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).

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.

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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.

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 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.

***

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!)

***

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. 

***

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…

***

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

Intellectual Fascism

THE MOST EFFICIENT WAY TO RULE MINDS IS BY SIMPLIFYING THEM. 

 Abstract: The Open Mind, has driven the evolution of topmost civilizations. As Pericles said in his Funeral Oration:”Our city is open to the world… We are the school of Hellas…” Pericles talked of Athens as an open school, and society. But he emphasized that its strength came from making Athenian minds as open, and richer, minds: “our ordinary citizens, though occupied with the pursuits of industry, are still fair judges of public matters.”

 Rousseau pointed out that, everywhere one looked, man was in chains. OK, it may be less true now, but we are going back there. Fast. And the real question is: why do the subjugated people love it?

 How come? Minds are brainwashed, and imprinted in simplified forms where core human wants, like curiosity, are reduced to pathetic forms, such as fascination for celebrities. (That is why the kings of France wore extravagant, hyper expensive clothing, for more than a millennium; not just because they could, but because that gave the rabble something to dream of!)

 The general drive for simplifying minds is a deliberate strategy, well engaged in the Roman empire by the year 300CE (so pre-Christian; Christianity was an afterthought). I call it Intellectual Fascism.

 Intellectual Fascism is a neglected concept. It is the opposite of the Open Mind. The Open Mind is the core of progressive civilization, whereas Intellectual Fascism is the ultimate strategy of repressive plutocracy. 

 Intellectual fascism is a form of fascism specific to human beings. It is the higher, more subtle, form of political fascism, itself an expression of group fighting as one, a trick many social species have evolved. Even wasps do it, when they swarm and attack. Intellectual fascism gathers the People tight around a few ideas, again with a combative aim.

  Superstitious religions are a typical example of Intellectual Fascism. God(s) have answer to everything, and the answer is always the same: God(s) Great, the shameful incantation of the subjugated. More generally, Intellectual Fascism views individual reason, the capacity of individuals to think for themselves, as the enemy, and always looks for some reason to subjugate it.

 In modern times, the idiocy of submitting ancient ‘gods‘ has become much less popular, because our civilization requires more brains. Thus a new startegy to subjugate reason had to be found, by the enemies of free minds, those who Pluto fascinates.

 Thus intellectual fascists have come to pretend that democracy is the ultimate reason for reason. In its most hypocritical version, intellectual fascism pretends that all ideas, or even reason itself, ought to emanate from the People (which, of course, has leaders, so it is truly these leaders who determine what reason is). Whereas the truth is that it is the other way around

 Verily, reason is the ultimate reason for reason. Reason is how what is veiled becomes defined in its full glory. Reason is the unveiler of truth. Democracy, well done, is just a mean to better reason.

 Reason emerges from truth. The best civilizations know this evidence, and act accordingly.

***

WHEN FOOLS PRETEND TO THINK, SO THAT THEY CAN DOMINATE:

Before WWII, the young philosopher Paul Nizan, a friend of Sartre, published “Les Chiens de Garde” (“The Watchdogs“). He argued that many famous intellectuals and philosophers just enforced the established order. An example was Bergson, a Nobel Prize winner.

Initially a communist, Nizan broke up with Stalinism, especially when he loudly condemned the alliance between Stalin and Hitler. He was thereafter reviled by the French Communist Party. That explains why he is not well known.

Nizan was killed in combat on May 23, 1940, at Dunkirk (the heroic delaying battle by the French army which gave enough days for the one and only entire British army to escape Hitler’s army).

A lot of the present world economic crisis has to do with the intellectual analysis of the situation not being up to snuff. The watchdogs have barked up the wrong trees, as they are supposed to. Often deliberately so. Ex PM Blair of Britain goes around, heaping spite on “Occupy Wall Street” and the outraged. Nobel Krugman told us that Greece would be better, off, ruined by abandoning its currency, and switching to monkey money (OK, recently Krugman changed his tune, it seems, but much damage has been done).

Main Stream Media (and that includes websites set up by the plutocracy such as the “Huffington Post”, or by the CIA and the like, such as the “Daily Kos”) reinforce points of view typical of pure intellectual fascism. Here is a spectacular example, straight out of the New York Times.

More than once in the NYT, Michael Lynch, professor of philosophy (University of Connecticut, Northern Institute of Philosophy, University of Aberdeen), author of the forthcoming “In Praise of Reason,” “True to Life” (2004) and “Truth as One and Many” (2009), was allowed to claim authoritatively, as a “philosopher“, in various editorials that:

“our faith in reason, as it were — is not blind. It is an expression of our commitment to democracy itself.”

Sounds good, but it is full of lethal venom. Watch the subliminal message. Because we are committed, we reason? To think we need to be crazy? Next Professor Lynch will probably claim that reason was invented by “liberal democracy” aka Wall Street. After all, Fukuyama (RAND, Stanford) did that before him, and was revered for it.

Seriously, the operative core of the doctrine of Hitler and company was exactly this principle. Hitler made clear statements to that effect, up to a small modification: “our faith in reason, as it were — is not blind. It is an expression of our commitment to National Socialism itself.”

One has to know, to appreciate the parallel fully, that the top Nazis argued, half jokingly, that Nazism was a “total democracy“.

Nazism was all about the rule of the mob, when civilians broke the law massively: see the Kristallnacht. This sort of tradition, to make the social contract the primary causative agent of the human mind, and of what is right, or wrong, goes back to Locke, Kant, Rousseau, and Herder. In the case of the latter three, it clearly led to murderous, racist fascism, straight as the arrow flies. Even an idiot such as Eichmann pointed that out, waiting calmly for his rope in Jerusalem.

Eichmann argued that he did not hate Jews. He was just doing his job, and did it well, as the (German) People had asked him to. He paid the Jewish girl who taught him Yiddish. His best friend was a Jew, he tried his best to save him from Auschwitz, even asking Himmler to intervene.

Eichmann claimed that he did what Germans had been told was the good: follow common interest and the will of the (German) people to determine what reason was. That is the core of Kant’s doctrine, Eichmann pointed out. And was not Kant an absolute good?

In the modern USA the argument was duplicated by Rawls, for justice (so Lynch borrows from Rawls who borrows from the usual suspects).

Rawls has a theory of “Justice As Fairness“. That is not supposed to mean explicitly that only people with a fair complexion gets justice. But maybe that is the subliminal message. Indeed, it might as well, because it rests, basically on mob justice (as in Kant, Rousseau and Herder).

Indeed that is what a critical inspection of Rawl’s “two principles of Justice-as-Fairness” reveal. The second principle admits social inequalities, and justify them by social justice (JF, pages 42-43). What Rawls forget is that everybody, even Hitler, agreed with “his” principles. So they are far from just, and his contrived argumentation leaves him in the neighborhood of the Reichstag, 1930s version.

The time honored characteristic of justice, instead is justice as balancing the facts to find the truth out of reason alone (and not from appearances).

The devil is within what is true, or not. Cognition primes even volition. This is what happens to those who make incantations about “If God wants it, Insha Allah, Deo Volente”. They have been imprinted upon subjecting what they want to what they know.

There is nochoice. Any human being has to do this. That is why Cognition Primes Volition.

***

SOCIAL CONTRACT AS THE MIND IS THE ESSENCE OF FASCISM:

Believing that the social contract is the end-all, be-all, is more than a mistake to those who trust in reason. But, of course, the primacy of the mob has been the main argument of intellectual fascism: reason ought to be submitted to the madness of crowds (themselves manipulated by their own fascist leader(s)).

The submission of reason to collective passion is a denial of the essence of man, which is wisdom. And that comes  from the independent mind. To subject reason to the rule, or approval of the mob, or to the rule of the people, is not reasonable in the fullness of civilization. Because civilization, and human progress, rest on truth, not feel-good-as-a-mob.

Verily, I think, because I independent.

***

WHY WOULD PSEUDO PHILOSOPHERS NOT KNOW WHAT A LEOPARD KNOWS?

