Time for Cause & Effect?

Cause, effect, and time are all mysteries at this point. As far as Physics is concerned.

When I was a young chicken, learning physics, pecking around the way chicken do, I came upon “the Arrow of Time”. At the time, the question about the nature of time was all about “Entropy” and the “Second Law of Thermodynamics”. How quaint it seems now that I got much wiser!

Entropy is about “states”. The “Second Law” says that processes augment the number of states, as time goes by.

The most basic question is then: ”What is a state?”

People in thermodynamics thought they had an answer. And, in a way, they do, like a car mechanics is full of answers about the state of your car.

Mechanics Getting Weirder: Are There Wormholes?

[Yes, these distorted things are distant galaxies, viewed through the wormhole. The picture, from the excellent movie “Interstellar” depicts how a wormhole in spacetime would appear at close range; the little flower is the rotating spaceship. Interstellar represents an Earth where society has pursued its way down the abyss, thanks to the anti-science, anti-rationality movement in evidence nowadays. NASA went underground… Something not far removed from its present state, where tantalizing clues for life on Mars are left unexamined, because of the anti-nuclear movement… Long story, another time.]

However, nature is a Quantum car. And mechanics have nothing to say about it. Quantum Physics has its own notion of state. Moreover, in the meantime, the very notion of time and causality came under attack. From an unexpected corner.

It was simple enough when Lorentz and Poincaré introduced the notion of “local time”. Time was relative (Poincaré Relativity Principle, 1904): it depended upon one’s state of motion. In a local frame moving fast, time slows down (relative to the friend who did not get on that speedy rocket).

Einstein then observed that if a local time was accelerated, it would also slow down. Einstein somehow hoped to extract from this “General Theory of Relativity” a cause for inertia, but he failed (and could only fail, as GTR is local, not global). He ended up with just a Theory of Gravitation (Fock), a better and much improved version of the one of 1700, true… But still GTR is articulated basically the same equation arising from Ismael Bullialdus considerations in 1645 (and then Huygens, Borelli, Hooke, etc.)

Enter Quantum Physics. There time is absolute (oops). Locally absolute over an extent. Why? Because each Quantum processes are logically and mathematically analyzed in a particular space, relative to said process, and GLOBALLY therein (here is that global concept Einstein was desperately searching for, as he craved for inertia as a global phenomenon, following Newton and Mach).

That particular space relative to that particular process is not just two dimensional (as in the famed double slit experiment), it can be pretty much anything that can be depicted as a Hilbert space (consider Dirac Spinor space).

In the past, before 1904, one could consider that if something A preceded something else B, in time, A could have “caused” B. However local time already messes up with that situation (consider closed time loops in GTR; reference: just released movie Interstellar, a respected relativist, Thorne, made discoveries while consulting for the movie).

Quantum Physics makes causation a worse consideration than ever. As it stands, the Quantum is Non-Local. No need to get into Spin and Bell, to figure that one out: the analysis in Quantum Hilbert space uses time only as a one parameter transformation group, it’s intrinsically Non-Local (hence the famed “Collapse of the Wave Packet).

If a physicist changes a spin axis on Earth, does it do something to the second member of the entangled photon pair he sent to Beta Centauri? Instantaneously? Really? No one knows for sure (and I don’t believe the “instantaneous” part), but the present Quantum formalism (sort of) says it does.

Paradoxically, all of this debate about cause and effect has become very practical, in the most fundamental domain possible, Quantum Physics. As real physics moves away from the multiverse derangement syndrome, it ponders using, as nature and biology, and even evolution do, the Quantum.

Indeed, even biology uses the Quantum to compute, and find best solutions (as was demonstrated in the case of the chlorophyll molecule; much more examples are on the way, including that will demonstrate how a type of Lamarckian evolution works).

However “what causes what” has stood in the way of making Quantum Computers. Real physicists and engineers have been trying to get a handle on causation. One wants to isolate the process of computation, yet get it impacted by complicated inputs, and only these.

Time to spend some money on all this (that means re-direct the economy that way).

Patrice Ayme’

Did Civil Rights Hide Plutocratization?

A train which passes by, may hid another one, charging the other way. Did obsessing about the Civil Right Movement hid the on-going Plutocratization which is flattening humanity, worldwide?

Did celebrating Obama’s brownish (fauve!) color as a great victory, prevent a proper analysis of the dramatic situation? To this day many a “liberal” (say, Krugman) celebrate obsessively Obama’s minuscule advances, which the Republican Congress will revert in five minutes, within a few weeks.

Even American “liberal” politics is to the right of the French Front National. It was not always so.

(The FN accepts the French welfare state, including single payer national health care, whereas most “liberals” from the USA do not, as the charade six years ago with Obamacare, demonstrated: when Obama proposed “Medicare For All”, democrats blocked him.)

A commenter (Aravis, an observant Jew) in Scientia Salon said that the USA was a good place, see how bad a place France is (France has a “fascist” National Front, many Americans like to pretend). This is fairly typical for what passes for reasonable opinion, in the USA. Bad mouthing France is a most honorable occupation, in the USA. Decades of Rand ranting, and the like, is the reason why.

Ayn Rand is a famous anti-philosopher, read by tens of millions of Americans. (Why so many? Excellent propaganda pushed her onto the masses.)

“Rand” was an outright racist, who extolled frantically the oligarchic principle (a few “Atlases” hold civilization up; whenever they shrug, civilization collapses). Rand was not her true name. Not American born, she came from Eastern Europe, the land of racism unchained, and discharged her venom all over America. She thought Indians deserved no rights, so I don’t see why Jews like her complain when the Nazis gave them no rights. Here is Rand ranting about the Natives:

“[The Native Americans] didn’t have any rights to the land and there was no reason for anyone to grant them rights which they had not conceived and were not using…. What was it they were fighting for, if they opposed white men on this continent? For their wish to continue a primitive existence, their “right” to keep part of the earth untouched, unused and not even as property, just keep everybody out so that you will live practically like an animal, or maybe a few caves above it. Any white person who brought the element of civilization had the right to take over this continent.”

France is the other republic, the one whose Constitution is from the same year (1789), as that of the USA. Yet, that French Republic functioned without killing (nearly) all the natives, without stealing (nearly all) their land, and without slavery (the Merovingian Imperium Francorum outlawed slavery in Europe by 650 CE, about a millennium before the Americans re-established it in the Americas).

The fascization of American politics started thanks to Nixon and McCarthy, in the early 1950s. Intellectuals were suspected to be “commies”, trade unions were broken thoroughly in invisible ways. Jesus helped with fascization: “In God We Trust” was passed by Congress in 1954. (Closely related to the SS “Gott Mit Uns”.)

