of the same sense of being and that even our sense of self is often multiple subconscious impulses and thoughts and it is our need to focus which makes them line up in a narrative fashion, like frames of a film. So when you look at the history of religion, it started off as animistic. The sense that things are mostly just alive. Remember that at the dawn of civilization, we hadn't pushed nature back and it really was very much alive. There really wasn't any aspect of what would have been encountered that wasn't essentially crawling with life, so it made alot of sense. Then came polytheism, as stories were made about this living nature. Then monotheism, as we looked for a single explanation for it all. To a very real extent, I see the natural and spiritual world as being much more like that thermodynamic medium and essentially polytheistic/animistic, while monotheism is an attempt to put it into a single narrative structure. To take all those living, conscious things, as well as thoughts and ideas and make them go in one direction. The result is we all get going in one direction and build up a lot of energy, but eventually it all comes apart again and is scattered, like the Tower of Babel.
So while you need to keep things lined up when you have a reason, otherwise go a little wild on occasion. It's healthy and necessary.
Regards,
John
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Gyenge Valeria replied on Apr. 20, 2014 @ 17:41 GMT
Dear John!
I feel calm, knowledge, wisdom and acceptance in your writings.
Anyhow there be a mentioning, apprehension about time and space, flowing back and forth, yes, things seem turning back to the origin-al 'knowledge' and wisdom. Perhaps, for that reason 'there be hacked the human history' :)
Thermodynamics means for me quite simply translating/narrating it, to be an...
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Dear John!
I feel calm, knowledge, wisdom and acceptance in your writings.
Anyhow there be a mentioning, apprehension about time and space, flowing back and forth, yes, things seem turning back to the origin-al 'knowledge' and wisdom. Perhaps, for that reason 'there be hacked the human history' :)
Thermodynamics means for me quite simply translating/narrating it, to be an order/disorder relation. Why the latter suggests a kind of negative attitude even so that may be a source of development, a new possible arrangement of things putting them into an order again.
As Joe Fisher says the 'Reality Once' (I call it, the original Reality as an undisturbed Natural order) is not complicated truly. However all possible information inherently involved, either one knows, apprehends it or not.
The Man has a capability (also inherently given) which propels him to understand, scrutinize his environment both inner/outer ones! The Man inherently wants to know! It also cannot be ignored! Surely there were and possibly there will be civilizations (natural organizations of universal arrangements or orders of beings) who never used hard technological inventions overtaking their own nature, used their knowledge wisely. (We should have heard about them as fairydom or ethereal kingdom). Also possibly there were civilizations and there will be who need to equilibrate between the incorporating dimensions. Some parts of the structure of dimensions should be meant material some parts anyhow named, termed interpreted by a kind of language. (involving mathematics, physics, esoteric, art, etc. Using those several kind of interpretation methods i.e. languages, I think, it really seems yet like a Tower of Babel.
I also think, the spiritual part of a complex Natural system at which apex can be the Universal Cosmic Man who is able to apprehend the whole structure and stratum of the existence basically inherent, immanent, encompassing, inseparable from the material parts, all involved, and integrated. The energy conveying information about the whole structure and stratum flows and circulates bottom up and top to bottom inside outside and vica versa. Neither the material existence nor spiritual one are more important.
What is interesting and thoughtful for me from your last advice. Yes, being wild also is a healthy part of the Nature, I can accept, even so I better prefer being balanced. We are able to keeping in balance our emotional turmoil arising from our inherent wild nature and the over controlled conscious decision making and steering ourselves supported by strong technological and artificial means.
We are presently on a way at an exceptional 'Moment in the NOW' when the sensing of time and space can vanish and we should be - WHO WE TRULY ARE, or want to be!
Thank you for our conversation.
Kind regards,
Valeria
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Author John Brodix Merryman replied on Apr. 21, 2014 @ 23:26 GMT
Valeria,
Each of us is a little bubble of awareness and knowledge and that is the basis of our knowledge. We describe the space as three dimensional, because it takes three coordinates to measure it and one of time, to describe the sequence of events we perceive. Now we think of progress as moving forward and constantly taking in new information and experiences, but what if we are to stop and let the world rush on by, so that even our own thoughts float out in front of us, like the spots, waves, sparkles and pulses in our vision when we just sit back and let our eyes stare off into the air? Then the interior dynamic of our thoughts start to pull on themselves and the third eye can see the thought before last, just floating out there, before it vanishes into a bird in the distance. Then we know that thin surface of the bubbles of our self is as much an illusion as anything else. It is its own sense of order and balance, but if it wants to see outside, it has to let go, just a little bit.
Regards,
John
Gyenge Valeria replied on Apr. 22, 2014 @ 19:36 GMT
Dear John!
Thank you for sharing with me your experiences.
I only deem to understand what you are describing here. It seems me just like you are able to visually recall time-lines (albeit those experiences are deemed to be lived and gathered new information sequentially forward in time) of experiences of a self, but those are projected backwardly in front of you by your third eye...
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Dear John!
Thank you for sharing with me your experiences.
I only deem to understand what you are describing here. It seems me just like you are able to visually recall time-lines (albeit those experiences are deemed to be lived and gathered new information sequentially forward in time) of experiences of a self, but those are projected backwardly in front of you by your third eye (functioning as a focusing prism) to oversee them. Furthermore those selves are even individual bubbling universes for their own. Do you mean something like this?
I'm not able to visually recall any else memory seeing backward to my present birth, only events happening in my present life. I'm also not able to imagine, visualize any kind of abstraction of energy patterns (such as waves, spots.. etc.) However, as I pointed out to you what is interesting and I'm sure - the void there may be present in a very complex form. - If I'm concentrating to recall any past life memories it is pretty same for me I've just releasing every thoughts emptying my mind - sometimes said one is contemplating the no think, no thing - I can see only an all encompassing light. Even so I'm doing this and experience it in a living complex physical body. Whether my physical body is an illusion or this kind of experience? I'm not sure yet. But I incline to think there is my physical body in a real reality unconditionally existing however my memory projected here is no thing. There may be probably 'a program' to create my holographically projected and materially arranged body illusion and one whom I'm presently experiencing just Me from a birthing point here, however the real I may be living in a reality which exists neither in time and and space .
That is also tricky for me, as I mentioned to you I'd got an else capability. What I should liken to a computer terminology. It seems me functioning as a crawler gathering thoughts patterns on certain key nodes of a network which are factually not mine own thoughts, but thoughts of a same self living in severally projected bodies and even living yet in else time-space space-time frameworks, somehow all convolute and converge in a present point, or at least try to make a consensus with very own their/him selves. This kind of experience much rather likened to the String and M-theory described in theoretical physics.
Are you riding a horse living outside or just that is also an illusion?
Honestly said, I'm a bit confused yet, what is an illusion what is not in our life.
Thank you again for our conversation.
Kind regards,
Valeria
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Author John Brodix Merryman replied on Apr. 23, 2014 @ 15:56 GMT
Valeria,
It has been a tendency I've had since childhood. Once when studying this ant, it stopped and I had this sense of a cone of awareness waving about with its antenna. When I drive down the road, I'll frequently get a visual sense of the drivers coming the other way. So much of our sense of sight is a matter of focusing on details, yet this is the opposite, to just objectively allow the vision to go in a zone. Remember the eyeball is a fluid sack being lensed by the muscles and much of what we think we see is really the brain patching together all the input into a semi-coherent narrative. As I'm someone who grew up as a younger child in a large farm family, with lots of large animals, I suppose I have the personality of a prey animal, so I know how to just melt into the circumstance, and just absorb my environment and physically function at a subconscious, muscle memory level. In some of those cave paintings in France, there are a various abstract symbols, alongside the drawings of the animals and they resemble the sorts of forms I see. For instance, one is the classic heart design. Now if you take one of those spot forms and have a line going through it and pulling on it, it creates that classic heart shape. As though that spot of awareness is being pulled by another. This line pulling on it would be the Cupid's arrow.
Not to get all cosmic here, but people these days do live very emotionally and organically sterilized lives, with all food, information, environment and often relationships being highly processed. My experience is that much of the actual organic nature of life is being lost.
Regards,
John
Anonymous replied on Apr. 24, 2014 @ 10:12 GMT
Dear John!
Thanks again, and again for your answers.
As far as, I can exert (and understand) written in my essay, I basically feel the 'natural original MAN' has a very structured genetic arrangement inwardly containing the stratum of the living species in the original undisturbed Nature (involving plants, animals) even chemically non-organic elements such as crystals. All...
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Dear John!
Thanks again, and again for your answers.
As far as, I can exert (and understand) written in my essay, I basically feel the 'natural original MAN' has a very structured genetic arrangement inwardly containing the stratum of the living species in the original undisturbed Nature (involving plants, animals) even chemically non-organic elements such as crystals. All information which are inside structured in an original 'hu'man genetic arrangement encompasses the MAN being projected outwardly we should call also outer environment. This unconditionally present both inner-outer environment information complexity may be anyhow conceptualized and narrated and labelled either with terms by a kind of complexity of languages, such as mathematics, physics, esoteric, what are worked out mostly based on abstractions what several kind of parts of the brain anyhow processes during experiences. Very Likely by that way, you are mentioning above. Every layer in the living Nature both inside and outside also separately experiences sensations which probably somehow can be also arranged severally some ones' genetic even yet depending on the closer environment in which one is actually living. This may be the cause your 'personality' as you feel and write is closer to animals, and supposedly your genetic works processing the information most closed to as how an animal can perceive and sense. Albeit every elements in the Nature has conciousness (it has been never said exactly either in philosophy, or psychology) however, I also suppose the man as a complex has some additional part in his brain for summing up the gathered information we should call - higher cognitive function - or conscious awareness.
I suppose too, that the recognition process about our world and nature, and the man's claim to know, and making its environment comfortable for himself is a process which doesn't depend on time and space, much rather an everlasting cyclic one. However, during this recognition process he should be able to get information arising from and examining very himself and his environment, which allows him to change his environment even more encroach into his own genetic. Whether is it ethical or not and how far we should go on this matter? Probably our present framework in which we are just living and those ways we are perceiving and sensing things can be a kind of environment for testing (I supposed intentionally created one, you proposed let there be hacked).
Very likely, there may be experiments running (either simulations or unfortunately not) for a kind of betterment or lowering of the original genetic capacity and inherent knowledge even those interspecies not created naturally during this experiments are incorporating in present.
I think, you are right, in this regard unfortunately - much part of the organic nature of life is being lost. I do not disagree there may be achieved a possible symbioses between that big diversities (as far as our present Earth both biosphere and noosphere have been changing), based on mutual high standards (see my comments on George Gantz essay) - but I'm not so optimistic in that somehow experiencing my present life lived very in-between and in-balanced yet.
Recalling the original higher memory here from which the original experiment (if there is such one)is yet too difficult,because the promotions of non-organic life forms in our present outer environment are stronger yet. So living in harmony and balanced with in a basically organic body, however encompassing it outwardly much more artificiality unfortunately should cause a collapsing. (Albeit I haven't any memory about it, I think, something similar might happen at Atlantis.)
Kind regards,
Valeria
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Author John Brodix Merryman replied on Apr. 24, 2014 @ 15:36 GMT
Valeria,
I think that animals inherently think mostly in terms of energy. Hot/cold, attraction/repulsion, left/right, etc. In other words, information is simply descriptive of what is physically happening. Man, on the other hand, has gone much more into thinking as a function of arranging informational frames and concepts, even to the current point of dismissing energy as relevant, but then instinctively reacts to the subliminal forces, much like herd behaviors and other basic impulses still overwhelm the logical process. So to get back to my original point to you, that you need to focus that field of energy that is your awareness, in order to leverage the larger process. It is still that fundamental expansion, consolidation of gathering energy/information and then focusing it in the desired direction. Not to say it works, because most other people are going to be very wrapped up in their own framing process and rarely see anything which isn't already in their field of vision. For example, there are a lot of broad minded and or deep thinkers in this contest, yet I think that at this point in history, the gift our generation can really past onto future generations is after the next impending financial crisis occurs to re-evaluate the nature of money and start treating it as the broad social contract and economic medium that it is and not simply as another commodity that can be treated as personal property, because the further this debt bubble continues, the more resources get wasted supporting it and humanity doesn't have enough left to repeat the same process without learning this fundamental lesson! Yet few seem to understand.
Such is life. Our complexity obscures as much as it illuminates.
Regards,
John
Anonymous replied on Apr. 24, 2014 @ 15:40 GMT
Dear John!
You surely found out the 'Anonymous' reply was me. The system actually logged me off, when I had pushed the 'Submit new post' button. I do not want to draw a hard conclusion it may be a kind of caution - shutting me down to say more.
I'd like saying to you yet, I can see from those conversations threads you are engaged on, you are working with them patiently and wisely inevitably with a huge background knowledge. I'd hope, I could help you as much as given information which could best fit into your insight too, without too much overloading.
I deem to understand why your essay title is what is. Unfortunately, hacking the human history and all tremendous confusing behind information disseminated in the last 25 years, not so simple just re-writing a wrong code in a computer program. We are dealing with the human history as a complex more dimensional living database and who is entitled to decide whether which parts there be deleted how and why - that is a high responsibility for anyone.
I can see you are on the right track figure out and promote an understanding and rewriting of the context of the nature of the money, but unfortunately I can see the greatest problem at the present moment is - How to substitute those wrong thought forms which drive ones into the extremity to own the nature and life which is unconditionally given for every being! I can't give an answer to this.
So at best good luck for us truly.
Kind regards,
Valeria
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Author John Brodix Merryman replied on Apr. 24, 2014 @ 20:39 GMT
Valeria,
The title was somewhat in jest, yet it does seem quite probable there will be an enormous financial crisis in the not too distant future and the solution to the last one, pouring enormous amounts of excess credit into an already over leveraged financial sector, with no real punishment for previous wrong doing, or serious regulation of current behaviors, is a recipe for an atomic meltdown of a financial crisis. Combine this with a highly networked population and virtually every other institutional model, from religions to governments and corporations, under various ethical clouds and no serious programs to address such an economic heartattack, who is to say this observation won't go viral?
On a personal level, I'd probably prefer it didn't, as it would likely get me far more attention than I care for, but it seems a logical observation to me, so I feel obligated to make it. If people chose to ignore it, oh well. Guess I'd have to put a bigger garden in next year and not spend as much time on the internet.
Regards,
John
Anonymous replied on Apr. 25, 2014 @ 10:10 GMT
Dear John!
Thanks again for your insight.
My essay and my comments put here try to convey also a message, I keep very important for our understanding at any level top-to-bottom or bottom-to top, which is not so simple to compress into either 9 pages or only sentence starting from one and being punctuated at the end. But I'm trying.
I keep, working with: The - thoughts - the...
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Dear John!
Thanks again for your insight.
My essay and my comments put here try to convey also a message, I keep very important for our understanding at any level top-to-bottom or bottom-to top, which is not so simple to compress into either 9 pages or only sentence starting from one and being punctuated at the end. But I'm trying.
I keep, working with:
The - thoughts - the utmost capability for the MAN! Explanation: The thought is energy and information (on many structured levels, even our emotions, deep senses are as much thoughts we are able to consciously formulate into being been intellectually aware, we should say a man is composed of his thoughts and his way for living in healthy organism and organization keeping his thoughts both intellectually and emotionally balanced. ) which allows us to create, to materialize around us our ideas, desires, will etc., independently from the existence exists in any kind of form we can conceive about it. The thought both local and non-local and exist neither in time and space and as much as the existence exists. So that above comprehension is what makes us to be a higher order being.
We are on the way to work out an utmost 'philosophy' at which apex should be the science about - physics of thoughts -! Used for our mutual benefit and health not for being our own autocratic oppressor!
The problem is not the 'money'! But, -
How to change our thoughts about to be anything in our possession! Nothing and no one is in our possession in the Nature! However everything is at our disposal to live, work with it and using it, even researching with it to further develop. However,our ability is that too, drawing limits to ourselves - what is worth to know and steer, truly.
So who is entitled to own and steer anyone's thoughts by any means - magic, technology even any kind of ideology? This is a deep conflict yet between the higher intellect and emotions and all about how the free-will may be achieved and maintained in a socially organized living systems - a.k.a. kept in a living history database of our many lives memory under scrutiny yet.
Yes, you are right the money should e.g. work as a social contract much rather than anyone own property. I agree, some you write, perhaps that may be a possible resolution in the present situation. But before even that to be accomplished - I keep much more important, the necessity of altering - NEVER BE anything, anyone's thoughts and life owned! This is something which need to be considered much rather starting from an intellectual awareness than emotional one. But requires balance from bottom up flowing for the apprehension and acceptance emotionally too.
This is my awareness! And thought-energy shared with everyone either wants absorb, absolve to accept or repels knowing about.
Thank you for our conversation! I hope at best, we as a living complex of humanity and also an economical and ecological one, will be able to apprehend and accomplish it for our best health and we will be able both intellectually and emotionally re-structuring ourselves by our thoughts, for keeping that and us, in a proper balance for our civilization survival - a.k.a truly 'hacking the human history' which is not a joke!
Kind regards, good works, and best of all for you and all of us!
Valeria
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Colin Walker wrote on Apr. 16, 2014 @ 20:00 GMT
Hi John,
I think you identified a big problem going forward as getting everybody to recognize and act according to our "collective self interest". Re-using plastic bags, for example, is something I see in the city (and now do myself) that is an indication that people have a recognition of this principle although it might seem like (and probably is) a token gesture in the big picture.
Your essay was a bit of a ramble, but a good read that resonates quite a bit with my thoughts.
Best to you
Colin
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Author John Brodix Merryman replied on Apr. 16, 2014 @ 22:32 GMT
Colin,
Thanks. It's a matter of perspective. Life can seem to be a token gesture, if we box it up too much. In order to make sense of the little things, we need to keep them in the context of emblematic of bigger things, not just lost in the shuffle of bigger things. Holographic, as well as digital.
I tried to stuff a lot in there, so it's nice to know it plays well.
Regards,
John M
Walter Putnam wrote on Apr. 17, 2014 @ 23:28 GMT
Very good, John. I love your concept of the "elemental self pushing out like a sprouting seed." I also like the way you summarize life as like a sentence, in which we must deal with the way we put things together between what came before and the punctuation at the end, and then go on to address the substance of the topic -- the nervous system of governance and circulatory system of economics that drive our daily lives and shape the future. I wonder, though, if you place too much stock in a "coronary" attack breaking down the system in which the rich and powerful become ever more so. You may be right, but that's not what happened five or six years ago and next time thrombosis strikes it might be too late for the masses.
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Author John Brodix Merryman replied on Apr. 18, 2014 @ 00:10 GMT
Walter,
Thank you.
You might say the response the last time amounted to a massive dose of adrenaline to get the system flowing again, but nothing was learned and it is doubtful enormous doses of credit will work as well another time. What is safe to say is that there will be significant questions raised as to whether we are on the right track and even Rupert Murdoch won't be able to control the editorializing. That is when the conversation will open up somewhat and new ideas will have at least a chance of being heard. The two economic observations I'm making, public banking and the fundamental nature of money, are being raised, with community and public banking initiatives growing at the grass roots and
Ellen Brown's Public Banking Institute as a sort of clearing house and idea center for them. Also Modern Monetary Theory delves quite deeply into the roots and evolution of money and gives a somewhat different version than conventional economics, which naturally argues there is no other way than as it is treated in capitalism. Which is essentially as a replacement commodity, rather than the social contract which validates its function.
While I conclude with the comments on economics, I also feel some of the other, more conceptual issues need to be addressed, as well. One point I didn't raise in this entry, but have in other contests and further up this thread, Apr. 13, 2014 @ 18:02 GMT, is the nature of time. That it is not the point of the present moving from past to future, but the changing configuration of what exists which turns future into past. While this might seem a bit abstract, given that human civilization is based on its various versions of history and thus the linear perception of time, understanding the underlaying physical dynamic might help us to somewhat unwind all these conflicting versions and arrive at that more agreeable place.
Regards,
John M
Georgina Woodward wrote on Apr. 18, 2014 @ 08:19 GMT
Hi John.
Not what I was expecting from the title but very interesting to read your point of view on the monetary system and religion. I fear the World's problems are too large for a change in banking to make that much difference. Though I have read and seen TV programmes about the success of micro-loans in India and elsewhere. Allowing small businesses to be started, that give employment and service to the community, improving the quality of life of more than just the recipient.
The whole premise of the worlds economies is unsustainable. In my essay, yet to appear on the list, I include the idea that in the future rather than success being measured by economic growth it should be measured by the contentment, health, altruism, high culture and creativity of its people; as growth is ultimately unsustainable. Can societies be made future proof or do they have to fall so that new societies with different founding principles can arise? I don't know. We were requested to give an optimistic outlook, so I have. There are still guns, and walls, but no zombie apocalypse.
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Author John Brodix Merryman replied on Apr. 18, 2014 @ 10:02 GMT
Georgina,
Good to hear from you. They haven't been posting contest comments on the blog sidebar, so the two conversations haven't been entwined as in past years. Nor is there an overall contest comment thread, so it's harder to keep these contest conversations easily in view. Oh well.
An interesting article on MMT is in this month's New Inquiry. In some ways, microfinance is just turning into a way to further drain value out of ever poorer people. Like many things, it's a two edged sword. There really should be a broad conversation over the physics of finance and money, but obviously the best financed schools of thought are those supporting the money as personal property side of the coin and not as broad social contract, but the success of this view appears to be leading to its undoing, along with a large chunk of society.
Well, I have to go to work and I'm sure we will both be having some fun with these debates.
Regards,
John
Georgina Woodward replied on Apr. 18, 2014 @ 22:23 GMT
John,
Your essay seems to have generated a lot of interest and discussion, too many for me to read them all. Seems I have missed out on some important expansion of the ideas in the essay. Its obviously a topic that many people feel strongly about and I expect especially Americans, given the recent severe financial woes of the country.