A snow leopard reasonably thinking does not ‘commit to democracy’. She tries to do the right thing, such as habituating the prey to little noises from the particular direction where she is crouching, by pushing little stones, just so.

The antelopes she is hunting then come to believe that some melting or crumbling process of non animal origin is creating the sound, in that particular direction, and pays no more attention to little noises from there. Thus, when the leopard will sneak and dash, she may gain the two seconds which will allow her to kill. The leopard gets to eat, and survive. Thanks to her theory of other creatures’ minds.

For the leopard, and not just the leopard, truth is in the kill. The leopard has faith in reason. No democratic process is involved. Only truth.

Pseudo philosophers do not teach people how to think better, but how to think worse. They are paid for that, and that is why Main Stream Media (NYT, WSJ, Murdoch, Huffington, etc) advertize them, loud and clear. That is also why the truth about the economic crisis is not brought to the fore.

Verily, among the characteristic of Pluto is invisibility. A confused mind cannot see well, because one sees mostly through the mind. A deliberately confused mind is a marvellous thing to ride. Ask any potentate.

***

TRUTH IS ABSOLUTE:

Indeed, there is such a thing as truth. Simply because there is something as the universe. The one and only. Not everything is relative, or false. Newtonian mechanics is still true, same as ever was, in its domain of application. Same for ancient Ptolemaic optics, or Archimedes principle, or Pythagoras theorem. All true, just as on day one. In their context (or “universe” to use semantics from logics). If one throws a two kilogram stone on some opponent’s head, it is still most injurious, a million years later. That is what it is, it is the truth. 

Truth, ultimately, is just what is. Nothing could be clearer. If it is, it’s true, if it is not, it’s not true.

OK, Martin Heidegger could not have understood that one, that ground for evidence, because all he wanted, deep down inside, was Nazism to be of the essence, but he could not say it, so he went around in circles, looking for the “ground”. Truths provide with grounds. Nazism, though, was, fundamentally a masochistic denial of reality, thus truth. So Heidegger could not find any ground that he could boast about.

To get to unobvious truth, reason(s) may have to be found. Truth rarely stand naked in all its glory on a denuded plain.

Faith in well known reasons reinforces reason, that faith is necessary to make reason all it can be.

Well established science in general, and mathematics, in particular, are reservoirs of well known reasons.

Mathematics consist in two pieces:

1) axioms, which depict some reasons we believe are crucial, or just interesting to believe in.

2) theorems, which are unobvious truths derived from axioms, which are unveiled through complex reasons.

The derivation of theorems itself uses other axioms, such as the Principle of Induction, which we have faith in (I gave a strong reason to believe the PI actually fails in my essay Largest Number, a modest full upside down of all of mathematics and logics that I apologize profusely for).

To believe in the Principle of Induction is an act of faith (all the more now that I gave a reason not to believe in it!), which, itself had been proven true by countless usage. What do we mean by this? Theorems proven by using the Principle of Induction have led to observable phenomena (such as jet engines purring) which were true and true according to predictions.

Did I just contradict myself? No. For all practical purposes we know nowadays, infinity exists. So the PI is true within its present context.

Democracy is most useful, because it allows debate, and debate helps in finding the truth, by putting many minds in parallel. So democracy creates reasons mechanically.

***

WHEN DEMOCRACY IS IN THE WAY OF REASON:

In the case of the ephemerally proposed Greek referendum, the reasons given for the decision to conduct a referendum on the exact nature of a rescue plan were clearly abysmal: people cannot judge upon such arcane financial technicalities. The Greek people was at 60% against the rescue plan. And that only for a bad reason: European inspectors are cracking down on amazing tax cheating in Greece.

Problem: in spite of the fact I want revolution now, I must admit, one must admit, that there is no immediate alternative to the rescue plan. It has the immense advantage to implement what I advocated for a long time, the immediate cancellation of 50% of the Greek debt, by the plutocrats themselves.

Moreover, if France and Germany don’t give oodles of money to Greece, right away, it will default uncontrollably, causing instantaneously a drop of per capita wealth in Greece of 50% and soon enough, 70%, with no way out. Instead France and Germany are trying to keep on going with the present orderly default (the Greek state has differed payments of some bills since 2010). The Greeks know that France and Germany will not make huge sacrifices for no good reason whatsoever.

Thus Merkel and Sarkozy correctly ordered instead that the referendum be on a non technical, but deeper question: do you Greeks want to be in the Euro zone or not? 

The answer to that one was known too: the Greeks are, by and large, very favorable to the euro. It has made them rich in more ways than one, be it only through subsidies. So not only they were then asked about whether something they liked should keep on happening, but also whether they would like not to drown.

So this was a case where a democratic consultation was not going to help.

Have all the truths been revealed in connection with the debt situation? Clearly not. And that, the People should try to start thinking about it.

How come the Greek debt, which is something like 120% of GDP, is supposed to explode to 200% of GDP, after a full year of a strict austerity program? It does not compute. Nobody explains that one. What kind of Dark Twist enables that sinister trick?

That is exactly what the watchdogs don’t want to talk about. So they will distract you with other things. I will dissect that fascinating riddle, crux of the problem, in another complex essay.

Let’s just say that both the problem, and its solution, are not localized to a few countries, such as Greece. They are global.

As far as the watchdogs of the established (plutocratic) order are concerned, the G20 at Cannes, distracted by the Greek crisis, was a great success: nothing was done about a Financial Transaction Tax. Britain, hypocritically, keeps on opposing it (they already have one, called the “Stamp Tax”, but on stocks only, not on the much more crucial derivatives; stocks are for vulgar investors, derivatives are for full blown plutocrats).

The USA is of course against a FTT as transacting the world into oblivion has become the last, and greatest, expression of American plutocratic power.  

Let’s also say that transacting away is how countries are brought to their knees by the world’s richest men.

***

NUKED REASON:

The U.S. department of energy just announced that CO2 emissions, worldwide, jumped up by 6% between 2009 and 2010. The emission due to coal burning jumped by 8%. more than half the increase is due to China and the USA (the same plutocratic mega organization: maximize coal burning, maximize profits for the richest of the rich).

This is an important failure of reason: we are puffing away towards a disaster which will make WWII seem like an anecdote. And it’s not just the reigning leaders who are at fault.

Ecologists puffing away obsessively against nuclear energy are also at fault: they make the bed of coal, and the results are blatant (I am not defending present reactors, which are dangerous, and ought to be phased out; but coal burning is not just dangerous, but guaranteed to be lethal on the largest scale). Nuclear, with its energetic intensity 100,000 more than anything else, is the only alternative to coal.

Let’s vituperate against fracking too: the USA is getting dangerously dependent upon fracking for natural gas. Let’s frack! Greedy bullies scream. Who needs water, when one can breathe gas and drink oil?

A well is not fracked once, but many times. Dozens of times. One can suspect that the process will lead to migration of the strong and nasty chemical agents fracking uses, over a few hundred meters in a few decades, polluting the water table. All the more since the concrete lining the wells will decay. The long term effects on the water table don’t look good, with a pretty high probability. If it turns out that there is a problem, it will be energetically disastrous. 

That is why France outlawed the technique (although the country has large reserves of shell gas). More modern, less dangerous techniques may be available in the future.

In the false debates about energy, one can see the failure of informed reason versus the reason of the mob. The mob does not like the word “nuclear” because of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Chernobyl, and Fukushima.

Better to breathe mercury vapor from coal plants, and eat mercury laden fish, because it gnaws at the brain, source of all our troubles.

***

TO SINK NOT, THINK SOME:

Another question, related to the meaning of reason, is whether animals are machines programmed by genes. This selfish gene theory was suggested by Hamilton. It is erroneous, or, let’s say, deeply misleading.

Living organisms are programmed by genes, true. But even much more so by the environment. And the more sophisticated organisms are, the more programmed by the environment they are. This is made obvious by the fact that sophisticated species have often fewer genes than grossly inferior, mindless species. Genes are just subtle keys which allow to unlock a development which, in turn, gets programmed interactively by the environment. This, I claim, will be true even at the level of the ten million insect species (and indeed hints that wasps have emotions have come to the experimental fore recently; emotions partly come from the environment).

