Math Extinguished Neanderthals

HOW NEANDERTHALS WERE OUTBRED:

Zillions of theories about the “disappearance” of Neanderthals. The latest one, from Oxford University, claims that Neanderthals’ big, beautiful eyes, and their big muscles caused their demise. They were too busy looking at things, and flexing their muscles. The idea is that significantly larger eyes would have crowded the Neanderthal brain out, making them relatively stupid. In particular it made them incapable of having social groups as large as those of Homo Sapiens Sapiens.

Big Eyes Do Not Kill

Sapiens girl on the left, Neanderthal girl on the right (reconstitution published in Science Magazine a few years ago).

I have long argued that the strength of democracy came from having many brains working in parallel. There is little doubt that larger social groups bring a higher cultural intelligence, hence higher individual intelligence. So I agree about that bit of logic. Yet, ironically, to reach the conclusion that Neanderthals’ social group were less numerous, the simple fact that Neanderthals were bigger, is enough. There is no need for hazardous demeaning allegations about Neanderthals’ brains.

That big eyes made Neanderthals stupid contradicts some facts that were thought to be established:

1) Sapiens Neanderthalis’ brains were significantly larger to start with. See Wikipedia.

2) Many very clever Homo Sapiens Sapiens have small brains. Famously Anatole France, an intellectual, had only a 1,000 cubic centimeters brain. Homo Floresiensis, the “hobbit” species living on the island of Flores, Indonesia, until it was wiped out recently, was extremely intellectually capable, although it had really small (and completely different) brains.

3) In the Middle East, Neanderthals and Sapiens went back and forth through the same large caves over 50,000 years. So whatever happened, it was not in evidence for 50,000 years.

So, of course, I have my own theory. That’s what philosophy is all about: trying to guess what really matters most, and how that most significant data logically articulate. Then scientists, politicians and writers can swoop, figure out the details, and attribute themselves the glory.

What could have happened by around 28,000 years ago that caused the demise of Neanderthals? At the time, the last fierce glaciation was gaining ground. (It reached its maximum 25,000 years ago.) Some have argued, absurdly, that the Neanderthals could not take it. That’s beyond silly, as Neanderthals had evolved, from half a million years ago, precisely to handle extreme cold.

Neanderthals were stocky, powerful, and they had thrived through hundreds thousands years of glaciation, mostly on a meat diet, hunting big game. But they also knew how to cook plants, and eat them. 

27,800 years ago, Cave Bears were exterminated. That huge animal who lived in caves, primed real estate Sapiens Sapiens and Neanderthals craved for. Could the disappearance of Cave Bears be logically linked to the disappearance of Neanderthals? Yes. That’s a consequence of my theory. More advanced technology played a direct role. So did size: Cave Bears disappeared, because they were larger than European Brown Bears (called Grizzlies in America), according to the mechanism below, differential exponentiation.

How did men kill Cave Bears? With technology. We do not know exactly what weapons men had at their disposal. However, technology had improved, and kept improving. Recently it was found that Sapiens Sapiens (Homo SS; I hope one gets the joke) in Africa had invented bows and arrows 80,000 Before Present (BP).  (About 60,000 years earlier than previously thought!) Before bows and arrows, the propeller had been invented, and was used in Europe. The propeller took advantage of angular momentum to send a sort of mini lance further and stronger than by hand.

Why did the Neanderthals and Denisovans (another human species from Central Eurasia) lose their edge? Advancing technology is the obvious answer. When technology of clothing and weapons was sufficiently advanced, the physiological advantage that the Neanderthals genetically had, disappeared. Homo Sapiens Sapiens could thrive just as well through winter.

At that point, Homo Sapiens Sapiens from Africa could be as successful as the Neanderthals through the freezing wastelands of Europe. OK.

But the Homo SS outbred the Neanderthals, so they became genetically more successful. How do I explain that?

Simple. However, the explanation involves the exponential function, the same function found all over, and that the mathematician Rudin called “the most important function in mathematics”. The exponential also explains the plutocratic phenomenon, and that is why it’s so dangerous. The exponential always rules extinction events, that’s why one day a species is all over, like the American Pigeon, or the Tasmanian Tiger, and the next day, it’s gone.

So visualize this. Neanderthals were bigger than Homo SS, just like the Polar Bear is bigger than the Black Bear. Bigness is an adaptation to cold. Southern Europe’s Brown Bears are smaller than those found in Kamchatka, or Alaska (also known as Grizzlies: the Grizzly is an emigrated European Brown Bear!) Bigger makes warmer inside. That’s why the most massive animal that ever was, the Blue Rorqual, at up to 180 tons, is nearly twice the mass of the largest dinosaur (it’s not just that it’s floating, but also that water is cooler than Jurassic air, I hold).

To simplify, let’s use a bit of exaggeration (that’s reasoning by exaggeration, one of my preferred tactic of thought; the one humor exploits, and why joking helps thinking). Let’s assume Neanderthals were twice more massive than Homo SS (certainly, in the average, Cave Bears were twice the mass of Brown Bears).

Now let’s consider an habitat where Homo SS and Neanderthal bands roamed. They will tend not to mix, for obvious racist reasons. The racial hatred between Neanderthals and Homo SS has got to have been colossal. People who look too different are not even sexually attracted to each other (and where Neanderthals and Homo SS were in contact in the Middle East, for 50,000 years, there is no evolution of an interbred species, an indirect proof that there was no love lost there!)

The density of human mass is going to be roughly the same all over, because that density depends only upon the resources available (mostly meat on the hoof, and fur in burrows in glaciating conditions).

Thus, there would have been apartheid. But the Homo SS would have been twice more numerous, where they reigned (from my assumption of twice the mass). So now graft on this a catastrophe; a drought, a flood, a very tough winter, a volcanic super disaster, whatever. The climate was highly variable, starting about 40,000 years ago, just when Homo SS appeared. Some have stupidly argued that Neanderthals were too stupid to adapt to this changing circumstances. Like this paralyzing stupidity struck them just when Homo SS were around. My explanation is more subtle.

After a catastrophe in said habitat, say one of these numerous habitat in Europe isolated by glacial mountain ranges, or seas and lakes, most of the human population would be wiped out, Homo SS, just as Neanderthals. There would tend to be always a small remaining population, because the greatest limit on man is man himself: as a population gets wiped out, resources rebound, and life of the survivors tend to get much easier (that’s what happened in Europe after the Black Death of 1348 CE; if nothing else, survivors could ask for higher salaries from their plutocratic masters, and they did).   

So say 90% of the population of the habitat was wiped out. As suddenly resources are no limited, the human population will rebound exponentially. The equation is: N(t) = N(0) exp(Rt). “R” is the “Malthusian” parameter, the rate of growth. Now it’s going to require twice the resources to feed a Neanderthal to sexual maturation (under our outrageously simplifying assumption that Neanderthals are twice the mass). Thus one may assume that R(Homo SS)/R(Neanderthal) is 2. The end result is that the quotient:

Number Homo SS/ Number Neanderthal = A exp(2t). (Where A is the ratio of the populations H SS/Neanderthal after the catastrophe.)

Thus the population of H SS would exponentially grow relative to that of the Neanderthals, resulting in a quick extinction. And in no way this is happening because Homo SS were superior. Just because they were more gracile.

Hence the mystery of the evolution of contemporary man is smoothly explained. Just a bit of math. QED.

Europeans & Asians: Not Just African

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Patrice Ayme

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Note 1: what of the mentally deliquescent and racist article in the Proceedings of the Royal Society? First, they sank so low as to “using orbit size as a proxy, that Neanderthals had larger visual systems than contemporary AMH [Anatomically Modern Humans]“. That’s about as intelligent as saying that, because special forces use night vision goggles, they have got to have bigger visual systems.

The main woman author also found the same physiological feature, bigger eyes, in the past, about people presently living at high latitude. She contentedly asserted that, because light levels are lower in the north, people living in the north (40,000 years at least for Homo SS) have bigger eyes. Amusingly, she did not draw, in that case the conclusion that Norwegians and the English are therefore more stupid. Somehow, though, in her lack of smarts, she applies that controversial reasoning to Neanderthals. Does she have giant eyes?

Seriously the Oxford study rests on a central fact that contradicts one of established facts about Neanderthals. Indeed it claims Neanderthals’ brains were not any larger than Homo SS.

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Note 2; what catastrophes am I talking about? Well the climate fluctuated wildly, to start with. Second, A Campanian ignimbrite volcanic super-eruption around 40,000 years ago, followed by a second one a few thousand years later, certainly crashed Neanderthal populations (based on logic, and evidence from Mezmaiskaya cave in the Caucasus. Mitochondrial DNA analysis of a specimen there is C14 dated 29,000 years BP, one of the latest living pure Neanderthals). After such a catastrophe, the exponential rebounds of populations would have advantaged Homo SS, as explained above.

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Note 3: OK, I exaggerated with the mass ratio. (Mathematicians often do this, considering an exaggerated case to understand the mean, through the tails.) But the real mass ratio would be aggravated because, Neanderthal was built in such a way, relative to gracile Homo SS, that they consumed more calories per day (some paleontologists have come up with 300). So there is no doubt that the effect above will play a role, even if the mass ratios were not as bad. Notice the mechanism above would tend to extinguish the Neanderthal traits that were most characteristic of the subspecies.

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Note 4: A preferred trick of Neanderthals’ haters is to exhibit Archaic Neanderthals‘skulls, and compare them to those of modern men. The skull of an Archaic Neanderthal of 400,000 years ago should not be compared to a modern human, less than 40,000 year old! All the more since Neanderthals’ brain size augmented faster than the brain size of Homo Sapiens Sapiens.

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Note 5: Part of the mechanism above generalizes for other species in competition. It provides with a disappearance mechanism after ecological turbulence, according to species’ ecological footprint. The reasoning can be generalized to other species’ extinctions. Let’s recapitulate the preceding, while generalizing it: 

1) it is hard to transform a near extinction event into total eradication (see the Black Plague of 1348 CE). Indeed, the more the extinction, the easier it gets for the survivors, as resources rebound (this is similar to the famous lynx-rabbit oscillation).

2) However, larger animals (Neanderthals, dinosaurs), or animals with a higher metabolic load (Neanderthals) are going to be to be left behind exponentially, during the rebound phase. 

In the case of Neanderthals the periodic catastrophes could have been of climatic origins (waves of cooling, warming and unstable climate as the earth underwent various tipping points, one way or another, into the occasionally severely glaciated period between 60 K and 11 K BP. A severe volcanic catastrophe or two would have added near extinctions episodes.

In the case of dinosaurs, the massive Deccan eruptions, over millions of years, culminated with the most acute episode, more or less contemporaneously with a massive asteroid impact (!). According to the exponential extinction theory, the back and forth of near extinctions would have put a severe extinction pressure on the dinosaurs and the like, as smaller, more efficiently active mammals and birds would have put huge pressure on dinosaurs and flying reptiles (same in the sea). By eating their eggs to start with, as mammal and bird population would have exploded very fast back up at any relief. (This would have happened in addition to other extinction pressures, such as cooling.)

See: http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2009/11/21/trapped-by-super-traps/

Note 6: A first reading of the ideas above may lead one to wonder why it is that small species do not overwhelm big ones, when they are in competition. But, in normal circumstances, one has an equilibrium ecology, the equivalent of equilibrium thermodynamics. the effect above does not apply. The effect above, exponential extinction, occurs only during non equlibrium ecological dynamics (hence the importance of near-extinctions). It’s the equivalent of non equilibrium thermodynamics (when Prigogine suggested the latter, he was viewed as nuts; until he got the Nobel Prize).

Fragile Earth Syndrome

Abstract: The Earth is already all too close from being getting all too hot, from its astronomical position at the interior edge of the Sun’s Habitable Zone.

The Greeks viewed Gaia, the Earth, as the Mother Goddess from whom all other gods sprang. Yet, discoveries they made later showed that this metaphysics was misleading. In truth, habitable planets, far from being all powerful, are confined to narrow zones around their stars (and these zones move, and are under continual threat, as I describe below):

Sun Like Stars Are Most Hospitable.

Vertically the masses, going up, the unit being the mass of the sun; as stars gets bigger, they get hotter, thus they change color, covering the entire black-body spectrum, from brown dwarves to blinding ultra violet hot “Blue Stragglers”.

Horizontally, the distance from the star; the graph gives only a rough idea of the notion of Habitable Zone; in truth the whole point of this essay is that Earth is at the edge of Sol’s Habitable Zone, within 1% of boiling; Habitable Zones narrow as the stars get smaller, and get much larger, far out, around bigger stars.

The life of Earth on the edge has got more dicey in the last 400 million years. Thus the risk of hyper warming is greater than in the Carboniferous Era. By pumping into the atmosphere the equivalent of 100 million tons of CO2, every single day, we are, literally, playing with fire. (A first counter-measure would be to outlaw, through regulations, those gases that warm up the air a lot, and are not indispensable; for example leaks in the pipelines of the USA allow 4% of the CH4 to escape!)
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The two close calls by large space rocks were a reminder that this is a serious, not particularly friendly universe. Something to meditate carefully.

Those who play apprentice sorcerers with the climate and planetary ecology should pay attention.

For reasons having to do with the periodic table, the frequency of elements and the chemical characteristics of carbon, namely its ability to form many liaisons, it seems likely that life in the universe will have to resemble life on Earth. That is being water, carbon and oxygen based. (Believing that life does not have to be carbon-centric may sound cute, but it’s unreal.)

Thus the habitable zone is the zone around a star where it is neither to hot, nor too cold, and a planet can support water.

Not all stars can have an habitable zone: the greater the mass of a star, the more fiercely it burns. A star with five times the mass of the sun will typically have 625 times the luminosity of the sun.

Why? In small stars, the part of the core hot and dense enough to sustain thermonuclear fusion is relatively small. In large stars, it becomes enormous, and embraces much more of the thermonuclear fuel tank.

For Stars, Mass Is Everything.

Thus, the larger the mass, the shorter the lifespan of the entire system orbiting the star. A star with 60 solar masses will shine only 3 million years before running out of hydrogen. At that point it will run hotter and hotter as it burns heavier elements until it explodes as a super nova. A star of five solar masses will live longer, but still only 100 million years or so. Long enough to make it a tourist destination, not long enough to evolve life (all the more as the habitable zone will migrate out fast, as the stellar furnace gets hotter, fast).

Even a star with only 50% larger mass than the Sun will live only three billion years. On Earth, after that duration, the first oxygen making organisms were appearing, and the atmosphere was going to change completely, from reducing to oxidizing. That would bring the “Snowball Earth” episodes, 600 million years ago, or so, when most of the planet froze, before enough CO2 could be generated to reach the appropriate greenhouse effect.