Good Luck, Georgina
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Author John Brodix Merryman replied on Apr. 19, 2014 @ 02:09 GMT
Thanks, Georgina.
Some of it's been discussions I've started on other's threads as well. While it concludes on a financial note, I suspect some of the more controversial ideas are developed before that.
Given they made it pretty clear the winners will be chosen from FQXI members, I simply set out to stir up as much controversy as possible, rather than appeal to any particular group. It is an interesting topic from my perspective though, as I mostly became attracted to physics in the first place as a way to make sense of cultural and social complexities and views. I think that a lot of people generally operate from within those models, so what I try to say mostly comes across as a foreign language. Even though it may seem logical to me, I do have a fairly good grasp of many of those cultural memes, at least the western ones, to know how simply different some of what I propose does sound. In fact, it seems to resonate best to those who tend toward an eastern, spiritually dualistic view, from a fairly modern western perspective. I think the true easterners approach these ideas from a much more cultural set of ingrained beliefs and so still might see it as a foreigner trying to speak the language. Since much of it comes from my own personal experiences of dealing with life and nature, along with a fair amount, but not what would be considered extensive reading, it is what it is.
Regards,
John
Anonymous replied on Apr. 19, 2014 @ 02:35 GMT
Letslink UK Local Exchange Trading and Complementary Currencies Development Agency Have you come across this scheme?
Wikipedia local exchange trading system. Quote:" A number of people have problems adjusting to the different ways of operating using a LETSystem. A conventional national currency is generally hard to earn, but easy to spend. To date LETSystems are comparatively easy to earn, but harder to spend." Wikipedia Local exchange trading system. That might be a good thing because there seems to be an addiction to consumption which is unsustainable.
Quote:"LETSystems often have all of the problems confronting any voluntary, not-for-profit, non governmental, community based organisation. LETS organisers often complain of being overworked, and may suffer burnout. Many schemes have ceased operation as a result."Wikipedia Local exchange trading system. That is something that would need addressing if their use is to be sustained and proliferated.
Wikipedia Local currency Found this interesting as although I knew of the transition town movement I did not know that some towns have associated local monetary systems. Also a long long list of benefits. I like this idea-Quote: "4.The Fureai kippu system in Japan issues credits in exchange for assistance to senior citizens. Family members living far from their parents can earn credits by offering assistance to the elderly in their local community. The credits can then be transferred to their parents and redeemed by them for local assistance."Wikipedia Local currency. What a good idea.
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Georgina Woodward replied on Apr. 19, 2014 @ 02:36 GMT
Sorry John, that Anonymous was me.
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Author John Brodix Merryman replied on Apr. 19, 2014 @ 15:15 GMT
Georgina,
I do somewhat follow the various efforts to start local currencies and now digital currencies, but the national ones have a fairly strong hold on the field. That's why I keep saying this is an idea which needs to be examined, rather than implemented, unless there is a specific opportunity.
The further point I make is what I'm saying is somewhat different than actually trying to develop a particular currency. Any form is going to have its advantages and disadvantages and maintaining one is a function of proper management, but what I'm trying to say is more in the category of vision as to how it needs to be done. As I keep pointing out, we treat money as a commodity, when it is a contract. Now when you think of it as a commodity, it is something to accumulate and store and hold, but if its a contract, the perspective changes entirely. Then it is like water, or air, or a road. You understand it is essential, but using it is a function of balance and letting go, as much as taking on. If people understand it amounts to a promise from the rest of the community and the essential value is therefore dependent on the health of the community, they will much better understand why the way we treat money today, with everyone trying to simply accumulate as much as possible and no sense of proportion, with an economy essentially geared toward producing this capital, as opposed to promoting a healthy society and stable environment, etc. it really is stupid and counterproductive.
Now there is a bloated class of people benefiting off this system and they pretty much control the terms of debate, but it isn't going to go on this way forever and the longer it goes, the more severe the crash will be. Then people will really start asking questions and the old answers won't do.
Regards,
John
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KoGuan Leo wrote on Apr. 21, 2014 @ 05:49 GMT
Dear John,
Congratulation, wonderful essay! It contains many wisdoms. I enjoyed reading it.
Best regards,
Leo KoGuan
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Author John Brodix Merryman replied on Apr. 21, 2014 @ 16:32 GMT
Leo,
Thank you very much!
Regards,
John
Hoang cao Hai wrote on Apr. 22, 2014 @ 04:45 GMT
Dear Author John Brodix Merryman
Do you believe that : all be must have limits?
And it seems that mankind has approached the limit of the problems that you made in this essay?
Best wishes with the highest point - Hải.CaoHoàng
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Author John Brodix Merryman replied on Apr. 22, 2014 @ 10:02 GMT
Hai,
Limits are an aspect of information and structure. The difference between what is and what is not. If it exists, it has limits and boundaries to make it what it is. Without those boundaries and limits, nothing exists. Now energy will always be testing and pushing on boundaries, structure and limits. If there was no movement and action, there would be no way to know there are limits and structure, because there nothing testing and acting on them. Essentially boundaries and limits are opposite forces pushing, or pulling on one another. So information is the definition, boundaries and thus limitations of energy.
Regards,
John M
James A Putnam wrote on Apr. 23, 2014 @ 03:59 GMT
John,
I chopped this up a bit and re-arranged it. I skipped your mundane attempt to define God. I don't agree with the rest of your essay either. However, I will ask for your response to this:
Your view of monotheism:
"Usually religion is the area in which society collects its communal vision of what is important, but that has become a bit of a fallback position for significant unanswered questions and it is seriously fragmented. The central thesis for many people, monotheism, the premise of an all-knowing absolute being, is about 3000 years old. While it fills and fulfills a variety of
emotional needs and some convenient political ends, many do not find it coherently logical."
Me: Before the above you presented your own monotheism:
"At its most basic level, reality is the dichotomy of energy and information. Like two sides of a coin, one does not exist without the other. Energy manifests information and information defines energy. Among those for whom this is a professional concern, information tends to be paramount because it is what is descriptive, yet in the absence of any form of energy, there can be no information. The void has no form. Sorry Plato."
Me: Changing God's name to Energy doesn't change theology to science. Is it your view that energy is the cause of intelligent life?
James Putnam
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Author John Brodix Merryman replied on Apr. 23, 2014 @ 16:17 GMT
James,
I can see getting that from my comment of thinking about the spirit as more energy than form, but that is within the context of my observations that the real mystery is this elemental sense of awareness which which life seems to be possessed of. So often with many things, we naturally relate the process with the form. For example, we tend to think of the present in terms of the specific situation, rather than that more vague presence of being. So when people think of God, they tend to associate it with some formless power, 'up in the heavens,' because that is what they are taught, rather than the source of their own sense of being. Logically then the source doesn't particularly know every detail of what will ever happen, only that it keeps pushing onward. Since many people want to be given some sense of direction and only really want freedom when their forward progress is blocked, especially those who feel the need for an all powerful deity, this notion of a bottom up spirituality probably isn't all that appealing, but I'm trying to figure out what is logical, not what people want. So for me, the question is trying to explain the sense of being, not the physical reality it manifests. That physical process seems to be a cycle of expanding energy and contracting mass, but that we have discussed previously.
Planning on getting around to yours, but with my limited time, have mostly been reading those who don't converse in the forums.
Regards,
John
James A Putnam replied on Apr. 23, 2014 @ 20:27 GMT
John,
Ok, I gather that you are not addressing how we are aware or as you put it that vague sense of being. When you speak of explaining the sense of being you are not explaining its original cause? I don't have any religious position on this. What I was thinking was that your point is that dumbness can provide for and produce intelligence. Your emphasis on energy is what prompted my question. I was wondering about the logic and empirical evidence for demonstrating that. Anyway, if your addressing our sense of being as a given, then my question is not relevant. Thank you for your reply.
James Putnam
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Author John Brodix Merryman replied on Apr. 24, 2014 @ 20:50 GMT
James,
My suspicion is that what would be considered the spiritual realm is every bit as complex as its biological manifestation. If not far more so. That said, I think the term intelligence is a relative concept, with many different applications and scales.
I think one of the most incisive descriptions of the source of this sense of being was Nietzsche's observation about staring into the abyss and sensing it staring back. That's the problem with our grasp of awareness, we like something to grasp onto.
Regards,
John
James A Putnam replied on Apr. 25, 2014 @ 03:50 GMT
John,
Well, I will move on. I haven't rated your essay and probably won't. As I said once before, you are good with boxes. I have also said that I don't fit in your box. Well it hasn't changed for me. It seems that others like your approach, so, lets see how well you do without me affecting it. Good luck in the contest.
James Putnam
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Author John Brodix Merryman replied on Apr. 25, 2014 @ 11:58 GMT
James,
The beauty of it is there are far more boxes than we can ever comprehend. Like pretty girls walking down the street, we just appreciate they exist.
Regards,
John
James A Putnam replied on Apr. 25, 2014 @ 17:25 GMT
John,
People make their own boxes if that is what they want for themselves. When you put others in your boxes, it is not the person or persons but rather your ideas that fit in those boxes. You design the boxes according to your specifications. They are your boxes. They form your boundaries on their contents. Their contents are your ideas whether about other persons or things. Anyway, we don't agree probably even on this: I don't fit into your box. I'm not in there John. However, your essay score is doing pretty well. I won't be rating it. Lets see what others think. Good luck.
James Putnam
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Author John Brodix Merryman replied on Apr. 25, 2014 @ 20:24 GMT
James,
There are not only boxes, but forces as well and you seem repelled by some of my observations. Sorry to hear that, but I do seem to cross other people's wires on occasion. I guess it's the nature of the beast.
Regards,
John
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Member Rick Searle wrote on Apr. 23, 2014 @ 14:12 GMT
John,
I enjoyed your essay very much especially quotes such as these:
"We are fundamentally linear creatures. As singular organisms, we experience this kaleidoscopic reality as a sequence of events and being generally predatory, this sense is further focused. Nature, on the other hand, is cyclical and any action ultimately is balanced by other, non-linear activity."
"We are fundamentally linear creatures. As singular organisms, we experience this kaleidoscopic reality as a sequence of events and being generally predatory, this sense is further focused. Nature, on the other hand, is cyclical and any action ultimately is balanced by other, non-linear activity."
I think you are totally right in suggesting that our current financial system is out of whack. Not to pick on the much lambasted high frequency traders, but they are indicative of our problems. Talk about short term thinking! HFTs trade in micro-seconds not even perceivable by human beings dis-attaching us from the slower cyclic moves of the economy and the slow emergence of the future as the product of our investments. A re-conceptualizing of money is certainly in order.
Like the Sabbath we need reminding that "money was made for us and not us for money". Your essay is a good move in that direction.
Best of luck!
Rick Searle
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Author John Brodix Merryman replied on Apr. 23, 2014 @ 16:32 GMT
Rick,
Thank you.
I do start with a broad view and try to narrow it down to some specific points, because that is how we need to distill any form of logical argument. In a sense, we put that predatory impulse to good use, with extracting the desired from the context. This then goes to my observation about the nature of utopia. It is a social idealization and ideals are all the good stuff distilled from the seeming extraneous, or simply undesirable parts. Yet often one person's ideal views another's nature as imperfect. We conflate our sense of perfection with a universal absolute, but as I point out, the absolute is basis, where all those details are lost. Given the nature of structure in general, it tends to be inherently self supporting and so like a gravitational vortex, draws everything inwards. When we then set up the ideal, it tends to become the center of this vortex, pulling everything inwards. While this is all very natural, when it happens with complex forms such as human societies, that simple, central thesis can be overwhelming to all the networks forming that society and you can end up with the various forms of centralized totalitarianism, drawing out the society into the black hole in the center.
So while we do very much need the focus of our desires and ideals, we also need to keep some sense of the larger context and a balance between the two.
Regards,
John M
Mark Avrum Gubrud wrote on Apr. 27, 2014 @ 00:52 GMT
A very thoughtful and enjoyable essay. I like your metaphor of energy and information being "two sides of a coin" but note that while a coin can be considered as representing a single bit (heads/tails) it is made up of 10
23 or so atoms and its full description is lots of bits even if considered only classically; I'm not really convinced that "information" is anything at all; the ultimate reality must be identical with matter/energy, whatever stuff is there. Also you write that "the energy is apparently conserved, but the information surely is not" which is not consistent with current thinking about quantum information, as you may know, but I'm not so much a believer in the Holy Wavefunction. You lose me when you write "When we combine information, the energy carrying it tends to cancel out, creating just that static and noise we so carefully extracted the information from." Not sure what you mean by that. Also not sure I understand your critique or prescriptions for financial reform. I think capitalism would work just fine if we only tax the rich enough to fix Piketty's inequality so r=g in the long term after we run it backwards for a while (g>r).
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Author John Brodix Merryman replied on Apr. 27, 2014 @ 03:11 GMT
Mark,
Thank you for the thoughtful reading and response.
I realize I'm stepping into a bit of a physics minefield with that thumbnail description, but its use was to lay a foundation for how our physiological dichotomy of the central nervous and circulatory systems are biological equivalents to the functions of government and finance.
Then the other leg of this view is how...
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Mark,
Thank you for the thoughtful reading and response.
I realize I'm stepping into a bit of a physics minefield with that thumbnail description, but its use was to lay a foundation for how our physiological dichotomy of the central nervous and circulatory systems are biological equivalents to the functions of government and finance.
Then the other leg of this view is how energy is inherently dynamic, while information is necessarily static. Consider the words on this page; How much would civilization have advanced without this stability of patterns? How much would reality exist as we know it, without those stable patterns? There is the view opposite to yours, that only the patterns, the math, are real and presumably, especially considering the concept of blocktime, that energy is just an illusion of the geometry of spacetime.
I have to say I avoid most serious discussions of quantum information and mechanics, because they seem to have presumptions of an objective classical reality that doesn't exist, but which only they realize. Take for instance a moving car and consider the idea of position; It really doesn't have one. There is no exact location, anymore than there would be an exact location for a subatomic quantum of energy. Yet you could certainly measure features, ie. information about it, if you measure it in a small enough unit of time. I think if we were to really peel away the last hundred years of increasingly abstract formulations(more of those static forms) and try to view it with the collective wisdom from many fields, such as information theory, neurology, etc, it might fit in better than we think.
One point I keep making is that we look at time backwards. While we experience it personally as a sequence of events and so think of it as the point of the present moving from past to future, which physics distills to measures of duration for use in the geometry, the reality is it's the changing configuration turning future into past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday because the world turns. This makes time much more like temperature, than space. Time is to temperature what frequency is to amplitude. Just that with temperature, we look at the overall effect and with time we look at the particular actions, but there is no universal clock, just a composite effect of lots of actions. Faster clocks don't move into the future quicker, they recede into the past faster, as they burn/age quicker. The hare is long dead and the tortoise is still plodding along. There is also no need to assume the future must be deterministic, or the past remains probabilistic, ie, multiworlds, as probability precedes actuality. So I think there are a number of such basic conceptual errors built into the model, but no one can really step back far enough to see them, so now it's string theory and multiverses as solutions.
As for combining information, consider taking a picture and how the shutter speed determines clarity. Now if we were to leave the shutter open longer, more light would get in and so presumably more information being carried by that light, yet the effect is to wash out the picture, as the information/energy cancels out. Much of how we experience life is just that sort of editing out lots of energy and only registering those parts to make sense of what we need to know. Extracting the signal from the noise.
In
Tom Ray's thread, I tried laying out a more precise description of the economic argument, which I'll paste here;
"In our capitalist economy, we treat money as a commodity, in fact one with by far the greatest overall value, given the amount of currencies, bonds, and all the other notational devices and derivatives being traded, not to mention actual commodities, like gold, whose value is largely a function of their use as a currency. Given the power of these markets, it is safe to say we have something of a tail wagging the dog situation.
What I would argue is that money is not a commodity, but a contract and if we understood it as such, it would seriously change the economic dynamic for the better. Originally what became money was specifically contracts, such as clay tablets used as receipts for stored grain in ancient Sumer, up to the gold certificates issued by the Rothschilds in 18th century Europe. They were essentially IOU's backed by a specific item. It then became convenient to trade these contracts around as though they were commodities in their own right. Then such things as futures, bonds, etc, which were backed by promises of future income, came into use. Not to mention all the innumerable devices of notational value since created.
From this commercial convenience arose the use of state currencies. Which were originally minted from precious metals and so presumably had intrinsic value, eventually became notational as well.
Now what backs the value of these notes is essentially the health, wealth and economic productivity of the state issuing them. Essentially they are a contract between the community and its members, that one can count on the overall goodwill of the community in making good on the worth of these notes. "Accepted as legal tender in all transactions."
Yet when we then consider them as commodities, they become personal property and so there is no moral imperative to consider their function and no logical reason to limit their acquisition. Since they possess effective value and manufacturing them is only limited by the insistence on validity of the promises being made, there is a very strong inclination to create as much as possible and ignore the backing. The result is that the entire economy and often much of society becomes focused on the creation and acquisition of these notes, often to the detriment of the actual society and economy on which they are based.
Now if people truly understood these notes really do belong to the agency that issues them, since they hold the copyright, are responsible for guaranteeing the value and can adjust that value at will, possibly then people will start to be far more careful how much they are willing so extract value from interpersonal relations and environmental resources, in order to exchange for these notes. Also, on a more fundamental level, if it is to be understood as a contract between a society and its members, there would naturally also be leeway built into the system in case of emergencies, etc, because this would seriously reduce the need to accumulate excess. On the other side of the bargain, it would mean those who do try to hoard them, or otherwise abuse the relationship, could have the value of their store penalized. This then would encourage people to store value as goodwill, strong personal relations and a healthy environment. It would also create a smaller and more stable monetary system that would be more adapted to the efficient circulation of value around the economy and rather than being the giant tumor that it currently is.
Now I realize in the current situation, this proposal is as far fetched as any here, but given the solution to the last debt crash was to issue trillions more in credit, ignore any improprieties and water down all regulation and enforcement, it is a virtual certainty there will be a much larger and even more systematic crisis, given the effectiveness of the prior solution is likely well watered down, so there likely will be attention given to other models and theories and with the extent to which society is networked, some of these proposals will undoubtfully go viral."
I would add further that on physical terms, this current system does act like a giant value vacuum and so simply taxing the stream of notional wealth being shot out one end, as Piketty, et al suggest, does not stop and cannot repair the enormous social and environmental resources being sucked up and destroyed by the other end.
Regards,
John
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Cristinel Stoica wrote on Apr. 28, 2014 @ 06:47 GMT
John,
Indeed, the problem has many facets, and one should not ignore any of them. I think you are right when you write
"First and foremost, this situation has to be addressed in a way that can be intellectually comprehended by vast numbers of normally intelligent people, not just those with select education in any of the various facets of society. What might seem viable to scientists, or politicians, or information technologists, economists, priests, lawyers, plumbers, or what have you, may well not make sense to the broader audience. So what I see as first being necessary is to lay out a very basic description of reality that is sure to irritate those with a professional interest in its description."
This is very important. When we are all concerned, allowing elites in charge without control is dangerous. Democracy gives the power to the many; information and education are needed to give them understanding of the problems they vote for.
Best regards,
Cristi
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Author John Brodix Merryman replied on Apr. 28, 2014 @ 11:36 GMT
Cristi,
Thank you. The dichotomy I argue for was a bit of a shot across the bow of the physic's community's obsession with mathematical structure as the basis, rather than just the description, so it likely won't be accepted by some people in the FQXI community, but it is an issue which does eventually have to be addressed, when Max Tegmark and company reach the limits of the multiverse as explanatory.
Time will tell, as with a lot of issues.
Regards,
John M
Paul N Butler wrote on Apr. 30, 2014 @ 18:21 GMT
Dear John,
I read your paper and found some of your economic concepts to be very good for someone not expert in that field. I also found your concept of the dichotomy of energy and information pretty good.
I must admit, however that I found your description of the nature of God to be lacking. It appears that you either don’t have a good understanding of what is meant by those who...
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Dear John,
I read your paper and found some of your economic concepts to be very good for someone not expert in that field. I also found your concept of the dichotomy of energy and information pretty good.