The environment is not digital, as genes are. Instead, like Quantum physics, the environment is continuously differentiable, and completely adaptive. No wonder: the environment itself is an outgrow of Quantum physics. To describe either, our full mathematical and logical panoply, from C* algebras, to quantum logic, while larger than any human can muster, is not enough.

There is no physics but the Quantum, and Muhammad is not its prophet. By this I mean that truth is not determined by social agreement, whatever Rawls, Lynch, Herder, and billions of Judeo-Christo-Islamists think.

Reason is a capability that evolved to allow organisms to make models of the environment. It is intimately related to minds which can create baby universes. Those models answer questions not just about what is, but also about what could-be, IF. Thus the organism can judge which universes are available, and which one, among them all, it prefers, and select for it.

Notice that the multiverse thus exists. But it’s all in our heads. And we are the ones determining which, among these possibilities, is going to be the universe, looking forward.

If we tried to do this with fully determined classical minds, it would be impossible. But we do it with Quantum minds, which escape local determinism, through non locality. That’s how reason gets entangled with freedom.

***

Patrice Ayme

OMNIPRESENCE

HOW THE 2-SLIT EXPERIMENT TEACHES US TO THINK.

Abstract: Quantum Physics is teleological. As simple as that. You read it here first. That this has not been pointed out so simply before, illustrates another theme of the essay below, namely that the wisdom of the Quantum has not reached the masses yet.

This has an amusing consequence: people simply do not know how to reason correctly. The models of logical thinking they have been taught are inspired by the naïve classical physics, the automata, the Turing Machine. Well, sorry folks, the world is not like that. That is what Quantum Physics shows. The world is not flat, the world is not round, the world is not curved, the world is Quantum. This has consequences even in the way one should think about politics, sociology, economics…

Some will scoff, and sneer that all the logic they need is found in Hollywood. Not so. We have global problems, and they have to be thought of globally. Quantum Physics shows us the way of correct thinking, and it is global: omniscience, and omnipresence, that’s what the Quantum is all about.

If you want to learn about energy, you better learn about waves. And this is not just a lousy joke about nuclear energy and tsunami waves.  Life is all about energy, all about waves, and neither can be put in a box, or then just so. (An allusion to the Casimir effect, a manifestation of vaccum energy; all these carry in metaphors and analogies to the everyday world!)

A concluding perspective on how babies learn, how we learn fundamental things, illustrates how our minds themselves are entangled with the Quantum.

***

***

WRONG YESTERDAY DOES NOT MEAN WRONG TOMORROW:

A lot of the received wisdom in philosophy is plain wrong. This has nefarious effects all over. Ironically a lot of what is wrong has to do with notions which used to be taken for granted in the Middle Ages, because of the super properties of the mythical God, and the son he tortured. They came short.

OK, let me be explicit: take teleology, and teleonomy. Tele means “far off” in Greek. Teleology would be logic at a distance, teleonomy, allotment, or management, at a distance. Philosophers cringe when confronted to those concepts, because Aristotle was notoriously wrong believing in their existence.

Here is Aristotle in —Physics, Book II, ch.8, 199b: “It is absurd to suppose that purpose is not present because we do not observe an agent deliberating… The best illustration is a doctor doctoring himself: nature is like that. It is plain that nature is a cause, a cause that operates for a purpose.”

More down to earth, philosophers in the last few centuries, made the simpler observation that it is not because we do not observe that an agent is present, that there is one which is present. Call that scarcity of reasoning. It proved most fruitful.

The Middle Ages believed a lot in mysterious influences, some hidden, some at a distance. The Devil, the Good Lord and various saints and archangels were the prime agents. That distracted from observing the most elementary facts, and reasoning out of them. Why to try to understand the “natural” world, when there is no such thing, because Allah, Devil and Djins control everything? (Another of my low blows at Islam!)

When the God craze subsided, the most elementary facts were finally observed. Aristotle’s physics was promptly found to be wrong, when not outright delirious. So philosophers and their pets decided that anything which smacked of the old superstitions, for example influences at a distance, were the mark of the primitive mind, and that they were counter-productive. But it is not because we do not observe an effect sometimes, that it is not present, most of the time.  

***

LOCALIZE ME NOT; AT A DISTANCE IS SPOOKY, BUT REAL:

How did the erroneous wisdom evolve? An example is the derivation of local logic, and more generally, local everything.

To understand the physical world, physicists made a number of hypotheses, to simplify the analysis of what they were considering. In particular, physicists assumed that the world was local. That worked very well. But, once again, it’s not because something works sometimes, that it works always.

As it turns out, in the deepest sense, locality never works, as I will show. If, each time a photon goes somewhere, or any particle goes somewhere, or any fundamental process happens, locality is violated, then locality is violated always, and everywhere. And this is what happens.

What does “local” mean? To find out what is going to happen at a point x, one analyzes what is happening in a neighborhood, around x. This is the crucial assumption of field theory (gravitation, electromagnetism, gauge fields). This locality assumption, made in physics for centuries, has informally filtered throughout modern decision making.

However, the world works this way only in the first, grossest approximation. Intrinsic to Quantum Mechanics is what Einstein called: “SPOOKY ACTION AT A DISTANCE“. Einstein and a number of collaborators, including the philosopher Karl Popper, evolved reasonings exhibiting situations in which measurements on one particle would imply an effect on a particle at a distance (this is called the EPR effect). The effect has been verified experimentally since, and the Wolf Prize in physics was given to Alain Aspect for so doing (2010).

Einstein and Popper were trying to prove Quantum Mechanics wrong, or incomplete. They failed. In particular Einstein naively thought that the “spooky action at a distance” could not be, thus all along the other particle had determined properties. And thus violated the uncertainty relationships, which a whole slew of physicists, such as Lande’, another Nobel Prize winner, hated. Indeed Non Locality and Uncertainty Relationships are related (this has just become again a hot subject of research).

***

WAVES, PARTICLES, & DE BROGLIE SYNTHESIS:

OK, let’s backtrack. I will resist going back all the way to the Greco-Romans, because they had nothing intelligent to say on the subject. However, in the Seventeenth Century, Huyghens, an originally Dutch physicist financed by Louis XIV of France (!), presented a wave theory of light. Later, Newton came up with a particle theory. However, in 1800 CE, Young a polymath medical doctor, came up with the TWO SLIT experiment, which seemed impossible to explain with Newton’s particles. Poisson came up with the Poisson’s dot, a bright spot in the shadow of a sphere, where the waves meet and constructively build up. And it was verified. Later Maxwell’s electromagnetic waves were found, by Maxwell, to be moving at the speed of light, and Maxwell proposed to identify them with light.

Then came Hertz, with the photoelectric effect, which he discovered in his lab. Hertz, like Riemann before him, promptly died, and it was left to Einstein to “heuristically” propose that the photoelectric effect showed that light was made of packets of energy. Planck, 5 years earlier, had “explained” away two contradictions of theoretical physics, by assuming that light was emitted in packets of energy hw, where h was a mysterious constant, and w the frequency of the light. The difference was subtle; Einstein had got one step further.

Then Bohr used Planck’s idea that energy differences E corresponded to radiation (= light) of frequency w, according to hw. He also proposed that the orbital period of the electron would be inversely related to the frequency of the radiation emitted at an orbit of period T, as it would be in classical mechanics. It worked. Bohr’s theory predicted that only some electronic orbits were possible, where the angular momentum was a multiple of h…

Next came de Broglie, a medievalist, and a prince, who decided to study physics theoretically, just as his brother was studying it experimentally. De Broglie proposed that any particle was associated to a wave. The waves could only interfere constructively in particular orbits, thus de Broglie’s axiom implied immediately Bohr’s finding of particular orbits. De broglie waves, if taken at face value, also implied the uncertainty relationships (a wave cannot be located within less than half a wavelength at most). Abstraction is all about finding the correct axioms.