Clearly, for evolving advanced life, more than a billion years is needed. Thus planets with indigenous life will be restricted to red and yellow dwarves (the sun is one of the latter, with an estimated lifespan of ten billion years before turning ephemerally into a red giant).

The 2012 sci-fi (silly) movie “Battleship” has it right on that point: most of the habitability is found cuddling next to red dwarf stars, so that aliens would be blinded by our sunlight is likely. This also means that life out there has a good probability to have evolved in what, for us, would be rather dim circumstances. Indeed most stars are red dwarves and those are the longest living stars, easily going on for 15 billion years (they use their thermonuclear fuel conservatively).

Some red dwarves could have evolved life, in our Milky Way galaxy, when our sun, a mighty yellow dwarf, did not exist yet. Such stars, with their habitable planets, could still be around.

Being in the habitable zone is necessary for life, but it’s not sufficient.

For example, any planet orbiting too close to its star will lock its orbital rotation and its diurnal rotation (as the Moon has with the Earth). Thus the planet will have one side too hot for life, and the other too cold.

That means that when red dwarves become too small, their habitable zones, get too close, and would-be habitable planet lock down. (Venus, although 100 million kilometers from the Sun is nearly locked: it rotate on itself slower than it does around the Sun.)

The Earth is totally exceptional. She is endowed with a huge satellite that stabilizes her inclination on the orbital plane (Mars’ inclination on the elliptic varies wildly, causing wildly fluctuating super-seasons). This resulting, constant and mild inclination allows the poles to not get too cold, and the tropics, not too warm: it spreads the goodness of sunlight around.

Earth is also a mighty nuclear reactor, providing with the shield of a powerful magnetosphere (Venus does not have any, so its upper atmosphere is scorched by the solar wind), and plate tectonic (allowing for a complex recycling mechanism involving CO2 and long term climate stability).

The present, sort of official, habitability zone theory is 20 years old. It showed that Earth was within 5% of receiving too much warmth from her star. What has been found by the latest study is even more disturbing: Earth is within 1%, 1.5 million kilometers of inhabitability (5 times the Earth-Moon distance).

Earth is, astronomically, at risk of getting too hot, and of suffering a run-away greenhouse, as Venus did.

Long ago, Venus may have been in the habitable zone. However, general main sequence star theory, and observation, show that the Sun has warmed up. Its power output has increased by at least 25% since it got started. So the habitable zone in the Solar System has been slowly moving outward.

Why did the Earth cool over the last 100 million years, if the sun is slowly warming up? It probably has to do with non linear effects related to the geometry of the continents: the continents migrated north, and shallow tropical seas disappeared. The migration of land towards the north augmented the albedo of the Earth (as land stays frozen in summer more easily than sea, ice and snow keep reflecting more sunlight back to space, even then; that’s the core of the two centuries old glaciation theory).

So, as Earth should have warmed up, by a miracle, a sun shade, the glaciated North, was put in place, just in time!

Not all the coolness is due to ice and snow. Earth, before very recent human interference, had long been endowed with a cool climate. It seems that clouds make the difference (the effects clouds bring are too complex to be taken into account in computer programs of habitability at this point).
It’s a double edged sword. Water vapor may bring more clouds, but it is also a mighty greenhouse gas.

Still the point remains that all the objective data show that, our planet is not far, astronomically speaking, from a runaway greenhouse. By keeping on pumping a witches’ brew of greenhouse warming gases in the atmosphere, we are, literally playing with fire. Every day we add nearly 100 million tons, in CO2 alone, in our apparent urge to mimic Venus.

Pumping 450 million years of carbon into the air all of a sudden is not smart: Earth has had plate tectonics from the start, so much of this carbon was sequestered. Now we are freeing huge quantities of it… and in a geological, and biological, snap.

All other things being equal, the Earth is closer to inhabitability through warming than it was 400 million years ago (when the CO2 was very high). Having the same CO2 in the air as in the Carboniferous Era would result in a warmer planet.
To make things worse, there are no plausible technological fixes to too much CO2 in the atmosphere (with existing science and technology; and contrarily to disinformation from the fossil carbon burning fanatics).

In between the high- and low-mass stars lie stars similar to our own Sun. They make up about 15% percent of the stars in the galaxy. Such stars have reasonably-broad Habitable Zones, do not suffer from hard UV irradiation, have lifetimes of the order of 10 billion years. They are the best candidates for harboring planets with indigenous life.

Intriguingly, the three stars of the Alpha Centauri system may harbor life. The system is made of two main yellow dwarves, one slightly bigger, one slightly smaller than the sun. They come as close to each other as Saturn is from the Sun (not close enough to affect each other Habitable Zones directly).

A planet was just detected, grazing the .9 solar mass Alpha Centauri B. (We have the means to find out if the system supports life, but NASA and the Congress of the USA, shut down the projects, in an apparent fit of obscurantist anti-science rage; one of them called the Terrestrial Planet Finder; Alpha Centauri would be reachable with nuclear propulsion.)

The stability of orbits (hence of the Habitable Zones) in the Alpha Centauri system has been debated. Many a stellar system has been found where giant planets have progressively swept the entire system. And we are always one giant comet away from extinction. That could happen in 6 months. And we don’t know, because we are apparently not interested to find out. (Although the mightiest nuke could solve that problem, that would require some preparations.)

Life exists in the cosmos, everywhere, but it’s fragile. Everywhere. Including on so far invincible fortress Earth. Invincible, but still so fragile.

3,000 years after the Greeks elaborated their mythology, we find out that, contrarily to what they guessed, Earth is far from the mother of all what is divine. There are greater powers out there… The worst of them being, potentially, ourselves.

As a star goes up the main sequence, its Habitability Zone moves out. So we should be careful to think we can reconstitute the conditions of the Carboniferous Era, by pumping as much CO2 in the air as there was then, and prosper.

Everything indicates that we will punch straight trough.
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Patrice Ayme

Washington Taliban

No need to go to Afghanistan to visit with the Taliban. It was invited at the Presidential Inaugural.

INAUGURAL VIOLATION OF CONSTITUTION:
The Constitution for the United States of America starts with a preamble:

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

Notice: Not a word about Allah, God, or whatever Deus ex machina, or any sort of superstition grounded being. So why did a so called “Episcopal Priest” come to the “Inaugural” of President Obama, to address the multitude in a so called “benediction”?

Benediction means saying something good. But it was nothing of the sort. That priest, “Reverend Doctor Luis Leon” proffered insults against humanity. Is that the message the President of the USA wanted to convey?
Dutifully all the potentates lowered their heads as they absorbed the wisdom. They mimicked well giant penguins watching eggs between their webbed feet. Only Sasha Obama looked as if she could not believe what she was hearing:

No God, No Good? Are They All Lord Crazy?

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WITHOUT LORD, MAN IS HELL, SAYS INAUGURAL MANIAC:
Below is more than half of Leon’s benediction:

“Let us pray:

Gracious and eternal God, as we conclude the second inauguration of President Obama, we ask for your blessings as we seek to become, in the words of Martin Luther King, citizens of a beloved community, loving you and loving our neighbors as ourselves.

We pray that you will bless us with your continued presence because without it, hatred and arrogance will infect our hearts. But with your blessing we know that we can break down the walls that separate us. We pray for your blessing today because without it, distrust, prejudice and rancor will rule our hearts. But with the blessing of your presence, we know that we can renew the ties of mutual regard which can best form our civic life.

We pray for your blessing because without it suspicion, despair, and fear of those different from us will be our rule of life. But with your blessing, we can see each other created in your image, a unit of God’s grace, unprecedented, irrepeatable (sic) and irreplaceable.

We pray for your blessing because without it, we will see only what the eye can see. But with the blessing of your blessing we will see that we are created in your image…

We pray for your blessing. Bless all of us, privileged to be citizens and residents of this nation, with a spirit of gratitude and humility that we may become a blessing among the nations of this world. We pray that you will shower with your life-giving spirit, the elected leaders of this land, especially Barack our president and Joe our vice president.”
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YOU MONSTERS NEED A LORD TO RULE YOU:
OK, let’s recapitulate; 5,000 years ago, Sumerians established a fun religion with plenty of myths, such as Adam, Eve, the Apple, the Snake, the Garden of Eden, etc. Meanwhile the Egyptians wrote a number of fairy tales for children, including the waters parting, etc.

2,500 years later those myths and fables were gathered together in a book (=”bible”) by some obdurate Jews enjoying Babylonian hospitality in a concentration camp. The central personage of the bible is Allah, or “Yahweh”, the “jealous god” of the Jews, always keen to destroy those who don’t obey his maniacal insanity. For example Yahweh tortures to death the son of (the famous king) David of Goliath fame, because David did not enforce mass murder with as much enthusiasm as Yahweh had ordered, and Yahweh becomes obsessed with making David suffer.

These monstrosities were made into a religion to make monstrous soldiers more thrilled by mass murder than David had been. That was the smart plot the emperors of the decaying Roman state found to persist with the plutocratic rule with the help of a bloody theocratic terror. It was not that smart: the killing of intellectuals, in connection with the continuing persistence of the hyper wealthy to pay few taxes, brought a quick collapse.

The evacuation of Britannia, while passing over of Roman military power to the Franks in Germania and Gallia, in 400 CE followed the theocratic, Sharia like terror edicts of emperor Theodosius, a Spanish general, by just 19 years. The consequence was the military collapse of the “Occidental Part” of the empire. But the monstrosity of Judeo-Christianism kept on going, and the destruction of thinking throughout the empire kept on going for another two centuries.

The monstrosity of the Judeo-Christian god was the gift that kept on giving, for more than a millennium after that. After all, if We The People are monstrous, why not exploit us? Don’t we need to be punished?

Now Luis Leon, a refugee from Guantanamo (!), Cuba tells us that, without the blessing of that imaginary divine, jealous imaginary ogre in heavens,
hatred and arrogance will infect our hearts
distrust, prejudice and rancor will rule our hearts
suspicion, despair, and fear of those different from us will be our rule of life,
we will see only what the eye can see.

So if we don’t abandon ourselves to pathological naivety, ignorance and superstition, we would be full of hatred, arrogance, distrust, prejudice, rancor, suspicion, despair, xenophobia. But everybody semi-intelligent nowadays, except for some forlorn peasants, ought to know that the bible is made of recycled fables, now that we have the originals, 2,500 years older.

Thus what Reverend Doctor Luis Leon says is that if we are not hallucinating, we are full of hatred, arrogance, distrust, prejudice, rancor, suspicion, despair, xenophobia. In other words, he views humanity as emotionally disgusting when not insane.

well Luis Leon and his Jesus Christ are wrong. Nearly all and any human has been brought by love, through love; such is the truth of nearly all babies. And Jesus was wrong, and the so called “Golden Rule”, “love others as you do yourself” is also wrong. And so is the biblical Ogre in the sky.

Parental love for the child can, of course, be much greater than the love the parent has for herself, or himself. So the Golden Rule is too weak to describe the beauty and strength of human love. Why? It’s not just a question of neurohormones. It’s also a question that the child, the little child, is precisely completely alien to all what the Reverend doctor Luis Leon believes defines us, as a despicable species.

One could even say that, as Mr. Leon apparently believe small children are full of hatred and other terrible traits, Mr. Leon is a child hater. One must fear that is just not step from child molestation, as clearly, he has already stepped over into (verbal) child abuse. Why are the leaders of the USa so keen to respect a child abuser?

Too bad I was not invited at the Inaugural. had i been there, i would have risen my head, spit on the ground, and walked out. differently from Beyonce’, I don’t do play-back.

Learn, followers of Leon: if we were as despicable as Leon says, we would never have evolved as a . Our hateful, arrogant, distrustful, pre-judging, rancorous, suspicious, despairing, xenophobic ancestors would never have established enough cooperation with each other to survive.
Learn Leon: as you preach that we are despicable, the debasement of humanity, you preach that hatred, arrogance, distrust, prejudice, rancor, suspicion, despair, xenophobia are us, and thus to be expected in others, as we expect them in us. As some crazy with god act as you say they naturally ought to do, we will get plenty of exploitation, greed and terrorism.

And learn, USA leaders: what’s crossing your silly minds as you bow to horror, and make a religion out of despising humanity? Because that is what Luis Leon preached, the contempt of humanity, one could even say the hatred of humanity.

If you believe we are all that despicable, and you bow to that revelation, as if an object of wonder, you are telling the entire world what you are.

It’s not just ugly, it’s a contradiction, as you too, were brought in love. Your abject submission to Luis Leon’s horrors makes you into hypocrites.

Or maybe you forgot? How come? Too much greed, too much hubris for too long, too much association, for too long with those who are all about greed, power and hubris made you forget that, without love, there is no humanity?
Practicing the Dark Side too long does not make just for a bad heart, but also for an incompetent, senile mind.

Just look at Sasha Obama’s unbelieving face. Truth, children find hard to hide. Yes, Sasha, no Lord can endow humanity with what defines it.To believe otherwise is to make abjection into a religion.
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Patrice Ayme

NO LOVE, NO MIND

LOVE IS ALL ABOUT MIND MELDING…

And Mind Melding Is What Makes Us Possible.

The question has long been asked: what is love, where does it come from? But the real question is: what is man, where does it come from? And the answer is love.

I do not allude here to the silly confusion between love and sex called, rather pathetically, ”making love”. At best, it has to do with the amplification oxytocin provides with, and it’s a sideshow; fishes do it.

Love in full is parental love, mammalian style.  

That does involve oxytocin (and vasopressin), sure. But love, in advanced species, goes well beyond chemistry, or biology. It involves intelligence, logic itself. The chemical intervenes just to amplify, and stabilize, the logical. And it is pretty obvious why.

Homo Sapiens Sapiens is the official name of the species. Sapiens Sapiens: Wise Wise. Where does all that wisdom comes from? Love. Facts are mostly learned. Logic is learned, like anything else. Wisdom is learned, even more than anything else.

And how was most of this learning achieved? From others, and for others. What motivated the teachers, the parents? Love. What mostly motivated those who learned? Love.

What one learns depends upon one’s environment. Famous experiences from  the 1970s have shown that kittens brought up in an unnatural visual environment do not see properly. Their visual neurons are abnormal. Kittens reared in a world of vertical lines do not have any neuron responding to anything within 30 degrees of the horizontal. (They need 5 months in a normal environment to start to see what is horizontal!)

In other words, neurobiology is made from what’s out there (the idea is at least as old as Ramon y Cajal, the Spanish discoverer of neurons, a century ago).