I must admit, however that I found your description of the nature of God to be lacking. It appears that you either don’t have a good understanding of what is meant by those who might say that God is an all-knowing absolute being or you have purposely chosen to use a different meaning for the word absolute than they would intend when using that term. You chose the meaning of absolute zero in an attempt to portray God as cold and distant and as zero or empty of all ability, etc. Those that believe in God would, on the other hand, intend it to mean that God is complete in himself, whole in himself, independent from all others, existing independent of all other causes, unlimited by any external power or control, pure, free from imperfection, perfect, supreme, the independent unrestricted, unlimited, and perfect being. All of the above are also meanings of the word absolute and would give a completely different understanding of God’s nature. Of course, it could be that you never came in contact with any believer in God so that you could enquire of him about the meaning of absolute that he would intend if he used that phrase and never looked it up in a dictionary, but may have heard of absolute zero, so that is all you had to work with. I hope that is the case because I have found that those who purposely attempt to misinterpret other’s sayings to attempt to belittle or make fun of them or their beliefs, as an attempt to discredit those beliefs so they can replace those beliefs with their own propaganda beliefs generally do so because they lack a reasonable logical argument to support their own beliefs. Your interpretation of all-knowing is also lacking. First you treat God as though he is just a man and subject to all of man’s limitations. If God created the universe, he is much more than the total of all men who have ever and will ever have lived. Before he made the universe he would plan it out and in so doing he would generate all of the information concerning it and its construction. His plans could have included the complete paths and interactions of all sub-energy, energy, and matter particles from the beginning of the universe to its end. This would give him complete knowledge of all things that would ever happen in the universe. Man might have to eliminate all that is meaningless because of his limited perspective of the universe, but since God generated it completely, he would positively know all things concerning it. He would not have to worry about any noise to eliminate. As an example, there are a multitude of possible ingredients that could be included in a recipe and those included could need to be added in certain ways and orders in order for the resulting meal to come out right. Someone who sees the meal, but does not know the recipe might have to try many things and eliminate all that don’t work until he finally has eliminated all things that don’t go in the recipe to finally get it right, but if you create the recipe, you know what goes into it and how to add all of those things in the way that makes it to come out right. You don’t even have to consider all of the other possible ingredients that are not part of the recipe (the noise). To actually know the complete recipe of how to make the universe would be a good thing for one who could contain it all without it being overwhelming to him. If he could design and build the universe, he could also contain its information. Moreover, if your concept that too much information overloads the circuits on which information depends in man, then as man increases in knowledge he would be moving toward the condition of being absolute all-knowing and the end of that pursuit would be attaining a state of knowing nothing. If man started with no knowledge and will end with no knowledge, but has presently gained some knowledge, then the process would likely start at zero, increase to some maximum amount of attained knowledge and then decrease to zero again. It would in that case be best for man to stop trying to gain any more knowledge at the maximum knowledge point to avoid losing it all. The problem is that man might not be able to determine when that point is reached, so he might lose most of it before he noticed that it was being lost. Maybe according to your theory man should immediately stop trying to gain any more knowledge in case that midpoint has already been passed. Wow, I didn’t realize how easy it is to generate nonsensical theories. Of course, I guess it is easier if you start with nonsensical premises. The real answer to the problem that you mention for man is that each person does not have to know and understand all of the information that has been obtained by man. When you have many people, each one can specialize in one area of knowledge and go deep into that narrow part of the total knowledge pie. The larger the number of people, the larger can be the total amount of obtained knowledge. Also, bigger and more powerful machines can store all of the information and retrieve the needed parts of it for man when it is required. This may not be as esthetically pleasing to a man as it would be to be able to personally know all of the obtained information, but the society as a whole can still function well and courses in basic structuring can be made available to any that desire to take them and then they can proceed to more advanced levels in areas of their interest, so it’s not that bad. There would also be the need for information combiners that would have less detailed understandings of the small specialized areas, but would be able to combine information from many of them for specific purposes, etc.
I do like your understanding that the physical need to deal with adversity is a source of character and spiritual growth or strength. You understand at least part of the reason that God allows people to suffer. I find it amazing that so many people in this world make themselves suffer greatly for many years just to try to win an Olympic medal or some other small unimportant thing in the overall scheme of things and then ask why an all-powerful and all-good God would allow people to suffer adversity, when he uses it to prepare them for eternal life in him.
There are other things that could be mentioned also, but this comment is getting large, so I will stop here.
Sincerely,
Paul B.
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Author John Brodix Merryman replied on Apr. 30, 2014 @ 19:32 GMT
Paul,
What you describe I would call an ideal, not an absolute, but you are free to ascribe whatever meaning you wish to words. In my view, absolute has to account for all, not just the good. The noise as well as the signal.
I did not in fact describe God as anything, but simply pointed out some of the conceptual issues of an absolute deity. Personally I see and tried to express a bottom up spirituality, in which it is the source of our sense of being, not any particular form, ideal or otherwise. My personal perspective on the spiritual realm, is that it is every bit as complex and deep as its biological manifestations, if not far more so. So I do not pretend to plumb the depths, just to try to make some sense of what rises to the surface.
Regards,
John
Robert de Neufville wrote on May. 1, 2014 @ 04:44 GMT
I still don't know after reading your essay how we can hack human history, John. You make a lot broad assertions about a wide range of complex philosophical and political issues, but I wasn't sure what it all added up to. Reforming the legislative process in the US certainly might be a good idea, but I don't know how dramatically it would affect the course of human history. In any case, good luck in the contest.
Best,
Robert de Neufville
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Author John Brodix Merryman replied on May. 1, 2014 @ 09:58 GMT
Robert,
Necessarily the question and the parameters of the contest does require packing a lot of context into a short piece. As I said, the essay is the abstract. The point of it, the turn in the road, which you seemed to have missed, is that we need to start treating money as a contract, not a commodity. Necessarily this does require some appreciation for how society treats contracts, versus how it treats commodities, as well as some appreciation for how the financial world operates, but since delving into the nature of these would require far more development, I hoped most readers would have some appreciation for the situation. You may wish to read
Stefan Weckbach's entry for some context on the effects of how finance operates as a giant vacuum. As it has been described, as everything from an octopus in the twenties, to a giant vampire squid today, sticking its tentacles into every aspect of life and the economy.
Regards,
John
Author John Brodix Merryman replied on May. 1, 2014 @ 10:00 GMT
Another point, which I presume you missed, is the opportunity to affect this change, the fork in the road, so to speak, will be the up coming financial crisis.
Michael Allan replied on May. 14, 2014 @ 05:51 GMT
Hi John - I tend to agree with Robert. My impression is that you neither engage nor dismiss the question of steering, but flirt with it. This doesn't so much place you off topic as erode somewhat my interest while reading. "Tell me how to steer," I want to urge, "or tell me that I can't steer, but tell me something definite."
Like Robert, I missed your plan for using "the up coming financial crisis" to change the economy, "treating money as a contract, not a commodity"; it didn't come across as a definite plan. Instead I saw your proposal for reforming the US budget process (p. 5-6), but I don't think you meant that as a full-blown steering plan. Your essay ends frankly on this point, "If others have plans..., I'm all ears." - Mike
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Paul N Butler wrote on May. 2, 2014 @ 20:35 GMT
Dear John,
Of course, as you say, you can make your own private definition of a word, but I have found that it is usually best to invent a new word or phrase if you need to communicate some new concept rather than trying to apply a new meaning to an existing word because it is less confusing to readers who may from their past experience think that you mean one of the existing meanings of...
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Dear John,
Of course, as you say, you can make your own private definition of a word, but I have found that it is usually best to invent a new word or phrase if you need to communicate some new concept rather than trying to apply a new meaning to an existing word because it is less confusing to readers who may from their past experience think that you mean one of the existing meanings of that word and thereby misunderstand what you are saying. You seem to be using the word absolute to represent all things and only all things. You also seem to believe that all things somehow cancel each other out to basically equal zero or nothing. In fact, if you look at the definition of the word absolute you see that it mainly implies the maximum extreme condition of something, not necessarily all things. You are right that zero is a maximum extreme of real quantity with infinity at the other extreme end. Of course, if you weigh and balance out zero with infinity as you describe to be needed in your paper, it doesn’t seem that zero would necessarily be the balance point between the two opposite or conflicting extremes.
To be fair, you do mention the universal state of the absolute and say that it would be a condition of overwhelmingly basic simplicity. Of course, we live in the absolute universe, we should, therefore, live in this state or condition of absolute simplicity that you mention where all conflicts are balanced out, there is neither good nor bad, up or down, inside or outside, etc. In reality things don’t work that way though. If in the universe all up’s and all down’s balanced and canceled out as you seem to be saying, we would not see any up’s or down’s in the universe, but that is not what we see. You might say that all of them cancel each other out on a complete universal scale, but don’t at the small scale that we can observe, but the full universal absolute knowledge of all up’s and down’s would not just include knowledge of the universal balance, it would also include knowledge of all of the individual up’s and down’s and the details of each one of them such as their locations in the universe and how far up or down they are, etc. The true absolute being would not only know the absolute generalization of all things, he would also know all of the details of each and every thing in existence from the smallest to the largest. After all, he would need to know all of these things in order to be able to come to the absolute conclusion that they really do balance out (that is if they really do). The universal absolute being would, therefore, not only need to know all of the balance points between the extremes of every type and the extremes of each and every thing, he would also have to know the state or condition(s) of each and every type or thing that generates those balance points. This would also all be necessary for him to be able to create the universe in the first place. Every detail about everything at all scales of all variables would have to be known including how they all relate to and interact with each other. Contrary to your belief that he would know nothing, he would actually have to know all the details of all things in order to have been able to have created the universe.
It looks to me that you began with the assumption that God does not exist in the form of an intelligent being that could plan, design, and create the universe without any real logical reason for taking that position. Once that belief is established it becomes necessary to somehow explain how the universe came into being as it is. The current problem with this concept is that observational information shows that the universe did not always exist, but had a beginning or creation and will also have an end. Various cyclical theories have been proposed, but the question remains as to what caused the beginning of the first cycle and since the end of one cycle destroys all information from that cycle, it is not possible from within any given cycle to prove that any other cycles have ever existed. Thus, it can only be considered an unprovable hypothesis or a blind faith belief. There is the problem of how the universe was generated from nothing and if something existed before it, what was it and what created that thing? Again that information is not accessible and, therefore, only another unprovable hypothesis. Moreover, it does not make much sense to believe that all of the complexity of structure that is present in the universe just happened by probability because that probability would have needed to be great enough to start from nothing and generate all things in existence at least within about the 14.5 billion years or so that man currently believes to have passed from the beginning of the universe. The size of the universe and the limited speed of light can make it difficult to envision how some complex structures could have been generated. One example is that since its formation the earth could have only made about 35 revolutions around the galaxy. Even if it and the galaxy had been formed immediately 14.5 billion years ago, it could have only made about 115 revolutions around the galaxy. This means that all of the complex structure of the outer parts of galaxies would have to have been formed in very few revolutions of the galaxy around its center.
More importantly and much harder to justify is that all of the complexity of life on this planet would have to have first begun and then to have generated all existing life forms and all forms that once existed, but have now gone extinct within 4.5 billion years, which is the belief of how old this planet is. No one knows how the first creature could have been formed without being created by an intelligent being since the universe other than living creatures, which would not have existed before the first living creature was formed, actively works to destroy complex high potential energy structures such as DNA and large Protein based molecular machines, etc. necessary to produce even simple living creatures. The probability that all of the complex structures necessary to even build a simple living creature would first be all formed in one place and then somehow be joined together in such a way as to produce a living creature before any were destroyed by entropy is just too small to be a practical belief. The biggest problem with explaining the complexity of life is that if one assumes that it is due to evolution caused by transcription errors during DNA copying with the good results being selected by natural selection, and a probability time between each positive change is chosen that is short enough so that all different living creatures could have been developed by the present time, we should be seeing major evolutionary changes taking place all around us in most current living creatures. This is because in the beginning there would have been only one creature of one type and positive changes would have to be often enough with the relatively small number of creatures that would exist in early times to produce adequate good changes to generate new types of creatures. As the number of different creatures and the number of each type of living creature increased in the earth, the rate of evolution would increase because the larger number of creatures would generate a larger number of good transcription errors. With the great multitude of many types of living creatures today (including 7 billion of man) we should be seeing large numbers of changes each year, but that doesn’t happen. A good demonstration example of this principal is atomic decay. If you look at an atom that has a 1 billion year half-life, you could expect to wait 1 billion years to have a good chance to see it decay, but if you look at 1 billion such atoms at once, you could have a good chance of seeing one atom decay per year. I have found that often only one side of a problem or a solution to a problem is looked at. Usually it is the side that supports a desired belief, but often there is another side that can show that what looks good when only looked at from the preferred side can be seen to not be practical when one looks at the whole picture. Of course, those who strongly desire to believe that there is no intelligent God who created the universe (usually because they desire to be god themselves) are still free to believe it against all probability by blind faith. I can have compassion for them because I once was an agnostic for about 22 years. My desire to know the truth about the universe compelled me to change that belief as new scientific information became available that showed it to be just too improbable that it could have arrived at its current complex, but stable state by chance happenings. The thing that finally caused me to believe in an intelligent God was that after I gained access to scientific information that no man on this planet knew about, I opened up and read some of the Christian scriptures and found that it had been recorded in the scriptures more than 2 thousand years ago. The scriptures could not have been made by man because much of the observational data that would allow some of those concepts to be thought of and developed has only come to be available to man in about the last 100 years and some is still not observationally available to man except that it is recorded in the scriptures.
For your information, a temperature of absolute zero is not actually a state of no energy or action whatsoever as you have in your paper. It is the point at which there is no molecular motion for all practical purposes, but electrons are still moving around in the molecules’ atoms (generally at their lowest energy levels) and still even going between atoms in the molecules to maintain the chemical bonds. The motions of the particles in the nucleus are still taking place and all the motions in the matter particles are still continuing. Sub-energy flow motions are also still taking place. So you can see that many actions are still going on at absolute zero. Matter can even radiate energy photons and matter particles at absolute zero. If you lower a sample of fissionable matter to absolute zero, atoms in it will still decay into lighter atoms and radiate energy photons and/or matter particles in the process. Motion is the true basic energy and as you can see there is still much motion present at absolute zero. I hope this is of help to you.
Sincerely,
Paul B.
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Author John Brodix Merryman replied on May. 3, 2014 @ 02:33 GMT
Paul,
It's late and admittedly I haven't read this with as much attention as you have put into it and it all seems basically reasonable and logical and we can debate whether an absolute state is molecularly still, or subatomically still, but what matters to me is direction. It's a fairly elemental state and complexity does seem to emerge from it in terms of opposing forces, positive and...
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Paul,
It's late and admittedly I haven't read this with as much attention as you have put into it and it all seems basically reasonable and logical and we can debate whether an absolute state is molecularly still, or subatomically still, but what matters to me is direction. It's a fairly elemental state and complexity does seem to emerge from it in terms of opposing forces, positive and negative charge. The fluctuations on the heart monitor, so to speak.
Where we seem to have the conflict would be the nature of God,
"It looks to me that you began with the assumption that God does not exist in the form of an intelligent being that could plan, design, and create the universe without any real logical reason for taking that position."
It really isn't my position that "God does not exist in the form of an intelligent being that could plan, design, and create the universe without any real logical reason for taking that position."
That could well be some essentially subjective aspect of such an absolute element of being. Even the Christian deity is a trinity. My point is that such purpose requires some sense of focus and intention and there is always a larger context from which such content is distilled. The noise out of which this signal is drawn. You go back to the Greeks and Zeus was born of Chaos. Frankly you can have whatever understanding of God you wish. I certainly was a basic monotheist, up until my mid thirties. Then one day I just had this great yawning sense that any such essence would be so far beyond any reality I could comprehend, it left me disoriented and I couldn't shake it. Eventually it took me three days to really come to terms with it and I remember standing there grazing this horse when my wife came out from the barn to tell me my father had died. You might say I took it as an omen that there was something far beyond my sense of being that was showing me some perception of the abyss. If you can explain it away and bring that old sense of inclusive nature back, hey, sounds good to me, but I've traveled a long road since then and it doesn't seem likely.
Regards,
John
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KoGuan Leo wrote on May. 3, 2014 @ 10:44 GMT
John, my conscious fellow traveler on spaceship Gaia. Welcome back with your irrepressible spirit of kindness and wholeness. As usual your essay deserved a ten(10).
Wishing your well and good health,
Leo KoGuan
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Author John Brodix Merryman replied on May. 3, 2014 @ 18:16 GMT
Leo,
Thank you very much!
I read your essay and the Dao certainly contains much wisdom, but I don't think its essence of balance can be used to propagate complete freedom from want. I think it is much better to use it to understand why we want and how these desires give us purpose, meaning and direction. If we could simply have whatever we wanted, then it would all lose meaning and value. I think what we need is knowledge that everything is its own price. To have we have to give and then there can be balance. Expansion and contraction. Up and down. Black and white. Good and bad. Pleasure and pain. All are to be understood as part of life.
Regards,
John
Thomas Howard Ray wrote on May. 4, 2014 @ 23:40 GMT
John,
It's nice after all this time to find something we agree on. I won't pick any nits. Good luck in the competition!
Best,
Tom
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Author John Brodix Merryman replied on May. 5, 2014 @ 00:48 GMT
Thanks, Tom. Best of luck as well.
It is certainly a different sort of question.
Regards,
John
Charles Gregory St Pierre wrote on May. 5, 2014 @ 05:43 GMT
Dear John,
Thank you for your essay. Your section on God, and signal and noise, reminded me of something I wrote awhile ago for one of my blogs: http://www.truthabouttheone.com/2010.10.01_arch.html (Noise, Signal and the Existence of God) I hope you will find it interesting, and I invite your comments.
About money. Clearly the debt overhang is screwing with the modern economy. But what is it? It is the wealthy's claim on the rest of us. And as long as we accede to it, we, and they, are screwed.
Money is often confused as being a store of value. While to an individual it may by, (it makes sense for an individual to save,) to a society it has no value. It is useless, and that is its value! (This is why fiat currency is more useful than a currency based on precious metal.) It
is just keeping score. Thus, while an individual can save money for the future, it is pointless for a society to do so. (Except perhaps as demand on another society, as eg China and the US. ) It can only save resources, and that by conservation or capitalizing in them ( eg soil preservation, replanting forests, renewable energy, etc.)
The problem (as I think you mention) is the oversupply of (real) capital, which must produce a surplus to maintain itself. This would be OK were humanity to have an infinite planet. It does not. Therefore there is a point where real capital cannot grow at the same rate as financial capital. This is Thomas Piketty's thesis, although, from what I understand, he merely predicts gloom, (the rise of oligarchy, and the descent of the rest of us,) and not doom.
Best of luck,
Charles Gregory St Pierre
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Author John Brodix Merryman replied on May. 5, 2014 @ 16:59 GMT
Charles,
That is why I emphasize the need to think of it as a contract, rather than a commodity. Not only people, but obviously society as a whole is guided by basic conceptual models and it behooves the banks and the government for people to think of money as some form of real value, rather than just one side of a promise. Sort of like it behooves the fisherman, for the fish to think the worm is tasty.
It is they who are creating this opportunity for real change, since it is they who are sacrificing the strength of the currency to save a bunch of over-leveraged banks.
These are their strings of control. Even security forces need a relatively stable form of exchange in order to function. It is as though they were shortchanging the structural integrity of a sky scraper in order to make the penthouse more extravagant.
I do feel this is not simply a matter of hubris on the part of a few, but the culmination of some deep cultural issues, of which what I wrote only begins to scrape the surface.
Paul N Butler wrote on May. 5, 2014 @ 05:55 GMT
Dear John,
Sorry to hear about your loss of your father when you were earlier in life than happens to many. Was your monotheist background Christian or some other? Was your father’s the same as yours? We both share something that I have found to be very common among those who either leave or distance themselves from God. It usually happens due to some traumatic or very negative...
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Dear John,
Sorry to hear about your loss of your father when you were earlier in life than happens to many. Was your monotheist background Christian or some other? Was your father’s the same as yours? We both share something that I have found to be very common among those who either leave or distance themselves from God. It usually happens due to some traumatic or very negative experience. In my case I went to a parochial school that taught about God, but did not actually have the students read the scriptures. As a result I had been told that if I had a need, I should pray to God and he would help me. I assumed that meant he would give me what I asked for. I was only about 9 or 10 years old at that time, so I didn’t think to try to read the scriptures by myself. When my parents got separated it was a very traumatic experience to me, so I prayed to God and asked him to bring them back together again. They actually did come back together for about a year during which my youngest brother was born, but then they got divorced, and even though I asked God to bring them together again he didn’t do it. This caused me to doubt whether he existed or not. Looking back it seems like it would have been best to go to the scriptures and read them for evidence of God’s existence, but that did not come to my mind at that time. Instead I went to science because I had always wanted to know how the world worked and I thought that I could look for evidence of God’s existence there. In science it was the time of the steady state universe belief and living cells were considered to be bags containing protoplasm and cytoplasm and some strange unknown life force. If the universe always existed and life was that simple, it seemed that evolution (which was then as is now the popular belief of how all living creatures came into existence) made sense, so I tended to believe it.
As science advanced over the years and it became apparent that the universe had a beginning and was, therefore, created and living creatures were extremely complicated in structure, evolution made much less sense. During that time I gained access to scientific information that was not known by man that explains things like the causes for the various outcomes that are generated by matter particle interactions and explains the specific cause for the specific probability that each outcome will occur as it does, etc. This required that the universe would be structured in certain ways. By that time there had been adequate advancement in particle physics so that when I looked to see if that structure was evident I found that the available observational data supported that structure as existing. I found it interesting that man had completely ignored it.
That brings me to the second thing we share. I have noticed that the age range of 30 to 35 seems to be a period when people either leave or come to God in larger numbers than at other ages, at least in my experience. I was about 33 years old when I decided one night that it would be interesting to read some of the scriptures to see if they made any sense. I opened them to the last book because I had found that the end of a book often gives a good idea of what the book is about. I read the book of the Revelation of Jesus Christ and to my surprise the structure of the universe that I had found to be necessary to explain things was already recorded in the scriptures. Next I started to read them from the beginning and found the same thing in the beginning of the book of Genesis. I could have considered it just a coincidence, but it looked too much like God had slowly prepared me over the years and gave me the information just at the time that the experimental observational data was there to support it and then he led me to open and read the scriptures just at the right time when I had gained and confirmed the information that would allow me to see and understand these things to show me that he exists and has the power and ability to make all these things work together with perfect timing. That plus the fact that the scriptures had been written over 2 thousand years earlier proved to me that they could not have been created by man because at that time man had none of the scientific information to allow anyone to be able to know of these structural details of the universe. Since then as I have read the complete scriptures, I have found much other information about things in this world and our lives in it about which science has only recently found the confirmation of their positive aspects, such as the use of olive oil, which has been recently found to have a good cholesterol balance of HDL to LDL compared to most of the oils that are currently most used by man for food production. Another example is the mention that in the beginning man was given to eat the fruits of tress and their nuts and again recent scientific findings show many benefits of eating these foods, etc. God tells us how we should live our lives in respect to him and others and recent scientific findings have shown that those who follow these ways tend to live longer, healthier, and happier lives than those who don’t.