***

TWO SLIT EXPERIMENT DEMONSTRATES NON LOCALITY:

Let’s go back to the 2-slit experiment. According to De Broglie, the 2-slit experiment should have worked with electrons, and it did. Just to make the situation as simple as possible, let’s consider photons. The 2-slit experiment shows that the photons tend to show up in places, where their waves constructively interfere, and avoid those where they destructively interfere.

This happens even when only single photons pass through the slits. That means that somehow the single photon is aware of both slits. So the photon is not a point: if it’s a packet a la Einstein, that packet somehow can compute the position of both slits, and move accordingly. It has an extended nature. THE PHOTON IS NON LOCAL.

This simple observation is rarely made, straight out of the 2-slit experiment. Why? Because physics students are taught to learn by rote the Born interpretation of De Broglie’s waves. Instead of real matter waves, Born interpretation views them only as probability waves. De Broglie disagreed very strongly with that.

De Broglie’s was not an opinion to neglect: De Broglie thesis, widely advertized as early as 1923, contained much of Quantum theory, including the Schrodinger equation. His prestigious thesis jury in Paris, with some Physics Nobel on it, did not know what to make of it, because it was so bold and out of this world. Finally they sent the thesis to Einstein, who was enthusiastic (and did not try to steal the ideas). It was published in 1924. De Broglie’s work is often ignored because of a triple bias: his ideas were too deep, he doubted Quantum theory the way it developed later, and he was not of the Anglo-Germanic persuasion that the Americans think is only worthy of appreciation (at least in physics). 

Born’s equation of matter waves with probability waves is rigorous, but not philosophically compelling: one could do the same on a beach: instead of looking at crashing waves as made of matter, one could consider them to be probability waves. Actually one could extend that skeptical philosophy to all phenomena, and view everything, and everybody as a probability wave. Obama would be a statistical probability wave surfing in plutocratic space… (Laughter, please! OK, I did not think so either…)

***

THE PHOTON IS NON LOCAL:

We can just sit here, and meditate: how can that be? Well, nobody knows. In such a sentence, on the foundations of the world, every single term is unknown: what does “photon” means? What does “local” mean? What does “is” mean? Nobody knows. In the depths, everything becomes obscure…

However in a strange logical loop, Quantum Physics may indicate how to solve the riddle, by an whole integrated reasoning. I will try to explain that later. The author has his own embryonic theory, the Totally Objective Wave, which is the closest to De Broglie’s extremely deep, and possibly correct ideas (here, again, nobody knows, it does not matter how many Nobel Prizes they got).

But this is the not the object of this essay, which is to consider the philosophical consequences of what is known for sure: QUANTUM PROCESSES ARE NON LOCAL. All and any Quantum Process is out of the integrated whole: the entire accessible geometry is globally determined by the waves, and out of that pop the possible outcomes. (This is described in the conventional approach, using all prepared mathematics, as: Geometry + Waves > Hilbert Space >  Eingenstates > possible outcomes.)

That determination is done ex-temporally (time plays no role). OK, let’s give the simplest example. When the 2-slit is set-up, the geometry is determined: we know where what all the possible interference patterns are. The only missing ingredient is the wave frequency of the photon. Once that is plugged in, we know the probability pattern of future photon presence.   

Thus Quantum Processes analyze all the available geometry at a glance. Out of that pops the solution. It is as if QUANTUM PHYSICS IS TELEONOMIC (management of the geometry at a distance). This allows incredible efficiency. Unsurprisingly, biology uses Quantum computation, to be as efficient as possible. This has been demonstrated for photosynthesis and vision. Soon it will be all over our explanations for life. The soul itself will come into this explanatory scheme.

***

I THINK, THEREFORE I QUANT:

Classical mechanical metaphors can only go that far, in the non classical world that we have. The Quantum provides with a wealth of analogies and metaphors, when not outright reasonings, which could be used all over the mental landscape.

Contrarily to legend, life is closer to the Quantum than it is closer to the mechanical. It is more dependent upon it. One could even argue that the definition of life is harnessing the Quantum to circumvent the classical. If this is true, it would mean that Quantum computers will be alive, and will achieve a form of consciousness.

The well known slogan:”Think global, act local!” is a good summary of a lot of what the Quantum does. We need to start thinking globally, because that is the only way to think.

***

MY BABY TOLD ME THE TRUTH:

I have a twenty month baby, multilingual and all that. The baby understands amazingly complicated sentences, and figures out words she never met before. (Then she repeats them 50 times for good measure.) How does she do it? I was mystified by her ability for quite a while. My mom declared it was all about genetics, but that did not help my urge to understand the amazing nature of the new soul.

Well, refined observations showed the following. The baby understands words, sentences and ideas from the context always. She figures out the globality of what is going on, and then determines probable meanings out of it. [Then she quickly figures out little experiments to check if she guessed right, such as pointing towards an object, and repeating the word for it (but her more sophisticated experiments are immensely more complicated, so complicated that they may escape even a keen observer).]

Notice that the baby’s mind works identically to much of Quantum Physics. She apprehends the globality, and uses it to find positively interfering solutions. Is it possible that the baby figured out Quantum Physics, and then thought that was a great way to get things done? Of course not. She does not need to figure that out.

It is very simple: she has a Quantum mind.  If you want to see Quantum Physics at work, you can close your eyelashes slightly, in sunshine, and observe interference patterns. Or you can go the closest baby, and observe her, observing the world. She is a Quantum mind.  That’s how she knows.

***

 Patrice Ayme   

***

Note: One commenter sneered once that I should just read  the book called the “Hidden Reality”, instead of being unintelligible. That well written, often very interesting and ridiculously biased book is about the silly idea that there are parallel universes (a contradiction in adjecto). The preceding remarks were about physics more fundamental than the multiverse babble. I have to point that out, because it is sure to be a question in some people’s mind.

The multiverse challenged believe that when a photon hit a screen a (countable) infinity of universes is created. That’s simply moronic. Imagine the accused at a tribunal been asked why he killed his victim, and responding that it is not really a problem, because murder did not happen in a parallel universe. He would be sent to a mental asylum.

But there is worse: the preceding considerations about non-locality, which is the real mystery of Quantum Physics, is left untouched by the multiverse derangement. In other words, multiverse types “explain” with the craziest logic what needs no urgent explanation, while ignoring the greatest riddle, which is in plain sight.

***

CARBONIZE THIS.

 

SEMANTICS FRAMES MINDS, FOR BETTER, OR WORSE.

***

Abstract: For George Washington: "Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master." Although I do agree, in first approximation, these concepts are more entangled than Washington suspected. And force starts with a single word.

I will worryingly argue that force is what humanism ought to be mostly about. Civilization itself is violence, but there are reasons for this violence. Even the apostle of love, Jesus, admitted this snidely. And human force is driven by the logos (Jesus, I hope I am not turning Christian!). But ideas are not just contained in logical propositions. The very logical elements the discourse is made of, matter. A single word or two, can carry so much semantics, that extreme violence ensues, right, or wrong.

Symbols, misleading or not, even reduced to one word, can induce massive force by impelling deviance from reason. Debates on race or around the meek euphemism "climate change", have been perverted by errant semantics.

The president of the USA ought not to label himself "black", as he is arguably much more white than black, while his color is brown. Such an offense to the color spectrum is an homage to racism. OK, some may want to make a few points, by claiming to be "black" when they are not, but points are often what vengeance, thus stupid violence is about (that is what the Lex Talonis is: keeping scores).

Similarly, to claim that one is against "climate change" is pusillanimous bimbo babble: it’s not the main problem.

Reciprocally, appropriate eloquence can frame a debate correctly. And eloquence starts with the very concepts, even reduced to a single word, that it animates.

An example is the expression "climate change", a potential partial description of what is going on. It should be given up, for a more responsible description: CARBONIZATION ought to replace it. Indeed, CARBONIZING the earth, an intrinsic evil, is what we are doing, which may, or may not, result primarily in man-made "climate change". Just arguing about the climate, and whether it is changing or not, is an homage to distraction.