Simultaneously, the Civil Right Movement was highly successful to give people of color the rights they had in the United Nation Charter (after all, the USA had ratified it!)

The United Nation Charter was an evolution from the principles of the French Revolution of 1789. Not so much from the Constitution of the USA (or some British Constitution, which still does not exist, to this day!).

Thus an explanation of the anger of so many American intellectuals against France. All too many of them are still closet racist, or something similar (to spare the Public, and my ears, I will not roll out statistics; however, some ethnic, and, or, religious groups, are still massively over-represented in universities of the USA, and still massively discriminating, to preserve their monopoly).

On the face of it, the “Civil Right Movement” ought to have been nothing important: Great empires, founders of the present civilization, the Greco-Roman, and its successor, the Imperium Francorum, were not racist. So how come the USA was? How come one is presenting as progress what the Romans found already natural, 2,000 years ago? (1)

Official racism in the USA was extravagant, an outlier, a sort of rage only inferior societies doomed to annihilation have engaged in (2). Killing about 3% of the population of the USA (the “Civil” War, actually the most uncivil civil war known, this side of Rwanda), fixed the problem. In part.

Deluded aggrandizement of the “Civil Right Movement” was a distraction. What was as necessary as flushing a dirty toilet, giving people their rights, was made into a glorious obsession, and constant over-celebration. Obsessing about Civil Rights that the USA had already signed on, and enacted, is why the stripping of the Banking Act of 1933 (so-called “Glass-Seagal”) could be done under Clinton, without anybody noticing.

Clinton could just play the saxophone, as if he were some jazzman (implicitly “black”), and everybody applauded, while Robert Rubin, Alan Greenspan, Lawrence Summers, were deconstructing social justice, and organizing the greatest heist in the history of humanity, and soon to spread it over the entire planet (except China, where banks are not the government, but, quite the opposite, under tight government control). (The saxophone was actually invented by a francophone from Belgium, but never mind.)

The Civil Right Movement unwittingly turned into being used as a cover-up for something much more dangerous: plutocratization.

Civilizations have flourished, because of capital large enough to muster great armies, which, in turn, defended cities (that’s where the “civis” comes from).

However armies function according to the Fascist Principle (one mind, one body), which gives them body, soul, and power. The army is no democracy, but the point of a lance.

Thus the army which makes the civilization possible is in danger of falling into a few hands (like in North Korea). Moreover, capital grows proportionally to itself, so those hands who control the most capital, especially if it is invisible, will become richer faster.

Hence all civilizations are at risk of becoming plutocracies. What’s a plutocracy? An oligarchy so vicious, it rules not just with money, but with demonic means. Historically, most societies were plutocracies. Human beings, though, are (evolutionary) made for democracy, instead of taking their order from “The Lord”.

The impressive reforms away from plutocracy by the Roosevelts and Eisenhower have been rolled back. Many people made a career to help with this roll-back. One ought to call them plutophiles. Randians are typical plutophiles: Alan Greenspan, a loud admirer of Rand, did his utmost to destroy the separation between banking and theft. Plutophiles spend their time seducing plutocrats, that’s their career.

Naturally in 2008, half the plutocrats got all the money the other half had stolen from banks, and the public was asked to replenish the stolen banks, hence the deprived thieves. So here we are. Plutocratic, also known as “financial derivative”, trading is 12 times world GDP.

This roughly means that the plutocrats have twelve times more money to play with than the rest of humanity. It makes even pretend democracy completely unsustainable. It also means that this cancer, plutocracy, born in the USA, has gone metastatic.

Patrice Ayme’

1. Yes, Rome had French (Claudius born in Lugdunum), Spanish (Trajan, Theodosius), Balkan born (more than half a dozen, including Constantius, Domitian), African (Septimus Severus), or even Arab, emperors.
2. Sparta is an example of a racist society which self-annihilated. Whereas Athens kept being influential for centuries: that’s where the future emperor and philosopher Julian went to study. Although Julian died from combat or homicide in 363 CE, the Gallo-Romans, and Franks, who had elected him, pursued in the Athenian spirit, and so does yours truly. By then, Sparta had imploded. Athens was the model of the “open society” (which Pericles celebrated). It is now a thriving megalopolis, and, as a city of the mind, her progeny is the United Nations. Sparta’s racism is buried everywhere, except in the likes of Arabia or Iran.

Against Emotional Shrinkage

Is Rejecting The Human Condition Wise? Or Simply Inhuman?

In “Against Invulnerability”, philosophy professor Todd May has walked some of my way, and I will help him with some of the rest (empathy in action!). Here is Todd, in the New York Times, for “The Stone”, a succession of rather stony essays in philosophy:

“Like many of us, I am often troubled. I am distressed by my failure to be more than I am: a better philosopher, a better family member, a better person. And I know that if I could take a little more distance on the daily goings-on in my world that trouble me, I would probably be better in many if not all of these ways. This knowledge leads me to think of those philosophies that counsel rising above the things that disturb me so that I may arrive at a tranquil state of mind. Philosophies like Buddhism, Stoicism, Taoism, and possibly Epicureanism (the ancient philosophy, not its modern association with pleasures of the flesh) offer different ways of achieving such a tranquil state, and so they are tempting. I believe, however, that for most of us they are a false if beguiling path.”

Chameleons Are Not Stoic, They Anticipate The World

[Chameleons are found in the Namibian desert, not just tropical rain forest; there they have to cover huge distances in search of prey… while avoiding to become dinner, so they change colors just as fast as they run across. The chameleonic way of life is not Buddhist, just begging inertly for crumbs from the rich, dressed in bright orange.]

Let me applaud Todd May. There was some predictable screaming on the Internet from Stoics and Buddhists, claiming for both that they do not shun emotions, but bears them.

However, that’s somewhat besides the point. Indeed, not enough is, in crucial situations, the equivalent of not at all: if a plane tries to fly, and it does not have enough speed, it crashes.

Stoicism and Buddhism, and the sort of Fatalism connected to Christianism (Dieu le veut!) or Islam (Inch Allah) have crashed civilization repeatedly (at some point, before a crash, Buddhism controlled most of India).

Here is more of what the heroic (by academic standards) Todd says:

“Buddhism, at least in its official doctrine, argues that if we abandon our desires by coming to understand the true nature of the cosmos and follow the Noble Eightfold Path, the end of suffering will follow. Stoicism similarly (but distinctly) counsels that we rid ourselves of emotion, and similarly (but again distinctly) offers a path of recognition of our place in the universe to help us get there. I do not wish to claim that either or both of these or related doctrines are mistaken. Instead, I want to say that most of us, when we really reflect upon our lives, would not want what is officially on offer, but instead something else.”