Although all of these things and others make for many confirmations that the scriptures were not created by man because man did not possess the supporting information at the time they were written, what I find most interesting is that in them God tells us why he made the universe and what part we have in his creation. It turns out that God is a Spirit and he is making a body for himself to live in. He made this creation to be the place where he is making his body. It is his body manufacturing plant, so to speak. His body is to fulfill all that he desires of it and is being made to last without end, so it is important to him that it be made to be perfect in all aspects. We have been given by him the ability to choose one of two possible overall choices that determines our place in his creation. We can either chose him in the way that he has provided for us to do in which case we are made to be members or parts of his body or choose someone or something else in which case he uses those who make this choice as part of the machinery he uses to produce his body members. Of course, once his body members have all been made, he will have no more need or use for this creation or the machinery that is part of it that was used to produce that body, so all of his motion that he used to make it will be reclaimed by him and it will thus be destroyed in the process. His body members, on the other hand, will be transferred to a new and better permanent creation and he will eternally live in them there.
Most other religions that I have looked at treat God as an impersonal and usually unintelligent force, as a vindictive dictator for whom man must continually sacrifice, or as a weak and desperate being who created us only so he could become man’s servant or slave to give man anything that he desires and expects nothing from man in return. I find these concepts of God unrealistic and based on man’s weaknesses and imperfections. Those who believe in a force type of God usually think that man will somehow learn to use that force and that man will essentially then become God. These people actually think of the one who created the universe as something less than a man to be controlled and used by man. Those who think of God as an evil dictator also think of God as if he was just a man and they realize that if a man had the power to create the universe and them, he would surely use that power to mistreat those under him in power. Those who think of God as their servant also desire to Be God themselves. They desire to completely reverse the relationship that God as our creator actually deserves. Only in the Christian scriptures is God shown to be an intelligent being who made this universe and us in it for his own reasonable and rational purpose, but his purpose shows that he loves man enough to create him and take the long period of time with man that is necessary to prepare him to become his perfect eternal body. Although it is not a perfect image because we are not perfect, the closest image that we have to this is the relationship that our spirit has with our own body. Our spirit generates all of our intents or purposes that we desire to fulfill. It will generally not have an intent that would be harmful to our body, but those that will be good for and pleasurable to both our spirit and our body. When our body members have needs they either send out signals to other body parts to directly fulfill them or send them out to our spirit through our soul which generates thoughts that our spirit can understand and then our spirit generates an intent to fulfill that need and sends it to our soul where thoughts are generated that our body members can understand. These thoughts are sent to our body members that can generate that which is necessary to fulfill the needs and those that can transport that which is needed to the member(s) that need it. Those body members then take care of the need. The body members give to each other according to the needs of each part and according to the thoughts sent to them by the soul. The soul sits in the middle as the mediator between the body and the spirit. It translates the messages from the body and sends the result to the spirit and it translates the messages from the spirit and sends them to the body. This is an image in the world that God has given us of our relationship with him. God is the Spirit, Christ Jesus is the mediator between God and man and man is his body. The reason that we are not perfect images of God is that in this world where God is teaching us how we are to behave so that we can all live together without end and not destroy one another and so that our lives can be joyful and fulfilling for all of us and also for God, he gives us examples of what happens when we behave contrary to what he teaches us. We, therefor, have examples like cancer, etc. that show what happens when body members either don’t do what they need to do or try to take more than they need for themselves at the expense of other members, etc. He also gives us examples of what it would be like if he were to not love us as he does and instead would treat us badly or destroy us, such as body mutilations and suicide, etc. These examples generally are not pleasant to us, but are necessary in this life so we can see and learn why God asks us to do the things that he does and so we can fully realize just how bad the result would be if we don’t do according to his will, since his will is what will work to allow us all to have life and have it more abundantly in continual love for one another without end in the world to come after this world is destroyed. This is just a short summary and there is so much to understand and I would like to keep going, but I don’t want to give too much at a time because I have found in my life that if I receive too much all at once, I tend to lose concentration and then miss much of what is given, so I will stop for now. If there are any special questions or things that you need answered let me know and I will try to answer them. I don’t claim to know everything myself yet though.
Sincerely,
Paul B.
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Author John Brodix Merryman replied on May. 5, 2014 @ 17:23 GMT
Paul,
Why do you tell me I'm 'leaving God,' just because I view it from a somewhat different perspective?
You seem to have some very basic boxes and if someone doesn't fit in one, then they must be in the other.
I do come from a very old Christian tradition and personally I view your description of God as a bit of a cul de sac version. Its comfortable and comforting, but is...
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Paul,
Why do you tell me I'm 'leaving God,' just because I view it from a somewhat different perspective?
You seem to have some very basic boxes and if someone doesn't fit in one, then they must be in the other.
I do come from a very old
Christian tradition and personally I view your description of God as a bit of a cul de sac version. Its comfortable and comforting, but is really just centered around itself. Personally I grew up as a younger child in a large
farm family and learned at an early age that I wasn't the center of anything. The idea of praying to God for anything never occurred to me because if he was in charge of everything, he didn't need to worry about me and since I had a brain, I could certainly figure out what I had to do. Growing up it seemed whenever I tried figuring out anything, it would invariably happen in some way directly opposed to my desires, so I found it worked best to tune out my own ego, after a fair amount of rebellion as a child, and just go with the flow.
To me, life is not about objects, individuals, entities, etc, but more about processes. The nodes and the network might be two sides of the coin, but the network interests me more. So, like animals, I tend to think as a function of energies, electricity, direction, velocity, interactions, rhythms. Words, concepts, models, etc. are just abstractions of these and mostly serve to process them in a broader sense. So to me, any entity is simply the connection between its content and its context. I ride a horse as though it were a tool for feeling the ground and the ground as feedback of the horse. My mind does not exist in its own bubble, with what is outside obscured by what I project, because what's outside can get me hurt and I want to see as clearly as possible.
Which all goes to say that I don't see my views as naive, or misinformed and that some television preacher version of religion is going to save me, if I just buy the plastic Jesus. There is good and there is bad and they go in cycles. We all want to have just the good, but it's only part of the puzzle and cannot exist alone.
Regards,
John
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Peter Jackson wrote on May. 5, 2014 @ 17:08 GMT
John,
Not quite what I expected from you, a nice original approach, though I don't think you overdid the 'ruffling of feathers' at all. And I don't recall a single mention of time!
I agree the recent crisis has been a salutary reminder of what 'money' actually is and isn't. I think it was a lesson people wont forget for possibly many months! Are thing, and bankers and politicians, really going to fundamentally change. I fear not. I think we need to look elsewhere for that quantum leap into the 21st century. Then when we HAVE caught up we can do another one! - but I agree, it's whether it's in the right direction that matters.
I did greatly enjoy the read as a lovely change from idealist subject matter and theorising. Needless to say I shall afford it the consummate remuneration contract, but avoiding empty promisory notes.
I hope mine is suitably pitched for you as you were my 'ideal' target audience in making QM causal and understandable. Your comment; "While we progress linearly, nature responds non-linearly." is profound and at it's heart. Few realise the import of the emergent unifying of classic and quantum physics. We've been in an ever deepening theoretical rut for ~100 years. But of course It'll be ignored, again.
There is not one branch of science that won't benefit massively from the ensuing improved understanding of nature and the universe. And ZERO walls and guns! Did you read the new Cyclic evolution paper; applying the same simple mechanism. If not then perhaps after the eye aching essay reading.
Very best wishes. Hold on to your C of G while she bucks.
Peter
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Author John Brodix Merryman replied on May. 5, 2014 @ 17:35 GMT
Peter,
Thank you very much. I did try to read your paper, but my math talents are limited to basics. Personally I do sense my reality is far more quantum, than classical, since I long realized anything presumably objective was usually just someone else's perspective.
You did miss my slipping time in there, as the effect of energy creating and dissolving information.
As for change, I'm a firm believer in Gould's model of punctuated equilibrium and there are quite a few financial, social, cultural and yes, even scientific/physics paradigms under quite a lot of pressure and while they may seem impregnable now, that is just Lisbon before the earthquake. When the system starts to crack, I think you will find that it is the bumper sticker sort of answers, not the dense, academic ones, which garner more attention. Just assuming the basic physical processes here will operate as usual.
Regards,
John
Peter Jackson replied on May. 6, 2014 @ 20:41 GMT
John,
Maths!! Who put 'maths' in there?, I assure you it wasn't me! Where did you find that? Mines just the one with pretty pictures.
To explain it in a nutshell; Spin a basketball on your finger. Now, is the middle bit ('equator') moving at the same speed as the bit near your finger?
I think you know it's 'moving' (on it's rotational path) much faster.
Well that's IT! It's fundamental dynamic really is that simple. Because the ball is curved, the change of speed away from your finger in non linear. Then finally, if you look down from the top, whichever way it spins on you finger (say clockwise) look down from the top and its spinning the opposite way.
In that short paragraph the whole of the quantum nonsense and illusion is taken apart, because the findings are what Bell said could NOT be found 'classically'. Can you believe that?! Bohr made the assumption that if you cut the baseball in half then both the bottom AND the top of the half you're left with would spin the same way! (i.e. both clockwise!!) No wonder the whole of physics is divided and theory has been in a 100 year rut.
The problem is Bells theorem is too deeply indoctribedded so if shown to be wrong they all run screaming with hands over ears and eyes. How do we overcome that? What we need is a description that the JM's of this world can understand. We need your help how to achieve that. (I hope you have a basketball!)?
Best wishes
Peter
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Author John Brodix Merryman replied on May. 6, 2014 @ 21:42 GMT
Peter,
I don't doubt there is a solution to the puzzle in there, fairly close to the surface, but having been vaguely following the Joy Christian thread these last few months and years, the problem seems almost more political, than theoretical. In which case, it isn't the observers like me that need convincing that factors are being overlooked, but the other side of the debate. When I hit a problem which seems insoluble, I just tend to switch to another problem, since the world is full of conundrums. Especially when the one in question has become a cage match. You and the rest don't care for my observations about time and that's certainly your prerogative, but the nature of time is a problem for physics, as witness the first contest and many of the threads, yet no one wants to turn that basketball over and see if it makes more sense spinning the other way.
As it is, How does resolving the issue of non-locality versus overlooked factors answer the question of how humanity can be maneuvered through its many impending crises? We look quite likely to have a global collapse, before we even get back to the moon, let alone any notions of real space travel.
Regards,
John
Neil Bates wrote on May. 8, 2014 @ 01:22 GMT
John,
I see that you too appreciate that we must first ask about the nature of things and not just pose suggestions in a vacuum. It is true that energy and information are related: just consider the Shannon entropy, and the various attempts to correlated gravity to entropy etc, and the connection of information/gravity/thermodynamics in the black hole information paradox. Thermodynamics...
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John,
I see that you too appreciate that we must first ask about the nature of things and not just pose suggestions in a vacuum. It is true that energy and information are related: just consider the Shannon entropy, and the various attempts to correlated gravity to entropy etc, and the connection of information/gravity/thermodynamics in the black hole information paradox. Thermodynamics seems more and more analogous to more and more things, something Prigogine got started with an idea of entropty being more fundamental than a mere derivative of classical ensemble statistics. We can go back to Erwin Schrödinger and "negentropy" (or "syntropy") in his 1944 popular-science book
What is Life? But it is all controversial and unclear, not yet a "well developed theory."
Your pinballing around is somewhat like my
own . Your speculation about God and the fundamental nature of consciousness reminds me of my own proposal that consciousness (the basic feeling of existence) derives from the fundamentals of existence rather than complex cognitive appreciations. I think you noticed that yourself, implied in your comments (I appreciate your interest.) You wrote:
So if God is in charge, she apparently doesn't want to know everything. Possibly a more reasonable theological proposition is the spiritual absolute would be the essence of awareness and beingness, from which we rise, not an ideal form from which we fell. In a sense, a spiritual energy, rather than the intellectual forms it manifests.That is very similar to my stating as follows:
...Well, suppose that a mind really works like a computer. That means, all it does is describable in terms of math. If that is so, then its operations don't depend on whether MUH [Tegmark's Mathematical Universe Hypothesis - math abstractions are literally all that exist, there is no "
esse" fleshing out some possible model worlds, and not others]
is true or not. All your brain could know is the abstractions represented by its computational activity. The same computations happen anyway in either a purely abstract sense, or in a world that is "made of math", as would happen in a special material world. Mathematics is defined and operates only on its own ideals, even though it seems to us to represent "realness" and not just pure form. Hence there would be no way for your brain to detect its substantive existence in a material world that was not just an abstract model world. ...
If we know that we and our world are "really real" and not just mathematical structures, our minds must intimately connect to the ground of being that constitutes the universe. Otherwise, brain processes would not be able to access that fundamental fact and reality - they would operate "above" (perhaps "below" is a better metaphor) that level and not be able to have awareness of it. That means that consciousness and "being" are the same essence, as the great mystics have experienced. Sentio ergo sum - I feel, therefore I am.(In other words, "the essence of awareness and beingness" are indeed
the same and not a dichotomy, and at heart expressed as "spiritual energy" rather than "intellectual forms.")
As for practical proposals, I agree that we need to re assess and reform our monetary system. It's just too precarious and bubble-prone. Money is surely the sociological expression of something which is both data and "work performing" as a dynamic enabler. You have some ideas in that vein worth considering, have you compared notes with Stefan Weckbach and Harlan Swyers?
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Author John Brodix Merryman replied on May. 8, 2014 @ 02:48 GMT
Neil,
I have to first admit to being a skeptic about our current astronomic models. My view is that we will eventually find redshift to be an optical effect and that many of the loose ends will come together and the various patches, from inflation to dark energy, will fall away.
As I see it, it is a convection cycle of expanding radiation and collapsing mass and that is why the...
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Neil,
I have to first admit to being a skeptic about our current astronomic models. My view is that we will eventually find redshift to be an optical effect and that many of the loose ends will come together and the various patches, from inflation to dark energy, will fall away.
As I see it, it is a convection cycle of expanding radiation and collapsing mass and that is why the curvature of each balances the other, leaving overall flat space. We know mass breaks down and sheds energy and since the volume of a given amount of mass is less then its constituent energy, the result is pressure. So if we look at the opposite side of the cycle and consider that such energy/radiation does coalesce into mass, the resulting geometric and spatial effect would be a vacuum. This would make gravity, not a specific force, or effect of mass, but a cumulative effect of how energy coalesces into and is absorbed by mass, as well as mass contracting and organizing into ever more dense forms. Obviously there are gaps in this concept, but there are lots of gaps in current theory and they are patched with some highly speculative propositions.
In a sense then, thermodynamics is elemental. Even the base state of background radiation(which I suspect is actually light from ever more distant sources that has been shifted off the visible spectrum.) and vacuum fluctuation would be described as thermal mediums and only have a temporal effect on the scale of specific frequencies.
One of my other points is that since we are single points of perception, we experience time as a sequence of events and so think of it as the point of the present moving from past to future, but the essential reality is that the changing configuration of the physical turns future into past. It is like seeing the sun move overhead, but its the ground moving the other way. Tomorrow becomes yesterday because the world turns. This makes time more like temperature than space.
Time is to temperature what frequency is to amplitude. With temperature we think of the collective effect, yet it consists of a multitude of individual velocities/amplitudes, but with time we think of those individual changes and measure their frequency, but cannot decern the measure of the universal rate of change. That is because, just like with temperature, it is a cumulative effect of those many actions.
I only hinted at this, in this contest, because I'm a little repetitive on the subject on FQXI forums, though I do think it is an important overlooked point.
I certainly do pinball around, but it is a very broad topic and I'm trying to aim for one of those high point holes, of trying to tie a lot together.
From your essay, "We can only steer the future if we can better steer our own selves, and we will only passionately care if we think we are truly alive."
The problem is that elemental sense of being seems to be more than just awareness, but it tends to have to project itself and so seems like a form of energy and this often acts like physical energy. Personally I work with race horses and find dealing with both animals and people that I get a much better read of them, if I simply consider their consciousness as energy fields, rather than thought processes. Much more a thermodynamic spirituality, than a linear thought process. Then they are vectors as a matter of will and singular expression. Otherwise more like a bubbling pot of complex interactions and contrasting elements.
Now I'm really starting to pinball around in my own pot...
I stuck a post on
Peter Jackson's thread, May. 6, 2014 @ 23:43, that goes into this more deeply, as I should be going off to bed and putting the mind back in order.
Regards,
John
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Paul N Butler wrote on May. 8, 2014 @ 04:51 GMT
Dear John,
When you said “one day I just had this great yawning sense that any such essence would be so far beyond any reality I could comprehend, it left me disoriented and I couldn't shake it. I thought you were saying that you thought God was so beyond your comprehension and disconnected from your reality that you felt disconnected or distant from him in your relationship with him and...
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Dear John,
When you said “one day I just had this great yawning sense that any such essence would be so far beyond any reality I could comprehend, it left me disoriented and I couldn't shake it. I thought you were saying that you thought God was so beyond your comprehension and disconnected from your reality that you felt disconnected or distant from him in your relationship with him and that was somehow different from how you felt before that time. I may have misinterpreted that, however.
You are right I do have some basic boxes that separate some from others, but they are not boxes that I created. They are the boxes that God created. As an example, God has set up the choices we must make and the things we must do to become members of his body and be joined to him to have the close relationship with him where he shows us what he is doing and helps us to do likewise to please him and so we can actively grow in our knowledge of him and what he is doing in this world and why he is doing it that brings us into agreement with him as we more and more see his love and care for us, so we then learn how to love him and others also and have a desire to help others to also get that relationship. God explains these boxes in the scriptures (Holy Bible New Testament). As an example, no one can come to God the Father except by his son Jesus Christ and to be saved (become a member of God’s body) it is necessary to receive and believe in Christ (Must believe that The Father sent him into the world to die for us so that we could have our sins forgiven and be reconciled and restored to a good relationship with God and that he did die for us and was buried and later resurrected as a witness to us that God the Father actually sent him and that he has the power to also raise us up and he was then received up to God to dwell with him until his enemies are brought down to earth.) (Must repent from our sins and ask God to forgive them and believe that they are forgiven.) (Must receive him as our Lord and Savior and believe that his words are actually God the Father’s words that he gave through his son Jesus Christ.), etc.
God is the one who is the true center of all things because he made all things and existed before all other things. He does, however, tell us about his body, so he does put us in the center of the conversation in some places in the scriptures. I can’t claim to be very important among the members of his body. I am sure that many others have been given more important positions in the body than I will likely have. So far it seems that I mostly get the hard cases to deal with, but that may be because I was one of them. If I have a ministry it is to those in the scientific community because of the information that God has given to me in that area, but a large percentage of that community is currently devoted atheists or those who believe that they are God or will somehow evolve to be God, etc. For the most part very few have even understood and accepted any of the scientific information that has been presented, which could result in great advancements for man and these things are very much based on observations that could be checked out. All that is necessary is to develop the math to support it. How much harder would it be to convince those who have committed much of their lives to developing quantum physics based theories and evolution based concepts to explain creation and the development of living creatures, etc. that God exists and made all things. So I am not likely to be one of those who convert thousands to God in a day or anything like that. If I work for many years and only one is saved by all that labor, I would consider it time well spent, however. Of course, I would like to believe that many will see and receive and believe and be saved and also that the scientific principles that are presented will be received and put to use by man in the right way so as to make life better for all those who are still living here in this world. In the long run it is up to God how he uses me in those respects and others, however. I have come to the conclusion that the work that God gives us to do, such as teaching the Gospel to others, is as much if not more for our learning and growth as it is for those who are taught by us. After all, God could certainly do a better job of it himself, if he desired to do so. He often uses our interactions with others to show us things about him and his works. As an example, in my conversation with you I mentioned that my parents were divorced and I also talked about how important it is to God that his body be perfect (lacking nothing), but I didn’t tell you that the reason that my parents got divorced was mostly due to money problems. My father worked switching cars for the railroad and made good money at it. Then he got his hand caught between two cars and it had to be cut off. After that he got a job in a cement plant that paid less, but it was still enough for us to get by on. Then he got a finger on his other hand caught in a machine and lost it. After that he could only get a job as a night watchman and could not make enough for us to keep up with our bills. I had never thought of it before, but it all came together to me when I was writing my previous comment to you that God was showing me, by my actually having to live through it, how important even a small loss of a part of the body is. The hand is not the most important part of the body, but it made the difference between a good life and a just getting by life. The loss of that one more finger, which is even a smaller body part made the difference between getting by and suffering from lack of necessary things. I have seen that many times God uses things that happen to us in life to instruct us about him and what he is doing and why he is doing it and what he wants us to do, etc. To me it shows his control over the creation. He allowed things to happen to me when I was young that were not pleasant to me at the time knowing that I would not understand them at that time, so I would go through the whole process of questioning his existence and searching for that answer. Then he showed me both sides of the argument and gave me the information that I needed to make the proper decision. Next he allowed me to read the scriptures and see that information already recorded in his scriptures over two thousand years earlier to finally convince me of his existence. Then he showed me why he created the universe and what my part is in it in the scriptures. One of the things he gives us to do while we are still in this world is to preach the Gospel to others. In the process of that preaching he shows me things that he has done in my life and what they were done for as noted above. All of these things and many more that he has done, show me God’s power to work all of these things together over thousands of years and bring them all together at the right times to accomplish reaching out to me to give me knowledge of him and slowly bring me to him as that knowledge worked in me to allow me to see his love for me that he would do all of these things for me. Of course, I have seen these types of things worked in the lives of others also so, I can’t claim that God’s love is only for me, but is for all that seek him and truly desire to know him enough to take the time to search him out in the scriptures. There are also many things built into the structure of the creation and into each of our lives that also show us many things about him if we take the time to observe them. It shows God’s great power in that he can work all of these kinds of things in the lives of each of us to teach us about him and what he has made us for and to demonstrate his love for us. It is true that God knows what we will ask him before we actually ask him, but at the same time he says ask and you shall receive. He desires to have a loving relationship with each of us and coming to him and asking things in prayer to him is just the beginning of that relationship. As that relationship grows and there is a real desire in us to truly know him and to be pleasing to him we begin to ask him to show us what he is doing and when he shows us we begin to act in accordance with what he is doing. The relationship progresses from asking him for things to please us to asking him to use us to please him as our love for him grows. The end result is him and us all working together as one, which is what a spirit and its body are meant to do. This world is the beginning preparation for that end result in the world to come. It will continue in the thousand year reign of Christ later in this world. Then we will be ready for the fullness of that relationship in the world to come. You are right that God does not need to worry about you or any of us for that matter, which to me all the more shows us his love for us in that he does worry and care for each of us even when we rebel or sin against him. He didn’t wait for all of us to repent or turn away from sinning before he sent his son into the world to die for us so we could be saved and live. He did that when we were still sinning to show his love and caring for us. You must be extremely intelligent and in complete control of all of your actions to always figure out what you had to do and always do it. I have found that I often don’t know what to do in many situations in life and need help to gain that knowledge. This meant that before I knew God I often did the wrong thing. I am not just talking about doing things that are wrong or evil in God’s sight, although I sometimes did so, but I am also talking about making choices that resulted in things not giving me the results that I desired even in things that God does not say that what I did was wrong. Of course, before I had read the scriptures I did not even know whether the things that I did were against God’s will for me to do or not. It sounds to me like you had some of the same kinds of results. There are a couple of things that I have observed both in myself and also in others concerning things working for us. When God first showed himself to me in the scriptures I went through a time when things did not go very well. I am not sure whether it was meant as a time of trial for me to see if I would continue with him or whether it was Satan tempting me to try to keep me from going to God (That happened to Jesus after he was baptized to begin his ministry), but If one continues with God this time passes. The next problem that I had was that after I had read the scriptures and knew God’s will, I tried to do according to his will and not sin. Every time I thought that I had finally overcome sin, though, it seemed that I was tempted in some way and always failed and did the wrong thing. This was very frustrating to me until God gave me understanding of the places in the scriptures that say that God promises to come into me and dwell in me and make me perfect and raise up my mortal body to do his will. I found that the problem was that I had taken that on to do it myself, but it is not something that I can do myself. I have since found that God can do it though so, you are right that when we give up on the idea that we are going to do things and go with the flow of letting God show us what to do and then doing it with him doing it through us, things work much better and life is much easier and more pleasant also.