This generalizes to many mental behaviors, and much mental infrastructure. True, one can learn logic, octopus style, by making little experiments at the bottom of the sea. But that carries only that far.

Interacting with the material world does not teach high level Machiavellianism, the gist of social intelligence. And indeed, although cephalopods are intelligent, they have not developed high social intelligence as, say, whales or primates. (Although cephalopods are very social, their lives are very short, they just don’t have the time to be taught by fellow cephalopods; an aspect of the connection between longevity and wisdom; so their brain/body mass ratio is between cold and warm blooded animals; it’s also probably why their brains did not grow much in the last 400 million years, whereas warm blooded social animals are launched in a brain size race).

To see with one’s heart, to have a heart that can see, one needs to be exposed to all the emotional lines imaginable. Otherwise, just as neurons reading horizontal lines do not appear in a world of vertical lines, so will it be with emotions, or other stimuli. Presenting a growing mind with a mutilated world fabricates a mutilated neurobiology.

The mutilated world can be physically mutilated, as with the cats with an amputated visual environment. But if the mental environment is emotionally, logically or experientally mutilated, it’s the same, and it’s worse in humans. For example the chidren of abused people tend to become themselves abusers.

One thing man did when selecting dogs was to evolve animals who are eager to find out the cues that human eyes indicate. In other words, animals eager to meld minds. This is reinforced by an expectation of love, which is necessary as most wild animals interpret direct eye contact as proximal to attack.

High social intelligence is taught by love, for love, through love. High social intelligence makes very complex, caring societies possible. But not just that. It makes technology and science possible.

How? High social intelligence involves Machiavellian Intelligence. Machiavellian Intelligence is, basically, and in its most general sense, the ability to compute with love (real, fake, suspected, or suspicious).

Machiavellian intelligence rests upon, and demonstrates, all day long, that infinitesimal causes, properly piled up, can have enormous effects. This is the hint, the motivation, the inspiration, that entices to create logic, science and technology, thus the human universe, possible. Man without logic, science and technology is nothing. Man simply cannot even survive in nature without technology, ever since stone weapons have been wielded.

I claim that Homo’s social subtlety was the paradigm for science.

Indeed, that infinitesimal causes, properly piled up, can have enormous effects, is the gist of infinitesimal and integral calculus, and the principle on which experimental and theoretical sciences rest: from the apparently neglectable, experimentally or logically, the essence springs forth. (An example is that if one contradiction arises in a logical system, the whole thing is invalidated.)

What we call love is the sensation we experience when our mind is working properly, that is, socially enough to learn most of what it knows from society (as it is congenitally programmed to do).

Love is about mind melding. Love is what makes mind melding possible. Culture is one aspect of mind melding. So is one’s entire emotional system.

To say that love brings the oxytocin up, explains how attachment is amplified, but it does not explain why attachment happens.

Attachment happens, and it is so strong, because minds are mostly programmed by the environment provided to them. OK, in the case of cephalopods the sea itself can provide much. In the case of social insects, a few simple behaviors are easily produced.

But advanced brainy animals have much more sophisticated behaviors. And only that very sophisticated environment called love can provide it.

Our brains have reward centers all over. My guess is that they are set-up so that enriching input from another mind is most appreciated, once basic physiological needs are satisfied.

Without love we would be nothing much. We would not even know how to see or think in a human way. And certainly we would not know how to feel correctly. Most of these behaviors are learned… from the loving environment provided by caregivers. And they are socially learned, and they can only be socially learned because our care givers were motivated to do their job well, by that particular organization of neurobiology found in advanced brains that we call love.

Thus there is symmetry breaking between the Good Lord and the Dark Side. The Good Lord, Love, makes us possible. Love is our ground state (to use the Quantum analogy). The Dark Side is just something that is sometimes necessary.

Hence a polity should not rest too much on the Dark Side: it’s not our creator. This is the fundamental reason that makes plutocratic or cannibalistic societies so little creative that they always meet an ominous fate, in short order. And also why they contributed so little to civilization.

This philosophical observation has a strong bearing on politics. It means that society has to be built on love first, not profit, or an ill defined “market”. It means that the economic set-ups based on exploitation strategies (that brought us Anglo-Saxon empires and Russia) are suspect.

This is something the Roman Republic, tough as nail, had understood perfectly well. It was built mostly defensively, around the idea that the simplest version of love inside the Republic was the ground state. They called it the law. And thus endures the Roman Republic to this day, at least in the spirit of our laws.

It also means that any other sentient species, long ago, in a galaxy far away, would also have been built first, out of love… At least for itself. Culture is impossible without a cultivator. And why to cultivate minds, if not out of love?

We love, we have been loved, therefore we think.

***

Patrice Ayme

Drugged-Out Mutant Olympics?

RAINING LOGIC ON A PLUTOCRATIC PARADE?

When It’s Too Good To Be True, It’s Too Bad To Be Swallowed.

***

Abstract: Drug usage is pervasive in sports… In some countries. That seems clear from the outsized results of some particular countries at the Olympics.  Yesterday sport medals were all about the DDR and the USSR, now it’s all about… (I stop here to not displease the corporate sponsors some readers may adulate…)

Solution? The Biological Passport used now for the Tour de France. Check anybody, any time. Worldwide. Some may say it will take manpower, but is not there an unemployment crisis?

That’s not all. As Nature puts it on July 19, 2012: “Are the games in fact a showcase for hardworking ‘mutants‘? And if Olympic rule-makers admit that the genetic landscape is uneven, should they then test every athlete and hold separate competitions for the genetically ungifted?”

Finally, having discarded colossal, jingoistic naivety, why not to embrace humanly engineered enhancement? Or is embracing honesty in sports a step in the wrong direction, that of eyes wide open, the one global plutocracy reviles?

***

Ah, the Olympics. I was listening to the announcements in London, and a young citizen of the USA, a distant relative, rose and asked her mother in an irritated voice:”What language do they speak?“. The mom said:”I think it’s French.” The youngster then sneered:“Why always French, why don’t they speak Chinese instead?“

As this insolence was happening less than two meters from me, I had to intervene: “Learn this, little one. The Christians outlawed the Olympic games. The French restarted them, 15 centuries later. The French don’t talk Chinese, but French, and so, the Olympics were restarted with French as the official language.“

France is not (yet) Tibet. The French introduced the metric system in the Olympics in 1796 CE, and the full Olympics in 1896; in 1924 the Winter Olympics were introduced in Chamonix, France, followed by Olympics again in Paris, a few months later. The official language of the Olympics is French (although some Anglo-Saxons claim it’s English). Another reason: French is the successor language of Latin, the games were held in that language for 6 centuries.

Moreover, on the face of it, France is the direct successor state of the Greco-Roman republic. England too, but less directly so: Greco-Roman civilization was transferred back through France (The Conqueror set-up Parliament). England seems to still have a way to go before mimiciking a Republic: England has a state religion, England has still no elected Senate, but a chamber of grotesque plutocrats called “Lords“, and a ridiculous monarch, basely adored by the simple minded, anathema to those who truly believe in SPQR.

In 393 CE, the fanatical Roman Catholic dictator Theodosius, originally a Spanish general, banned the Olympic Games, and other festivities, for being “too pagan“. OK, that was more lenient than condemning philosophers to death (another of Theodosius’ bright ideas).

Under the emperor’s orders, rabid Christians dressed in black closed and later tore down many wonders of the world. They had to destroy the world, so that their super hero the Crucified would swoop down again (as the Book of Apocalypse in the Bible had it). Most notably the Christian vampires destroyed the fabulous Temple of Zeus at Olympia and the giant Temple of Serapis in Alexandria (they also burned the library there, in Alexandria, later confusing that with a strictly Muslim blaze that happened 2 centuries later). Never mind that “zeus” and “deus” are two aspects of the same word (too brainy for vampires).

One of Theodosius’s successors, Theodosius II, ordered the Roman army to demolish the stadium of Olympia in 426 CE. That stadium could accommodate more than 40,000 spectators.

Thunderous universal applaud after the London Olympics. The corporate participants are very pleased, and they are making sure, in a huge propaganda campaign, that everybody claims to be pleased. Everybody else is a party pooper.

Never mind that the London Games cost twice more than expected, it’s the public who pays this sort of things. Meanwhile, let’s applaud, and consume simple stuff corporations sell us, starting with colossal amounts of naivety. Without colossal naivety, the plutocratic order would collapse, so it’s good to exercise the naivety muscle as much as possible.

OK, granted when one athlete from one tiny nation (Grenada) gets one gold medal, it gives that nation the highest count of medal per capita in the world (Grenada has about 100,000 souls). However, when Jamaica gets 12 medals, the anomaly becomes statistically significant, for someone who uniquely enjoys wisdom (tyrano-sophia).

Jamaica has long been famous in the 100 meters. The once hyper famous and most glorious Ben Johnson was born there. He later won a gold medal at the Seoul Olympic games, taken away from him three days later after he tested positive for some steroid. The hyper muscular Ben aggravated his case by claiming most athletes did this (’40%’, he said).

He and his coach claimed Johnson had been deliberately contaminated by a third party, as he did not use that particular steroid (“because it made his body feel tight!”), but another one. International sport authorities were not amused. Woe onto the one who brings scandal! They treated Ben Johnson like the plague, claiming that any athlete competing with him would be viewed officially as “contaminated“, and barred from any competition. Mysteriously, when Johnson was disqualified, some of the athletes who went up as a result, had themselves tested positive.

(Plutocracy will not explain anything to you, but for what it wants…)

By the way the third sprinter at the London Olympics, the bronze medal, a USA citizen, was suspended for four years, for drug usage, in the past. No doubt he knows how not to get caught anymore.

How does one not get caught? Very simple. There are many ways. One way is masking agents. In France they are treated as the drugs themselves.

Or take the case of amphetamines. There are all sorts of variants in the chemical formulas. So what do greedy kitchen chemist contrive? They invent new one variants, not on the list of illegal amphetamine-like drugs. Those are not, strictly speaking, unlawful. Recently the customs in the Paris airports had a list they made themselves, of no less than 762 amphetamine variants, all not illegal, all of them that they informally seized (no charges, but no return of the drugs, either…)  

Before the London Olympics, Nature, the Britain based science weekly, published several articles on sports and drugs. The gist being that one should organize Enhanced Olympics (my term), and then some drug free Olympics. I agree with the idea, for a number of reasons that I will expose below. Moreover, how to do it.

One does not need to be a brain scientist to realize that, when some countries succeed as well as the DDR, the Deutsches Demokratiche Republic of old, there is got to be something not kosher going on. The DDR was the most successful country in the Olympics, per capita. For decades. DDR doctors gave drugs to their athletes, sometimes for decades, sometimes seconds before an event. Some guessed it at the time, and suspicions were confirmed after that police state was swallowed by West Germany, and tongues freed.

Jamaica, population 2.7 millions, got 12 medals in London 2012, no less. I am not trying to be racist and I am not suggesting that this is because the surviving slaves were those running the fastest away from their powerful white masters. Far from me such silly, traditional, half funny, anodyne remarks. I would instead direct my gaze towards the one in the know who suggested Jamaican athletes should be controlled around December.

Look at Senegal: same powerful West African genes as Jamaica, five times the population of Jamaica, and a very strong native and imported sport culture. Number of Olympic medals of Senegal? Zero. OK, one medal. Twenty years ago.

What’s the idea? Some drugs have long term effects: they build up muscles, tendons, ligaments and even the attending motor neurons. Do that in December, much of these physiological changes will last until July.

Control in July for a drug that one has stopped taking three months before, and unsurprisingly, it will not show up. Smart for chimps, but not too difficult for even a hare-brained sportsman to understand.

For decades, USA Olympic committees were in deliberate denial that drug usage was massive in USA sports. Corporate sponsors celebrated Marion Jones, all the way to the front cover of time magazine. The American media claimed she was going to get five gold medals. Even then, it was perfectly clear that Jones was officially connected to Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative (a.k.a. BALCO). That was a drug factory, for the best. In the end, International instances told the USA that this could not be tolerated any longer, it was too blatant, and Marion Jones could not get as many drugs, and thus, medals, as she expected in Sidney. Further inquiries led to her going to prison, and returning five gold medals.  

The corruption of the system is obvious in the sense that not all the gold medals and titles attributed to the USA in connection to Marion Jones were rescinded. Never mind that IAAF president Lamine Diack, a Senegalese, stated that: “Marion Jones will be remembered as one of the biggest frauds in sporting history.”

So what of the USA in all this? Well, athletes are not controlled for drugs in many USA sports. Not at all. A hint: life expectancy of so called American football linemen is barely fifty years of age (even the aficionado sport magazines admit they are stuffed with growth hormones).

I have a passing acquaintance with some sports. I was astounded when I saw routine drug controls for private events in France, even for exotic disciplines. The same sports (such as climbing) have rigorously no control in the USA, and individuals practicing them, in the USA, are routinely taking drugs, and showing all the symptoms, complete with swollen wrists and female with suddenly jutting chins. It was amusing to see French sport climbers downing two liters of water within seconds of winning an event, and then, much more (drug controls happening after the hysterical celebrations).

What to do?

Well, France was in a quandary: for about twenty years, not one Frenchman won a stage in the Tour de France… except for Richard Virenques, who got caught for drug usage by French authorities, and became a black sheep barred from cycling.

Drug controls are ferocious in France. Why? In the 1950s, the top British cyclist, Tom Simpson, would have won the Tour de France, except that he died on Mont Ventoux. The autopsy of this highly successful athlete showed heavy drug usage.

In the 2000s, there was the pathetic spectacle of Lance Armstrong, always winning, with a smirk. In the beginning, he was embraced, he met with the French president. Later, though, old samples analyzed with more modern techniques showed drug usage (for example EPO on Turin to Briancon, a stage I saw with my very eyes!). Not perhaps too keen to be called Anti-American by the umbrageous USA, the French authorities did nothing about it. Instead authorities in the USA are prosecuting Armstrong on their own. Systemic controls by surprise at 5am had changed nothing: the smart ones, as I said, trained with drugs. 

This year, 2012, was different: the French won a lot of stages, and the best climber. For a first time, a Brit won the Tour (this Wiggins is a well known track world champion, and won the gold in London). Three cyclists were caught cheating, two them quite famous, and immediately expelled and  punished. A past multiple winner from Spain was barred (like Ben Johnson, he argued somebody had contaminated the meat he ate). From the ways victories during stages happened, it is clear that the Tour is getting clean.

How did the Tour authorities do it?  

By instituting a BIOLOGICAL PASSPORT. Union Cycliste Internationale and the Federation Internationale de Ski are increasingly using it (yes, France did not just create the modern Olympic games, other sports speak French as a first language).