But the author is right on target on his main point, the excellent notion of “invulnerability“:

“In their official guise, these doctrines are examples of what I am going to label “invulnerabilism.” They say that we can, and we should, make ourselves immune to the world’s vicissitudes. What is central to invulnerabilist views is the belief that we can extricate ourselves from the world’s contingencies so that they do not affect us. We are capable of making ourselves immune to the fortunes of our bodies, our thoughts, and our environment, and we will live better or happier or more pure lives if we do so. Whether the task involves the abolition of desire, the elimination of emotion or the recognition of the ultimate oneness of all things, the guiding idea is that we can and ought to make ourselves invulnerable to the world’s vagaries.”

Todd makes implicitly the point that, fundamentally, the invulnerabilists deny the human condition:

“For invulnerabilist views, what matters is only the present. After all, as they argue, the present is all there is, and therefore the only thing we can have an effect upon. Moreover, we can only be assured of having an effect upon ourselves in the present. Our effects upon the world are always uncertain. The task of invulnerabilism, then, is for us to inhabit the present fully and without reserve, letting go of the grip of our past and our desires for the future. Only if we do this can we render ourselves immune to the predations of our psychological tendencies, tendencies tied up with hope, regret, expectation and mourning.

Invulnerabilism recommends that we secrete a distance between ourselves and the world so that ultimately it cannot touch us.”

This is all very true. Its major defect is that it denies what the brain is made for. The brain is made for predicting the future. Even a chameleon’s brain anticipates the future, as it focuses, and prepares its tongue. Stoics, Buddhism and the like, want to have no tongue, and no focus on anticipation. They want to amputate us, please help! Are they why there is so much plutocracy, and nobody is doing anything about it?

As I have argued for years, that, by reducing emotions, one reduces the human condition, and, thus, the very ability to reduce pain. Invulnerabilists are self-defeating. Todd touches upon that:

“Most of us want to feel caught up in the world. We want to feel gripped by what we do and those we care about, involved with them, taken up by them. The price of this involvement is our vulnerability. We must stand prepared to feel the loss of what we care about, because that is part of what it means to care. Caring requires desiring for the sake of others, which in an uncertain world entails that that desiring can be frustrated.”

Stoicism, as defined by Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius is centered on trying to achieve emotional detachment from what one cannot change.

Of course the problem is that one finds out what one cannot change from thinking, and thinking arises from emoting. So, if you don’t emote right, or not enough, you won’t think right.

By insisting that acceptance and tranquility are the most important, somehow most noble moods, invulnerability theories shrink the imagination, and mental reach.

Thus making acceptance and tranquility into a religion dwarves the human spirit into a shadow of its former self..

Are we going to accept infamy, too, because we cannot change it?

Marcus Aurelius is exhibit number one. Somehow he decided that he could not change the old way to select an emperor, and it had to be simply the son of himself. Thus he named his own son Commodus on a whole succession of honors by the age of 12, then made that boy a Consul, and finally co-emperor by the age of sixteen (16).

The son was Commodus, one of the most atrocious Roman emperors, and certainly the worst one (he gave up huge chunks of the empire, next to its core).

Marcus Aurelius, and the four emperors before him had been selected on merit. But merit and performance, selecting the best, were apparently antagonistic to Marcus Aurelius’ acceptance and tranquility.

Marcus Aurelius ought to have cracked down on plutocrats who did not pay enough taxes to sustain the army, then engaged in desperate defense. There, again, Marcus opted for acceptance (of infamy) and tranquility.

Stoicism is comfort, but duty is not always comfortable.

Moods and emotions are at the root of thinking. Cancelling the former would cancel the later, and turn us into beasts. That would be counterproductive to the oftentimes loudly advocated aim, reducing human suffering (people behaving like beasts do not live optimal lives in the complicated civilization we have).

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2014/12/26/moods-rule-thoughts/

Trying to reduce pain through invulnerability theories is a bit hypocritical, because one could swallow a great quantity of sleeping pills, or take other drastic measures, to achieve a pain-free coma… Or death, surely an end to suffering in this allegedly terrible world.

So why are these theories arise so popular? Two viewpoints, as usual: those of the masters, and those of the slaves.

A meta question ponders who pushed, and pushes these theories on the masses? The mechanism is obvious: it is easier to domesticate the emotion-deprived, and thus thought-deprived ones, than fully intelligent human beings.

Thus invulnerability theories and religions are actually optimal for great masters who want to have many emotion-less, inhuman little slaves, with reduced intelligence.

That’s why the masters love Buddhism and company. But then why do the small people love this mood which serves to oppress them too?

Acceptance and tranquility should not be the end-all, be-all. Except, of course, for people with frayed nerves living in denial. Or then people who wants to live gloriously.

Anger is crucial to crush infamy. Absolutely excluding anger is absolutely accepting infamy as a matter of principle. Instead one should follow Voltaire’s advice: “Il faut ecraser l’infame!”. One ought to crush infamy.

Some specialists of Asian sociology believe that a lot of the problems in Asia (for example the holocaust in Cambodia) originated with too much tranquility and acceptance for the intolerable.

Obsessively focusing on acceptance and tranquility is self-serving, as it persuades the beholders, and those who look at them, that they are good, elevated people. And yes, it gets hot and passionate, where civilization is progressing. Yes, as with a kitchen, it gets hot there. But those who stay out ought not to get the respect they crave for.

Get angry, expand thinking, crush infamy!

Patrice Ayme’

NON-LOCALITY

Non-Locality, acting at a distance, without intermediaries, is the stuff of legends in tales for little children. A sorcerer does something somewhere, and something happens, or is felt, somewhere else. Newton himself rejected it. Isaac said the gravitation theory which he had helped to elaborate, was “absurd”, precisely because of it implicitly used “act upon another at a distance”:

“It is inconceivable that inanimate Matter should, without the Mediation of something else, which is not material, operate upon, and affect other matter without mutual Contact…That Gravity should be innate, inherent and essential to Matter, so that one body may act upon another at a distance thro’ a Vacuum, without the Mediation of any thing else, by and through which their Action and Force may be conveyed from one to another, is to me so great an Absurdity that I believe no Man who has in philosophical Matters a competent Faculty of thinking can ever fall into it.”—Isaac Newton, Letters to Bentley, 1692/3.