God has given each of us specific gifts of abilities and ways of looking at the world so, I have come to accept that I am sometimes limited in some ways compared to some others and also some others are sometimes limited compared to me. It is not that one is better than the other it is just that God has different things for each of us to do that, therefore, require different skills than others. I have always desired to know everything as completely as I can (my wife says that I always have to do everything the hard way), so I desire to understand both the network and the nodes. I have found that you really can’t separate the nodes from the network because we live in a world of nested networks. The nodes are generally just composed of smaller level networks and the nodes in that smaller level network are usually just still smaller level networks, etc. As an example, in your example the nodes would be you, the horse, and the ground and the network would be the paths and the motions that are transferred from the ground to the horse and then to you over those paths due to the interactions involved. But if you look at one of the nodes, let’s say yourself, you find that you are another network composed of nodes of various organs that are connected to each other over the various network paths in your body. If you look at one of those nodes such as your heart, you find that it again is a network of cells that are connected together over their network paths. Again, if you look at a cell which is a node in that network, you find that it is another network composed of nodes of small protein based machines and memory storage devices such as DNA, etc. networked together. There are still lower level networks with the lowest level being composed of basic motions, but I’m sure you get the idea. This hierarchical structure in which subassemblies often perform functions that are abstract to the overall function of the system are signs of an intelligent source of the structure. Man’s devices often exhibit this type of structure. I don’t ride horses very much, but if I did I would want to feel the motions of the particles in the ground transferred all the way up through all of those networks in the ground to the horse and through all of the networks in the horse to me and then through all of the networks in me to the place in me that gives me the feeling of it. That is when my mind is freed from the bubble when it is all there to see including all those things that can hurt and all of the paths to avoid them.
You are right that some television preacher’s version of religion can’t save you unless it is also God’s version. I wouldn’t buy the plastic Jesus. It can’t save you and God doesn’t like idol worship. It is always best to go to the source to get what you need to be saved and have life and have it more abundantly. I always, therefore, recommend going directly to the scriptures to get the information directly from God. God tells us that comparing ourselves among ourselves is unwise so, if we desire to compare ourselves with someone else it should be with God and compared to God we are all naïve and misinformed. Any small variations between any one of us and another one are, therefore, insignificant and unimportant. He does say though that in the world to come we will know even as we are known, so there is hope. God created evil and made us subject to it in this world so, we would learn just how bad and destructive it is and how dependent we are on him to make us to be able to do good and not evil. This is part of our instruction in this world to make us ready for the world to come. There will be no evil in the world to come because we will have learned to overcome it because God will live in us and we will live in him as one. The concept that there must always be both good and evil primarily comes from some eastern religions and is an error. The concept that when there are two opposite possibilities they must somehow both exist together in balance or shift back and forth between the extremes in cycles is not universally valid. As an example, there is matter and its opposite antimatter, but our world is composed of matter and we don’t see it shifting back and forth between being composed of matter and antimatter either. I hope I can be of help to you in some small way in your preparation. As I mentioned above God has already used our conversation to give me an understanding of why I had to go through some unpleasant experiences when I was young. That kind of thing is not uncommon at least to me when sharing things concerning God with others. It is all part of the training experience.
Sincerely,
Paul B.
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Author John Brodix Merryman replied on May. 8, 2014 @ 09:57 GMT
Paul,
I'm just not a centrist. When lots of people are headed in one direction, I tend to hang back, or actively go in the other direction. While I realize groups need that center point and common narrative to function as societies, which is why religion is at the center of all societies, I simply prefer to live on the fringe. Not too far in and not to far out. What falls all the way in simply becomes ever more dense, focused, uncompromising etc. Life, on the other had, isn't at the center. We are not at the center of the galaxy, or at the center of the solar system, or at the center of the earth. We are at that plane about in the middle. Not too far in and not too far out.
Unless groups are balanced by what's outside them, or other groups, etc. and everything really does start falling into the center, it becomes very totalitarian and eventually, when all the bodies start piling up, messy.
What I like about Christianity is the trinity. Christ is the balance between God the father at the center and what comes next, out there, the future, etc. in the function of the Holy Ghost.
People make up these models to explain very fundamental principles to the laity, who like to think in stories, not theories, but I'm someone who doesn't need stories, I can handle the abstractions, even though their manifestation is as us living organisms. That's why I spend my spare time on physics forums, not religious ones.
Regards,
John
Jonathan J. Dickau wrote on May. 11, 2014 @ 13:19 GMT
Hello John,
Thanks for the thoughtful pieces you have dropped me links to. I just wanted you to know I am paying attention and attempting to take in everything offered, but I may not have time for detailed comments if I am in 'receive' mode for long periods of time. Also, there is that thing called life which beckons my participation. A group of about two dozen awaits me now.
I will respond to all the input I can.
All the Best,
Jonathan
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Author John Brodix Merryman replied on May. 11, 2014 @ 17:54 GMT
Joanathan,
Not a problem. I happened across them and they seemed to fit in with your basic thesis.
Regards,
John
Author John Brodix Merryman replied on May. 11, 2014 @ 17:55 GMT
Jonathan. My thinking and typing work at different speeds.
Gbenga Michael Ogungbuyi wrote on May. 11, 2014 @ 21:02 GMT
Dear John,
Your essay is short but touches a variety of subjects. You have quite a lot of philosophical quotes. I see a lot of attention on energy on your essay, until I hit “energy can be conserved”.
I have rated you. I also employ you to read my article on STRIKING A BALANCE BETWEEN TECHNOLOGY AND ECOSYTEM using this direct link http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/2020
I anticipate your comment and rating
Wishing you the best in this competition and your future endeavor
Regards
Gbenga
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Author John Brodix Merryman replied on May. 12, 2014 @ 01:10 GMT
Gbenga,
I did read your and I like your general approach and your determination. I have problems with your writing and your conclusions. This is just my personal opinion, but based on my years of reading and an attention span that has been lost to all the information of the internet, but you make way to much use of examples and other points. You need to take the information and focus it like a light beam on a singular and pointed conclusion. It is good to see others in this discussion who realize the possible solutions to our problems are not just marching onto higher levels of technology, but a strong need to go back and review what our underlaying premises are.
I'm usually against vote trading, but since I do like your general approach, I'll score it well, but not the highest, because it doesn't have as strong a focus as necessary.
Regards,
John
Gbenga Michael Ogungbuyi replied on May. 12, 2014 @ 22:40 GMT
Dear John,
First, why did you choose to discuss my article on your wall? If others had followed your path, I am sure your thread will be empty by now! The culture is- respond to comment as posted on your wall if you feel so, and if otherwise it is not a crime. There are more than 150 essays in this forum and it may be a little tasking in reading essay you have already commented on while other have not even been read at all. All essays authored in this forum are equally important.
Your comment however is not a reflection of what is in my article! You have a style of writing, and then I have decided to use my own unique style to discuss the theme of the essay. It is not possible to compel me to adjust to your style. Remember it is the quality of your content that make a good article and not the philosophy of writing! Let's leave the stylish thing to the ultimate judge.
About rating! The choice is yours. I have rated so many essays in this forum including yours because I wish them good. It is my philosophy just to help other succeed. I only requested you to read, comment and rate. I do not need to beg you to rate my essay. The comments about your essay pasted earlier are just my philosophy.
If you still choose to discuss my MY OWN ESSAY on your thread, please be kindly informed that it will not be recognized!!!!!!
Regards
Gbenga
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Gbenga Michael Ogungbuyi replied on May. 13, 2014 @ 21:31 GMT
Dear John,
Thanks for your explanations. I was not offended. Really, this platform has brought a combination of diverse backgrounds together. But we can continue to learn from one another especially on the subject of the theme that has united us together. The liveliness of this forum is in our diversities.
Thanks so much. You are great! All the best!
Best regards
Gbenga
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Jonathan J. Dickau wrote on May. 12, 2014 @ 20:30 GMT
Hi John,
I got to thinking about your essay while practicing to sing "Comfort Ye" from Handel's Messiah (whose lyric is from Isaiah). The language is kind of odd, by modern standards, and what got me thinking was the word iniquity. It's not much used today, but if you trace it back, it relates to inequity and thus to inequality. That is; if you didn't play fair, it was a sin. When you come right down to it; a lot of what is considered sinful or evil, by the old standards, relates to unfairness, cheating someone of their due, and so on.
How different that is from today, where it is almost a badge of honor - in some circles - to be able to say that you cheated someone out of a lot of money, and got rich as a result. These days; it seems that inequity is a way of life, for some people, and that is shrugged off as not even being a personal decision, but rather a simple acknowledgement of the ways of the world. We have always had liars, cheats, and thieves - but our culture did not always exalt such people, or revere them above others.
All the Best,
Jonathan
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Author John Brodix Merryman replied on May. 12, 2014 @ 23:09 GMT
Jonathan,
It's not so much a question of life being unequal and often unfair, but the much more specific dynamics of why this current situation is going parabolic and how can it be logically addressed.
Society is always going to have winners and losers and different strata and both friction and exchange between them all. As I keep saying much of human activity on the surface of...
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Jonathan,
It's not so much a question of life being unequal and often unfair, but the much more specific dynamics of why this current situation is going parabolic and how can it be logically addressed.
Society is always going to have winners and losers and different strata and both friction and exchange between them all. As I keep saying much of human activity on the surface of this planet can be modeled by the same thermodynamic convection cycles which pretty much explain most of the abiotic and much of the biotic activity.
Money originated in many forms and situations. Some were actual commodities, like the salt paid to Roman soldiers. Others originated as a form of contract, like the clay token Sumerians used as receipts for grain, which were then traded around. Much of what we think of as money today, is various forms of contracts. Promises of some value for which the certificate can be exchanged. National currencies, now that they are completely backed by the debt of the issuing country, are based on the future health, wealth and productivity of that country.
Remember when many banks had the term "Trust" as part of the name? The problem is that since we all want money, not just the rich, because it signifies security and stability for most, it creates a strong incentive to produce more than there are resources to back it with. Now that the situation has grown completely out of control and the very function of the economy is to produce ever more of these increasingly unsupported and unsupportable promises, which become ever more leveraged and ethereal, that the actual health, wealth and productivity of the world is being sacrificed to manufacture them.
When you really stand back and think it through, it is as ultimately illogical as those Easter Islanders who destroyed their island to manufacture those stone monoliths, because they signified some overriding ideal.
The fact is that we do need a medium of exchange for large societies to function, but it is a public medium, like a road system and to the extent it is based on public debt, ie. obligations, it is a contract between a community and its members, that one's services will be rewarded.
Now in some ways, it is like blood in the civic body and like blood, it needs to keep flowing evenly around and large pools of it are extremely unhealthy and functionally unnecessary.
Since the main reason most people save money is for large purchases, retirement, eduction, etc. Then other, more effective social mechanisms need to evolve around those needs, leaving the conventional monetary system to handle the more liquid aspects. For one thing, if we understood strong communities and a healthy environment are a valuable resource and time and effort should be invested in maintaining them, such activities as elder, youth care and education might function much more as organic expressions of society. Not to mention having manufacturing produce product which could be maintained and last a long time and not simply be thrown away, it would create a significant local servicing capacity.
Since they would be acknowledged as a contract, those caught abusing the system would consequently have the value of their notes penalized.
Essentially all this requires is acknowledging these notes are not personal property, but public contracts and that is exactly what they are in the first place!! Your picture is not on them, nor are you individually responsible for guaranteeing their value. Consider that if the average Joe Sixpack understood those bills in his pocket were no more his property than the section of road he was driving on, he would be far less impressed with possessing as many of them as possible and would be careful what tangible value he would exchange for them. His efforts would have to go to making his family life more important, his social relations stronger and his environment healthier, because he would know that this is what would matter, not how many zeros are in his bank account. Then consider what this would do to the governments and financial industries currently drunk on all this power we subconsciously give them.
The fact is that since the system has gone parabolic and every time it has another heart attack, the response is more of the same and so the problem grows even bigger. When the next crisis occurs, it is going to start to be obvious to pretty much everyone that it is unsustainable. Then people will be looking for other answers.
Regards,
John
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Andrej Rehak wrote on May. 13, 2014 @ 11:51 GMT
Dear John
Your article, filled with analogies and allegories, was pleasant to read. Wars and guns are certainly manifestations of a disease conditioned by non-living virus, build and led by infected, self-destructive cells. Money (non-value) flow is one of the circulatory mechanism of spreading and maintaining the infection. Without reproductive mechanism of a living cell, virus is a frigid...
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Dear John
Your article, filled with analogies and allegories, was pleasant to read. Wars and guns are certainly manifestations of a disease conditioned by non-living virus, build and led by infected, self-destructive cells. Money (non-value) flow is one of the circulatory mechanism of spreading and maintaining the infection. Without reproductive mechanism of a living cell, virus is a frigid information, unable to replicate itself. Planted and maintained delusion is the most fertile ground at which virus can flourish. By mastering the ability to recognise and block such non-living intruder, life immunizes, reinforces and evolves itself. Only life can procreate, organise, maintain and evolve life. Life borrows life to a virus for only as long as it takes to decode it. Hence, the virus can be considered as Tanatos, sculpting Eros. The next evolutionary step in sculpting life of our shared, accelerating space-time orbit is in recognition of a malicious virus tricking our immune system by calling itself "Humanity". Did you notice that all living necessities, like sexual, reproductive parts of our body, or natural, like natural food and healing plants... is stigmatized and controlled by "them"? On the other hand, all which is unnecessary, artificial, unhealthy, lethal and non-alive is favoured by "them". "They" arbitrarily invent and execute their irrelevant, local legislations falsifying them as laws. "Altruistically", it is always "in the name of progress, in the name of democracy, in the name of god, in the name of humanity, in the name of our children... bla, bla..." Well, who the "bad word for sexual activity" are them, and in the name of whom...? It is of course always infected "I Am (not)" in the name of "I Am (not)" ...
As concerning your analogy of information and energy processing divisions of human body, each of us is as well consisted of two to three kilograms of bacteria... This symbiotic structure evolved into cooperation and self-organised necessity, rather than combat, domination and competition. "I am" is the only power holder over "I am not". And what makes "I am not" being blind to the simple truth that the "All mighty" is in fact "I am" is non-alive, frigid and useless information contradicting life.
Regards
andrej
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Author John Brodix Merryman replied on May. 13, 2014 @ 18:01 GMT
Andrej,
Humanity is one more flower reaching for the sun. Hopefully the seeds it scatters won't be as foolish as we have been.
I think also it is each of us is I am, but we don't always identify the I am in the other, because we only see their wants conflicting with our wants and like the same ends of magnets, we push each other away.
It is only when what we have to give matches they want and vice versa, that we become one.
Regards,
John
Paul N Butler wrote on May. 16, 2014 @ 04:15 GMT
Dear John,
I don’t believe in being a centrist just for the sake of being a centrist either. I go where the evidence leads me. Sometimes that can be to the center of something and sometimes it can be at the outer extreme or anywhere in between. When it comes to God I hung back for over 22 years while I observed the evidence on both sides. When the weight of that evidence...
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Dear John,
I don’t believe in being a centrist just for the sake of being a centrist either. I go where the evidence leads me. Sometimes that can be to the center of something and sometimes it can be at the outer extreme or anywhere in between. When it comes to God I hung back for over 22 years while I observed the evidence on both sides. When the weight of that evidence overwhelmingly tilted in favor of God’s existence I went where it led me and have found that it only has pointed more strongly in that direction since then. I do agree that there are those who you might find at the center of the group of believers that tend to get carried away and make up their own rules and traditions, etc. that are not in accordance with God’s will and teachings. This is made clear in the scriptures even during Jesus’ ministry in that Jesus had to point out errors in the teachings of the Scribes and Pharisees, who were at the center of the Jew’s religion at the time. The one place that I am sort of a centrist is that, as you say, God is at the center of all things and if you want to be joined to him you have to come to him at the center also. I have found that God desires to have a relationship with us that is closer than any that we can have with each other in this world. It is closer than the relationship of marriage between a man and a woman, which is an image of God’s relationship with man when both the man and his wife are perfect, because that relationship is limited in that a man and his wife do not share their thoughts or even their experiences and feelings internally with each other, but God shares his thoughts, feelings, and experiences with us and, of course he can always share in our thoughts feelings, and experiences. I have not seen that he offers to have a permanent fringe or distant relationship with him because he made us to be close to him as members or parts of his body. He has, however, built in a degree of separation between us and him in that he has placed Jesus Christ as the mediator between himself and us. This seems to be mainly because his intents, thoughts and ways are well beyond our ability to understand directly, so he has placed Jesus Christ in the middle to translate his intents, thoughts, and ways into a form that we can understand, etc. There is, therefore, that amount of separation from him (the center). He made things in a similar way in our relationship with the natural world. We cannot connect directly to matter structures and observe their internal information directly, but must observe them through the mediator of energy and sub-energy interactions, etc. If this works ok for someone in this world, he probably will find a relationship with God acceptable also. The natural world cannot love us and care for us as God does though.
Although you could look at God’s relationship with man as totalitarian, in that he has ultimate power and control over us, his rule over us is not like that of man’s totalitarian governments that are based on satisfying the lusts, greed, desire to forcefully use and misuse subjects for his gain at their expense. Since God is the source of all things, he does not need to take resources from his subjects. Instead he is the one that provides all resources to them. To be high in God’s kingdom does not mean that you will be in charge of taking resources from the people to supply the needs and desires of the king, but that you will be in charge of distributing resources that come from God to the people. God’s kingdom is based on his love for us in that he created us to be joined to him as members of his body and he demonstrated that love to us by greatly suffering for us, so that he could save us from death and give us eternal life in him. This is one case in which the bodies only pile up in those who do not come to him at the center. He does give everyone that choice, though.
I agree. God has perfectly balanced all things in him.
You are right. Many men have made up stories that are not according to god’s word and have misled many. God does give examples in the scriptures from the lives of people (both the good and the evil) to demonstrate how he has made the world to work and what kinds of results can be expected by either going according to his will and working in line with the way he designed the world to work or, on the other hand, going against his will by working against the way the world was made to properly work. Of course, God does not need to use theories because he knows all things concerning the universe, since he made it. There are some things in the scriptures that are presented in what would usually be considered very abstract forms. I have found that at least a large number of them appear that way because they tell us about things that man has not yet come to understand. As man’s understanding increases their meanings become clear. Those who don’t have the background information to understand them tend to either read them and then ignore them or try to apply meanings to them according to their current level of understanding. I go to the type of forum that God leads me to at any given time. I have found that both truth and error can be found at any type of forum. Only God’s word can be counted on.
Sincerely,
Paul B.
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Author John Brodix Merryman replied on May. 16, 2014 @ 17:02 GMT
Paul,
I really don't think you try to understand my point of view. Since I don't follow your theological model, you make a bunch of assumptions about what I think. Having followed religious beliefs over the years, I do have some sense of that top down, paternal deity to which you subscribe and I just find it limited and pretentious, not to mention hypocritical. It may not be authoritarian in the way human governments tend to become, but it does validate top down authority. I suppose the female side of the spiritual equation is just a form of Adam's rib and incidental to this model, but I think this dichotomy is far more reflective of much deeper spiritual realities. Going through all which you write, the separation of god and humanity, the need to come to 'him,' etc. all speak to methods of social control and direction which serve normal civic functions and while they might well be necessary to have a cohesive society, can also be misused and so don't necessarily need unquestioning validation, since this serves the purposes of those who will misuse them.
I could go on, but I realize you are not going to listen and what you say isn't anything I've haven't already heard by others wishing me to join their church.