All and any cyclist engaging in the Tour de France has to declare where in the world he is, at any moment, all year long. And is exposed to immediate control. Cheating on this (it happened, an athlete claimed to be in Italy when he was in Argentina) results in immediate disqualification.

Meanwhile, all results, in all other sports, absent a biological passport, ought to be taken tongue in cheek. OK, Usain bolts certainly smarter than Ben. OK, the queen parachuted into the stadium with dozens of gold medals. Well done, quite hilarious. Nice spectacle for the children. Tongue in cheek for those with drugs in cheek.

Maybe, indeed, Jamaica has a superior sport culture, and Britain too. If so, prove it. And if you don’t want to prove it, allow us to laugh.

Another dirty secret in sport competitions is that most successful athletes have successful genes. Those genes are increasingly known. How do we know if they have been injected or not? And is it fair to have mutants competing against normal humans?

Why can’t normal people become mutants too? More than 200 gene variants are associated to high performance in sports. As Nature puts it in “Genetically enhanced Olympics are coming“: … an option, if safe, would be to allow athletes who did not win the genetic lottery to ‘upgrade’ through gene therapy — a practice that is now banned as ‘gene doping’.

More generally, what is wrong about enhancing human capabilities? Did not EPO, besides helping Mr. Armstrong to dress in a yellow jersey, save millions of lives? Indeed EPO has become a routine medical treatment.

So let’s embrace enhancement. But let’s do it above the table, for all to see. Let’s admit many cheaters are winning, and many of the others who also win, the gods favored. And common people on common diets, common blood, common genes can have their own common Olympics.

Indeed what is wrong is cheating, claiming one is clean, whereas one is winning, precisely because one is dirty. And making a world, Olympic size cover-up about all this cheating, is an even more worrisome meta cheating, as it requires Olympic naivety. Among Pluto’s characteristics is invisibility. By making massive cheating officially invisible, the Olympic committees do not help the forces of goodness.

Instead the sport authorities imprint people on something very subtle: deep down inside, people feel there is something not right about some countries getting so many medals. But then they are taught that it is fair, balanced and reflective to swallow this troubling feeling, and accept that any sense leading towards suspicion is in poor taste.

Outlawing suspicion is part of this general meta morality people learn so well in the USA: conspiracy theorists are crazy. Working hard, and taking no vacations is good, while believing that some people out there, important people, are conspiring, in very important conspiracies, sometimes, is crazy.

Can goodness come, when one cannot let one’s mind be suspicious? Can goodness come when one makes it a moral duty to believe whoever has an obvious interest to say whatever they say? Can goodness come when exposing some for the crooks, thieves, criminals and charlatans they may well be definitively something reflective people are not supposed to do?

And yet, is not goodness what the Olympic Games should show, and celebrate, before anything else?

***

Patrice Ayme

REASON FROM UNREASON

Superior CRAZINESS For Superior LOGIC.

CALM IS OVERRATED, CRAZINESS A LOGICAL NECESSITY:

Abstract: Why do people go crazy? Is it fate, or is it evolution? Is it disease, or is it creativity?

 Two of the creators of modern mathematics and metamathematics, Georg Cantor and Kurt Godel, experienced some craziness. Nietzsche produced some of his best work before he went insane. Van Gogh experienced serious mental difficulties. Bolztman killed himself. All these cases were within a generation. Those may all be unrelated accidents, sure. 

 However I will show below that superior intelligence in a species can only come from an ability to engineer (productive) craziness. (Perhaps the reason why chimps and bears are so unpredictable: they are not just clever, but a bit crazy!)

 What president Roosevelt said of the bankers:”I welcome their hatred!” may sound crazy to some, and it is exactly the opposite of the praises the all too cool Obama bestow on bankers, every chance he gets. But Roosevelt domesticated the bankers, whereas Obama got domesticated by them. Of course the superior intelligent one was Roosevelt, who knew it was smart to go crazy on the bankers. It’s certainly crazy to cling to an appearance of sanity in an insane situation (Eichmann used Kant to justify his crimes, an appearance of philosophy to promote infamy.)

Thus insanity is hardwired in Homo Sapiens Sapiens. Perhaps Homo Wise Wise, Homo Sapiens Sapiens, should be renamed Homo Crazy Wise: Homo Sapiens Demens! 

This has some fascinating, but sinister implications for Artificial Intelligence. In his Turing Test for intelligence, Alan Turing forgot craziness. That was crazy.

 It also means that, as insanity will follow a normal distribution, some substantial part of any human population will be insanely dangerous. 

 As technological capability improves exponentially, the danger exists that this insanity will be also exponentially amplified (as happened with the death camps of WWII).

 Hence the necessity of counterbalancing it by augmenting truth, and thus transparency, just as exponentially, too. 

 If we want survival, we have to become truth fanatics. A new religion.

***

***  

 MADNESS AS THE SOLUTION TO LOGICAL INCOMPLETENESS:

[Advanced.]

 The Incompleteness Theorems in logic say that any logical system big enough to contain arithmetic is incomplete, in the sense that there is an infinite number of propositions, about natural numbers, which are true but that cannot be proven in that logical system.

 If it cannot be proven, it has to be assumed (and that, an infinite number of times! It’s a crazy world out there: it turns out that, if a logical system is complete, it’s inconsistent, etc. (If one supposes the usual properties of arithmetic to be true.) 

 These facts were demonstrated in the 20C, but they were true all along. I claim that there is a strict correspondence between brain circuitry and logical completeness. Thus, brain operations stumbled on circuitry incompleteness, all the time, ever since there are advanced brains, and they think. 

 The problem of logical incompleteness is solved in metalogic by making assumptions. The same holds with brain circuitry: logical incompleteness there is also solved by making assumptions. 

 How does the brain make assumptions? Well it just connects different neurons, or different parts of the brain with axons. In other words: Axons for axioms.

 How does the relationship work? Incompleteness in logic is caused by a confrontation between the finiteness of logic on a piece of paper (or in a Turing Machine), and the uncountable infinity it gives rise to (modulo some assumptions mathematicians classically do). Basically the finite axioms allow, modulo some infinite choice procedure (for example Cantor’s diagonalization), to build an infinite number of further axioms.

 The same happens with neuronal and neuroglial networks: they are finite. But, once given, it’s possible to build other neuronal and glial networks different from them. That’s the equivalent of the Godel proposition built from a Godel number. How does one build such a number? Well, with dendrites, etc. That in turn happens if and only if, some astrocytes get in high gear, andthat happens in case of high emotions. In other words, if the brain builds new assumptions through new emotions. And probably, the more different the assumptions, the more different the emotions.

 Hominids who practiced a bit of craziness were evolutionary advantaged, because they found more readily solutions to logical incompleteness at hand. Craziness allowed to find new, necessary axioms. Thus evolution learned to exploit logical incompleteness.

***

 NO UNREASON, NO CREATION:

 An excellent example is geometry without the parallel postulate; it’s a logically incomplete system. For more than 2,000years mathematicians tried to prove that it could be made complete. 

 But the solution was very obvious, and very crazy: take a sphere, and try to do geometry on it. Take a saddle, and try to do geometry on it. 

 A modicum of craziness is intelligence’s friend.

 Hence a necessity, to make Creative Artificial Intelligence would be to contrive crazy robots.

 [I will deny all and any responsibility when Artificial Intelligence engineers use that idea to make more clever killer robots.] 

***

 LYING AS THE WORST CRIME:

 So there is a hard core of badness out there. If one ignores it, it will grow: fascism, before and during World War Two is an excellent example. The more ignored fascism was, the bigger it got. 

 If one ignores the hard core of badness out there, one is lying, big time. Because one claims that something potentially lethal in giant proportions is of no consequence. That’s a lie, if there ever was one. Lying about nothing is not a lie. Lying about something that can turn into everything is a terrible lie.

 Look at the haggard, drugged out, half dead, passed out face of the cruel and crazed maniac who shot 71 people in a movie theater in Colorado. Or the other crazed maniac in Norway, killing 73 Norwegians to save them from impure blood, or to save Norwegian culture (whatever).

 Such people are bad, they are pathologically bad. Maybe they took too much drugs, maybe their neurohormones are all wrong from more natural causes. The basic fact, though, is that there will be pathologically bad people out there, always. 

 Or at least, there will be crazed out people as long as we do not have a thorough understanding of the human mind. And even then. Because when we understand why people become pathologically insane, some, the same as those who abuse drugs (starting with alcohol and psychoactive smoke), will decide to use their freedom (if they are left any) to become psychologically insane, deliberately so.

 Some will whine when they read this. But they understand neither evolution, nor the logical incompleteness theorems, and even less the fact that evolution has mastered both.

 It is even worse than that. It’s not just that there are bad actors out there. Power attracts bad actors, like flies are attracted by excrements.

 Those who rise up high in human hierarchies, all too often do so precisely because they are bad. This is the Achilles heel of representative democracy.

 Examples abound with dictatorships: there the worst do best. Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Stalin, are recent cases. Stalin overcame Lenin (founder and theoretician of the Bolsheviks) and Trotsky (head of the Red Army, and also a theoretician), precisely because Stalin was so much worse. as a human being. That was his best qualification (he started by robbing banks…wait…). 

 However, Stalin’s extreme badness allowed him to out-Hitler Hitler himself: that made him laugh, according to Churchill. That Stalin’s horribleness was viewed as an advantage by those subordinate to him seems unlikely, but it’s thoroughly demonstrated by the facts. 

 Hitler attacked his ally the USSR by surprise. Stalin had been leading the rapprochement with Nazi Germany, so he expected his colleagues in the Politburo to punish him severely. After sulking for days, he finally showed up, expecting the chop, and was enthusiastically confirmed as great war leader. Why? Because all his comrades knew he was the very worst. And indeed Stalin put in place policies considering that anyone not respecting an order was subject to immediate execution. Any soldier knew that his captain could kill him any time, and so on, throughout the Red Army. 

 Thus in Stalingrad, workers built tanks while other drove them to engage the Nazis in combat, at the other end of the factory. 

 The Nazis, who thought of themselves as the meanest characters on the planet, and had demonstrated it with engineers doing suicide attacks with explosives on their backs against the French after crossing the Meuse, could not sustain that level of ferocity.

 Hence not just craziness, but criminal insanity can be an advantage to rise to the fore in society. Certainly, if Alexander so called the Great had not annihilated the cities of Thebes and Tyr (crucifying all the men there), he would have been less Great, because Athens would have taken him, and his general Antipater less seriously.

 Ultimately, though, the criminal mood in the USSR was made possible by systematic lying on such an industrial scale that the connection with reality became increasingly tenuous. When enough truth was projected onto the system, the lying, and the political system that depended upon it collapsed.

 If craziness is so useful to augment those mental powers we need so much to survive as a civilization, how do we survive it? Precisely by augmenting the truth. Thus only craziness compatible with the truth will be able to survive. That is why I have not hesitated to tell various truths about Obama (whom I have intensely supported in all sorts of ways), or Hollande, whom I approved of, until he started to say lies about World War Two (details soon to come).

 Truth is my religion. A touch of craziness my sanity. (Latest demonstration: It’s not like I did not know of the danger in advance. I was slightly charged by a large bad mood moose with calf today on an Alaskan trail, where I was nonchalantly running with a bad ankle; after a high speed retreat, as a good predator, I circumvented the difficulty, and anxiety switched sides, the calf nearly spraining its own ankle in the process… . )

 There is no truth but the full truth, and a touch of craziness is its prophet.

***

Patrice Ayme

***

I AM, & SOMETIMES I THINK

SUM ERGO COGITO:

Abstract: Thinking is what defines us. Agreed.

Yet, from most perspectives, Descartes’ famous “Cogito Ergo Sum“, “I Think Therefore I Am” is (grotesquely) counterfactual, as I show below, from the nature of logic, from science, and from introspection. No, the soul does not come before and independently of the body, Messieurs Descartes and Havel. The reality is the exact opposite.  

Thinking emerges from the rough and tough, it is something that rises only from very complex, very organized matter. It may be the face of god, but it is first an act of human will. Last, and not least, the self extends well beyond conscious thought.

***

LOGIC IS (NEUROLOGICAL) RULES, DATA ARE (NEUROLOGICAL) INPUT; EXISTENCE FIRST:

It often happens, in the course of human debates, that, by manipulating standard concepts from fresh, and sometimes opposite perspectives, one is perceived to say the exact opposite of what one is trying to say. Why? Because much of what passes for thinking is actually perfunctory checking for the presence of a few known facts, in an ancient mood.

(This is not really a failure of the logical system; it turns out perception itself works in the same perfunctory way: 90% of input in the visual system consists of reentrant fibers…)

One consequence of my essay “I Mood Therefore I Think” is the exact opposite conclusion of Descartes’ most famous statement, from a multi pronged attack.

Yet, Paul Handover, the excellent gentleman and versatile thinker who founded the excellent site “Learning From Dogs“, in what I fear could be a standard critique, suggested that I complicated matters about thinking, by trying to deviate from Descartes’s “I think therefore I am“. Said he:

“Cogito ergo sum, or as the French would say, “Je pense donc je suis”…surely all you are saying is that famous phrase, “I think, therefore I am”?

Ergo, writing so extensively about moods is complicating something basic to man. Some humans think and some don’t!”

Well, surely not. (Paul later understood what I meant, as the comment section made clear.) I agree that moods, paying attention to moods, considerably complicates the analysis of thinking, as I tried to show, for example, with Socrates’ obsession with pathetic little logic. That itty-bitty logic was just a transparent way to change the conversation from what was really wrong with Athens, namely that it was a slave society… Instead Socrates lived as a hanger-on of the golden youth of Athens, those whose descendants would ultimately collaborate with Macedonian plutocracy (Antipater, and his goons, 322 BCE). About that most grievious logical flaw, he had nothing to say; it was a question of moods.

Living, worldwide, among various natives, all endowed with very varied moods, about the same things, from Silicon Valley to Iran, Black Africa to the Latin Quarter, has taught me that moods dominate logic. Maybe not locally, in a mind, but certainly, globally, throughout a mind.

Recently I was talking to a Silicon (Valley) mini titan, and he asked me how my writing was doing, feigning polite interest, while barely hiding his considerable irritation, hostility and contempt (to all I represented, the Cogito). The mood he projected was clearly not the mood I would have enjoyed at the Café de Flore in Paris. Nor, of course, with such a mood in place, the debate could reach any depth. Silicon Valley does not want depth, just profits and market share, enabled by financial plots, and as little government as possible (while entertaining and financing the president). That’s the mood.