Du Châtelet Discovered Energy, Infrared Radiation, Correcting Newton On His Confusion Of Momentum (Buridan) and Energy, Which She Established

[Yes, one of civilization’s most important physicists and thinkers was a woman; but don’t ask the French, they never heard of her… because she was a woman.]

However Émilie Du Châtelet pointed out that: “…hypotheses eventually become truths for us if their probability increases to such a point that this probability can morally pass for certainty…. In contrast, an hypothesis becomes improbable in proportion to the number of circumstances found for which the hypothesis does not give a reason. And finally, it becomes false when it is found to contradict a well-established observation.” (Du Châtelet’s Lectures on Physics, 1740. Notice the subtlety of the thinking.)

Every Quantum process contradicts Locality, thus, Émilie Du Châtelet would say, Locality is a false hypothesis.

Gravitation got better described (not much) by making gravitation into a field propagating at the speed of light. It is not a trivial modification: it immediately predicts gravitational waves. If two huge star like objects (such as pulsars) rotate around each other, they should generate such waves, they should carry energy away, and those two objects ought to fall towards each other at a predictable rate. Said rate is indeed observed, thus Einstein’s gravitational equation (obtained by talking a lot with others, such as Hilbert, Grasso, etc.) seems correct.

Einstein’s main motivation for his theory of “General Relativity” was that he wanted to explain inertia (why fast rotating planets develop a bulge at the equator, or more generally an acceleration VV/r). That worry, called Mach’s Principle, actually originated 100% with Newton. Newton put water in a pail, twisted and twisted and twisted a rope from which the pail was suspended, and let go: the pail rotated faster and faster, and the water inside crawled up.

Einstein basic wishful logic was that: gravitation = inertia (he called that the “Principle of Equivalence”). So, by making a theory of gravitation, Einstein would make one of inertia, and become a giant among giants (of Du Châtelet’s caliber, say).

Silly. Silly idea, doomed to fail.

Why silly? Once gravitation was made into a field, Einstein and company made it into curvature in a manifold (called “spacetime”; the basic idea was elaborated by genius Riemann, two generations earlier, although implicitly attributed to Einstein by the ignorant ones).

So gravitation is locally determined: once at a point A, gravitation, that is, curvature of spacetime, is determined in a(ny) neighborhood of A (call it N).

The distant stars do not influence N much, if at all. Yet, inertia is clearly determined by the distant galactic clusters.  Einstein could not understand this.

But now physicists understand better Einstein was deluded, and (Soviet physicist) Fock’s critique that Einstein’s General Relativity is just a theory of gravitation is universally (albeit silently) accepted.

So let me repeat slowly, as I suspect many readers will not understand this either: inertia, as far as present day physics can see, is a Non-Local effect. Inertia has been Non-Local, ever since Buridan discovered it, seven centuries ago (1320 CE; time flies!)

Einstein completely failed at understanding inertia. Einstein even failed to realize that it was a Non-Local effect, although that is completely obvious. So he came out obsessed by Non-Locality, while being angry at it (so he was open to the Non-Local objection of philosopher-physicist Sir Karl Popper! Hence the EPR paper, more or less lifted from Popper.)

All this to say that I am not shocked by Non-Locality: I just have to go out, and look at the stars, move about, and I see Non-Locality.

Many, if not most physicists are horrified by Non-Locality.

Philosophically, though, being afraid of Non-Locality makes no sense. Once I was broaching Quantum Physics with my dad. I explained what I understood of the problem of Non-Locality to him.

My dad did not know much physics, but he was a scientist. Admitted to the famed ENA (the school of conspirators from which the present leaders of France come from), he declined it, and, instead, following the path of his own father, an amateur-professional geologist, he himself became a (highly successful) non-academic geologist (he discovered Algeria’s fortune).

My Dad said: ”Non-Locality is obvious. To think things would get ever smaller, just the same, made no sense.”

With this philosophical perspective, the following arise: physical space is not made of points (although Quantum Field Theory is, one of its many problems).

When physicists talk about Non-Locality, they feel the urge to get into the “Bell Inequality”. But it’s a convoluted, over-specialized, contrived way to get at Non-Locality (I say this, although I respect the late John Bell as much as I despise Feynman when he tried to steal Bell’s work… Although, in general I do respect and love Feynman, especially in light of his appreciation for my own ideas).

Bell theorem says that some Local Hidden Variable theories imply an Inequality that Quantum Physics violate. So Bell’s is a work which predicts that something false is not true.

My approach to Non-Locality is made for Primary School. It goes first through:

• The Uncertainty Principle:

Suppose you want to know where an object is. Suppose all you have is touch. So you kick it. However, if you kick it, it goes somewhere else. That’s the Uncertainty Principle.

Why touch? Because light is touch. It turns out that light carries energy and momentum. Anybody who lays in the sun will agree about the energy. To demonstrate the momentum of light requires a bit more experimental subtlety.

Could you kick the object gently? No. That’s where the Wave Principle kicks in. Waves ignore objects which are smaller than themselves: they just turn around them, as anybody who has seen a twenty meter tsunami wave enter a Japanese port will testify.

So, to detect a small object, one needs a small wavelength, high frequency wave. However the energy of a Quantum wave (at least a light wave) is proportional to its frequency.

So the more precise the determination of (position of) the object, the higher the frequency of the wave, the greater the energy and momentum conferred to the object, etc.

• Conservation of Momentum: 

One has axioms, in physics, as in mathematics. Modern physics axioms include the conservation of energy and momentum. Newton knew of the latter, and confused it with the former. A French woman, Gabrielle Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, marquise du Châtelet discovered (kinetic) energy (”force vive”). As she also discovered Infrared radiation, she obviously could have done more when she died from a fever, at age 43, after giving birth to her fourth child. (Her lover Voltaire, also a physicist quipped that:” Émilie du Châtelet was a great man whose only defect was to be a woman”)

Fundamental hypotheses in contemporary physics are conservation of energy and momentum (something the Multiverse violates, thus, into the bin of silly ideas).

• The Non-Local Interaction:

So say two particles, such as a positron-electron pair, are created together and have total momentum zero (a completely realistic situation: machines do this, for medicine).

Knowing the momentum of (say) the electron E, gives that of the positron P (the vector is exactly opposite to that of the electron). Classical and Quantum mechanics say the same.

So, without having disturbed P (it could be next to Beta Centauri, 4 light years away), we know its momentum. Should one measure it later, one will find it as said. (The latter experiment, retrospective checking of entanglement was actually accomplished by the Austrian Zeillinger and his team!)