Regards,
John
Israel Perez wrote on May. 20, 2014 @ 03:55 GMT
Dear John
Nice reading your essay, well written and concise. You touch several delicate topics, such as economy, politics and even religion. I would avoid talking about God in science groups. I think science and God are irreconcilable. Anyways, religion also plays its role in society. You also ask some philosophical questions difficult to answer. You are a mature man and have a lot experience in life; that's what your essay reflects. According to your experience, what do you think humankind is seeking? Shall we arrive at stable state in the future? What is your vision for the future of humanity?
I'd be grateful if you could take a look at my essay and leave some comments.
Best regards
Israel
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Author John Brodix Merryman replied on May. 20, 2014 @ 18:41 GMT
Israel,
I did read your essay and went back and reviewed it. As you say, the situation is overwhelmingly complex when we start considering all the actual details. A big part of the reason why I like discussing physics, rather than history, politics, sociology, etc. The secret seems to be to find the patterns and processes within all those details. For one thing, we really are not looking...
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Israel,
I did read your essay and went back and reviewed it. As you say, the situation is overwhelmingly complex when we start considering all the actual details. A big part of the reason why I like discussing physics, rather than history, politics, sociology, etc. The secret seems to be to find the patterns and processes within all those details. For one thing, we really are not looking for stability as an overall state. There has to be inherent ebb and flow. It is just when it gets out of the acceptable and manageable ranges and those vary, according to perspective. Otherwise stability eventually leads to stagnation and then disruption, as that stable state decays.
As for science and religion, they actually evolved as two sides of the same coin. When you go back to the ancients, it was a matter of both describing natural order and explaining it. This description became mathematics and science. Think cosmology. Meanwhile religion grew out of the entirely natural impulse to explain this order as intentional and assign personality to these natural forces. Beauty, anger, fear, ego, attraction eroticism etc. can all find, with a little imagination, parallels in the natural order of things. The premise of monotheism is essentially knowledge and wisdom as a form of platonic ideal. Given the inherent dynamic of intellectualism is to distill signals from the noise, this reductionism is a logical progression. Christianity is actually a bit of a step back, with the concept of the trinity, to the inescapable complexities. Essentially it is a personification of past/father, present/son and future/holy ghost, since it grew out of a schism in Judaism and so the son was projected as a renewal, but after suffering centuries of persecution, hope for the future became its selling point to those who where persecuted, which is a big audience.
Islam was actually a much more politically successful movement for its first seven hundred years (and largely coasted for the next six hundred), compared to Christianity and as such, was able to project a more monolithic vision and only in the last hundred years, have the downsides of this, in its lack of conceptual diversity and thus social inertia, come home to roost.
We are taught good and bad are some cosmic conflict between the forces of righteousness and evil, but they are in fact the biological binary code of attraction to the beneficial and repulsion of the detrimental. What is good for the fox, is bad for the chicken and there is no clear line where the chicken ends and the fox begins. Between black and white are not only shades of grey, but all the other colors of the spectrum.
What might be good for the individual, expansion and reproduction, might be bad for the group, if it uses up all the resources, so like any computation, the factors are many. The fact is that reality is bottom up and we only see it top down from our particular limited point of view.
So analyzing religion really must be part of any full scale review of humanity and its options, since it functions as the core and vision of societies.
As for our immediate situation, I just wrote a comment on
Don Limuti's entry, which I think lays out the immediate situation and where to go from here. I've given this topic a fair amount of thought over the years, but tend to have trouble finding forums willing to discuss it in real depth, so I don't get a lot of feedback. Since I submitted my entry with the very first batch, I have been getting enough feedback to think it through even more, so this comment reflects that slightly more complex view. I'll post it here anyway;
"Don,
A spot on and logically focused article. I've been castigating various entrants for their 'out in space' entries and so it is nice to have such a well centered and reasonable one. I think though, that the possibility exists to be far more radical than you might think possible. Significant change is only possible when the old order breaks down, but right now the current status quo is coalescing in upon itself and only re-enforcing its own increasingly disfunctional methods. So all the various sectors of society mostly seek to hold onto what they have and further antagonize other parts of society. In this situation, even your reasonable proposals would meet considerable resistance from those who are more focused on holding onto what they have, than gambling on a better outcome.
The result would normally be a state of slow stagnation and increasingly stratified and compartmentalized future society. Yet I think that the monumental nature of these issues provides a potential relief.
The enormous tumor of financial excess can only keep growing at this exponential rate and will blow up when it reaches some totally unsustainable level. The result will be the equivalent of a massive heart attack on society, as the economic circulation system siezes up. While this will be potentially catastrophic in some quarters, it is not as though monetary regimes haven't collapsed before and had forms of local exchange rise in their place.
My proposal is that we begin treating money as the contract which it is, rather than the commodity we have been led to believe it is. While this might seem a minor conceptual issue, it has the potential to change the paradigm by which society functions.
Any society above a few hundred people needs a medium of exchange. If there is not some readily available commodity with universal applications, such as gold, silver, salt, grain, etc. then a debt based monetary system is quite effective. Yet we forget it is essentially a form of public utility and social contract, not private property. We no more own those bills in our pockets, than we own the section of road we happen to be driving on, yet it is very much in the interest of those controlling this system for us to believe that it is personal property, much as it is in the fisherman's interest for the fish to think that worm belongs to it. This way, every aspect of exchange becomes denominated in this medium and everyone wants as much as possible, further empowering those controlling it.
Money functions like blood in the economy and as such it needs to keep flowing. Since everyone wishes to obtain as much as possible, this naturally creates excess. If we simply take it out of circulation and store it, it means more must be issued and then there becomes more than necessary, so that if the value started to go down, people would try dumping these stores, further decreasing the value.
Otherwise it must be invested, ie. loaned to someone else who can effectively spend it in ways to make even more and then pay off the debt and still earn enough to make the effort worthwhile. The fact is there are far fewer of these opportunities, then there is money seeking worthwhile investments.
This then leads to various unsustainable feedback loops, such as that once speculative investing, ie. greater fool systems, start, it can quickly become possible that money can be borrowed into existence cheaper than these bubbles grow and thus building on theselves, as is currently happening in much of the investment world
There is also the need to create ever more debt to feed the production of this capital and so lending standards fall. Not to mention the innumerable ways further leverage is added.
Now if people wish to gamble, this should be perfectly legal, with the understanding that it is gambling, not disguised as safe investment.
So in reality money is a form of debt. One person's asset is another person's obligation. When those with large piles of these surplus bills gain functional control over the government, then they can effectively have the government, ie. the public, buy this notational wealth as public debt and so sustain its value, since the public is required to pay it back, with interest. Then this money has to be spent and often it is in ways which further enrich those in control.
Now if we were to begin to understand that money functions as a necessary social contract and we don't actually own it, then most people will start to be far more careful how much they are willing to pull value out of personal and social relations, as well as environmental resources. This would then make the community and the environment natural stores of wealth, not just resources to be mined for value, in order to compete and gamble in the financial system.
Since stores of currency would be recognized as potentially unhealthy to the system, methods would be devised to reduce them. Most people store wealth for such needs as elder and youth care, education, housing and other large expenses. Now if we started storing value within our communities and relations, the normal, organic systems of exchange and reciprocity would emerge. We would start caring for the old folks and kids like nature intended, as part of life, not just services bought and sold. Much of primary education could also naturally fall into this system and more naturally integrated systems of secondary eduction might evolve as well. Then there could be forms of mutual building societies, much as the Amish do.
This is not to say a normal and extensive monetary, or even various overlapping monetary ststems wouldn't still function, but they would be built with full understandings of how they best function and for more liquid forms of exchange. Then local public banks would use their profits to fund services and projects within the communities that produced those profits. They would then serve as shareholders in regional systems, in a bottom up system.
Much as the body has both a heart and a head, society would naturally keep this function of circulation of wealth somewhat distinct from its public management, as a natural distribution and separation of power.
So this is how I think humanity should be steered; When this current financial system does break down, which seems imminent, but has been for a few decades, but they keep patching with ever more public debt and the resulting surplus credit, we simply have to open our eyes and understand this stuff called money is not, in and of itself, a form of commodity, but a contract which a community is making with its members and those caught abusing this system will naturally have their benefits penalized, not be allowed to profit from this abuse.
We need to educate people how it all works!!!!
Regards,
John Merryman
I
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Israel Perez replied on May. 24, 2014 @ 22:51 GMT
Dear John
Thanks for your reply. You almost wrote another essay. I have some minor disagreements on some of your points. That I would like to make some comments.
You: stability as an overall state... Otherwise stability eventually leads to stagnation and then disruption, as that stable state decays.
In my opinion, stability does not necessarily imply lack of movement, progress...
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Dear John
Thanks for your reply. You almost wrote another essay. I have some minor disagreements on some of your points. That I would like to make some comments.
You: stability as an overall state... Otherwise stability eventually leads to stagnation and then disruption, as that stable state decays.
In my opinion, stability does not necessarily imply lack of movement, progress or stagnation. This would depend on the collective goals a nation or group of nations have.
You: As for science and religion, they actually evolved as two sides of the same coin. When you go back to the ancients, it was a matter of both describing natural order and explaining it.
Strictly speaking science was born with the work of Newton in 1687. Before Newton there were philosophical doctrines, mathematics, natural philosophy, etc. but not science because there was no model of doing science. So, at that time we had philosophy and religion as two ways to approach the truth. There is a debate whether religion is some kind of philosophy or philosophy some kind of religion. Some have tried to claim that because science is a descendent of philosophy it is some sort of religion. I see religion, science or philosophy just as ways of perceiving life. Moreover, science and religion have opposite principles.
With respect to the money issue, I don't consider myself an expert in economy. It is evident that you have given a deep thought on that topic and I'm afraid I cannot not offer much valuable feedback. However, I think that your idea is quite good and sound. So, I would like to make some comments.
You: Significant change is only possible when the old order breaks down... and ...
The enormous tumor of financial excess can only keep growing at this exponential rate and will blow up when it reaches some totally unsustainable level...
This reminds me of the book written by Thomas Khun, on the structure of scientific revolutions. He argues that science is done in several stages. The stage that corresponds to normal science, which is a STABILITY stage, where most scientists work happily following certain principles, where theories are tested and confronted with experiments. Then, as time goes by anomalies start to appear that challenge the establishment. This stage marks the set for the development of new and fresh ideas. Then, more and more experimental and theoretical evidence piles up that demands radical changes and set the landscape for a new revolution. As the pressure on the orthodoxy increases, those maintaining the status quo hold and resist as much as possible until new and bold people put forward a new theory. The next stage is the revolution in which there is competition to introduce the new theories and ideas. In the final stage the new theory is accepted. Then the cycle repeats again.
I think, the case is similar in any revolution scientific, economical, social or whatnot. And now I think we are not close to a revolution of this kind (may be close to world war). Indeed, I think elements are emerging and piling up, but I do not think the economical system will collapse in the following 50 years or so. Although I agree with you that those who have the economic control can steer the future. But I don't think they will be happy with the restrictions you are suggesting. I agree however that we should be informed of how money is handled.
Good luck in the contest!
Best Regards
Israel
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Anonymous replied on May. 25, 2014 @ 03:20 GMT
Israel,
Thanks for the reply.
I'm not saying stability doesn't exist in the first place, but that it functions in an inherently dynamic context. You might say life is a bit like riding a bicycle. Either you keep moving forward, or you fall over.
Yes, I certainly agree with your points about the relation between science and religion, but they more clarify my basic argument,...
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Israel,
Thanks for the reply.
I'm not saying stability doesn't exist in the first place, but that it functions in an inherently dynamic context. You might say life is a bit like riding a bicycle. Either you keep moving forward, or you fall over.
Yes, I certainly agree with your points about the relation between science and religion, but they more clarify my basic argument, than refute it. Yes, they do serve different functions, which is what I said. One seeks to describe the order of reality and the other seeks to explain it. And so as science gets ever more effective at both describing and explaining reality, it seemingly pushes against the realm of religion, but as the old saying goes, the more you know, the more you know you don't know. So now science, specifically physics, is starting to make up lots of explanations, from string theory, to multiverses, to explain all it finds it doesn't know and thus commits the errors of presumption for which religion found itself accused of.
As for that cycle of speculation and consolidation, it pretty much describes many of the processes in life. As I keep arguing, time and temperature are essentially frequency and amplitude and the two hemispheres of our brains are effectively a thermostat and a clock. The left linear side seems rational, because we can follow that causal chain of sequential events, but the non-linear, emotional, intuitive, right side functions as just such a scalar mechanism, of expansion and then consolidation around the perceived results that are distilled from this larger grouping, be it anything from the insight of a connection not otherwise perceived, or anger and stress from too much information and pressure, causing the 'pot to boil.'
Scientific American recently ran an article on how speculative bubbles are fundamental to the economic process. Though they were far more circumspect about how they described it, rather that Ponzi schemes emerge naturally and not just as confidence games.
I also posted a continuing rant on the subject of the financial situation, over on the
contest thread. Thanks!
Regards,
John
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Israel Perez replied on May. 27, 2014 @ 01:21 GMT
Dear John
You: I'm not saying stability doesn't exist in the first place, but that it functions in an inherently dynamic context.
I agree.
You: One seeks to describe the order of reality and the other seeks to explain it.
About more than 20 centuries ago religion and philosophy used to seek the truth. Although science continues with this line, I would not say that religion is about truth. Religion has been relegated to cover spiritual aspects of life but no longer truth. As I said, these two are incompatible.
You: ...to explain all it finds it doesn't know and thus commits the errors of presumption for which religion found itself accused of.
You're probably right. In some sense science is behaving as religion.
The article you cite seems to be interesting. As far as know the Ponzi scheme is fraudulent.
Israel
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Author John Brodix Merryman replied on May. 27, 2014 @ 02:47 GMT
Israel,
In the grand scheme of things, a few millennia is not such a long time. Monotheism is an extremely powerful concept and fulfills a lot of emotional, social and civil needs. As we have all come to realize, logic comes in a distant second to emotion. It's an ideal and who really wants that bubble popped.
Truth is the way it is. Answers are what people will pay to hear. Philosophers seek truths, while priests and politicians provide answers. That is why far more people can make a living as priests and politicians, than can as philosophers.
Regards,
John
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James Lee Hoover wrote on May. 20, 2014 @ 18:59 GMT
John,
Time grows short so I'm revisiting and rating. Your response to my questions before: "We really won't know what will rise from the rubble, but I'm naturally optimistic. As I point out, the larger issue is that the earth's resources can't sustain the current economy indefinitely, so having what amounts to a self induced heart attack will be a serious monkey wrench in that process and who knows how it ends up."
My essay has a solution of "looking beyond" -- to dark skies and sustainable actions and "looking within" to a mind that is a microcosm of our universe, using it for transforming actions. I still wonder if we have doomed our world's environment, something that will hamper real recovery.
Jim
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Author John Brodix Merryman replied on May. 21, 2014 @ 01:11 GMT
Jim,
Nature is constantly building up and tearing down. We are seriously disrupting the biosphere, but even a cleared stage eventually is creating opportunities for whatever has the capacity to fill it. At the very least, it will be an interesting few decades.
Regards,
John
Michael Allan wrote on May. 21, 2014 @ 20:33 GMT
Thanks again for reviewing my essay, John. I'll be rating yours (along with the others on my
review list) some time between now and May 30. All the best, and bye for now, - Mike
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Don Limuti wrote on May. 21, 2014 @ 21:32 GMT
Hi John,
I am suspicious that philosophy may be outlawed in the FQXi contests, we may be forced back into sinning (in the essays) so that grace may abound..... heaven forbid!
Good to see you in another contest.
Wishing you the best,
Don Limuti
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Don Limuti wrote on May. 22, 2014 @ 22:03 GMT
Hi John,
Appreciate your links to state public banking and to Ellen Brown.
I was in the process of replying when you post just disappeared !?!?
The post was reply to a Jonathan D. post I made.
The links were very informative and appreciated.
Could you post again?
Don L.
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Anonymous wrote on May. 24, 2014 @ 07:02 GMT
Dear John,
My attempt to extract convincing arguments from your essay was not very successful. Why did you not give an abstract? What the heck means hack human history?
Your musing around philosophy might be appealing to many who share your half-digested questions how to cope with their personal perspective. You are focusing on money and you predict a belonging catastrophe. I agreed with you on that money is not a commodity. I should also agree on that money is said ruling the world. Should I invest money in India after the election was won by Modi? Hm.
My wife asked me what does oligarchy mean. My dictionary told me: a small group of people who control and run a particular country or organization. India could definitely be a huge market. However, it suffers from lack of true democracy in the sense that most people (the demos) are utterly poor while those oligarchs of India who live in London are incredibly rich. Most people I know in Europe are neither very poor nor very rich. The oligarchs will perhaps try and prevent both a new worldwide war and the worldwide collapse of the monetary system that you seem to envision. Discoveries, inventions, and other contributions to progress will perhaps prove stronger than military or monetary maneuvers. Modi was almost an underdog. He might or might not achieve a lot. However, I see India's problem rather than its strength its young and still growing poor population. They will like to live as do we and as Modi promised to them.
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Author John Brodix Merryman replied on May. 24, 2014 @ 09:50 GMT
Anon,
The contest question was a bit broad and so the idea of packing everything into 9 pages isn't possible, thus the reference to the essay being the abstract. Unfortunately one of the areas left on the cutting room floor was the impact of these points on Indian politics, especially those which occurred after the essay was submitted.
As for oligarchies, it is also difficult to explain political form in such a short piece, so I did stick to abstractions, such as energy/the dynamic and information/the form. Necessarily oligarchy is a form, so your questions might possibly pertain to the historical dynamic by which it came to be and the potential dynamics by which it might be disrupted. Now this might not necessarily be a good thing, given the tendency for established social orders to crumble when disrupted, rather than quickly assume a more ideal form.
I prefer to stick to physical abstractions and not have to explain all their potential manifestations, as the result tends toward clutter, rather than clarity, even if not everyone is able to think abstractly and apply it to their personal situation. Have you had similar reactions to many of the other entries? This is more of a physics forum, than a strictly political one.
Regards,
John
Lorraine Ford wrote on May. 30, 2014 @ 00:44 GMT
Hi John,
Your essay points out that "money is representative of a social contract and as such is a form of public utility" and it shouldn't be treated as a commodity. And I agree that money is not just a token that represents potential exchange for potential goods and services and commodities: money is like a social contract where society agrees that this is so. But as you say: "those running the financial system have lost sight of their larger role". They have a public trust and they need to see beyond their self-interest because "contracts and promises are only as valuable as the integrity of the system on which they are based."
As you imply, the community and the environment etc. ARE the true wealth, they are where actual value resides. I think that you are right that the disengagement of money-tokens from what they actually represent must lead to the destruction of actual value in the community and the environment.
Re community banks: the issue of community oversight of what is happening (e.g. in government and banks) will never go away. We can never write a computer program to plug all the potential loopholes and solve all our oversight problems. Because our lives are so complex and busy, we have to sometimes trust that the other person is doing "the right thing", and our trust is often abused.
I think you are right to remind us that we must deal with these money issues as we attempt to "steer the future".
Cheers,
Lorraine
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Author John Brodix Merryman replied on May. 30, 2014 @ 01:51 GMT
Lorraine,
Thanks!
This contest has been a bit of an eye opener. Usually I discuss these sorts of ideas on economic and social forums, where there is a much higher level of interest. I guess FQXI appeals to a section of the population not engrossed in community issues.
I thought though that trying to relate a physical description of reality to the way abstract wealth extraction compounds environmentally and socially destructive tendencies would get more interest and there would be more entries focused on what seems to me a very significant aspect of modern life.
I suppose I should have developed it more, but I know how hard it is for most people to digest many of these entries, so I edited it as much as possible.
That said, there have been some interesting exchanges and feedback. I did have my hopes up to reach the finalists there for a while, but the reality is another year in the also rans.
I suspect though that we are going to have another significant financial earthquake soon, possibly by this fall, so I'm sure I'll be discussing these issues on other venues.
I can't boost your score more, since we can only vote for each once and I enjoyed giving you that ten to put you up on top for a few days, early in the contest.
Regards,
John
Paul N Butler wrote on May. 31, 2014 @ 03:14 GMT
Dear John,
I am sorry that it has taken me so long to get back to you. Several things came up that required my attention, but at the moment I am back.
I am trying to understand your point of view, but you are right that I have apparently jumped to some conclusions that appear to not be accurate based on some of the things that you said. Let me start from the beginning with those...
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Dear John,
I am sorry that it has taken me so long to get back to you. Several things came up that required my attention, but at the moment I am back.
I am trying to understand your point of view, but you are right that I have apparently jumped to some conclusions that appear to not be accurate based on some of the things that you said. Let me start from the beginning with those things that seem the most clear to me about your point of view and you can correct me if I am wrong in any of them.
1. It appears that you believe that God exists.
2. It seems that you believe that he is so great in comparison to us that we have no hope of ever comprehending and understanding him.
3. You come from a Christian background and you seem to like and possibly accept some parts of the scriptures because you say that you like the trinity concept that is presented there.