The first thinker to dare criticize Descartes directly was the (ultra-rich) Ludwig Wittgenstein, who went to Cambridge to study with Russell, and taught there, between bouts of building a cabin with his hands in Norway, and renouncing his plutocratic prerogatives. (Although it can be said Sartre & Al. made a covert critique of Descartes, see below.)

Wittgenstein thought Descartes’ famous slogan was pointless. Ludwig used to make fun of Descartes in his Cambridge seminar by loudly remarking:”I think, therefore it rains!” Or: “I think, therefore the sky is blue!” He did not elaborate more than that, I will.

All humans think. Simply some refuse to do it creatively, or have been conditioned, by a special mood, to avoid all and any creative thinking.

On the face of it, Descartes’ “Cogito” statement is ridiculous, as it uses an emerging property to define existence itself. But emergence pre-supposes existence. (And see what Existentialism hinted about the subject below.) And yet we will see the story is a bit more subtle.

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THE BRAIN EMBODIES LOGIC, PHYSICS, MATHEMATICS:

When one looks at an implication: a > b, one is looking at a piece of neurology. Most mathematicians not only do not understand that, but refuse to understand it, are highly offended by it, and would rather leave the room screaming (they already have). However, so it is.

The wolf can howl to the moon, call it divine, still it is the moon. A physical object. Just like the mathematician can howl to mathematics, call it divine, still, like the moon, it’s just out there. That makes it even more important, but nothing physics did not invent first. 

Mathematicians want to call mathematics divine, for the same reason dogs want to call the moon divine: because, having discovered their object of adoration to be out of this world makes them feel divine about themselves (something very obvious in mathematicians). Descartes, creating the world just from his own thinking, is a typical case.

Reality is much more prosaic, not to say vulgar.

It is well known that a dog trying to get at a ball thrown in the water, will run along the beach just so, and jump in the water according to the optimal trajectory confirmed by electronic computers and 7,000 years of intense human efforts to write down the rules of calculus, so that they could be installed inside said computers.

How do mathematicians think wolves know calculus? (And so do lions, I have seen it.) Because they got the Fields Medal, the Abel Prize? How come the dog takes a year to learn what takes the mathematician 15? Because they read it in books, like human mathematicians?

No, it’s much simpler than that. Wolves have neurobiology which embodies (the) calculus (they need). This is the reason for what Wigner called “the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics“. The mind is built from the existence of histories experienced. Yes, even in wolves. They make this spiritual construction when they play as puppies.

The puppies play with a lot of possibilities, their minds memorize those that work the best. It’s not building the cathedrals, but it leads there.

(The basic principles of cathedral construction were also found by trial and error, then culturally transmitted… so was calculus, now culturally hammered in, so that young human mathematicians, differently from those poor dogs, do not have to invent it!)

***

THINKING, CONSCIOUSNESS, EMERGE AFTER PLENTY:

Logic is made of (neurological) rules, data consist in (neurological) input (most internally generated). Those exist first. Thinking comes later, it is what is called an Emerging Property.

What is an emerging property? An enormous system is put in place, with an enormous number of interactions, and, as it becomes dynamic, it builds an order, an order that emerges progressively. Even plate tectonic is an emerging property. Crystallization is an example. pain, physical or psychological, another. All societies, even those of ants, are emerging properties.

Clearly, whatever thinking is, it’s an emerging property, because thinking requires a bunch of neurons to come together, first.

Moods and sensations are the indispensable background to any logical system.

It’s not just my opinion, and it’s not just neurological. Open any treatise in logic. OK, it’s easy to get lost within logic, as a quick peek at Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy shows . Logic is a universe of its own. Most mathematicians know nothing about it, and don’t want to know (lest they feel beaten at their own game, logical arrogance). To simplify, as usual, I go hard core, by sticking to hard core pragmatism (as found in the best hard science and mathematics).

Judicious simplification leads to better abstraction. I am going to simplify what logic is.

I have studied various logical systems, long and hard, even including Girard’s Linear Logic (invented very recently, in 1987). I have also studied, long and hard, before it became fashionable, Category Theory. Category Theory is literally a rigorous structuralism, a bunch of rules of manifest interest. (Nobody knows if it can replace Set Theory as a Foundation of Mathematics; practitioners don’t care, it’s too useful to give them time for deep meditation.)

My rough (philosophical) conclusion from all this esoterica: any logical system (including categories) consists, at the very minimum of:

1) a set of rules (it could be diagram chasing in a category). Call that the ‘logic‘.

2) a universe of symbols to which these rules apply. Call that the ‘universe‘ (in which that logic operates).

The way I look at it, this corresponds to the way the brain is organized:

 1) corresponds neurologically to an axonal system (including dentrites).

 2) corresponds to the regions (in the brain) the logic starts from (it will varied places, as inputs internal, or external, vary).

Sensation, moods, emotion, neurohormonal regimes act as meta-controllers, upon both the logic and the universe. For example in case of hyper stress, automatic meta controllers acting on gateway neurons will shut down parts of the brain by starving them of oxygen, and redirect oxygen and fuel towards areas indispensable for survival. So the brain’s logic is controlled by moods, as meta.

***

FALLING OFF A MOUNTAIN, TOO BUSY FOR THINKING:

Once I was delicately crossing a famous and notorious ice gully equipped just with an ice axe and rock climbing slippers. At the worst moment, I looked up, and saw a cloud of rock silently forming up in the sky, 600 meters higher. I started to run, in the hope of reaching the rock on the other side first. However, the avalanche from the partial collapse of said mountain hit my ropes just as I made it to a vertical slab. (The shoulder of that mountain entirely collapsed later, a famous case in Chamonix).

Torn off rock holds, I fell off, facing certain long and painful demise down the mile high gully of death (and the death of my partner, who had a lousy belay. From cracks in the one and only mineral block in that ice gully). I had a last thought: not only was I airborne, but I was dead, that was it, survival probability was strictly zero.

However my brain, in a miraculous feat I cannot not believe, to this day, succeeded to block me between vertical walls, one of ice, the other of granite, in a chimney position. All the more remarkable as I had only rock slippers (not mountain boots). The amount of unbelievable precision and giant neuronal power to unleash colossal force to stop the already long fall was only possible because all my brainpower was applied only where it mattered.

There was no thinking whatsoever. Actually it’s clear that after I had the thought that I was going to die, fir sure, the brain shut down all and any thinking. Consciousness was useless, it just stood in the way, so there was none. Pain and fear did not exist: they were irrelevant.

Thinking, consciousness, pain and fear were obviously completely shut down. All that was left was tremendous will power, enormous mathematical power and the capability to generate an enormous action potential in millions of motor neurons to create gigantic force.

After I stopped in other inhuman feats, I jumped out of the chimney position, grabbed rock and solo climbed ten  meters up to a terrace. It felt like jumping up. When I got to the terrace, and looked at lots of abraded arms, I just could not believe what had happened.  I still do not.

“Cogito, ergo sum“, said Descartes. But where does cogito, ergo and sum fit in this gory scene? Nowhere.

Superstitious people who love slogans would just say that “God” took over. Whatever kicks their simplicity.

Clearly what happened has been related many times in similar incident: all my brain’s energy got concentrated exactly where it could make a difference, in a particular application of elementary mechanics, with maximum motor neuron power. Completely extinguishing the rest of brain activity.

Many years ago, a famous solo French sailor, Alain Colas, was in a race in the middle of the ocean. A loop of rope suddenly snapped around his ankle, and nearly completely severed his foot, causing severe blood loss. He had to make a tourniquet to save his life, administer first aid, then bring down his sails, on his giant boat, also to save his life, then try to give the alert. All of this while dragging foot and nerves on the deck. But he did not feel the pain, and he did not go into shock. That happened only when he was done with the essentials.

Anybody who is real hard and has experienced the grand outdoors hundreds of time, will have a similar story to relate.

***

MINIMUM INTROSPECTION SHOWS EXISTENCE, & FEELING COME FIRST:

Waking up from total exhaustion one has first the sensation of existing (“I am!”, or: “I seem to be!”) , well before one starts thinking anything remotely organized, or logical. That could certainly be proven by e-m brain studies, BTW.

Somebody in very deep coma demonstrably exists, while often not being in thought, deep or not.

Actually anybody familiar with heavy exercise knows they can reach points where he or she is, but do not too well what anything, including themselves, is all about. They are, but they don’t really think. So being precedes thinking, elaborated or not. When I run uphill at 3,000 meters for more than fifteen minutes, it tends to do this to me, for example.

Moods provide (part of) the context that a logic needs. How does a baby learn the meaning of words? Not from a dictionary, but from emotions. Emotions come first, they provide the semantics of the world, for any growing human mind. I should go back in the essay and point that out, so thank you Paul!

Thus, at first sight, it’s amazing Descartes, an army captain, could make such a mistake. Did he have an agenda? He did.

***

DESCARTES, OR MACHIAVELLISM SERVING EXISTENTIALISM?

I am tough on “Cogito Ergo Sum”, but I should not be so on his author. Indeed there are twists in this story.

Three centuries after Descartes, Sartre, raising the flag of so called French Existentialism, claimed that existence precedes essence (“l’existence précède l’essence”). That reverted the philosophical view that the essence nature of something is more fundamental and immutable than its existence (Aquinas defined god as the thing where existence = essence…). So, if one thinks of the essence of man, as one should, to be thinking, then Sartre was (unwittingly?) saying that thinking was emergent.

Descartes was a genius, if there ever was one: he invented analytic geometry, making calculus possible. So why did he say something as absurd? Well, if man existed just from his thinking, it was not because of God.

Descartes’reasons were grounded in anti-theocracy, subtlety and the advancement of civilization. His new aphorism, “Cogito Ergo Sum“, was iconoclastic.

But iconoclasm yesterday, doctrine tomorrow. Compare the way Descartes broke new ground with his aphorism to the return to primitive theocracy of a modern celebrity such as Václav Havel advocates. Said that otherwise very honorable one: “… one great certainty: Consciousness precedes Being, and not the other way around, as Marxists claim…”. Havel would go oncondemning ours as “the first atheist civilization“, which “has lost its connection with the infinite and with eternity“.

Descartes’ mood was to go where no mind had gone before. Neo-conservatives are rather in the mood of going back again where the logic has thoroughly proved not to be sustainable. No wonder the birth rate is collapsing in such parts.

***

Patrice Ayme

I Mood Therefore I Think

SYSTEMS OF MOOD ARE CRUCIALLY ENTANGLED WITH IDEAS:

***

***

MOODS COME BEFORE IDEAS:

  The philosopher Foucault became professor at the most prestigious Collège de France in 1970 as a “Historian of Systems of Thought“. That was an admission, by the power that be, that there are such things as Systems of Thought, and that they are most important. I don’t know if Foucault did that much of a good job (I find his analysis of the Franks extensive but rather superficial, and worst, rather conventional; but, at least Foucault had the merit to think that the founders of the West were worth studying).

  The idea the Collège de France had,  of studying Systems of Thought, is crucial. (By the way the CdF was founded in 1530 CE, all its lectures are free, and the professors the foremost world experts.) All comes from there. Even the hardest sciences.

  Just as one studies arithmetic, or organic chemistry, one could, or should study any system of thought, from fly fishing to Islam. They have lots in common.

  Foucault’s “genealogy of knowledge“, was similar to Nietzsche‘s “genealogy of morals“. A colleague of Foucault was Maurice Merleau-Ponty. His phrase: “No preconceived notions, but the idea of free thought” is burned in golden letters above the main hall of the building of Collège de France. But is free thinking an idea, or a mood?

  Ideas are central to logic, but what do they do? They connect notions, that’s all what logic is, and that’s the job of axons in the brain, basically. Yet, the axonal network is only part and parcel of the brain.

  In a related effort at understanding, David Hume held that reason alone cannot move us to action. Action come from passion. Reason alone is merely the “slave of the passions,” i.e., reason pursues abstract and causal relations solely in order to achieve passions’ goals and that reason provides no impulse of its own. (Treatise Of Human Nature.)

  My opinion is more extreme. Just as in Quantum Physics, particle and wave are entangled concepts, logic and passion are also entangled in Brain Physics, at any single moment, or during each other’s blossoming.

 Not only are moods involved in thinking, but moods have to be attributed to entities involved in logic, for conceiving better what is going on. If nothing else, I observed this with top mathematicians and physicists, who I had the good fortune to observe in their natural environment for quite a while.

  These creators view themselves as the most rational people in the world, but they are pretty much dominated by passions, not just as a motivations, but also as a way, the way, of thinking. When addressing terms in equations, Fields medal level mathematicians will talk about, “these guys”. Top mathematicians need to make mathematics into an anthropological milieu, with mathematical terms running around in their heads like little beings, with moods of their own… I would even venture to say that it is this animation of mathematics that makes the top mathematicians: they are at the zoo, herding terms from equations.

  Modern brain imagery and studies show that neurons and neuroglia are entangled deeply together. Clearly neurons embody logical connections, and glias partake in entangled emotional support. Both make (their won, but entangled) networks.

  The mood behind Damasio’s  Somatic Markers Hypothesis, and similar work, supports all this. Damasio pointed out that Descartes made an error by concentrating just on logic, and forgetting emotions in the scaffolding of logic. But I go much further, be it only because I point out that, on (meta)logical grounds alone, emotion, and only emotion, can provide logics with the universes they need to exist.

  Thus we need to dig deeper. To study thought, we need to study the passions, which often come as culturally imprinted Systems Of Mood.

***

AMERICAN ROBOTS DREAM OF FINANCIAL SHEEP; USA WEALTH ADMIRATION MOOD:

  Systems of mood are all over civilization. For centuries, Christians and Muslims screamed:”God Is Great!” Often while slicing each other up. They were both expressing, and reinforcing, a mood. A large part of this mood was apparently that slicing each other up, was the best of all possible worlds. (A more careful consideration shows that the most enthusiastic God Is Great screamers were part of military aristocracies which profited handsomely from the political systems that God Is Great served so well… Thus God/Allah was part of a mutually reinforcing triangle of oppression)

  When Obama became president, he arrived with the mood that financiers were most admirable: his “friend” Jamie Dimon, he much “admired for his gigantic portfolio, which he [Obama] could certainly not manage“.  It’s not just that Obama wants apparently a lucrative job of consultant at JP Morgan. It’s worse than that: he is sincere.

  Dimon was born and raised a financial plutocrat, third generation (at least). Dimon made his most important financial investment in a plot with the central bank of the USA, which was so famous, among banksters, that it got its own name, the “Jamie deal” (buying Bear-Stearns for peanuts, thanks to his always so generous friends, Ms and Mr. American Taxpayers!)