Modern physics, with it accurate philosophy, is centered around the idea of using the correct words, and all of them. Time to get inspired by this.

The problem is not violence. As (the mythical) Christ observed, defending love with the sword is no sin. But defense starts with a discourse. As the Evangels (John 1;1) says, liberally stealing from Greek philosophy: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” And that word better be good and appropriate.

***

A NEW ERA OF IRRESPONSIBILITY; TOO BIG TO JAIL:

“I was right 70 percent of the time, but I was wrong 30 percent of the time,” said Alan Greenspan as he testified on Capitol Hill. Imagine the captain of the titanic, the pilot of the jumbo jet, or the commander of a nuclear strategic submarine telling that much.

Surveying America’s moral landscape in his Inaugural Address, Barack Obama called for “a new era of responsibility”. Well, responsibility starts with the careful choice of words, even with the careful choice of every single word. To call black what is white is wrong, and so is calling black, what is black and white.

"Responsibility" requires first to know what one would respond to. It starts with the choice of words. Because words represent the concepts logic manipulates.

In today’s USA nobody is responsible, no predatory fish who is big enough is ever caught.  Be it official judicial precedent to make torture as official practice in the USA, or colossal theft endangering the world economy, nobody is to be prosecuted, because it’s a new era of (ir)-responsibility. Some will say that, so it is, in a kleptocratic plutocracy.

***

WHEN WHITE TURNS BLACK:

The USA is making its census, as it does every ten years or so. Besides finding how many Americans there are, where they live (thus determining the political circumscriptions), it finds which "races" Americans are. "Race" is important in the USA. The census is, literally, racist, and Americans feel that is OK. One of the races proposed is "white". Another is "Black, African-American, Negro". In a bold leap forward, because soon most Americans will be of mixed origins, people are allowed to write down more than one "race", thus making "race" into the irrelevance it ought to be.

Sadly, this point seems to have officially eluded Barack Obama. He wrote: "…I ceased to advertise my mother’s race at the age of twelve or thirteen, when I began to suspect that by doing so I was ingratiating myself to whites…"

Never mind that his white grandparents showed up at every school event at the time, as people who knew him very well testified. Moreover, since most people in Hawai’i are of mixed race, nobody cared to start with. (I spent my childhood in black Africa, where, just as in Hawai’i, nobody cared about what "race" one was, and where attention to race was called racism.)

But now everything is different for Obama, because the force is with getting votes wherever they are, in the racist continental USA. So he has to demonstrate he identifies himself to a race, to get the racist vote. So, OK, no more "mother’s race advertizing". Ingratiating to people who are just white, is pretty useless anyway.

***

WHY "RACE" OUGHT TO BE IGNORED:

In France,  racist or religious demographics have been unlawful since the nineteenth century, and racist cultures are viewed with contempt. Indeed, one cannot even ask officially people about their religious obsessions, either. France does not even know how many of her citizens are "Muslims". Anyway, how to define "Muslim"? Most French are atheists, and genetic studies have shown that in South-West France, many French partially descend from Muslim invaders.

Why did France become so adverse to racism and religionism? Because of the atrocities committed against Cathars, Jews, Protestants, Atheists, and Catholics, on religious grounds, from the 1200s to the 1700s. One full blown crusade happened on French soil (!). Centuries of massacre motivated by paying homage to the exclusion principle. Only at the end of the 16C, seven religious wars occurred in quick succession. A century later, the protestants were kicked out, helping to foster a global European war.

So, when the Nazis occupied France, they could not tell who and where, the Jews were. Out of roughly 400,000 Jews in France, 75,000 were deported and killed by the Nazis, and the majority of the dead were not French Jews, but recent Jewish refugees from Nazism. Many were from Germany: the USA had refused to let them in. Small place, the USA, sometimes.

In the Netherlands, in contrast with France, people had to declare their "religion" on official government forms. Such was Dutch law, prior to the war. The Nazis liked that, a fellow country where "race" mattered. The Nazis were all about race. With a bit of help from IBM, most Dutch Jews were found out. In 1941, there were 154,000 Jews in the Netherlands. All of them, but a few thousands, were killed subsequently, including Ann Frank.

***

BLACK IS BLACK, BROWN IS BROWN, AND OBSESSION WITH ORIGINS, RACISM:

In 2010, president Barack Obama declared his "race" to be "Black, African-American, Negro". However, Obama was brought up by his 100% "white" mom and his 100% "white" grandparents in non-"African-American" society in Hawai’i and for four crucial years of childhood (age 6 to 10) in Indonesia.

OK, here is Obama’s black family:

[Barack Obama and half-sister Maya Soetoro, with their mother Ann Dunham and grandfather Stanley Dunham, on Punahou’s campus, Hawaii (early 1970s). His white grand-mother, who brought him up in Hawai'i, as he refused to go back to Indonesia with his mom, is missing in this picture, she is probably taking the photograph.]

After you believe that this is a black family, you are ready to believe Wall Street has nothing to do with the decay of the USA. Good for you, because you have no choice in the matter.

***

I DENY, THEREFORE I AM:

Of his early childhood, Obama recalled, "That my father looked nothing like the people around me—that he was black as pitch, my mother white as milk—barely registered in my mind."

He described his struggles as a young adult to reconcile social perceptions of his multiracial heritage. That could have been only after he left Hawai’i because, at the time, most of his school and friends there were multiracial. Reflecting later on his formative years in Honolulu, Obama wrote: "The opportunity that Hawaii offered—to experience a variety of cultures in a climate of mutual respect—became an integral part of my world view, and a basis for the values that I hold most dear."

Somewhat confusedly, Obama confessed about using alcohol, marijuana and cocaine during his teenage years to "push questions of who I was out of my mind". Obama identified his high-school drug use as his "greatest moral failure." Little problem here: as I said, at that elite private school, Punahou, most of his friends were multiracial, in a Pacific Islander-White cocktail (and some looked pretty much like Obama himself). And, as Obama himself pointed out, little racism was around.

One may wonder if opting to deny one’s "white as milk" origin, is more of a "moral failure". All the more since Obama knew his absentee father, a Kenyan polygamist, only for a short time, as a baby, and later, for one month. Now, of course, the characterization of Obama as an "African-American" came up during the electoral campaign, and Michelle Obama stepped loudly forward to call non sense assertions to the contrary (she is a genuine African-American). Thus, the Obamas made sure that all "African-Americans" would vote for him. But it is pretty obvious that Obama was elected precisely because his mind-set is not that of an African-American (his white, and world backgrounds made the difference).

To call someone a "negro" in the USA is viewed as an insult. To celebrate Obama as the "Negro In Chief" would be viewed, by most Americans, as racist. But to consider whether they are "negroes" or not "negroes" in the census is not. Go figure.

It is also disheartening to see Obama follow the infamous "one drop rule". In the racist USA, even if you were blonde with blue eyes, you were counted as "black", as long as you had one drop of African "black" "blood".

In America, "black" is that strong a magical curse; a drop of it, and blackness pervades you. That way the American racists were way worse than the Nazis, who counted as fully Aryan anyone who had less of one grandparent of heinous "blood". The Nazis also had the notion of intermediate type ("Mischling"), and several types of Mischlings at that (depending how many Jewish grandparents, and if one was declaring Judaism as one’s religion, etc.) Thousands of Mischlings served in the Wehrmacht, and notoriously the Marshall invading and torturing Norway was a full Jew (he and his family were aryanized by an attentionate Adolf).

But, in the USA, for the racists, one drop of heinous (black African) blood does it. So, let the "conservatives" be reassured: Obama dreamed of his father, found him black as pitch, and therefore observed the "one drop rule". Obama is a good, traditional American. His mother was white, therefore, he is "black". The stain shall not be rubbed.