4. One place that I apparently made an error is that I assumed (based on item 3 above) that you believe the scriptures to be God’s communication to man telling us about him, his creation, and how we fit into it all. It now appears to me that you don’t believe the scriptures to be God’s word because you say that you do not accept the concept of a top down paternal deity when it is clear in the scriptures that God desires us to consider him to be our Father. As an example, when the disciples asked Jesus how they should pray he told them to start their prayer with “Our Father which art in heaven”. You appear to believe that the scriptures were just made by men with the purpose of controlling other men to get them to do what they want them to do. If that is your belief, I can understand it because when I was an agnostic I came to the conclusion that I would not be able to determine whether or not the scriptures are actually God’s communication to man. That is probably the main reason that I did not read them during that 22 year period when I was trying to determine if God existed or not. Instead I looked for indications of his existence in the structure of the world through science. In the beginning the prevalent established scientific concepts seemed to support the belief that God did not exist, but over time they gave way to other prevailing scientific concepts that made the alternative possibilities less and less likely and the existence of God more and more likely. When I received scientific information that no man on this planet knows about, much about the structure of the universe became apparent to me. Like most in such circumstances I began to think that I was really great to have come to understand so much that others had not been able to accomplish. I did not consider that I was just being prepared by God to be able to see that the scriptures could not have been made by men, because it contained this information that man still did not know and certainly could not have known 2000 years ago when they were written. Because the evidence that has been provided to me that the scriptures are God’s purposeful communication to us about him, his creation, and our place in all of it is so great, I can no longer reasonably deny or even doubt it. I, therefore, must accept all of it to be God’s message to me, so if he says in it that he desires me to call him my Father because he has adopted me to be one of his sons, I rejoice in that he loves me enough to be that way with me and not me only, but all that are his. I do not worry about him being over me in a top down relationship because as my creator and because he is so much greater than me, he deserves that position and I trust him to not mistreat me, but to use that position to work all things for my good as he promises to do.
5. It appears to me that you have not found such things in the scriptures that would convince you that they are truly God’s word. If you believe that God does exist and is great beyond our comprehension, do you believe that we are just something that he happened to make for no real purpose or that he just doesn’t desire for us to know our purpose in his creation? Of course, you could believe that he has shown to us his purpose for making us in some other way in the creation. If that is the case, how do you believe he has done that and what do you believe our purpose is? That is about as far as I can go without more information from you so I will close for now.
Sincerely,
Paul B.
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Author John Brodix Merryman replied on May. 31, 2014 @ 22:51 GMT
Paul,
You really are making a genuine and sincere effort to understand my point of view and for that I commend you. Yet the reason you don't fully understand or accept it is part of what I'm trying to explain. Since it doesn't relate to the frame you are working from, it is as though I'm simply speaking another language, or a branch of math you haven't studied.
Consider the...
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Paul,
You really are making a genuine and sincere effort to understand my point of view and for that I commend you. Yet the reason you don't fully understand or accept it is part of what I'm trying to explain. Since it doesn't relate to the frame you are working from, it is as though I'm simply speaking another language, or a branch of math you haven't studied.
Consider the concepts of objective versus subjective. Now me sitting here typing, while the coffee is brewing, is my personal subjective experience. While the equation E=mc2 is a largely objective observation. Yet while my situation is specific to my reality, it is very detailed, but the formulation of relativity is very general. It is like a very focused picture of a particular scene, versus a white sheet of paper. Consider this in terms of a camera taking a picture. If you want that detailed picture, you have to specify shutter speed, aperture, focus, lighting, distance, direction, angle, lenses, etc. Otherwise it isn't what you want. For instance, simply leaving the shutter open too long and too much light gets in and you have a white sheet of paper!!! That is because you have too much energy and to much information being carried by that energy onto the surface of your film. So that is the reality of the objective perspective. All that information balances out and so cancels all the detail, while the subjective perspective is fundamentally dependent on the particular frame required.
So now consider this in terms of how a movie is shown, with the projector light shining through the film. You might say my conception of that essential sense of awareness is like the light shining through the film, while you and I and all living creatures are basically images on that film. Now obviously this would be a far more involved and interactive process, with that light/consciousness pushing and motivating all the different life forms according to all the subjective particulars of their different existences. Sometimes these life forms are bumping into each other like they are just material objects in the world and sometimes that life force is flowing through them together, like they are all one being.
A large part of the reason we have trouble sensing this level of reality is that as complex thinking, essentially predatory creatures, is that we associate thought and awareness with concentration and focus. While this process is very effective at distilling preferred signals from the noise and such useful points of observation and value out of all that goes on around us, it also destroys much of the subtle connectivity which is the life force tying everything together. You might say that while the spotlight of our concentration is very good for illuminating what we are looking at, it consequently obscures all the contextual connections which really make sense of it.
Now consider the idea of oneness, versus one, or unity versus unit. When things are connected, they are unified, but when one object is distinct from all its surroundings then it is a unit. The first is a network, while the second is a node. The problem is that we often mistake the two. For instance, the idea of God handed down to us, is that it is a unit. One entity distinct from everything else. So we put it up in heaven, or on a pedestal. Yet when those ancients were first considering the idea, given they were far more organically imbedded in nature, it seems likely the original concept was that everything is connected. That all those various deities and spirits and natural forces and the order seemingly running through it all, were connected in one bigger reality. A network.
Now what happens when you take that sense of connectivity and filter it through several thousand years of human experience, needs, desires, interpretations, etc. Than that it becomes this singular father figure watching over us would be a logical result.
The problem is that different people go through different situations and so emphasize different aspects and interpretations of what they perceive. For instance, the early Jews needed a sense of collective unity to survive and keep together through all the hardships they were enduring, so what had been in the earlier Egyptian conception of wholeness and unity, of the sun shining down, not just as a object in the sky, but a source of light and heat, raising up life, became focused as much more of a tribal deity, watching over this particular band of people and guiding them. By the time Jesus came along, this had hardened into a bureaucratic structure, with little concern for the basic cares and feelings for individuals. So by proposing a rebirth, he was making a very naturalistic argument, since the old pantheistic religions had traditions of year Gods, that died and were reborn. The problem was this didn't exactly fit with the idea of one God and yet some form of cycling had to be included in an understanding of nature. Since Jesus was no more and his movement was persecuted, the promise then became to look tot he future, which for many downtrodden people, is a powerful message and so the image of the Holy Ghost arose as that light shining through and giving hope for a better, stronger, healthier future. So you have the cyclical God encased in a singular entity.
Islam actually proposes a far more defined and universal monotheism and since it was phenomenally politically and socially successful for seven hundred years and largely coasted on that success for the next six hundred years, it is only in the last hundred years in which the down side of such a monolithic belief system came home to roost, as it tries to compete with the technologically advanced and socially flexible west.
So it is not as though those people three thousand years ago were not having brilliant insights, motivated by their self awareness and wonder of the universe opening before them, but what today you have of that perception is a very edited account that bears faint resemblance to the reality in which they lived and much to do with the needs of the many generations which managed to add additional insights, political desires, social needs, etc. to that collection of writings. Now I can understand why you view this source as a guidepost in life, as certainly many people do, but do you think that had you been raised in an Islamic culture, Jewish, or Hindu, or Buddhist, that you would have still gravitated to the Christian explanation of the universe? Now I expect you to consciously believe that you would, but that would mean you would have to ignore all those profound social and cultural ties to whatever society you were a member of and it is those which give a religion its real strength, not just the particular stories it tells and morals it tries to convey. That light shining through the people and life around you, is more important to your health and wellbeing than any words in any book.
So it is not that this spiritual essence is incomprehensible, but that it is profoundly elemental and not that it does not care for us, as we are its expression. It is just not an ideal, which are simply preferential qualities from our point of view. It is like light without any filters, yet we are a filter.
Regards,
John
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Anonymous wrote on Jun. 3, 2014 @ 03:55 GMT
Dear John,
Thank you for your more detailed description of your beliefs concerning God. I think that you somewhat underestimate me. I just needed adequate information to understand your point of view. This is because I have found that there are many different definitions that are applied to the same words and phrases by different men. If someone says that he believes in God the most...
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Dear John,
Thank you for your more detailed description of your beliefs concerning God. I think that you somewhat underestimate me. I just needed adequate information to understand your point of view. This is because I have found that there are many different definitions that are applied to the same words and phrases by different men. If someone says that he believes in God the most prevalent definitions would mean belief in a being that would be worthy to be worshiped or served, generally with the belief that God would at least in some way relate positively in some way back to the person that worships him or at least would be less likely to treat him negatively. Generally a belief that God is only the sum of all the myths that men have made up about God to comfort themselves or to have less fear in times of trouble, etc. would not be considered a belief in God by most people. This belief would generally be considered more a part of atheist religion (belief that there is no true God) as part of its doctrine to explain away why so many people all around the world believe in the existence of God as some form of being.
I can understand that concept because as I mentioned we both have similar backgrounds in some ways. We were both brought up in more or less Christian homes to some degree. I believe yours may have actually been more so than mine because I was brought up in that environment until my parents were divorced when I was about 10 years old. That environment pretty much ended at about that time and was after that mostly a neutral environment without much family influence in either direction. Of course, over time I did discuss the subject with some who believed in God and some who did not believe in him, but I found their arguments lacking on both sides both in detail and in logical reasoning. During those 22 years that I was searching to see if there was adequate evidence to come to a conclusion as to whether God existed or not I was mostly informed by scientific observation, both of my own and that of others. I also saw that there were many different religions both in the past and also in the present that portrayed God in vastly different ways. It became apparent to me that at most only one of these religions could be true and it was possible, of course that none of them were true. At the same time the fact that so many different people believed in God in one way or another as a living being suggested that either man had needs that he could not meet and was falling back on that belief for comfort, etc. or that God really does exist and made man to have a relationship with him, which caused man to try to fill that relationship need that had been built into man’s structure with a belief in him even when they could not have the true relationship with him. The fact that a large number of men would have to be in the group that did not have a true relationship with him in order to allow for the creation of all of the false religions and all of their followers meant that the way of obtaining the true relationship with God would have to be restricted by conditions that would exclude most people from obtaining that relationship. The other possibility was that they all were wrong and God did not exist at all. I found that both of these possibilities existed, but I did not have adequate evidence to determine which was true, so I withheld judgment and continued to look for more evidence as to whether God did exist or not. It appears to me that you came to the conclusion that God does not actually exist as an intelligent being who created the world or even as a living being at all. If I am right about that, how did you come to this conclusion? What evidence did you see that convinced you that God does not exist as a real living being? Whether God really does exist as the creator of the world who has chosen to communicate with us to tell us about him, his creation, and our purpose in it in the scriptures or not is the important understanding to gain because if he does, although all of the things that you mention in your reasoning about why each of the gods were believed to be as they were might apply to all of the others, the things recorded in the scriptures are as they are because they actually tell us about how God actually is, how his creation actually works, and what his purpose for us actually is, etc. We should, therefore, first look at the evidence for and against God’s existence as a living being who created the world, etc. I have already provided to you some of the evidence that has convinced me that God does exist as a living being as mentioned above, so I will wait for your evidence to the contrary before I go any farther.
I see that you have a real and strong aversion to the concept of top down authority. Did something happen in your life associated with this type of authority to make you believe this way? You did mention that you rebelled in your earlier years. Did that and the results of it have anything to do with the establishment of that belief or was it based more on external observations, etc.? I have found that top down authority is built into the structure of the world and can be a great positive influence when used properly, of course, like most other things it can be used wrongly to create negative results. As an example, when we are born into this world we all experience the top down authority relationship with our parents. Because at birth we are all completely helpless none of us would survive for very long without this relationship. As we grow and begin to be able to interact with the external world, we would not likely survive long without obeying the top down authority commands of our parents to not play in the street and not get into a car with a stranger, etc. Even though we do not yet have an adequate understanding of how the world works to justify it, it is common around the age of 12 to 14 years old to begin to have a strong desire to be free to do what we want to do in the world. At the same time we are driven by hormones as a result of puberty to fulfill desires that can easily result in very detrimental outcomes that can negatively affect our lives for many years to come if allowed to be fulfilled. Although it is not usually appreciated at the time, strong top down authority during this time can be of great value to children in this time of life. Of course, it is best if a positive relationship between the parents and their children has been cultivated during previous years, so that the children have come to respect their parent’s guidance and can, therefore, accept it during this time without rebelling against it, thus preventing the negative outcomes that would result from that rebellion. I have found that children in this age group talk about having freedom, but this freedom does not extend to actually having to take care of their own needs, etc. It is usually around the age of 19 to 21 when the children are truly set free to make their way in the world and they find out how much work is involved in it, and they tend to see how much work their parents had to do to take care of them while at the same time trying to keep them from rebellion to prevent them from having to suffer its negative consequences, that they begin to come out of rebelling. This time can sometimes be delayed somewhat by college attendance, etc., however. Top down authority can be very useful in situations that involve very complex structuring because the greater the number and complexity of decisions that need to be made the more difficult it becomes to get bottom up agreement of all involved as to the best decision to make in each circumstance. I do agree with you that top down authority can result in very negative results when used improperly, however. Similar results can also occur when bottom up authority is used improperly (mob rule). These things are tools and all tools can be used for good or evil resulting in the corresponding output results.
I find the use of the concepts of objective verses subjective to be greatly misunderstood by most people. The term objective normally refers to an object or thing as it actually exists in reality while the term subjective means the subject that is generated by the mind such as thoughts and concepts, etc. This would mean that E=mc2 would be subjective in nature because it does not exist as an object in the real world, but is instead an abstract concept made by the mind of man to express a relationship between real objects. Your coffee, keyboard, and fingers would be real world objects and, therefore, would be objective. You could, of course say that you don’t actually experience these objects, but only the images of them that are received by your mind from interactions of photons with those objects and then further interaction of the same photons with sensors that are parts of your eyes. You could then say that your mind interprets these interactions and, therefore, you are only seeing subjective information produced by your mind. Looking at it in this way everything would have to be considered subjective to us because we would have no way to directly observe the real world objects. The other way that people sometimes think of objective and subjective is: that which can be obtained by deduction is objective and that which can be obtained by induction is subjective. Induction is usually considered to be less surely known because it is obtained from information obtained from a finite number of observations, so it is always possible that the next observation would prove it to be wrong, while deduction is achieved by a closed loop of logical reasoning from that which is positively known to that which is not presently known to gain an understanding of the unknown. Induction does have the problem mentioned above of lack of certainty. Deduction is harder to understand. You could consider E=mc2 as deductive because all of the elements are defined and their possible interactions are defined according to logical rules that have been made by the person who made the formula. Since a man has created the formula and made all of the rules concerning it, all of the possible outcomes can be known with surety because they are all defined in its structure and the associated rules that describe it. Of course this does not mean that it in any way conforms to reality. The only way that this can be confirmed is by making many observations and subjectively reason that if they all agree with the formula, the formula must be true to reality. The use of subjective reasoning in this proof makes the result uncertain, however, because if another observation had been made it may have not agreed with the previous observations because of some unknown variable that might only come into play under very uncommon circumstances that no one was aware of up to that point. The end result of all of this is that there is always a degree of uncertainty concerning our knowledge of objects that exist in reality except those things that we completely create ourselves in our minds and these things are of very limited use to us if we don’t connect them to reality. In the above example, you can positively know all things about the formula E=mc2 as long as you do not try to connect the E with real world energy or the m with real world mass or the c with the real world speed of light, but if you do so, you can never know for sure that the formula is then completely accurate because you can only access this information by subjective observation. Scientists often think that because the formula that they made is objective in nature it is more certain than that which is obtained by observation, but they often don’t see that when they connect it to reality it loses that certainty and if it is not connected to reality it is practically useless. As long as you restrict your statements to the outcomes of current observations and all of those observations agree with the statements, both subjective and objective arguments that completely agree with the observations can be considered completely accurate within the scope of the available observational data. Subjective experiences are not always more detailed than objective observations. You could set up a simple subjective observation of a voltage meter’s output while you turned a variable resister in a circuit while you were in a dark room to limit the detail of your experience and at the same time you could observe a very complex objective math formula that would contain more detail than the subjective observation.
To me it is not really important by what process man might have come to the conclusion that God was a father figure if god did not really exist because it would not really be true and, therefore, would be irrelevant. On the other hand if God does exist, then he is the way that he is, so man’s belief of him as a father figure is only applicable if he really is a father figure in his relationship with us. Even then it is not important because man came to that conclusion, but because he is really a father figure to us by his nature. The real important determination to be made is, therefore, whether God actually exists and if so what is his nature and how does he choose to relate to us.
The argument that Jesus’s death and resurrection was derived from year gods makes very little sense because these year gods died each year and were reborn the next year to create a continuous repetitive cycle, but Jesus died only once like the rest of us. He was then resurrected the same year and will never die again. At most this would only be one half of an additional cycle, but he was not reborn to start life all over again, but was raised from the dead fully grown as he was when he died on the cross. He then ascended up to the Father high above the highest heaven with eternal life.
That God has 3 parts (The father, The Son, and the Holy Ghost and these three are one is no great mystery. He made man in his image and man is, therefore, also made of 3 parts (a spirit, a soul, and a body). The spirit generates our intents or purposes for us to accomplish. The soul translates those intents into thoughts that our body can understand and our body carries out the actions in accordance with those thoughts to perform the intents of the spirit.
Some men three thousand years ago may have had some brilliant insights compared to the level of knowledge of most during that time, but many of today’s scientific concepts could not have been envisioned by any of them because they had not yet developed the ability to make the equipment that would allow them to make the observations that would allow them to conceive the possible existence of such things as the structure of sub-energy particles, energy photons or matter particles or that they are all composed of basic motions. The observational information that would allow man to understand that all things that we can observe are composed of basic motions has only been available to man for less than 100 years and man has so far mainly ignored that data. The scriptures also contain much more advanced information than these things some of which cannot currently be disclosed to man in this world because it is not yet time for it to be known. Other things such as the existence of multiple fifth vector structural levels can be mentioned, but cannot be given in much detail at this time. I would not be in the position to have obtained all of the information that I currently have if I was not able to look beyond all of man’s and other’s political and ideological viewpoints and prejudices, etc. both past and present. The social and cultural ties may be what give the false religions their strength to affect the people to get them to believe in those religions, but it is God himself who gives the strength to those who seek him to find and believe in him and his Word. You are right that in the long run it is not the printed book that is most important. It is the light of God in us that gives us to be able to work with him to do his will and to also work with him to bring his light to others. The book gives us the information that allows us to get that relationship with God.
If it is just the result of men and men’s works then it is of little value if any value at all. Why would I consider a god composed of men’s works of any value to be worshiped when I am also a man and also not worthy to be worshiped. A spiritual essence that is profoundly elemental and not an ideal, but like light without a filter sounds a lot like religions that consider god to just be some unintelligent force that we could learn to control to get it to do what we want it to do like in Star Wars. Such a god would just be a tool that could be used either for good or for evil (the light side or the dark side) and could, therefore, not make man any better or help him to overcome his inherent weaknesses that cause him to do things in such a way as to ultimately destroy himself and possibly the whole planet in the process. It would only be able to magnify man’s current condition to accomplish larger scale results that were in line with man’s current condition. Those who were evil would still do evil things and ultimately advanced scientific knowledge could allow one such person to do a terrorist act that would destroy everything for man.
This does not even consider any who are more powerful than man (let’s say a fourth vector civilization) who would desire to displace man from this planet, etc. Even if some fifth vector civilization that is more powerful than them will protect man from them because they have an interest of gain from relations with man, such a relationship could not be counted on in the long term. The word has it that before they consider man to be ready to be joined to them a seventh vector source will open up the fifth vector to man. The response of those from the fifth vector will be to force advancement control over the minds of those who are not yet ready. They will suffer greatly and even desire to die, but will not be allowed to do so. This will take about 5 months. Only those who are already prepared will escape this suffering (those I call true Christians). In the long run man will only be safe if the one at the top desires to protect him because he can control all of the others. This last part is well beyond man’s believability quotient, but others might take note and act in a way so as to be productive and thus be judged favorably and receive positive rather than negative results. If you desire, you can consider this last part as a SYFI moment or maybe future history.
Sincerely,
Paul B.
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Author John Brodix Merryman replied on Jun. 4, 2014 @ 02:54 GMT
Paul,
You do put an awesome amount of effort into these replies and I certainly wish I had enough time to reply in kind. I do edit much of what I would say, for time considerations.
Yes, by about a thousand years ago, the cloistered priesthood had determined the trinity stood for the spirit, the soul and the body, but the fact remains that Jesus was attempting to push the reset...
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Paul,
You do put an awesome amount of effort into these replies and I certainly wish I had enough time to reply in kind. I do edit much of what I would say, for time considerations.
Yes, by about a thousand years ago, the cloistered priesthood had determined the trinity stood for the spirit, the soul and the body, but the fact remains that Jesus was attempting to push the reset button on the Jewish God and this was fairly firmly acknowledged at the time. That is why it is called "God the Father and God the Son," not God the Spirit and God the Soul.
Meanwhile God the Holy Ghost did grew out of a neutering of the female deity and came to stand for hope in the future and the Second Coming/rebirth. As I said, this has all been put through two thousand years of interpretation. As we all well know, when the academics get hold of any idea, it little resembles what was originally meant.
Personally I have no problem with top down authority. In fact, I worked for my parents, on their farm, until my mid twenties and have mostly worked for various family members since. This is because that makes them point person in an economic world I find very disturbing and am quite willing to accept my role as more of a manager and tactical point person. In fact, I feel it gives me far more emotional freedom then the stresses of being the boss would allow.
This is because that top down role is still relative to a larger context. As the process of distinction and judgement, intelligence is an essentially navigation function. So, from my perspective, making it some form of theological absolute is contradictory and simply an example of anthropomorphizing God. Good and bad are the biological binary code of attraction to the beneficial and repulsion of the detrimental. What might well be beneficial on the individual level, such as going forth and multiplying, might well be detrimental on the mass scale, as overpopulation destroying the environment.
Now I do realize making good and bad a cosmic duel between the forces of righteousness and evil provides a wonderful narrative contrast, but personally I don't need stories to appreciate morality.
As you frame it, it seems your highest ideal imposed on this preferred deity is intelligence, yet intelligence is in fact the tool. Even in the story of Adam, Eve, the snake and the apple, it was understand that knowledge can be a double edged sword.
Light can be a destructive force, but than so can life itself, as we have all been discussing in this contest. I appreciate the light, but I do know it can burn. My judgement is stay in the middle ground between too much and too little and not chase it like some moth.
Men can be led with hope, or herded with fear. We need to be able to put both in the larger context and not have the priests herd us around like children.