  Obama is still deep in his mood of admiring Lord Dimon.

  On May 15, 2012, episode of ABC’s The View, Obama responded to JPMorgan Chase’s recent $5 billion (or is it 9 billions?) trading losses by defending Dimon against allegations of irresponsibility, saying, “first of all, JP Morgan is one of the best managed banks there is. Jamie Dimon, the head of it, is one of the smartest bankers we’ve got”.

  Notice the imparted mood: Dimon is not just the “first of all“, but “we” all own Dimon as a sort of national treasure… Dimon got the treasury, the Fed, and apparently the president, by the balls (if any), but Dimon “we’ve got”! He is ours! Lucky us: we owned Dimon all along, we just did not notice. Dimon is our man, he works for us. Soon we will dreaming we sleep in the 17 rooms mansion he had in Chicago …It reminds me of the song of the Temptations: “Just my imagination![running away from me]“…

  Well, “best managed” is not the “first of all” of Dimon. On the face of it, very few banks, worldwide, have been as badly managed as JP Morgan. How many banks, worldwide, may have got maybe 100 billion of subsidies from taxpayers? Very few. Out of 8,000 USA banks, or so, nearly none needed taxpayer help. Same in Europe with more than another 10,000 banks. And certainly at most a handful of banks, worldwide got help on the scale of JP Morgan (OK, Dimon, a screamer, screamed that he did not need the help; watch what they do, not what they scream about).

  Obama should, please try to get out of his bankster admiration mood. Dimon is using taxpayer money. That’s the “first of all“, about Dimon, for those who approach the situation with the right mood, the objective mood. 

  Let’s Paul Krugman say it. Dimon is “the point man in Wall Street’s fight to delay, water down and/or repeal financial reform. He has been particularly vocal in his opposition to the so-called Volcker Rule, which would prevent banks with government-guaranteed deposits from engaging in “proprietary trading”, basically speculating with depositors’ money. Just trust us, the JPMorgan chief has in effect been saying; everything’s under control. Apparently not.”

  The key point, notes Krugman, “is not that the bet[s] went bad; it is that institutions playing a key role in the financial system have no business making such bets, least of all when those institutions are backed by taxpayer guarantees”.

  And, a fortiori, when those plutocrats’ heavens use taxpayer money directly, which is exactly what expanding the “monetary base” or “quantitative easing” amounts to. (Krugman did not mention these, because he is partial to them… He has to. But he knows…)

  Someone like Obama is desperately into the mood of believing Warren Buffet is his father, or something like that. Dreams of his father.

  Yes, fathers are important, in the plutocratic universe: Dimon got a gold plated career from the start; his father, a stockbroker, executive VP at American Express helped… Although the fact that Obama’s father was at Harvard, also helped him, no doubt, Harvard having instituted the prerogative of inheritance as part of its global reach of plotting pseudo intellectuals.

  I documented in “Sage of Obama” Obama’s mood of embarrassing adulation of riches. That deep desire to confuse financial wealth and wisdom, shared by all too many Americans (millions of whom partake in calling Buffet, a miserable financial conspirator, who, in a just world, would be the object of a warrant of arrest from Interpol, the “Sage of Omaha“).

  In Mexico, by the same token, we have Carlos Slim, plutocrat, son of plutocrat, and made much richer, as all real plutocrats, by being serviced by the state. Slim bought Telmex, Telecommunication Mexico, from the state, for not much, allowing him now to control now 90% of telecoms there, while charging some of the highest rates in the world. A conspiracy theorist may believe that happened because many politicians and bureaucrats got paid under the table. That is why conspiracy theorists are the enemies of philanthropists.

  Indeed, there again, the only reason Slim is not in jail is that the mood has been carefully sown that he is a “philanthropist“, and that such titans can only be admired (and they could never have conspired to buy Telmex because, just because, we told you, everybody knows, that conspiracy theorists are crazy.)

  Obama tasted of wealth enough when he was a child, to want much more. Something about having four in-house servants… That put him in the mood of respecting wealth. A mood that became much more extensive in the USA after Ronald Reagan was elected king.

  Being a prisoner of such a mood of adulation of the richest, one could not expect Obama to prosecute banksters with the vigor presidents Reagan and Bush Senior had shown with the Saving & Loans conspiracy.

  Contrarily to its ill repute of being cool and remote, science is completely entangled with systems of mood. Examples are found in fundamental physics (Big Bang, Foundations Quantum). reciprocally, science can be brought to bear on Systems of Mood. OGMs and the attitude relative to nuclear energy are two obvious examples.

***

THE NEOLITHIC OUGHT TO BE FELT AS THE REIGN OF GENETICALLY MODIFIED ORGANISMS:

  A tale of two moods. Some are going around, hysterically decrying GMOs, feeling very progressive (the headquarters of the anti-GMO agitation being France, although that may change now that the Socialists are in power). I personally think that any GMO that could potentially, and plausibly, gravely threaten the environment should be outlawed. That’s a good mood to have, indeed.

  And yet, another, even better mood to have, is to realize that, without GMOs we would still be in a pre-Neolithic state. And that Earth could carry, optimistically, only a few million people (and they would be eating each other a lot).

  Indeed nearly all we eat, plants, nuts, fruits, animals, are Genetically Modified Organisms. So we should feel gratified to enjoy GMOs. (The most correct and deepest mood in that arena of thought.)

  Considering that civilization would never have appeared without GMOs, a meta-mood ought to be called upon: to be against GMOs is uncivilized.

  So in connection with GMOs, three moods are justified:

1) Potentially dangerous GMOs ought to be outlawed. (Caution!)

2) No GMOs, no civilization. (Gratitude!)

3) Throwing all and any GMOs out with rage is inhuman, the royal road to total destruction. (Defiance Against Chimps On A Rampage!)

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FUNDAMENTAL MOOD BEHIND SCIENCE: OFF WITH THEIR HEADS!

  Science has been distinctively unpopular under tyrants. Examples abound: Imperial Rome, which was crafty enough to cover its anti-intellectual mien with extravagant generosity to philosophers obsequious to the plutocratic system. The Catholic Church in the Middle Ages, Stalin, Hitler, were also great enemies of science…

  Science and technologies are often the butt of fierce moods. Some people have written to me of their hatred for the LHC at CERN (which just discovered the Higgs field). Some even identified CERN (a French acronym) with Hitler’s weapon programs, in the vain hope to ruffle me in the wall street Journal comments.

  I will explain in a future essay that the mood against nuclear energy is actually a mood that contradicts the reality that our planet is life giving because Earth is the largest fission nuclear reactor in the universe we know of.

  Once this fact gets to be well known and understood by the world’s masses, no doubt the mood about nuclear energy will change, from revulsion to adoration. Nuclear energy! Our savior! Our creator! Our shield! Our continent churner! Our CO2 storage device!

  Why so much hatred against new knowledge? Because new ideas threaten the established order, which is, first of all, a mental order. The mood that what we know leaves much to be desired, is intrinsically threatening to all and any established authority. If we know more than the authority why is it not us the authority? If we do not ask this question, the authorities certainly will, thus suspect and dislike us.

***

STRANGE MOODS EVERYWHERE, ONE, OR MORE, PER TRIBE:

  The Big Bang is another mood. Never has so much rested on so little. It just, feels good. Just like Genesis. Same mood, Fiat Lux.

  As far as I am concerned, established observations are compatible with a 100 billion years old universe. (Not 13.7 billions! They get to 13.7 billion by macerating the data with a special Big Bang sauce) But of course, the mood among the Very Serious Scientists is that, if you say such a thing, you are ignorant. The VSS are not known for condescending to be fully honest with the public.

  Never mind that Big Bang theory necessitates the Inflationary Universe, zillions of new universes everywhere, all the time. On the face of it, that’s the most insane idea, ever. Well, if you think so, you are just not in the right mood, and we know of no conference nor seminar you will ever be invited to. VSS are not in the mood to talk to you.

  Once I gave a seminar (at Stanford) on Black Holes (in a joint math-physics seminar), and I explained that the theory crucially depended up hypothetical Quantum effects, that I made explicit, and which were usually ignored. Thus the logic had unexamined bifurcations, and the standard Black Hole theory could not be viewed as conclusive. A (future) Fields Medal accused me of “meditation“. He was in the mood of embracing only what it was fashionable to embrace (sure it helped him to get the Fields Medal).

  The Big Bang has a great advantage: precisely because it rests on a great mystery (universes out of nothing, everywhere!) that deep revelation is impenetrable to the masses, and thus unites, and empowers the priesthood.

Along similar lines, the Nicean version of Christianism insisted that 1 = 3 (the mystery of the “Trinity”, justly derided by Arians, Copts, and, later, Muslims).

  The more absurd the belief, the more mysterious, the more distinguishing, unifying and empowering to the oligarchy that holds it. Such is the mystification mood.

  And I do say such a thing, because I lived in many cultures, and I have seen many, where dozens of millions of people are very much into the mood of deliberately believing into something stupid. They are in the mood of imposing upon themselves a crazy mood.

  Why?

  Simply because distinctively outrageous moods define, enforce and encourage an even more rewarding mood, the tribal mood. Tribes made humanity possible. They made the many into a super organism. The tribal instinct is tied to deep psychobiology to make it not just irresistible, but something to crave for.

  This why there are these insane moods supporting the local sport team (whatever sport, whatever team, whatever locale it is).

  The tribal mood is why the British view themselves as living in democracy, while refusing to live in republic, or with a written constitution, and call “Glorious Revolution“, the ignominious invasion that gave rise to the present rather plutocratic regime. Britain: not a thing public (res publica), but public rule (demokratia)? There again we find the mood of the absurdity that binds.

  On a less quaint note, an Israeli commission of eminent jurists suggested to validate all West Bank settlements, even the wildest, and less authorized. In other words, the ancient Israeli jurists are trying their best to make Israel hated worldwide. Why? Because hatred is a mood that reinforces the tribe. Moods within moods. 

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MORE NUCLEAR MOODS:

  General Electric and Hitachi have applied for a licence to make a Uranium laser enrichment plant, a new technique that would allow to make nuclear bombs cheaper and more discreetly. There was great anxiety about releasing the details. An expert pointed out in the journal Nature, though that the main secret was already out: namely that Uranium laser enrichment worked. The details are less important than the mood: it can be done.

  Similarly, in World War Two, the top Nazi physicists were not in the mood of believing that one could make nuclear bombs, so they did not push for such a program. Whereas the French war Ministry was sure, as early as January 1938, in great part because of (Nobel laureate) Irene Joliot-Curie’s fierce temperament, that a nuclear bomb could be made.

  Similarly, Japanese scientists conveyed to their fascist government the mood that nuclear bombs were possible, and the Japanese military started no less than three different nuclear bomb programs, in an effort to nuke before being nuked.

  And of course, in the USA, Einstein wrote to president FDR, in the summer 1940, conveying his certainty that a bomb could be made (now that the French nuclear scientists had escaped to England). After the war, Churchill, suspecting French nuclear scientists were commies, eager to tell all to Stalin, wanted to jail them all (another funny mood; instead the PM was defeated in elections). In truth, French intellectuals, led, once again by Irene Joliot-Curie, confirmed to their dismay that, after all, Stalin was just another fascist, and were not in the mood of collaborating in any further bomb program, now that the Nazis had been defeated. The French military cooperated with Israeli scientists instead, to develop bombs. Israelis, for some reason, were in the mood…

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THOROUGH THOUGHTFULNESS STARTS WITH HONEST MOODS:  

  Some will say: “Wait a minute! are you not regressing? Did not Socrates say that the correct way of thinking was by piling up little reasonings such as: ‘Socrates Is A Man, All Men Are Mortal, Therefore Socrates Is Mortal’?

  All I can say is that I have seen lions hunting, and their reasonings, on the fly, were much more clever than that. (The antelopes were pretty smart too.) This sort of reasonings a la Socrates were amusements. A 2 year old can understand them (I enjoy a two year old). The obsessions with these infantile reasoning covered up the truth. Athens’ truth. The truth of the plutocratic friends Socrates lived from, as Rousseau would later live off rich women.

  The truth was that Socrates was a man, because he was not a slave. That was the real mood of Athens, and, to be obsessive about: [(a>b>c)>(a>c)] was just a way to change the conversation, from the mature, to the infantile.

  Fundamentally a contradiction of moods stabbed through the heart all of Athens’ logical systems, just as it would with the Roman republic later, with the same result: collapse. Athens’ principal mood, the mood of the rule of a free people resting upon the mood enforcing the massive enslavement of others, for no good reason, but happenstance, was itself a happenstance waiting for no good.

  Everybody is dominated by moods, but nobody with contradictory moods goes very far. And the same holds for societies. No logic in the world will change that. Why? Because logic always needs a universe in which to unfold. And that is provided by moods (the Incompleteness Theorems in metamathematics say nothing else).  

  Those who want to think better will work on their moods first. It’s harder than to work on ideas. Philosophers will view any, all packaged, already prepared mood, with even more suspicion than an unexamined idea. The unexamined mood is not worth having. Yes, I always lived that way. Early on in life, I acquired the mood of respecting, somewhat, but not trusting, at all, the naïve way the natives felt about their perception of their universe.

***

Patrice Ayme

FORCE IS A HUMANISM

FORCEFULLY CONTEXTUALIZING MAN.

Force Is Strong, It Beats Weakness Anytime.

***

 Abstract: Homo Sapiens, fundamentally, is all about force. And thus, so is humanism. So is wisdom.

 The name of the species is “Homo Sapiens Sapiens”. In English: “Man Wise Wise”. And in which sense is Man Wise Wise  wise about? Wise in the usage of force.

 And how did all this wisdom arise? Through genetic mutations that force facilitated, and implemented. The force of the most domineering species, those even lions feared, the human species. Force protected our fragile, growing brains. And the usage of force has become much more extensive since man has become super brainy. Brains are all about mustering, and mastering, forces.

 So how come conventional humanism ignores this powerful evidence? Simply because conventional humanism tends to be the humanism masters prefer their slaves to have. Even Nietzsche’s ‘Amor Fati’ is so affected. So is Existentialism. Real man does not just exist out there. 

 A human being in full creates worlds, using force, inside out.

***

 FORCE ME UP:

 It’s not even sad, and certainly true that man is about force. Molded by forces, creating new ones. It should be forcefully celebrated. Celebrations are often about force: contemplate fireworks. Those who disagree with this evidence live in denial. OK, living in denial can be best: so does the resigned sheep, when eaten by the wolf. Force is good, when well directed. Just ask bacteria. And good does not happen without force. Such is the theme of this essay: NO FORCE, NO LIFE, NO INTELLIGENCE, NO MORALITY.