However, the basic set-up of Quantum Physics says that the measurement create the state (my formulation, you will not read that in textbooks, although it’s clearly what Bohr wanted to say, but he did not dare, lest his academic reputation gets vilified: he had only a Nobel Prize in physics, after all…).

So the state of P, maybe a few light years away, was created by measuring E.

How come?

The basic Quantum set-up was designed for laboratory experiments, not Cosmological Quantum effects. So it did not need to consider all the consequences of this.

Following Du Châtelet, I will say that we are in obvious need of a new hypothesis, the QUANTUM INTERACTION (ex “Collapse of the Wave Packet”). It explains what we observe (instead of trying desperately to say that we cannot possible observe what we observe).

Following Newton, I will say it is absurd to suppose that the effect of E on P is instantaneous. So this Quantum Interaction goes at a speed I call TAU (it’s at least 10^10 the speed of light: 10,000,000,000 times c).

New physics coming to a Quantum Computer near you.

And of course , said new physics will have giant impacts on philosophy (be it only by presenting new models of how things may be done), or Free Will (is it really free if it takes its orders from Andromeda?). This is going to be fun.

Patrice Ayme’

Free Will & Quantum

It is natural to suspect that those who evoke the Quantum at every turn are a bit deranged. Has a Quantum obsession replaced God? God died, but not the need to obsess? (Dominique Deux made a wry remark in that direction.)

Nietzsche himself is an example. Having “killed” (his father’s) “God“, Nietzsche obsessed about the (Indian based) “Eternal Return of the Same”, something from the Zeitgeist. Henri Poincare’ soon demonstrated some dynamical systems roughly do this (although I certainly do not believe all Solar Systems will; recent observations have confirmed my hunch: many Solar Systems are very unstable, the Sun-Jupiter harmony may be rare…)

Quasar & Host Galaxy [NASA-ESA Hubble]

[The picture, from 1996, is poor, as the Quasar is very far. We need another telescope, but plutocrats don’t want it, because they would have to pay more taxes, thus rendered unable to treat the Commons as dirt as much as they desire. Yet, in spite of the plutocratically imposed low resolution, one can see the mighty ultra-relativistic jets arising from the Quasar’s core.]

Obsessing about the Quantum is obsessing about the true nature of Nature. As it turns out it’s much simpler and magical than the classical picture.

Nature is the Quantum writ large. Relativity, the Standard model, the Big Bang: these are all amusements of dubious veracity. The Quantum is the Real Thing. And it’s everywhere. Most people just don’t know it yet.

Even Biological Evolution Theory, or Free Will, are going to be revealed to be within the Quantum’s empire.

There is something called “Free Will Skepticism” as massaged in Gregg Caruso Scientia Salon’s essays, and his (celebrity) TED talk. It is not so much skepticism about the existence of Free Will, but skepticism that those who loudly believe in “Free Will” have a constructive, progressive attitude in the society of the USA.

Ultimately, the problem of Free Will will have to tackle the problem of what are exactly the free agents in Quantum Physics.

Well, nobody knows for sure. What the free agents are is the central problem of Quantum Computing, and the high energy physicists’ wild goose chase for high energy processes went the other way, for two generations, so we don’t know what determines the evolution of the Quantum systems.

High energy processes are of interest only in high energy places, none of which are found where the biosphere lays. In other words, much physics, high energy physics used the Quantum, but did not try to figure it out.

Not knowing what the free agents, if any, of Quantum Physics are imply that we do not know what determines the evolution of the simplest processes.

The simplest processes are, by definition, the Quantum processes.

As long as we do not really know what controls simplest systems, talking about whether there is Free Will, or not, is shooting the breeze.

Free Will is even a problem in Quantum Non-Local analysis.

On-going experiments on non-locality. In some hard core physics labs. Those experiments aim to turn around the problem that we may have no Free Will.

The situation is this: doing a measurement at point A was found to have an influence at point B. The influence propagates orders of magnitude faster than the speed of light (as the formalism of basic Quantum Physics theory predicts).

French physicist Alain Aspect was able to show this with crafty optico-acoustic devices (he got the Wolf prize for this, and, clearly, ought to get the physics Nobel). The question remained, though, that maybe Alain Aspect himself was a pre-determined phenomenon deprived of Free Will.

To check this, Aspect’s experiment is going to be re-run with distant quasars in charge (rather than just some French guys). MIT physics department is doing this.

Free Will is the last major loophole of Bell’s inequality — a 50-year-old theorem on Spin that, as it is violated by experiments, means that the universe is based not the (topologically separated) laws of classical physics, but on Non-Locality.

Actually this is all very simple. (No need for the fancy high school math of Bell’s theorem, a particular case of Non-Locality with spins.)

Two quasars on opposite sides of heavens are so distant from each other, that they would have been out of causal contact since the (semi-mythical) Big Bang some 14 billion years ago: there are no possible means for any third party to communicate with both of them since the (semi-mythical) beginning of the universe…

Now, of course, if my own version of the universe is true, and the universe is actually 100 billion years old, the “loophole” re-opens…

But of course, as a philosopher, I know perfectly well that I have Free Will, and, as a momentarily benevolent soul, I extend the courtesy to Alain Aspect.

The universe is Non-Local, even my Free Will is Non-Local, it does not have to be like long dead gentlemen thought it should be.

Patrice Ayme’

MOODS RULE THOUGHTS

Systems Of Moods Overwhelm Systems of Thought.

MOODS MAKE UP THE GENETICS OF LOGIC:

Are we born with “instincts” such as “care”, and the like? Or do we learn? I believe we learn (much of this being fast learning, and, mostly, subconscious). How does that work? Well, it would work from General Topology informing neurogenesis.

French philosopher Foucault baptized himself historian of systems of thought, when he got a professorship at the prestigious Collège de France in 1970. (Collège de France, the ultimate think institution, is five centuries old.)

I have gone one further, by introducing Systems of Moods. Why moods? Emotion Primes Reason. However, rarely does one emotion rule alone, but for ravenous hunger, abject terror, and other animalistic crazes. Instead, when we meditate ponderously, we are usually ruled by moods.

What’s a mood? It’s a cocktail of emotions. Systems of Moods are articulated with their own logic. Pascal discovered this, when he said “Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison n’a pas”.

Why and how does the “heart” have its own logic? The answer has to do with where does logic come from? Logic is basically about arrows, implications: ’if A, then B’.

Where do these “thens”, these implications, come from? When one says:’I have a bad feeling about this’, one reasons out of a mood: the forest is suddenly too quiet, or a bird made an alarm sound… And suddenly all of one’s senses are in full alert.