My take on it: the famous writers Cesaire and Senghor, in France, made the point, long ago, that there was no reason to be ashamed of the niger (= black in Latin), negre, negro qualificatives. They, correctly, celebrated "art négre", and négritude philosophy. This being said, to call, in France, or Africa, somebody who is brown, "black", is viewed as racism, precisely because it implies the "one drop rule", the most racist violent violation which ever was.

It is violating semantics to call "black" who is brown. It is as if one admitted that "black" origin changes everything. One drop of black, and all is carbonized. That later idea was the essential mental facilitator of American slavery. The pope, in the Middle Ages, decided that it was OK to enslave black Africans, as if they were not fully human. In other words: "monkey = black = slave". Because the whites wanted a lot of slaves, they then introduced a further equation: "non white of plausible partial black African origin= black = non human".

To call "black" who is brown, or beige, or vaguely tinted non white, is a reverence to the concept of the quality-that-changes-everything.

I do not want to pick on Obama, who has made deliberate efforts, precisely, to avoid the traps of misleading semantics. And most elder Americans embrace the "one drop rule", a sacred feature of what passes for culture in the USA. But, still, it is a flaw, an homage transmogrifying exclusion into a religion.
***

OBSESSIVE SEMANTICS TO IMPLEMENT ULTIMATE VIOLENCE:

The reverence to details that-changes-everything is the neurological root of tribalism, racism, exclusion. To call "black" who is "brown" is viewed in Africa as a deliberate insult. (Instead, Africans qualify each other with their ethnic origins, which are numerous, with different languages, even within the existing nations bequeathed by European imperialism. Overall, the word "African" is preferred, since it eliminates the obsession with skin color and, thus, race.)

To view a partial origin from somewhere as the quality-that-changes-everything is the root of racism, because it makes violence to reality. It makes a detail into a world. Once one has made violence to reality, one is ready to make violence on anybody.

And violence on reality, racism is: races can, in general, not be defined, even using modern genetics, because alleles of genes are all over the place. For example I have a friend who is, in appearance, completely Scandinavian: blonde hair, striking blue eyes, white skin, and what the Nazis would have seen as classical Aryan features. This is not just her appearance, but the reality of who she is: much more Aryan, superior white race looking than, say, Hitler’s wife, Eva Braun. Although this ideal Aryan views herself 100% "Jew", and born that way, being an American, the Nazis would have certainly sent her to the oven (except if Hitler had made her a "honorary Aryan", as he did, with thousands of Jews).

Why so much absurdity? Because mental violence is irresistible to humans. Among other advantages, it allows them to go to the bitter end of their errors, and, thus, to find the truth… by exclusion.

***

VIOLENCE IS WHAT HUMANS DO:

Violence is about force, powerfully applied. Some situations require swift, powerful force, and nothing else could remotely address the situation. So force has to be brought to bear.

When a fanatic decides to explode in a crowded place, that is violence, and only a swifter violence will prevent a great mayhem.

Smaller violence to kill much larger violence is violence well applied.

"Non Violence" is similar to "non-force". Philosophically, it is warm mud. Indeed, man is all about the modification of the environment, which means, the usage of manly force, energy. Thus "Non Violence" means actually "Non Human".

Some will scoff at this notion, but we have a zillion examples of this. Many tremendous warriors brought magnificent peace, whereas limp, non violent types brought only war. Examples are Henri IV of France, a warrior who put an end to the religious wars, whereas the hands off, holier than thou attitude of the USA relative to Hitler, condemning France for threatening to do the dirty work, brought only a world war, and a holocaust. As the Romans used to say: "Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum!" ("If (thou) want peace, prepare war!")

***

VIOLENCE GOOD, HYPOCRISY BAD, OR HOW MANDELA WAS BETTER THAN GANDHI:

An example of violence working for the good, contrasting with showy goodness propelling crime: Gandhi and Mandela. Both were lawyers, experts in British law. Both exerted their profession in South Africa. Both are revered. But they went opposite ways. Gandhi was an hypocrite, Mandela a honest thinker. One embraced goodness with poisoned lips, the other embraced violence, because it was the lesser evil.

Gandhi opted for "Non Violence", and is famous for it. Conclusion: not only was he violently assassinated by an Hindu fanatic, but his allegedly "non violent", certainly self satisfied, low quality thinking led to about 10 million people killed, and perhaps 100 million, soon. Or more.

Indeed, Gandhi’s religious, Hindu nationalism, in the guise of resisting the Brits, enraged and worried the Muslims living in India. Opportunistic Muslim leaders were then happy to have an excuse to get their own state to reign over, in turn. Gandhi was not the dragon itself, maybe, but he certainly woke it up, played with its tail, provoked it, and lit the fire. India would have been better off imitating Canada: it would not be divided as it is right now, perfused with conflicts, the thermonuclear match at the ready, to visit gamma rays upon itself.

Moreover, Gandhi’s entire show was pretty useless: Britain administrated India with a tiny number of officers (sometimes less than 2,000). Britain was on its way out, India was basically already independent.

Mandela thought bigger thoughts. And he faced a real, determined enemy. After he saw that the crushing power of racist white violence could not be finessed with, Mandela, this partisan of progress and human rights, deliberately decided that only violence in kind would allow the pride of non whites to wake up, and shock them into action, while it would make the world notice apartheid’s violence, and the reaction would prove too costly to the racists.

After a few bombs exploded, Mandela went to jail, switching to mental power, from inside, turning his own jailers around. Hence he succeeded to avoid a blood bath in South Africa, and to foster national and racial reconciliation. By using great mental energy, and physical violence, as needed. A much more difficult task that going around nearly naked, spinning one’s wheel, as Gandhi used to (the wheel being an Hindu-Buddhist symbol so, under the guise of making one’s own clothes, anti-Muslim emotions were promoted, not the best thing after 1,000 years of Hindu-Muslim civil war.)

This being said, violence is what we humans do. To know this, it’s enough to watch the Space Shuttle, or the Arianne rocket take off. We just have to do it well. But often, as Gandhi unwittingly proved (and understood too late!), the devil is in the details.

There is nothing more human than violence mixed with technology: the Nazi philosopher Heidegger had not understood anything in that matter (as in many other matters).

The ancestors of man arose from eating meat, much more meat than the meat obsessed chimpanzees, thanks to the use of weapons. Meat gives superior energy, hence force. Force is how Washington kicked imperialism out.

Weapon usage, feeble in chimps and baboons, was allowed by locomotion on two legs in humans, as it freed the arms to swing down from heavens, crashing various projectiles on a dejected fauna (baboons throw stones from below, swinging up weakly, humans throw stones from above, swinging them mightily; I have known quite a few baboons in Africa who could have testified to this).

***

MORE HONESTY, PLEASE:

But of course, stealth is half the victory as Sun Tzu pointed out. So it is often best for aggressors to do like Gandhi, or (the mythical) Jesus, and claim goodness, when they are hell bent at encouraging implicit aggression

Although the mythical Jesus was more honest about his aggressiveness than the Hindu fanatic Gandhi, since Jesus admitted that: "I come not to bring peace, but to bring a sword" (Matthew 10:34); OK, philosophers are dangerous, at least to others’ minds, and the mythical Jesus was a philosopher of love, so, he, indeed, brought a "sword".

***

THE EUPHEMISM "CLIMATE CHANGE" IS BAD CLIMATE FOR CHANGE:

The euphemism "Climate Change" is another deviation from reality opening up the possibilities for lots of implicit aggression. It reminds us of Don Quichote charging windmills: who wants to fight the climate, and its changes? Does not the climate have a right to change itself? After climate has changed, what is it going to wear? Fighting the climate: does not that sound ridiculous? And even if it implicitly means a warming of the climate, this does not have to be negative: tropical beaches in Alaska, why not? Agriculture and forests in Antarctica; why not? Millions of square kilometers in gigantic Siberia and central Asia, free of permafrost, at last, why not?

Indeed the way the planet is, most of the warming would be at the poles. "Global Warming" means the poles would melt. Temperate zones would become tropical, some would get in the desert belt, true, but most of the changes would happen in the refrigerator, and the freezer of the planet, which would get busted.