 Force.

 A word conventional humanism has been avoiding as if it had the plague. Thus the ostrich’s head is deep in the sand, and its juicy rump, up in the air, ready for clawing by lions. “Why can’t wolves eat grass, as we do?” bleat the sheep. Some questions, like the moon, have no moral answer.

 Here you have an animal (man) driving the entire biosphere to extinction. And some ecologists observing this deplore the usage of force? But it is force that destroys the biosphere, force applied by man, and only other forces applied by man can stop those destroying forces.

 An American acquaintance reading a tweet about force as an essential part of humanism, denounced me as “too far off”, adding he was “off”, “unfriending” me right away. That brutality was fully coherent with yesterday’s humanism’s hysteria on the subject of force. 

 That got me to think: why does conventional humanism hate force so much? Why does it want to be weak so much? How can one hate force so much, in a world, a civilization, that rests on force, so much?

 My irascible (ex)correspondent confused “force” and “abuse”. Those who have studied physics know that force (or, even better, potential) is fundamental to (all of) physics. What is fundamental to physics is fundamental to man.

 Anything can be abused. Anything.

 Those who forcefully deny force as an overwhelming concept, are, at best, hypocrites. And, at worst, severely retarded. How come so much common philosophy got so retarded, then, that so much of the folks also are, and does this explain the civilizational crisis we are experiencing?

***

 LOGIC IS STRONG, BUT CONTEXT, STRONGER; Context Overwhelms Deduction Forcefully:

 The irascible clown was prisoner of a deeper flaw than faulty logic: simplistic semantics, too meager a context to support reality. In his context, force is abuse, a manifestation of evil. However, in its physical sense and more frequent occurrence, force is just what brings change. In particular what turns oppressive infamy into delicious salami.

 This, neglecting the importance of context, was Socrates’ main strategic character flaw. Socrates set-up for himself little logical games he then won (easily, as he had rigged the context). But, as Alexander showed when he cut the Gordian Knot, logic is nothing if one uses force, and more of a context often gives greater force.

 Nietzsche too neglected context when he embraced fate. The Franks he alluded to, calling them “noble” were not just free of other men, they were free of fate as much as they could get the better of it, in a good fight they always welcomed. They welcomed hatred and resentment as calls to violent, forceful action. That, in turn was directed towards many hostile forces, including intolerable Christianism and invasive Islamism.

***

 LIFE IS FORCE. INTELLIGENCE EVEN MORE SO:

 At first sight, life is an orderly organization, but the Second Law of Thermodynamics says that entropy, that is, disorder, keeps on increasing. So life contradicts the Second Law, on the face of it. That law can be contradicted only by the application of force. That is the first obvious way in which force enters what defines us. Even an urchin’s symmetry is the expression of force.

 That leads to a number of philosophico-physical questions: what is force? Where does the organizing force that defines life come from? Those questions are very deep, and involve the deepest philosophy of mathematics too; we will eschew them here (however, see the note).

 What is force? A deviation from routine, an inflection of inertia, a change of geodesics. Short of changing the trajectory of the planet itself, certainly extinguishing the biosphere qualifies as a considerable change of trajectory. A considerable usage of force.

***

 FORCE, ESPECIALLY THE FORCE OF TRUTH, ALLOWED MAN TO BE:

 What is intelligence? Using force to one’s advantage. Picture a bacteria going up stream towards a food source the smell of which it detected. It is using the force of its propelling system to its (future) advantage. If the bacteria had no possibility of using force, it could not deflect its existence closer to its (future) subsistence.

 Chimps were never far from trees. Not so with the ancestors of man, thanks to their usage of force. The very principle of man was to evolve into an all conquering ape who uses so much force, the lions themselves contend in vain. Thus the apeman could settle the savannah park, and also the rest of the planet. And force was not just about protection, but energy procurement. Eating energy and protein rich meat allowed more time and energy for thinking (and first of all, about projecting more force, such as about how best to hunt, make war, and grab lots of females)

 Of course, there is no civilization without force: civilization means cities, and one needs force to build houses, let alone operate a city, and keep it alive, by forcefully bringing goods and water to it, while evacuating waste. The Greco-Roman empire existed because of long distance trade, rendered possible by 10,000 ships, all using force. Force could be used passively: see aqueducts and other hydraulics.

 What is intelligence? Doing the right thing. “Doing”: how does one do anything without force? No doing, nor even ding, without force.

***

 WHY ARE SO MANY MENTAL SYSTEMS ADVERSE TO FORCE? ALTHOUGH CIVILIZATION RESTS ON FORCE?

 Naturally civilization has to be civil, and so the usage of illegal force within society has to be discouraged. Oppressive mental systems hide behind that to implement their oppression of the full, but innocent nature of man.

 The cruel masters, the plutocrats, fear that force will be used against them. So they instill the People with the fear of force. Not only the fear that this terrible thing could be used against the innocent, but also the fear of wielding it against abuse. 

 That is why Christianity was a slave religion: so that there would be masters, who reigned with their minds, rather than tiring themselves beating up their subjects as much as they otherwise would have to. The occasional execution helped: the last person assassinated by the church for heresy was in the Nineteenth Century. This violence of Christianity by mental means unfolded until the Twentieth Century: the papacy, namely Pie XII, was an active collaborator of Nazism, the religion of the Master Race, and was so effective that nobody think of it to this day.

 Although Nietzsche posed as the re-evaluator of all values, and an adversary of “slave religion”, Nietzsche was all about having the force to accept the force of one’s fate. That alleviated subjects from extraneous baggage such as resentment, he opined. But what is wrong about resentment? If I resent Obama and Krugman for having set-up too small of a real stimulus to the economy of the USA, there is nothing wrong with me. It reminds me there is something wrong with them.

 Nietzsche, following a lot of top thinkers of the enlightenment, spent a lot of time heaping scorn on Christianity. However, he was the son of a pastor, and his belief in fate is immediately recognizable as the old Christian quandary of the problem of Grace and the Christo-Muslim attitude symbolized by the slogan “Inch Allah!”

 And what of many of the French intellectuals of the mid Twentieth Century, those who embraced decolonization, Mao, after embracing Vichy and Stalin? Well, they embraced all these mighty forces, because they were weak. Weakness was their religion. They produced an obscure philosophy, Existentialism, whose shadowy existence denied context. It had no more impact on infamy and plutocracy than Heidegger putting on his Nazi uniform had on civilization. Heidegger, too, was weak, and thus their hero.

 Nietzsche was clear, strong in his elocution, and said many good little truths. However Nietzsche embraced the oldest message of the leaders of empire: learn to love your fate. Many French philosophers (Sartre, Foucault, etc.) were neither clear nor strong enough to embrace anything, but themselves, and the sycophants who licked their bottoms clean.

 As Sartre puts it in his ‘Existentialism is a Humanism‘: “man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world – and defines himself afterwards.” That is silly. Man does not just exist, and “surge”. Humans are molded by forces, including some mental ones from caregivers. There is a debate of forces at work, and that debate is called man.

***

 WHEN MAN IS SO STRONG AS TO BE A MAKER:

 Nietzsche could not escape his own fate. Nobody can. For this travel that we cannot escape, Nietzsche enjoins to carry as little baggage as possible. No resentment. So be it. But so what?

 Nietzsche was just scratching the surface of the nature of man, when he proclaimed again the religion of accepting one’s fate, a religion very well known, indeed, as it is the one the masters prefer, ever since plutocracy appeared, and it has ruled. Nietzsche’s message was without any originality.

 Verily, Nietzsche and the slave religions missed the big picture completely. Man is strong. Although man has to embrace fate, man is also a creator of worlds, and a maker of fate itself. For those who doubt that, have a look at the tortured planet. Fate is elaborated there, poisoned river, after polluted sea, extinguished species, after mercury sprinkled Arctic, melting icecap, after dying plankton, and burned out forest.

 For those who doubt that, have a look at the grander work of man.

***

 WHEN FORCE IS USED TOO LATE:

 During their reign, the Nazis assassinated one million and a half Jewish children. With the best of intentions, of course.

 The Nazis killed even more innocent children, and people, than that. However, by 1935, it was clear, considering the Nuremberg racial hatred laws, that the Nazis had they set the framework for such a holocaust.

 Yet, they were not opposed, and the United Kingdom and the USA (among other vermin, such as Sweden) kept on collaborating with the would be mass murderers, transferring ever more power to them. (Even thoroughly hostile the French republic, led by a Jew, sent her athletes to Berlin in 1936.)

 Why? Lack of force. Lack of desire to use force. Lack of relish for the usage of force. Force was not used. Neither intellectual force, nor physical force. Force was nowhere to be seen. Yet, what greater delight than to crush a terrible infamy such as Nazism? If that pleasure does not exist enough, it ought to be taught.

 When finally France and Britain decided to use force, September 1, 1939, it was all too late, and the alliance between Hitler, Stalin and American plutocrats had become nearly unstoppable. 70 million dead were what it took. OK, better late than never. Millions of assassinated children were part of the price paid for having not enough intellectual and moral force in a timely manner.

 Now one can see something similar with the spectrum of Merkler rising. Fortunately, she is in the process of being stopped in her tracks by the force of the (mostly French) electorate. The others have been there, and seen that, this time they have the force.

***

 WHY IS IT IMPORTANT TO REALIZE FORCE IS THE ESSENCE OF INTELLIGENCE? THUS MAN?

 Because only force allows to do what is necessary.

 Just look at the austerity programs implemented around the West, from Greece to the USA. Austerity is characterized by a renunciation of force. It’s something monks do (thanks to others, in the background, who are working and fighting for them).

 When Obama came to power, instead of being forceful like the wheelchair bound Roosevelt, who closed all the banks, and enforced a giant WPA, Obama put in place a tiny real stimulus program (not any larger than that of Sarkozy in France). OK, Obama played basketball a lot, so he felt very active. The activity of the spinal cord, not that of the higher mental functions FDR displayed.

 Merkel has been much more devious. Whereas she embarked on heavy stimulus inside Germany (10% GDP!) plus massive Kurtzarbeit and other socialist, central planning tricks, all of which bore excellent fruit, she has been pushing deliriously on murderous austerity on the rest of Europe, earning herself full Nazi garb in caricature, and theperfidic nickname of ‘Merkler‘ from yours truly. (That theme will be developped in the next essay.) 

 Europe is equipped with the most plutocracy friendly banking system in the world. Unbelievable, but true. All the screaming from wall Street about Europe being a ‘welfare state” masks that fact. And all banking systems in existence are plutocracy friendly, as the Chinese Prime Minister admitted recently about big Chinese banks (adding that was intolerable). To break that institutional state of affairs, force has to be used. Mental force, physical force (white nights of debates among politicians, economists, and philosophers, studying of the situation by the common citizenry, demonstrations…)

 Similarly, to build a world sustainable economy, massive force has to be used.

 The root of the financial-economic-social-civilizational crisis is that plutocracy has envenomed democracy with torpor and a paralysis of the mind. As the People got persuaded that force was anathema, the forces of evil were left unopposed. So, out of the lofty, thoroughly idiotic perspective that humanism had nothing to with force was born, naturally enough, a humanism without force. And now a civilization without force, something that does not grow anymore, but implodes onto itself.

 Time for some vigor. Voltaire’s recommendation to crush infamy requires some force. Let’s gather it. It starts with observation, analysis, resolve. It’s not as bad as when our ancestors had to face real lions.

 Context is made of bits and pieces of semantics, and all connect to the emotional. To be a human in full, it’s important to feel good about force. Otherwise one will end up without dignity, as the dinner of hyenas, or banksters. A weak, degenerated version of humanism is bringing us, and our biosphere, to an ominous doom. Time for some glory.

***

Patrice Ayme

***

 Note on life’s vital principle. How come life grow within an ever more chaotic world? How does life overwhelms the second law of Thermodynamics? This is related to a thought experiment called Maxwell’s Daemon. The Daemon separates gas molecules, fabricating a cold compartment in a tank. Maxwell did not present a mechanism to do this. Nor does life.

 My hunch though is that a so far unrevealed force, tied to low energy Quantum Mechanics, the collapse force, is what presides to the rise of this order. Big particle accelerators cannot study that force. (But research towards the Quantum Computer will.)

*

Note on: http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2011/03/08/humanism-is-force-no-fly-over-libya/

The present essay offers an abstract framework for the older one, which urged to intervene in Libya to throw out the bloody dictatorship.

Species, Niches, Cultures

SPECIATION COMES FROM NICHES, BUT THOSE CAN BE SELF CREATED.

***
 The diversity of species is much greater in the tropics. How come? The main reason is obvious: species get periodically vacuumed in the high latitude regions, by ice and cold. This has various notable consequences. Especially in the cultural domain.

 One has to remember how speciation happens. Speciation is a discovery that Darwin made explicit in the Galapagos archipelago, far from the South American continent. Species of the local birds had evolved from a common ancestor, a kind of South American finch. More than a generation before, Lamarck has studied various invertebrates (a word he coined), and their fossils, to show that the species had evolved over the eons, and thus that the Earth was immensely old (something that made a huge scandal at the times, at it was more in tune with Indian than Christian thinking). 

 (The theory of evolution itself, and especially evolution by natural selection was old, and its original authors were Maupertuis, of the Least Action Principle, writing 120 years before Darwin, and Lamarck, who, as a research professor in biology, another word that he also coined, could lay it thick; Darwin’s refining observations were decisive in the Anglo-American empire, though. Just as French physicists developed Newtonian mechanics in the 18 C, English evolutionists, especially Wallace and Darwin, developed the French breakthrough work of the preceding generations in biological evolution!)

 The following became clear: once introduced to a new ecological niche, a species will evolve anew. Biological species tend to be optimal for their inheritance in symbiosis with the environment they also inherited. That is why species such as oysters, sharks, turtles or crocodiles, did not change much in more than 100 million years: they were optimal, and their environment did not change. Crocodilians are the picture of perfection: not only they munched on the last dinosaurs, but recent discoveries have shown that, in some dinosaurian environments, crocs were already the top predators.

 Change the environment they are made for, and by, and suddenly species are not optimal anymore. They are forced into the survival mode. Then naturally occurring variations present an advantage or disadvantage relative to the new environment, and evolution happens again. And it happens all the faster, the greater the difference with the previous environment is. 

 Hence environments with many new ecological niches will create many new species. So the question becomes: why are there more niches in the tropics than in the cold regions? Well, one has to realize that the question is asked in space-time. History matters. When a niche changes, a species can resist through mini adaptation, while, simultaneously, the throttle of evolution is open to the max. But nothing can force all individuals of the suddenly inadequate species to evolve fast and far. Some will just make do. Thus outright new species can evolve, while versions of the old still cling around.