Sets of moods will tend to topological relations. Instead of the one to one relations of logic or category theory. Topology, the logic of places, can bring to bear relationships that are much more general than ‘if A then B’. Relations such as: ’if A is close to B while C is close to D, when closer to A than B, then…’

This topo-logic can be embodied by neurohormones, neurotransmitters, and the neighborhoods they create (neighborhood is here used in the exact mathematical, General Topological sense). This no idle theory: it’s known that dendrites, and other neuronal structures, tend to grow in some directions, depending upon these chemicals. That means that the neurological relations of linear logic are built from the emotional and neurohormonal calculus.

***

AN EXAMPLE WHERE MOODS DOMINATE, AND LOGIC IS SECONDARY:

I am going to use an example that arose from my adventures at a philosophy website. It’s rather complex, so let me give an abstract first: a philosophy professor drew a correct conclusion, yet the EXACT OPPOSITE conclusion is also valid. How is that possible? It is because, once some moods and emotions are rolled out, logic can go one way, or the other.

So much for the old hope that determinism and logic (in the conventional sense) rule all.

The example was extracted from Scientia Salon, a site run by university philosophers.

Philosophy professor Gregg Caruso considered polls on the behavior of USA citizens (that’s called “experimental philosophy”). Verdict? The relationship between believing in Free Will and believing that low lives dug their own fates, seems strong in the USA.

Gregg wrote: “juries — eager to preserve their belief in a just world — are already inclined to see the victim … as other than innocent… just one unfortunate example of the pernicious nature of belief in a just world… since, of course, if the world is just, then people must have brought these circumstances upon themselves. This blaming of victims (in defense of belief in a just world) has been established by numerous studies… the stronger the belief in a just world the greater the likelihood of blaming victims for their unfortunate fates.”

Any society rests on logic. The logic does not have to be all-embracing, it just has to be effective enough to support the social organization. Gregg’s general thesis is a good antidote to the present logic dominating the USA. Yet a USA social truth does not have to be a truth of human ethology.

And it is not, as egregious cases in non-USA based history and geography show.

The Nazis believed the less Free Will, the better: “society’s needs come before the individual’s needs” (Adolf Hitler). So did the followers of Stalin. So do, to a great extent some of the Muslim religions (so called “branches” of Islam). All believe(d) that individual Free Will had to be eradicated. Islam comes from aslama “he submitted”.

All believe(d) that the world could be made just through the application of strength, and the Will of God, the General Secretary, or the Guide.

Now, if I abstract the examples above (Stalinism, Nazism, Islamism), I can rephrase the grand conclusion of Gregg, into its complete contradiction. Below I just changed “Free Will” into “NON Free Will”:

…belief in NON free will, it was found, by studying the historical examples above, is associated with just world belief, authoritarianism, religiosity, punitiveness, and moralistic standards for judging self and other. While these considerations do not prove belief in NON free will is mistaken, they do indicate that the putative pragmatic benefits of believing in NON free will and desert-based moral responsibility are bogus.

Gregg showed that in the USA to doubt Free Will would allow society to progress. History, in many other places show that rejecting Free Will led to horrible societies.

How come Gregg’s informed logic and concrete polls can be turned on its head? What is going on?

The answer is from the theory of systems of moods. The reason that the logic can be turned on its head is that what truly matters are the mood and subjacent emotions.

Example. The Nazis posed themselves as victims of an unjust world (big, bad, rich, hypocritical, Indian exterminating America; Versailles Treaty). Germans, all over, were oppressed minorities. Only surrendering Free Will would be bring back justice and stop the punition they were submitted to.

Strong emotions, bound by strong logic, make strong medicine. Yet, the logic is secondary. It could go whichever way. This is what the apparent truth of both Free Will Skepticism, and the truth of its exact opposite, my pernicious anti-thesis (just an observation, too), demonstrate.

Foucault suggested that power laid in discourses, more than anything else. I agree. Yet, beyond that, power lays in the raw emotions, and the moods they blossom into. The exact nature of the way they get organized is an afterthought.

Here is an explicit example: Christianism and love. Christ said that to love was the commanding commandment. Fine. However, read what he exactly said:

“‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

What’s the strongest emotion here? Jesus says it himself: loving obedience to “the Lord”. He puts it first. However, obedience is not the most prominent feature of human ethology (raw love probably is, next to the survival instinct). Thus the implied logic is the violence one has to exert to do something unnatural, obeying a so-called “Lord”.

In the end, Jesus’ primary emotion holds in just one word: “Lord”. Jesus is a plutophile: loving a “Lord” is the first law.

He, and others, can put whatever logic they want after that to embellish the ugliness, and comfort the horror. It does not really matter. The overall mood flows from there, one concept: “the Lord”. The rest is just rearranging the chairs on the sinking Titanic of Jesus’ make belief goodness.

Patrice Ayme’

Was Jesus Christ Immoral?

‘TURNING THE OTHER CHEEK’ MEANS COLLABORATING WITH EVIL.

Instead, Forget Abraham, Resist, Crush Infamy, and Save the Little Children.

Jesus is an imperial Roman fabrication. Not only his mythology was cut and pasted from pre-existing religions, but even His birthday was displaced from one side of the Sun to the other. This 6 months translation made it coincide with the Winter Solstice and the Saturnials, the feast and celebration of the Greco-Roman empire which lasted weeks.

No philosopher of note has considered Jesus since Nietzsche noticed that the crucifix was a sex symbol for frustrated Christians. So why do I bother? Well, the USA is pervaded by God, and Jesus is his son. That would be OK, except that the GDP of the USA is growing at an annual rate of 5%, whereas Europe, and even Germany, has been stagnating with zero percent growth since 2008.

Both facts are related, but I will not get into that for this essay. Another point is that a version of the remarks on Jesus’ morality was censored on a philosophy website, because the moderator, a professional philosopher, and self-declared atheist, viewed it as “unduly offensive”.

Real philosophers offend the baffled and uncomprehending masses with true ideas they cannot swallow yet.

In the West, for more than a millennium, “Jesus” was viewed as the paragon of morality. Instead I will propose the exact opposite, by analyzing carefully what may be Jesus’ most famous saying. It made “Jesus” into the whetstone on which Nazism, among other evils, was sharpened.

I already pointed out that Jesus had homicidal tendencies: not only did this rabbi make explicit threats, but he said he came to impose the “Law” the Old Testament.

Said Old Testament depicts a God drunk on power, mass homicides, and a passion for torturing to death little children, so as to humiliate or punish their parents. It is hard to find a more despicable character in the history of ideas. The Biblical god can do whatever He pleases and call that divine.