So it was in the heydays of dinosaurs: the poles were very warm. Dinosaurs and saurians thrived there. Ever since the climate has cooled down. And the biosphere had 100 million years to get used to the cooling, although there were hick-ups along the way, like the extinction of dinosaurs, and their flying and swimming cousins.

Unsurprisingly, the mammals, who descended from mammalian reptiles who had warm blood to live in cold areas, 200 million years ago, and the birds, flying dinosaurs with high metabolism and a very warm temperature, replaced dinosaurs, and their cousins, who were not adapted to the cold (dinosaurs liked Alaska, Greenland and Antarctica, but only when those were covered with forests now found closer to the equator, with species such as Patagonian beech).

***

HOW TO WIN A DEBATE BY FRAMING IT WRONG:

So it is not the climate which woke up, some day, and decided to change. And, even then, it does not have to be a bad thing. By emotionally framing the debate thus, those who want their carbon profit friends to keep on messing the planet, win it automatically; climate is doing its thing, and its thing is a nice warming.

Framing the debate thus is a fallacy. Such fallacies are historically important: human beings are reasonable, and, if you frame their reason craftily, an oligarchy will put them in any mental corral it likes.

For example, the Nazis claimed that they improved the economy of Germany. Everybody swallowed that lie, and it is repeated to this day. But, in truth, they ran a super gigantic deficit, while stealing their self declared enemies bare, and redistributing the stolen wealth to their followers, making them rich. But, by asking the question to their followers and their admirers: "Are we better off under Nazism?", they framed the debate around erroneous emotions, such as glee for their "success". (This strategy inaugurated by the Nazis, of focusing just on partial apparent economic success was used again by American neo-conservatives, as they were sinking the USA in the last 40 years. As Wall Street GDP went up, they misrepresented it as a success for the USA.)

***

CARBONIZATION IS A CRIME:

Thus the expression "Climate Change" is inaccurate, and misleading. It is even fallacious; most of the real change is a massive extinction of the biosphere, and a poisonous acidification of the ocean (indeed half of the CO2 created by the carbon industry goes into the sea). Thus it’s not so much the climate that is changing than the BIOSPHERE THAT IS POISONED, AND EXTINGUISHED, BY MAN.

So I propose to label the process of injecting billions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere by evoking it, as it is. I propose "CARBONIZATION". I am against the CARBONIZATION OF THE BIOSPHERE. "Climate Change" is an amusement. "Carbonization" is, obviously an inconvenient crime.

The concept of "Carbonization" includes the warming of the lower layers of the atmosphere, of the oceans, and the soil, plus the acidification (through carbonic acid), plus mass extinction, and depicts what is going on, namely the injection in the biosphere of half a billion years of buried carbon.

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Conclusion; ONE WORD IS UTTERED, AND EVERYTHING IS CHANGED:

After Louis de Broglie launched the full blown Quantum Wave Mechanics in 1924, there was a tremendous philosophical debate about the importance of words in physics. Bohr argued forcefully that classical words led to the erroneous Classical Mechanics irresistibly. Nearly a century later, it is clear that Bohr was right. For example, there is nothing such as the "trajectory" of a particle involved in a fundamental quantum process. To utter the word "trajectory" is already to assume what is not. One word is uttered, and everything is wrong.

Interestingly, as Heisenberg told a recalcitrant Einstein, the later, adopting Poincare’s pragmatic approach to space, had changed the semantics of space and time, and thus changed Classical Mechanics already a lot. Some words (such as simultaneity), and the physics associated to them, had been eliminated, others were born (such as spacetime, or mass-energy).

Responsibility starts with responsible words. As Frank Rich points out in "No One Is To Blame For Anything", "Obama has been less forceful in stewarding a new era of responsibility when it comes to adjudicating unresolved misdeeds in the previous White House. “Turn the page” is his style, even if at times to a fault. Many of the Bush national security transgressions, including the manipulation of the case for war, are rapidly receding into history and America’s great memory hole.

The president will not have the luxury of mass amnesia when it comes to the recent economic past… Most of its victims are genuinely innocent bystanders who lost their jobs and savings while financial elites cashed in on the crash… the fear that the Obama administration is protecting its friends persists. On the same morning that Rubin testified last week, Eamon Javers of Politico wrote about his continued influence on his many acolytes in the White House. That includes Geithner, whom Rubin talked with repeatedly in the weeks before the president released his financial regulatory reform proposal last June.

Americans still waiting on Main Street for the recovery that lifted Wall Street once invested their hopes in Obama. Getting the new era of responsibility only 70 percent right won’t do."

Responsibility starts with the correct words because each word, in each mind, neurologically connects to a number of other words and concepts. Connecting irrelevances together is just as irrelevant as the irrelevances it is made with. Pedaling besides the bike does not an efficient mind make. Black and white is not just black, climate change is not just the problem, and so on.

Quantum Mechanics has shown that, in any fundamental process, nature takes into account the whole context, and never just a fraction of it. Taking into account only a fraction of the context of a fundamental quantum process changes its Hilbert space, hence the eigenvalues and eigenvectors, hence everything. It’s irresponsible.

It is high time to bring daily human logic up to the level of rigor our study of nature has revealed. Responsibility starts with responding to nature as we know it. Quantum Mechanics has shown that contextuality is everything, and it starts with the exact words.

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PA

Tyranosopher

http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

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Annex on acidification, and global carbonization: NOAA states in their May 2008 "State of the science fact sheet for ocean acidification" that:

"The oceans have absorbed about 50% of the carbon dioxide (CO2) released from the burning of fossil fuels, resulting in chemical reactions that lower ocean pH. This has caused an increase in hydrogen ion (acidity) of about 30% since the start of the industrial age through a process known as “ocean acidification.” A growing number of studies have demonstrated adverse impacts on marine organisms, including: The rate at which reef-building corals produce their skeletons decreases. The ability of marine algae and free-swimming zooplankton to maintain protective shells is reduced. The survival of larval marine species, including commercial fish and shellfish, is reduced."

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) writes in their Climate Change 2007: Synthesis Report: "The uptake of anthropogenic carbon since 1750 has led to the ocean becoming more acidic with an average decrease in pH of 0.1 units. Increasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations lead to further acidification .. While the effects of observed ocean acidification on the marine biosphere are as yet undocumented, the progressive acidification of oceans is expected to have negative impacts on marine shell-forming organisms (e.g. corals) and their dependent species."

IPCC also includes in its last report that with a probability greater than 0.66: "the resilience of many ecosystems is likely to be exceeded in this century by an unprecedented combination of climate change, associated disturbances (e.g. flooding, drought, wildfire, insects, ocean acidification) and other global change drivers (e.g. land use change, pollution, fragmentation of natural systems, overexploitation of resources)."

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Greed Can’t Lead

 

Many parts of the economy of the USA are falling apart, or getting retarded. It is as if the economy was not an activity worth having anymore.

Even Lawrence Summers, President Obama’s chief economic adviser, an admirer and perpetuator of plutocracy, recognized that 75 percent of the public schools have structural deficiencies and 25 percent have problems with their ventilation systems. Dozens of thousands of bridges are falling apart, and the number of those decaying is growing faster than the number of those getting repaired. Even Russia is building high speed electric rail, and China claims to build 47 such lines, but the USA is not working on a single one. What is going on?

A small power elite has grabbed the debate, and imposed its conceptology, and its axis is maximizing financial profit, independently of any other considerations. Unfortunately for humankind, that financial world is derivative, not primary. It is a convention, not a realization. Thus make belief has replaced what really is. The real infrastructure is disintegrating, precisely because the derivative rules, and, as all mathematicians know, integration is the inverse operation from differentiation.

This is not a silly play on words and concepts: the mathematical analogy here goes all the way; letting financial derivatives rule is basically a gigantic mathematical mistake civilization has been making, in great part because those who decided, or let decide in their name, a bunch of lawyers without calculus background, such as Bill Clinton, were cognitively incapable of understanding the most basic mathematics in play.