 In Australia, a lone, extremely ancient eucalyptus was found in the mountains. Some suggested it was the oldest individual plant in the world. That plant was, and it is, the oldest, and unique, representative of its species. The species had evolved when the climate was much colder (during or before the last glaciation). Somewhere else in Australia, in an isolated, secret canyon, in the Blue Mountains another species of pine trees, long disappeared elsewhere in the world, was also found (now they are for sale worldwide). Those plants survived to the disappearance of the niches in which they evolved long ago, through luck or happenstance (a particular canyon with special circumstances throughout history).

 Australia did not have a very cold climate, even during the worst glaciations, due to its overall location (and it drifted there from the polar region while Earth climate was much warmer). If Australia were a subpolar island, all its trees and animals would have been wiped out during great glaciations (as they were in Antarctica, which used to be joined to Australia). Under milder conditions, Australia would have been recolonized by distant trees from tropical areas: genuine Australian trees would have disappeared during a cold episode.

 Another example: trees grow again in Greenland. Trees have grown in Greenland for dozens of millions of years, but all the species of Greenland trees were eliminated when Greenland was covered by ice. If Greenland had been located next to New Guinea, it would have maybe even more species than the land of Birds of Paradise (I say “maybe” because, although Greenland is bigger, New Guinea, the wrinkled forefront of the Australian plate, has higher and larger highlands, which creates a lot more environmental niches than one would expect from a place of that size; there are isolated sky islands in New Guinea, surrounded by steaming jungle, with, of course, their own species).

 So it is in all regions that icecaps and glaciers could trample in the last four million years: cold hostile to life wiped biological evolution out clean, periodically. For example sequoias were eliminated from Europe: the slow moving trees (trees move as a species), got blocked by glaciers, and destroyed. This because mountain ranges are mostly east-west barriers in Europe. In California, they survived because the ranges are mostly north-south.

 This is nothing new: many dinosaur species evolved in very high latitudes, where their adaptation allowed them to enjoy the polar night. That was when what are now subpolar regions enjoyed a tropical climate (when crocodilians thrived in Greenland). The distant ancestors of mammals, the mammalian reptiles, evolved in very cold climate, so they evolved strong thermoregulation. This came in handy when drastic changes occurred 65 million years ago. Said change has long been viewed as an asteroid strike. But it is unlikely that an asteroid strike would have struck all dinosaurs, and all dinosaur-like sea reptiles, while leaving mysteriously mammalian and bird alone.

 Whereas, obviously, episodes of intense cold and heat could have had that effect. Dinosaurs had poor thermal regulation, but also high metabolism (differently from birds, which evolved from them; birds have higher temperatures than mammals). Crocodilians, turtles and sea snakes could survive, as they have lower metabolism: when it gets cold, they just stop moving, a luxury dinosaurs did not have. Of course, the colossal Dekkan Traps eruptions, by covering entirely the planet with clouds, while poisoning air and seas with CO2, fit the crime perfectly.

 So what I propose is simply that, as glaciations fluctuated dramatically, conditions in the tropics also fluctuated dramatically: for example the Amazon suffered droughts. This created niches (however transient, they were long enough for species to evolve). However the conditions never fluctuated so much as to lead to complete extinctions, in the tropics. As conditions changed, species tended to adapt, and new ones evolved, thus leaving a patchwork of diversity behind… At least in species which can exist in great numbers, such as insects.

 Not so in subpolar regions. In subpolar regions, intense cold periods happen, and during intense cold episodes, all species get killed (at least among plants and insects). When conditions become mild again, the regions are reconquered by survivors from the tropics (much of which became a temperate zone during glacial maxima). A similar mechanism could have demographically flood Neanderthals in suddenly warm interglacials.

*** 

EXTINCTIONS AS A DRIVERS OF EVOLUTION:

 If an extinction occurs, it is probably because all the ecological niches were changed at once. So all species are not optimally adapted anymore. Some will resist in micro niches (as crocodilians, turtles, etc. did), some will evolve drastically (as birds and mammals did after the Cretaceous). In the end more species will be created, and they will compete with the old ones, so, in a sense, in the average, they will be improved, or at least the adaptability of the entire ecosystem will be greater (some of the old will be around, some of the new too).

 It is not excluded that the dinosaurs disappeared through such complicated mechanism: after an initial ecological shift, the competitivity of small mammals, or birds, may have been improved (as their personal dinosaur predators went away, say), and they may have been free to eat larger dinosaurs’ eggs, etc.

***

WHY EUROPE BECAME SO SUPERIOR INTELLECTUALLY:

Europe is assuredly the largest expanse of greatly interconnected peninsulas, islands, mountain ranges, lakes and seas in the world. An enormous set of potential ecological niches. Some could brandish the Arctic archipelago of Northern Canada, but first, well, it’s frozen, and was completely covered by an ice cap for most of the last three million years, not a situation conducive to any sort of biology.

 Indeed, European geography is at mid-latitude, with an oceanic climate rendered mild by the Gulf Stream (which has transported tropical water towards Europe, for millions of years, since the Americas became one, and the currents changed). During the worst glacial maxima, Southern Europe was still ice-free. With mountain ranges and flowing waters everywhere, this labyrinth of ecological niches was excellent for evolving many species.

 And so it was with evolving many cultures later. The many environments in Europe allowed for evolving many cultural species. That was helped by trade, of goods or ideas, using the ubiquitous waterways. Some of the old stuff survived and transmogrified. For example, many ideas of Zoroastrianism have become part of the mental skeleton of the Enlightenment. The ideas went west by 3,500 kilometers, and in time by 3,500 years.

 (Europe is geographically defined, linguistically, humanly, commercially and physically, as roughly the Western part of Eurasia, west of the Himalayas and the Urals; India is also part of that ensemble, consecutively to conquest and colonization, about 3,500 years ago, and subsequent continual and extensive exchanges. Yes a vast steppe corridor starting in Hungary, goes all the way to Mongolia, and was always there, hence the many visits of various Mongols to Western Europe, all the way to Orleans…) 

 Compare with the entire African coast, North and West, which has only a handful of natural ports, on maybe more than ten thousands kilometers. Whereas the European coast is covered with possible ports, each ready to serve the local ecological and cultural niches with trade. Look at the Croatian coast: from far away, rather short. However, from close by, a length of nearly 6,000 kilometers, and thousands of islands. Similarly Greece or the British isles each have nearly 15,000 kilometers of coastline. And Norway, with all its fjords, more than 100,000 kilometers! This sort of extremely detailed geography and imbrications with water, allowed for extreme diversity and exchanges of very differentiated goods. Compare with the Sahara desert, with a handful of oases on an area greater than the USA (full disclosure: my first memories are from one of them, the amazing Gardahia). 

 Just an example: a small part of the Italian coast, facing the island of Elba, and endowed with natural ports, was rich in extravagant ore deposits. Especially iron. This attracted, among others, the Etruscans.

 Thus, without the wealth of iron, Rome may never have been. Verily, the long standing half joke is that the Roman peasants learned all what they knew from the Etruscans… And, later the Greeks. By the way, that grafting of a higher culture on the more simple minded may explain why Rome evolved down the blind alley of over-exploiting others, instead of developing its own deep ideas… As the Franks did, when they took over in 486 CE. 

 Some will scoff about claims of European superiority and diversity. But little known are the basic facts. For example the Celts had developed technology which was in some ways superior to Rome (and in 399 CE, the Roman republic did not get annihilated, just because the Celts condescended to be paid to go away from the Latin capital that they were occupying; the superiority of the Romans laid in the institutions of that republic). The Celts were probably the first to make fleets of thousands of boats to conduct intense systematic trade, and a polity of sorts, over an ocean (the Atlantic). 

 European diversity was a strength, as long as it did not explode into devastating conflict. After the Celts subdued the Romans in 399 CE, some marched on to present day Anatolia. They refused to submit to Alexander later. Notice that it  would have been a much poorer world if the Celts had destroyed Rome in 399 CE (as they probably could have, had they been meaner). True, the Romans conquered the Celts, but they did not destroy them: in 400 CE, the bishop of Lyon (Lugdunum, capital of the Gauls, just supplanted by the Parisian capital of the Franks), preached in Celtic. Thus a Gallo-Roman mental ecology had established itself, where many of the best ideas of both had thrived, while terrible ones (such as Celtic sacrifices) had been snuffed.

 Europe may want to remember all this, the richness of diversity, as it tries to resist homogenizing plutocracy, be from Russia (where filthy rich strongman plutocrat Putin accused Hillary Clinton to have caused the arrest of thousands of Russians, by giving a mysterious “signal” which made thousands of Russians whine in unisson), or with the so called market (intent on berating France and Germany, while lauding financially much worse, Greece like Great Britain, because the latter’s government is plutophile, thus a friend of the slave market).

*** 

SUPERIOR MINDS, HOW THEY EVOLVE, WHAT THEY FEAR:

 Thus one will acquire a mind endowed with more, and superior ideas by varying one’s environment: the more mental niches, the more ideas can adapt to them, the greater the chance to develop superior ones.

 I guess that is the idea behind having scientists travel all over the world to conferences where they meet each other. Although, of course, this may lead to homogenization, not speciation! To have speciation, one needs time to evolve separately, otherwise one will be thrown back with the blob, as one more undifferentiated piece of the blob.

 Speciation in the realm of ideas is why greatly original thinkers go to the desert, to avoid too much mental entanglement with the commons. That is why Montaigne called attention to the necessity of the Ivory Tower, to think deeply, quietly, and from above. Great minds cannot blossom, if they mix too much with the stupidity of what was long viewed as true by common invertebrates.

 Thus, in these times of budgetary restrictions, and considering the existence of the Internet, I would suggest that scientific conference budgets be reassigned to the rescue of scientific experiments (which are threatened, especially in astronomy, the part of physics which has brought most of the spectacular experimental results of the last 50 years). In general, the requirements of scientific careers are little conducive to originality, and groupthink is to be feared. 

 To pursue the analogy further, if ideas evolve in mental niches, what would be the equivalent of life killing cold? Well, intellectual fascism, glacially crushing all in the way. 

 Intellectual fascism could be the Roman attitude to slavery (the foundation of the economy, with the large slave enterprises of the empire, such as agribusinesses). Or it could be the social and economical devastating Christian philosophy (for example Roman Catholic Christians believed it was wrong to kill highway men, so highway robbery, being unpunished, exploded to the point that Roman roads could not be used anymore, and public order collapsed). Mao and company made the point that Confucianism was a form of intellectual fascism which had paralyzed China for millennia. And indeed they introduced communist forms of thinking which had evolved in the French niche. The French communist, not to say Communard niche. 

 The most famous intellectual fascism is Islam, a superstition which has the arrogance to claim the entire public sphere for itself (which is what Christian bishops did in the West around 400 CE; however, as Christ had very loudly ordered to separate Caesar from God, and thus soon the bishops, after trying their hand at dictatorship for a while, decided to outsource government to the Roman army, by then reduced to Imperator Clovis’ Franks). 

 Groupthink was not our ancestors’ forte. After all, our very distant ancestors were lizards who colonized subpolar areas: they were not held back by the prospect of a career among the multitudes, quite the opposite. To be different, and go where no lizard had been before, urged them on.

 And so it did, even before that, for the first fishes which followed plants on land. We live on a planet where life itself is teleonomic: it looks forward, at a distance (tele) and finds out what can be changed, or, at least, managed (nomos), to invade further. This goes against the philosophical grain of Jacques Monod’s “Chance and Necessity”, which makes a big deal that life is not teleonomic. But, just as in physics there is something called “Effective Quantum Field Theory”, so should it be in philosophy: if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, flies like a duck… It should be a duck. Life is an adaptation machine. 

 That is why probes to Mars are carefully sterilized; experiences have shown that some bacteria can survive in space. Of course, space is not a niche where bacteria evolved, but some can survive there. So it is with ecological diversity (bacteria may find harder to survive a glaciation than interplanetary space). Evolved in a particular niche, a species can survive independently, as long as a big bad glacier does not come its way, crushing all in the way.

***

LIFE DOES NOT JUST ADAPT, IT CREATES, EXTINGUISHING SOMETIMES ALL IN THE WAY:

Minds and lives were made by wasting the environment, and make it more complicated, make it at their service ever more. 

 Life changed the atmosphere of the planet by replacing its reducing atmosphere into oxygen laden air. Many suspect that this biological change brought “Snowball Earth” episodes, by knocking off greenhouse gases and replacing them by a nitrogen and oxygen mix (around 700 to 600 million years ago). The fist evidence for Snowball Earth were traces of glaciers in the tropics, at sea level. Later life adjusted itself to provide itself with a more comfortable environment (yes, adjustment does not necessitate consciousness). 

 Biological complexity has inertia. And biological complexity represents immense riches, because life forms have evolved many systems to handle the environment, countless environments, past and present. As the plutocrats ravage the planet, and biological diversity, we thus see that riches is not what they are truly after, whatever they claim. 

 What Pluto, the Dark Side of man, is after, is the illusion of the domineering self, because it has not embraced diversity. So it is with those who rule according to him, and his principles. When I speak about the illusion, I know what I mean: John Corzine, past head of Goldman-Sachs, past Senator of the USA, past governor of one of the richest states in the USA, New Jersey, has lost one billion, two hundred miilion dollars: Corzine went in front of Congress, to “apologize, I simply do not know where the money is”. He was playing with Italian debt. 700 trillions of credit swaps out there. Or maybe more, or maybe less. It’s all about illusions. Except for the Italians or American farmers whose money Corzine and his accomplices have devoured.

 The USA is under the illusion of energy independence, because frantic fracking is quickly augmenting the fossil fuel and gas production of the country. Damn the water table. Damn the CO2. Full fuel ahead! The oil crats of the USA are in heavens. So the USA has been blocking progress towards an effort to mitigate climate change (in a disingenuous ping pong with China, for the third climate conference in a row, one more illustration of the collaboration of the American and Chinese plutocracies). Hey, once again, never mind that the EPA has found what everybody knew, that fracking devastates the “vital groundwater” (with CH4 at saturation, benzene at 50 times maximum, and the Ph of bleach). OK, that’s in Wyoming, who cares?

 We may not want to indulge in near extinction, as during the Snowball Earth, before we can adjust to our new found powers (some of them powers of illusion). After all, some of us are conscious, endowed with our own personalities, even our own ideas, and we may be teleonomic enough to manage at a distance what is ahead without getting crushed by it…

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Patrice Ayme