The local plutocrat, our local lord, made in God’s image, was then morally justified to behave just as he wished all along. Hence the dealing and pushing of Christianism onto the mystified masses by plutocrats, from Constantine to Putin.

Jesus said: [those who] serve other gods … thou shalt surely kill him; thine hand shall be first upon him to put him to death, and afterwards the hand of all the people. And thou shalt stone him with stones, that he die.” [Bible New Testament; Dt.13:6-10]

A Christian, Elizabeth Carter, was not thrilled with the unconventional picture of Jesus I gave. She commented (Dec 5, 2014):

“Christ taught us not to resist evil but to turn the other cheek.

He said that if you choose to live by the law of Moses you will be judged by the law of Moses…

Jesus was crucified and did not resist the evil that was being done to him at all. Christians were told to follow Him.”

The statement “Christ taught us not to resist evil but to turn the other cheek,” is the epitome of immorality.

Jesus, even if he existed, was a savage of 2,000 years ago who repeated like a parrot what rabbi Hillel The Elder said a century before. Even the conservative Edmund Burke, 250 years ago, came to realize that Jesus was morally evil. Said Burke: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

Ironically this idea is central to the French Revolution, which Burke hated. In the French revolution, good men decided to do something about plutocracy… And the struggle is not over. Voltaire’s “IL FAUT ECRASER L’INFAME” got it right, and got the whole world rolling in the correct direction.

What did Chris thought he was achieving with turning the other cheek? Looking somewhere else? Indicating that punishment, cheek slapping, should be pursued, until morale improve, or one passes out?

Or was Christ, by turning the other cheek to evil, teaching us to collaborate with evil? Or, to put it more crudely, and to the point, to collaborate with Auschwitz? Let Him get to the oven first. With my most sincere contempt.

The hundreds of extermination camps the Nazis set-up all over Germany could function only because, like Jesus, the average Christian German decided to turn the other cheek and look somewhere else. Some extermination hells, such as Dachau, were in full view, a few kilometers from Munich. An outraged American general forced the whole local population of good Christian Germans to visit this place of extermination. The honorable German citizens put their finest clothes, and grimly contemplated what their hellish culture of cheek turning allowed to happen.

Jesus is distinctly less popular in Germany now. He had told the Germans to avert their eyes, and not fight evil. Jesus was wrong as wrong could be. All over Europe, he does not cut the saintly figure he used to.

Christians were told to follow their love boy, Jesus, and his dad. Germans were told to follow their “Guide” (Fuhrer).

Evil’s face could be that of a hungry lion, or that of a thug, or a rampaging dictator. Turning the other cheek only encourages it. The mythical Jesus Himself, when confronted with a few merchants in the Temple, not really an outrage in my opinion, got very angry, and physically violent, as he threw them out.

Thus the alleged acts of the mythical Jesus make no emotional sense: if some fast buck artists soil the Temple with their wares, He attacks them, but if some dictator puts a child in the oven, He turns the other cheek? Insignificant is outrageous, and outrageous, is insignificant?

Is it this perverse logic which allowed hungry Crusaders to roast and eat little Muslim Children?

(This evil culinary fact is well documented through direct eyewitnesses and participants; one would assume that, as good Christians, the Crusaders just turned the other cheek, so they could munch better…)

Essential to Jesus’ “teaching” is that one should not resist infamy. The very fact lover boy Jesus did not resist his own crucifixion, as Christians say, is the very proof that, either he deserved it, or he was of the lowest moral sort.

Or maybe he was a masochist who wanted to be crucified, because that gave him a sexual kick, to rub his buns on rough wood.

And his followers are even worse. I mean what are these creeps going to do when some monsters come to torture a child? Turn the other cheek? Not resist? Celebrate Abraham, who bound his own son, to slit his throat, because he was in love with his boss? That’s clearly worse than gay marriage, it’s gay murder.

How much more despicable can one be?

Those “Christian” ideas ought to be buried in the mental rot to which they belong. They are precious only in the sense that they laud the exact sort of systems of thought and moods we should avoid like the mental plague they are: lethal and contagious.

To have made a religion out of collaboration with infamy, is not just inhuman, absurd, demented, and an insult to our true creator, biological evolution. It should outright be made unlawful to teach it as non-fiction. And frowned upon, submitted to the severe punishment, as non-assistance to children in danger. Some demons will laugh: ‘No wonder Christians love the cross so much: deep down inside they know they all deserve it, being the lowest of the low’.

Amen.

Happy Birthday, Christ. Should you have truly existed, as the Good Lord, no doubt you taught the exact opposite of many of the words plutocrats such as emperor Constantine put in your mouth.

Patrice Ayme’

Santa Claus A Good Superstition

We all need superstition, because by defining what is “super“, it helps to define the ground we stand on (the mathematical model is sheaf theory: reality id the base space, superstition, the sheaf).

We can teach Santa and a few other things to children, just so they know about lying, even from the most trusted, and that even lying, can have some positive aspects (although transparency is better).

The Santa Claus legend also teaches that there are innocent superstitions and magic… And the Santa Claus legend, or the like, imprints children upon a higher order of things, a just universe rewarding the good. And that point, a superstition, is a good superstition, which helps society, and which is even correct, evolutionary speaking.

Thus some superstitions, have got to be much less welcome. And it teaches to reject appearances, however nice.

To help children discover what is real, we have to teach them what is unreal and even lead them to gently believe, sort of, what is not. Discovering where reality lays, by discovering what is not true is not a science reserved to science. It’s something we discover in childhood. Santa Claus, and his ineluctable dismissal, teaches skepticism, a good thing. Learning the magic of giving and receiving is also a good thing.

This being said, I have not talked much about Santa Claus to my own 5 year old daughter. Why? Because I continually tell her about the many marvelous and magical things of the real world, such as wild life documentaries, or imagined versions of the real world (many cartoons, some of them prize winning Japanese, or movies, some Indian, some Chinese, some Star Wars, etc…)

Nevertheless the 25 centuries old tradition of the Solstice Tree and feast, and the gifts it brings ought to be most respected and important. And it’s also an occasion of learning about the Solstice, that is the heliocentric system and the magical ecliptic.

How do I reconcile my tolerance for Santa Claus with my crackdown on Christianism and Islamism? Well, Santa Claus is not a myth full grown men are supposed to believe in, and go kill people in his name. It’s a myth to grow out of, all the wiser.