Regards,
John
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Toby Asher Lightheart wrote on Jun. 4, 2014 @ 07:26 GMT
Hi John,
Your essay seemed a bit fragmented. Perhaps it would have benefited from a more specific focus. Adding headings for sections is a method that a lot of people have used for breaking their essays into logical parts.
That said, you do raise some interesting points about the structure of government and the banking system. These are in need of some reform. I think there is some danger of things crashing down and people resorting to using "walls and guns". Unfortunately, with the invention of military robotics power can be incredibly concentrated, so this collapse of society might even be in the interests of some powers.
I'm hopeful that there are alternatives that might be adopted before things get too bad. Even though it's not the topic of my essay, I'm interested in making learning and teaching a core ongoing activity everyone in society. This might possibly expand to reform political and economic practices.
Cheers,
Toby
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Author John Brodix Merryman replied on Jun. 4, 2014 @ 09:56 GMT
Thanks Toby.
It is a rather incredibly broad topic, which is why I made the observation that the essay is the abstract. I wanted to coalesce both a basic description of reality and our conscious awareness projected within it, onto a point of focus on the fact that our economic medium of exchange is being used as a massive wealth extraction process by an increasingly parasitic and corrupt banking sector, motivated by our collective desire for notational wealth and this is magnifying our environmental destruction, as well as keeping it short enough for those trying to digest many of these entries. Having been in these contests before, my goal wasn't so much to win as to try to stir up some debate on the topic, for which I've had some minor successes.
Regards,
John
Douglas Alexander Singleton wrote on Jun. 5, 2014 @ 02:21 GMT
Hi John,
I just skimmed, fairly thoroughly, your essay (I want to rad certain essay but am running short of time). I'm sorry it took me so long. I really liked it. First I liked the fact that your eschewed an abstract -- this fits in with the general tone of your essay. Also interesting bio.
Your essay focuses most one the current monetary/financial system and its inherent...
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Hi John,
I just skimmed, fairly thoroughly, your essay (I want to rad certain essay but am running short of time). I'm sorry it took me so long. I really liked it. First I liked the fact that your eschewed an abstract -- this fits in with the general tone of your essay. Also interesting bio.
Your essay focuses most one the current monetary/financial system and its inherent inequities. I like the analog to a circulatory system and the idea that we are heading for a coronary. My only question is there anything really to be done about the financial system? It seems that humans have made strides in science, medicine, even political systems (you talk about individually run governments, monarchies, giving way to institutional governments which are public trusts). However, (and I may be wrong) even though the forms of the economic institutions have changed over human history they (always?) tend to end with an insane concentration of wealth in a few hands, abuse of this wealth and then some revolution/upheaval. OK this is grossly simplified but still the question is "Has there been any really progress change in economic systems over the course of human history? By the way this is an honest and not a rhetorical questions since history of economics is very far from my field.
One of the most persistent myths of at least the US economy is the trickle down idea. This "theory" is used to justify the concentration of large amounts of wealth into a few hands. In this regard you may find of interest (or may have already seen) the *banned* TED talk. From the website the description reads:
"Around a year ago TED banned Nick Hanauer‘s talk named ‘Rich People Don’t Create Jobs‘. The talk was deemed too ‘political’ and was never put online. However, after word got out, a large number of people signed a petition and demanded the rights to view it. TED reluctantly published Nick’s talk which you are able to view right here:"
You can find this talk now easily by doing a Google search. In it Hanauer compares trickle down ideas to the old Ptolemaic system of the Universe -- simply wrong.
You make the statement on page 1. "First and foremost, this situation has to be addressed in a way that can be intellectually comprehended by vast numbers of normally intelligent people," and you mention that lying out such a basic description may irritate "professional interest". Exactly! Whenever some expert gives you some jumbled/jargony explanation whose end is to get you to part with some of your money or resources, you can bet that this is just nonsense hidden by technical sounding language. I've heard (I need to find a reliable source but the story is too good not to repeat) that Wall Street Investment Houses would hire mathematicians and physicists to come up with impenetrable (to someone without a math/physics background) mathematical formulas which they would trot out to their clients to show them that they were a serious science driven firm, when in fact the formulas were useless for anything except for separating the client from their money.
One minor critic -- you say "because the energy is apparently conserved, but the information surely is not". In physics terms (specifically) black holes which are evaporating via Hawking radiation the question of whether information is conserved or not is hotly debates -- with a slight edge to information being conserved. I know this is not what you meant by information (at least I think it isn't) but BHs are my research area so I couldn't resist putting in a technical criticism :-).
Anyway best of luck with this contest,
Doug
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Author John Brodix Merryman replied on Jun. 5, 2014 @ 17:52 GMT
Doug,
Your questions raise the problem that it really would take a book length exposition to do justice to the various questions being raised, yet much of this would have to be supporting detail to deflect the invariable criticism to any complex argument. Since you do seem far more curious of the issues, than critical of my observations about them, I'll try raising a various salient points...
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Doug,
Your questions raise the problem that it really would take a book length exposition to do justice to the various questions being raised, yet much of this would have to be supporting detail to deflect the invariable criticism to any complex argument. Since you do seem far more curious of the issues, than critical of my observations about them, I'll try raising a various salient points and let you process them from your own frame.
Consider two terms you would run into in any in depth reading of economics; Derivatives and re-hypothecation.
If you know much about gambling, derivatives amount to a form of parimutual wagering, where one is betting against other betters, rather than the house. So effectively you can have enormous amounts of money gambled on a very minor issue of probability. For instance, millions of dollars being wagered on a horse race, where the purse might only be 5-25 thousand. The difference though, is these bets don't have to be closed after every event, but can be rolled over into another, so the losses don't have to be declared.
Re-hypothecation basically means the same asset is being used to back multiple securities/loans/etc. Now on its surface, this might seem like outright fraud, but monetary systems have effectively worked this way for centuries, in that there is rarely enough gold/assets in the treasury to back the amount of money in circulation. In fact, prior to the world going off the gold standard, they were often required by law to only have about 25% gold to money in circulation.
Now with low interest rates, money can be borrowed into existence generally cheaper than the stock market is growing. For instance, if you can borrow money at 2% and the stock market is growing about 5% a year and lots of people are doing this, the rising market absorbs the fresh money being created and the only ones losing are those foolish enough not to be speculating in the market, since it does eventually drive down the value of the money.
The larger reality is that this process is being driven by the entire society valuing money more than they might more intangible assets, like environmental resources and the stability of societies in other parts of the world, because of the promise of security. It is like a wave. While we might focus on its peak, the real force driving it is hidden under the water.
The bigger this bubble of notational value gets, the more desperately it needs tangible assets to feed off of and the more amoral it becomes in acquiring them, so the greater the effective suction being applied to the entire economy.
The reason it requires so much complex math, is not simply to confuse those outside the process, but to maintain enough friction and balancing of obligations within the system, in order to store vastly more notational wealth than the actual economy is capable of producing. As for getting quantum theorists from MIT to do this, versus normal accountants, I do think it should be noted that physicists currently believe that math is foundational to reality and any reasonable mathematical structure must reflect some form of actual reality and so that entire universes must exist to reflect the models they formulate. Yet accountants understand the math as only an abstraction of reality and should they get too imaginative in their formulations, it could well attract legal attention and create enormous personal difficulties. So it is simply logical for the bankers to appeal to the quantum theorists for help in inflating these bubbles.
Yes, this process has occurred throughout history, but a large part of that is because we naturally edit much of the facts about reality to what is immediately convenient and so it is much easier for most people to think of these notes as a commodity to be traded around, much as any other commodity and thus loose sight of the network of obligations giving them value and making the system function. Then the system of regulation becomes a burden to the process of creating and managing these flows of value and so is bought off and consumed by it. It is like a wave, in that it exponentially increases and then crashes. Like a game of Monopoly, when one person actually owns everything, the game is over and the paper money is re-distributed. In real life, this often involves pitchforks and torches. What goes up, comes back down.
This is why I'm trying to emphasize that we need to step back and remember these notes are a contract, not a commodity. You no more own those pieces of paper in your pocket, then you own the section of road you happen to be driving on. It behooves those managing this system for people to think they own the money, then people are far less concerned with how integrated it becomes into every function of their lives, while not understanding the power this gives those responsible for managing the value and flow of this money to tax and otherwise control deep social functions.
If your average Joe Sixpack knew those bills with the picture of a dead president were a form of public utility, that he was only being allowed use of, he and the rest of society would naturally be far more careful how much they would extract value from social relations and the environment, in order to acquire these notes. There are many functions in life, from elder and child care, to local community projects and primary education, which throughout history were normal social effects and didn't require established currencies to occur. In this way, social relations and the environment are stores of value to be preserved and built on, not just resources to be mined, because they arise from organic social contracts that we are born into.
In the first part of the essay, I did brush over some equally controversial topics. Obviously the one about religion and how spirituality is more logically a bottom up impulse of a primal sense of self, rather than a top down ideal. This would well be a book length topic. For instance, good and bad are the biological binary code of attraction to the beneficial and repulsion of the detrimental, not the rather useful narrative contrast of the cosmic forces of righteousness and evil our stories lead us to believe. Going forth and multiplying is good on the individual level, but bad on the planetary level. Just as what is good for the fox, is bad for the chicken and there is no clear line where the chicken ends and the fox begins.
This is not to to disparage the top down executive function, as individually it is the conscious state that mediates all our subconscious impulses and collectively it manages the forces within society for the betterment of the group. Yet being able to appreciate it in this relative context and not as an absolute, would allow us to better mediate decisive factors and not have single minded desires and obsessions create more havoc than is normal. In the age of kings, we came to understand the executive function had to be an expression of the better judgement of the people and not just left to the whims of the heir of the prior decision maker. Similarly, our economic medium of money has to serve the interests of the whole society and not just the desires of those tasked with managing it.
Another topic I get into on physics forums, is that since we experience change as a sequence of events, we think of time as the present moving from past to future and physics further distills this to measures of particular duration, to use in calculations. Yet the actual physical process is that change is creating and dissolving these events, thus it is the events going from future to past. For example, the earth does not travel/flow/exist along a dimension from yesterday to tomorrow, but rather tomorrow becomes yesterday because the earth turns. This point has had me banned from a number of physics sites, since it makes time an effect of action, rather than the dimensional basis for it. Effectively it is much more like temperature, than space. Time is to temperature, what frequency is to amplitude. It's just that we experience temperature as a cumulative effect and overlook the multitude of individual actions(velocities/amplitude) creating it, but with time we experience the individual effect of sequence and overlook the fact there is no universal clock, only the effect of a multitude of changes. In fact a faster clock only burns quicker and so falls into the past faster. Remember that, the next time you are in a hurry.
Obviously this is another subject which would take a book to examine, but it is reflective of our necessarily episodic, sequential view of reality, which makes us focus on the concept of objects, more than the processes creating them. Thus such tangibles as notational devices seem more real than the processes giving them force.
I could further develop these subjects, but this should give you something to consider.
Regards,
John
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Author John Brodix Merryman replied on Jun. 5, 2014 @ 18:00 GMT
I would also note that is is perfectly reasonable to have a monetary system based on public debt, if the rewards accrue back to the public. As it is, currently the obligations are public, while the rewards are private. This serves to siphon value out of the public and into private hands. The resulting bubble eventually bursts, to the good of no one, if the system of contracts allowing private ownership is destroyed.
Neil Bates wrote on Jun. 6, 2014 @ 02:20 GMT
John,
I see here a perceptive analysis and a sensible if not revolutionary framework of suggestions for improving the world. The way you bring in concepts of the nature of God or ultimate reality, is certainly not same-old futurism. Your idea of the ground of being/godhead being more an "esse" of existence that develops, rather than an infinitely structured superbeing, relates to my own argument about how our minds access and build upon the essential stuff of the world to become conscious and know they are more than just abstractions of mathematics. You have already commented on my own
essay but I want to quote the portion of your essay that ties them together well:
"So if God is in charge, she apparently doesn't want to know everything. Possibly a more reasonable theological proposition is the spiritual absolute would be the essence of awareness and beingness, from which we rise, not an ideal form from which we fell. In a sense, a spiritual energy, rather than the intellectual forms it manifests."
The spiritual energy drives the essential overall experience of being alive, which is more than just a collection or product of various individual sensations and thoughts etc. It makes a stage, which helps form a unity out of all that and also gives us the essential drive to care about it. I also argue that this wholeness is required for us to behave in a globally controlled manner, such as when we suddenly stop our actions, then resume them later etc. I argue that a "society of mind", even an efficient one, would not be quite nimble enough to pull this off.
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Neil Bates replied on Jun. 6, 2014 @ 02:32 GMT
Well I didn't even remember I already commented here, but that's OK - I made some new points of value.
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Author John Brodix Merryman replied on Jun. 6, 2014 @ 18:29 GMT
Thanks Neil.
It has been an interesting contest and hopefully the conversations will continue.
Yes, having grown up and lived on a farm my whole life, I do see the spirit as an elemental sense of awareness and rational thought as how it interacts with a complex reality, rather than arising from that complexity by chance. As such complexity is part of a cycle of expansion and consolidation. So even nimble minds only go and grow as far as circumstance allows. Then the reset button gets pushed again.
I have to say that I have an inexhaustible supply of trolls, as every time I get a bump up, another comes along to push my score back down. Hopefully I'm actually causing some irritation and they are not just trying to push their own scores up.
Regards,
John
Aaron M. Feeney wrote on Jun. 7, 2014 @ 00:39 GMT
Hi John,
Nice essay! The good rating I was about to give got an additional point added to it because of your funny abstract and your righteous bio. All the best to you!
Warmly,
Aaron
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Author John Brodix Merryman replied on Jun. 7, 2014 @ 03:47 GMT
Thanks Aaron.
It has been another very interesting contest. I have to say I originally got interested in physics as a way to understand society, so it was a good question for me. I suppose that was one of the points I tried to make in the bio.
REgards,
John
Paul N Butler wrote on Jun. 8, 2014 @ 03:24 GMT
Dear John,
I can understand the editing. Although my replies can be long they would be much longer if I tried to cover in detail every possible response that I consider to all of the points that you mention. You made this reply shorter than some others, so I will try to do the same to make it easier for you to respond adequately.
You mention that “but the fact remains that Jesus...
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Dear John,
I can understand the editing. Although my replies can be long they would be much longer if I tried to cover in detail every possible response that I consider to all of the points that you mention. You made this reply shorter than some others, so I will try to do the same to make it easier for you to respond adequately.
You mention that “but the fact remains that Jesus was attempting to push the reset button on the Jewish God and this was fairly firmly acknowledged at the time. That is why it is called "God the Father and God the Son," not God the Spirit and God the Soul.” I was not trying to say that God used the terms God the Spirit and God the Soul in referring to himself. What I was pointing out is that God says that he made man in his image and man is composed of three parts, a spirit a soul and a body and that because man is made in the image of God these three parts are an image or likeness to the three parts of God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. As an example, talking about God the Father in the scriptures it says, “God is a Spirit and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth. This shows that the spirit in man is an image of God the Father who is a Spirit. It also shows that the only way that a man can worship (serve) God the Father is to do it in his spirit. The spirit is the part that generates the intents or purposes to act on. It is the beginning and initiating power that is required to start any purposeful action. This means that to worship God the Father a man’s intents or purposes must be the same as God the Father’s intents. To put it another way, to worship or serve God the Father, the man must intend to do that which God the Father intends for him to do. There is a joining of the two spirits to accomplish the same actions. There is a certain way for this joining to be accomplished and certain conditions must be met first. These are given in the scriptures. The man’s soul takes the intents of the spirit and generates thoughts to carry out those intents. The thoughts are sent to the man’s body and the body converts them into actions that accomplish the intents of the man’s spirit. The soul is, therefore, the mediator between the man’s spirit and his body. In the scriptures, God says that the Son is the only mediator between him and man. The Son, therefore, receives the Father’s intents and generates the thoughts that man can understand and sends them to the man. The man then receives those thoughts from the Son and acts in accordance with them to carry out God the Father’s intents. The soul in man is, therefore, an image of the Son and the man’s body is the image of the Holy Ghost. An image is never as good or complete in all ways as the original source that it is an image of. This means that man cannot be equal to God, but he is formed in a way that is similar and gives us an insight into God’s form. I am not concerned with the meanings that men apply to God. My concern is what God says about himself in the scriptures. I believe that God is capable of keeping his promises such as when Jesus said “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall never pass away.” I, therefore, believe that God has kept the meanings in his Word intact, so that it has not been changed by men to mean different from what he originally intended it to mean and I can, therefore, trust that it is true. I do, however, understand that you probably do not believe this way because you would have to believe in God as a living being with the power and intent to do these things. If you look at the scriptures as only a work of man, it would not be reasonable from your perspective to believe that anything in it could be sure to be as it is said to be in the scriptures because man does not have the ability to make it so. To me the fact that the scriptures contain so many prophesies that have come to pass and many that are happening now in the present, etc. is another indication that they are not the work of man because man does not have the power to make them happen.
Again, I can see why you might believe this since you don’t believe that there is actually a God who could keep the academics from modifying his message to us, but since the evidence is that there is such a God that concept only applies to the false gods and not the true God. You still have not given me any real evidence that the true God does not exist. You have only given stories or fables based on the assumption that God does not exist other than in the form of fables or as man’s imaginary creation. On the other hand, I have already given you some evidence that he does exist.
I am glad that you are happy with your current situation in life. I to have found it good to give up being the boss, but to me it is to give it up to God because he can always make the right decisions and lead me in the right direction to make things work out for good.
I cannot see how you consider that the concept that God is intelligent to the degree that he is able to create, control, and maintain the universe to cause it to yield the results that he desires to fulfill his purpose for creating it is in any way looking at God as though he is a mere man, since man is not intelligent enough to do any of these things. You are right that his intelligence is only one property of him of many that he possesses and it does help him to be able to rightly divide and make judgments as necessary to fulfill his will, but I do not consider that to be his only attribute, but it is an important one. Without it he would not have been able to have planned, designed, and determined the best way to create the universe. Of course, I can see why you would not consider it something you would consider important because you have jumped to the conclusion that god is only a collection of myths and stories and has no real abilities. You, therefore, fit your conception of the nature of god to agree with the god that you assume to exist. One problem with the conception of good or bad being what is beneficial or detrimental to the greatest number of people is that it can then be used by the majority to justify mistreating any minority group that they define. As an example, there are currently people in this world who believe that the world population should only be about 300,000,000 people. Using this logic some of these people could justify killing about 6,700,000,000 people because they might say that even though this would mean killing most of the people alive at this time, in the long term future there would be a total of more people who would live than that amount and they would say that the lives of all those future people would be better. Of course, you could bet that the ones that were not killed would be the rich and powerful people who would really be doing it because they would think they would have more as a result of it. It would not really work that way, but greed and the desire for power can easily blind people and cause them to do stupid destructive things. For man to kill is wrong because God reserves the times of a person’s birth and death to his determination because he knows the best time for each of us to be born and to die.
God created both good and evil in order to allow us to be able to have free choice. The choices that are the right ones that work for good are the good ones and the ones that end in bad results are the bad or evil ones. He tells us to make the good ones and not the bad ones, but he allows us to make the bad ones, so we can see and learn how bad they are. This is all part of our training, so we will learn that God leads us in the right direction to go in all things and we can learn to trust him to do so. There are 2 ways to get this understanding. One is to do both evil and good and get the results first hand or you can look at the results of other’s actions (the stories) and learn that way. I have found that the most pleasant experience is to do the good and get those results directly and look at the results of others who do evil and learn about those results from the stories or accounts of those others.
First, God is as he is and I only try to determine how that is by the evidence that I observe about him. I cannot impose any highest ideal on him. His highest ideal is what he makes it to be as the most important part of his being. I mention intelligence here for 2 reasons. First, it is necessary for him to possess great intelligence to have created the universe and the evidence is that he did that. Second, those who don’t believe in God’s existence as the one who created the universe generally try in one way or another to define away that as being an attribute of God, so they can then say that he could not have done it. You are right that intelligence is an ability that can be used as a tool that in this case God used for the purpose of creating the universe, so he can use it to make a body for himself. I believe that this is a good purpose and that he will accomplish his goal and that it will work for good for him and all who become members of his body. The problem with Adam and Eve is that they desired to have knowledge that they were not at that time prepared to properly use. That is why God commanded them to not access it at that time.
In a lot of things the middle place or to do things in moderation can be the best course of action, but when it comes to God that is the worst place to be. Jesus says that he would have you to be either hot or cold to him, but if you are lukewarm (in the middle) he will spew (spit) you out of his mouth. He says that those who try to stay in the middle are wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked. He counsels such to buy of him gold tried in the fire, that they may be rich (this comes from doing right even when you have to suffer to do it), and white raiment (the righteousness of the saints), that they may be clothed, so that the shame of their nakedness does not appear, and anoint their eyes with eye-salve, that they may see (an image of going to and being anointed by Jesus (God’s Word to get understanding)). Jesus says that as many as he loves he rebukes and chastens and says to, therefore, be zealous and repent from being lukewarm. He then says that he stands at the door and knocks and if any man hears his voice and opens the door he will come into him and they will sup (share their lives) with each other. He then says that to him that overcomes he will grant to sit with him in his throne even as he also overcame and is set down with his Father in his throne. Although I did not understand that I was this way to God when I was an agnostic and, therefore, in the middle between belief and unbelief, I have since then found that compared to how life can be with God in Christ it was a pretty good description of me at that time. It is evident that God desires to have this relationship with us in that he says that he stands at the door and knocks and is ready to come into the man that hears him and opens the door and desires to sup with him and when the man has overcome his problem of being in the middle he even offers to share his throne with him.
I agree that it is best to not be herded around by men, but it is good to be one of God’s sheep and be herded by him to learn from him to know what is best to do in any situation. You can’t get any larger context than God. This comment is still turning out kind of big, but it is still smaller than the last one.
Sincerely,
Paul B.
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