To have made financial profit the guiding principle of civilization is, of course, deeply absurd: the fox was made guardian of the hens.

Finance was given extravagant powers in the last two centuries, powers that it did not have in the 4,000 years of civilization before that, and for very good reasons.

This abdication of power made finance the real power behind the throne, worldwide.

As Baron Nathan Rothschild (yes, from the Rothschild family) put it: "I care not what puppet is placed on the throne of England to rule the Empire, …The man that controls Britain’s money supply controls the British Empire. And I control the money supply."

Puppet. That is Rothschild’s word, not mine. It is also reality. A reality that explains the main diversion of most available capital towards the system set-up by Goldman Sachs and the like in the last 90 years, and, in particular, reinforced in the last 13 months.

Indeed, unbelievably for those not in the know, this is the exact same system that brought fascism to Italy, Germany, Spain after World War One, and made Britain, France, and the USA into close calls themselves.

The same system of thought, and actually some of the other same institutions were tender nannies for nascent Nazism (Nazism being just the most outrageous example, outrageous not just because it happened that way, and the horrendous toll, but because the instigating institutional system was capable to successfully cover its tracks. Of the people behind the Nazi scene, only Hjalmar Schacht, a "Lord Of Finance" was put on trial, and promptly acquitted in 1946. But Schacht, directly, and his ilk, more generally, made it so that Hitler got his job).

There are extremely extensive regulations in most economic domains, worldwide, but not so much in finance, although finance is the overall money creating and money allocating system.

Finance created Hitler, even the Soviets. Lenin used to joke that the "capitalists would even sell him the rope to hang them with"; at least one American plutocrat, Averell Harriman, was bestowed with the honor of being made a "Hero of the Soviet Union". Harriman got the top medal both from the Soviets, and the Nazis!

The bank Brown Brothers Harriman was a massive money laundering operation for the Nazis. JP Morgan organized and financed German cartels that propelled Hitler, etc. Unsurprisingly the same lords of finance are back to variations of their old tricks, as they allowed, if not incited, some governments to turn around all sorts of laws. Then, having violated the law, they trade on this, as the ultimate insiders! [Some of this occurred even in the last few weeks, so sure of impunity Goldman Sachs is. I say: write international warrants of arrest!]

So what is happening now, with the invention of financial derivatives, is that most of the world’s disposable capital is manipulated by financial sharks, so as to create fake revenues, to justify their bonuses and overall power wielding. There is therefore no more capital for the real economy (or, more exactly, increasingly insufficiently little).

Hence all financial products ought to be declared unlawful, until proven safe and effective. Financiers already are endowed with the regalian power of creating money (which government bestowed on them in the last 2 centuries, but which they did not have prior).

However, financiers know not enough to create a sustainable economy. Financiers are not engineers, just profiteers. And their search for profits has blinded them to their extravagant privilege, and even to how the universe works. Civilization is an exquisite mechanism, and so is an increasingly stressed biosphere. [This is not to be taken lightly: violating ecology and civilization simultaneously is how the immensely old Maya civilization self destructed, without any exterior input aside from a drought.]

None of this is new in principle. As James Madison, fourth president of the USA put it: "History records that the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit, and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments by controlling the money and its issuance."

This is not new, but we have just reached the breaking point, the point at which civilization and the biosphere are not sustainable anymore, from the activities of that obsolete particular financial system. It brought us Auschwitz, among other disasters. Left in power, it will bring up worse, soon.

There are other emotions than greed. Love, altruism, the passion for understanding, or for a job well done, can guide reason better than the obsession with having what one stole from others as they were looking somewhere else. It is time for reason to guide, and greed to be crushed. Otherwise there will be no world to call home, for anybody, whatsoever.

Patrice Ayme

http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

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Annex and background: 1) FINANCIERS HAVE BEEN TELLING US WHAT MAN IS, AND THEY ARE WRONG. They have just been telling us about who they truly are. It’s all about them, not us.

Subjacent to economic theory is neuroeconomics. The hypothesis that the financiers and their political servants made, that profits ought to dominate social organization, was, fundamentally, a neurological hypothesis.

But greed belongs to the basic instinct of the Will To Power, whereas studying neurology belongs to the specifically human endeavor of establishing systems of thought. In other words, the neurologist is a new species, with a new kind of motivation, whereas the financier is an all together different species, animated by the sort of motivation we have seen in the last half a billion years, since there are social animals, and they crowd together, and need a unique leader, to have the single mind that allows them to stick together. This need, E Pluribus Unum, is the fundamental reason for the Will To Power, Nietzsche talked so much about. Will To Power is also the mechanism behind tyranny, oligarchy, and the domination of the Lords Of Finance.

Man is the species that went beyond Will To Power as the fundamental organizational principle of society. Being overlorded by finance is subhuman.

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2) The "Nobel" Prize in Economics was given for some equation helping to price some financial call options. It surely will not be given for the simple mathematics alluded to above, which are much more drastic, but much more deserving, as they throw the entire existing financial system out of the window, as deserved for flaming material threatening to burn down the house of civilization.

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3) Shacht (economics PhD, 1899) met with the American JP Morgan as early as 1905. Yes, JP Morgan, founder of the eponymous bank, whose present leader is much admired and befriended by Barack Obama (so he says).

Shacht, in charge of finances in imperial Germany occupied Belgium, was summarily dismissed, when his superior, general von Lumm, discovered that Schacht had diverted funds through his present and future employer, the bank (Dresdner), the sort of incest that passes for routine in present Washington.

After WWI Schacht came to lead the Reichsbank, the German central bank, and got to campaign against Germany paying war reparations, and helped set-up the Young and Dawes plans with Wall Street (which made Germany into Wall Street toy and profit generating center).

By 1926, besides supporting Wall Street, JP Morgan and various American banks’ operations, Shacht, the most important Lord of Finance in Germany, entangled with American financiers, through and through, was supporting the Nazis. Soon Schacht organized petitions by top personalities and plutocrats to persuade president Hindenburg to nominate Hitler Chancellor. Schacht’s financial career blossomed further under Hitler, as he headed the Reichsbank and the economy ministry (busy stealing Jews and other victims). He was to rise again after he got cleared of any wrongdoing in 1946.

Not to say that Shacht was thoroughly evil in appearance. He was not. Like Eichmann, his evil was rather “banal” (to use the concept from Hannah Arendt). Like Eichmann, Schacht pretended to keep on befriending Jews under the Nazis, and have empathy for them.

For a plutocratic servant, Schacht was rather personally pristine. But he efficiently pushed many extremely criminal ideas in his lifetime, and thus he was an ideal instrument for the plutocrats. Such people are legions. Instead of attacking them one by one, day by day, emotion by emotion, and anti-idea by anti-idea, it is more productive to attack the system of thought that gave rise to them.

And, as it is, the criminal system of thought is the regalian fractional reserve banking system, which allows private, unrepresentative, unelected, unsupervised money men, the bankers, to create most of the money, and distribute it to whoever they want, to do whatever they please.

Indeed, contrarily to what most people believe, although the state makes physical bank notes and coins, it’s the big private bankers who create most of the money, and, aggravating factor, do it through debt. That system was created, because it is very profitable to those, the plutocrats, who selected the politician-servants who defend and further their interests. That it went on for about two centuries in some parts (Britain) does not mean it is sustainable. Rome switched to a system biased towards plutocracy in 300 BCE, but lost its republic about 255 years later.

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The question of how to have a currency, and how to make money to use in the USA, was a central question from 1791 (when up to an amazing 50 currencies were used inside the USA) until the “greenbacks” of the Secession War. Two attempts were made at making a “Bank of the USA”. The second such bank helped create a huge bubble in land and agriculture, to feed Europe, and displace its agriculture, after the old continent had been devastated by the Napoleonic wars (this to say that speculative bubbles can serve imperialism well). Because the “Bank of the USA” got accused of corruption and undue influence of European financiers, it was allowed to expire under president Jackson.

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