Christianism, and Islamism’s moral systems, reduced to the parts compatible with human ethology, are fine with me. Actually I am ready to admire some of their practitioners.

Actually the present Pope just made an excellent blast against the diseases of the Church, which I totally approve. (And said blast can be generalized well beyond the Church.)

The Dark Side is strong, such is its main asset, the ability of doing what is necessary. And if it means using Christianism and Islamism, or the Pope, to advance correct human ethology against plutocracy, that’s all right with me.

The ends certainly justify the means, if they are incommensurate in the right way.

Patrice Ayme’

Free Will, Meta Will, Evil, & the Good Lord

That “Free Will” is not free of society was made clear in Europe with the example of fascism (German, Soviet, Italian, Spanish, in historical order, not to mention Slavs and Balkans…). Various nationalistic crazes and pogrom like activities have shown the natural tendencies of entire peoples to behave like nasty robotic mass-homicidal torturing monsters.

Europe was founded and named, by the Franks. The Frankish government, in antique Roman Republican style, “renovated” by its good offices, was tolerant of all superstitions, including Catholicism, Paganism, Atheism, Judaism, and even Islamism.

However, coincident to and related with, the rise of extravagant Middle-Ages plutocracy, society became much less tolerant. The trigger was the First Crusade. In 1099 CE, Jews were mass massacred, in Alsace and further east, when herds of violent Catholics, full of enraged fervor. migrated east to take back Jerusalem.

Evil, Intel Of Angel

The grand conclusion of this experience in hatred was revealed to the world by American Army generals in 1945, when the horror of extermination camps was revealed (the logical chain of Jew hatred went from burning all Cathars to Saint Louis, to Luther). In those Nazi camps around 22 million people were assassinated, according to the latest estimates (11 million killed for racist reasons, including 6 million Jews, plus 3.3 million Russian army prisoners, etc…).

Thus, after World War Two, social engineering in many European countries repaired the society to cure the individuals. It seems to have worked: the probability of being victim of a very serious crime, or being incarcerated, is an order of magnitude (a factor of ten) lower in Western Europe, than in the USA.

Does Knowledge Cause Crime?

That knowledge causes crime is the argument the partisans of obsolete moral systems always use. In a trivial, self-referencing way, they are right: if one defines crime as what the old moral system forbids, the change of moral systems will always cause crime. Having women starting to drive in Saudi Arabia would not doubt augment the crime rate.

However, human beings are knowledge and wisdom machines. Once they know what influences them, they take it into account.

Why? Human beings have long known that what’s in their heads is not necessarily what is out there. All hunters know that what appear is not necessarily what there is. They did not have to wait one million years for Nietzsche to tell them that. Superiorly differentiating distortions in information and the nature of reality, is what make a better predators, hence a more successful human being, or group.

Better philosophy eats better, and survives better. It’s the ultimate weapon. (Example: Athens at its apogee, when a herd of philosophers drove the state, and was able to harness the Free Will of its citizenry in a superlative armed polis.)

Saying that “Free Will does not exist” is not really what is going on. Much of what looks like “free” is actually a product of the group. Free Will arises from “Meta Will” what J-J. Rousseau called the “General Will”. The “General Will” will be hard to define: after all, it’s a mathematical notion going beyond our present computational capabilities (a typical case where Quantum Computing will help).

Any social thinking, where part of the Meta Will lays, is tainted in the USA by the background of the American police and justice systems, with its incarceration rate more than five times the world average (and much more if one takes into account all those under judicial surveillance, a category developed more in the USA than anywhere else).

Much “Free Will” being “Group Will”, if one does not like what the former leads to, one has to work on the latter. This is why what society believes in, say in a superstition, does not just impact individuals, it makes them up into what they are. (Consider the Middle-East an its imbroglio of fanatical, lethally opposed superstitions.)

The more we know, the more we can act upon the world, and thus the more freedom we have. However freedom is not what plutocrats want to see average people enjoy. Plutocrats go according to their namesake, Pluto, Satan. Demons in hell do not want to see those they are supposed to torture, enjoying freedom, or enjoying anything at all.

Yet, it’s the other way. Overall, on a civilizational scale, knowledge augments not just power, but morality.

The more we know, the more we know when we are not acting for the best, the more we can accuse ourselves of not acting well. And thus, the greater the opportunity we have to act well, and the better we will act.

We have a moral system which is evolutionary given (evolution being the Creator we had been looking for!). This natural Human Ethology interacts both with the Meta Will and individual Free Will.

However, in the USA the Plutocratic mentality is triumphant (latest GDP growth at an annual rate of 5%, not far behind plutocratic China). In this social paradigm, the Randian worship of the rugged individual is celebrated. People have to work, not by choice, as in Europe, but just to survive.

To justify itself, the Plutocratic mentality reveres Free Will. According to this system of thought and mood, all and any success is attributed to immanent justice, a just universe, which rewards character, ability and effort. Sociological studies have proven this.

The tension between Free Will and General Will, is that between Evil and Our Good Lord. It’s a debate, one side can’t think, let alone talk, without the other.

Obama has understood this, just enough to make do. We all have to travel the same road. Our General Will, right now, is called CO2. It will be a heavy cross. Look at the bright side, as Jesus, or Camus, would say.

To be able to smile, and it means something, we have to know how to snarl.

Patrice Ayme’

Free Will, Consequence of Meta Will

Systems of thought arise from individual wills to create what Jean-Jacques Rousseau introduced, and named the “General Will”. In the last 150 years or so, it has become increasingly clear that the notion of “Free Will” was in turn highly dependent upon other notions, including “General Will”.

I prefer the expression “Meta Will” (which is even more general).

A philosophical site managed by professional academic philosophers ran an essay entitled Free Will Skepticism and its Implications an Argument for Optimism (part-1). My comment below was repeatedly censored, supposedly for making “grating” anti-German, or anti-Nazi declarations. (I think the truth is even more sinister: professional philosophers fear me; I will reproduce the exchange in the comments.)

Free Will Ought To Give Way To Meta Will

Whenever an action is taken, it turns out to be dependent of some context, often cultural, or some preparation, often neurological, or some ulterior motives, often self-aggrandizing. In other words, free will is never free of contingence.

So what? This just show that the expression “Free Will” depicts the wrong semantics. After all, we are not free to stop breathing. In theory, yes. In practice, it is impossible, except if we carefully prepare a mechanism that will take over (a lot of sleeping pills, or a noose).

The problem of suffocation suggests that, if we want to be more free (for example free to stop breathing), we have to make the environment take over. Thus Free Will has to operate not just on “us”, but on the environment which controls us.

This is why philosophers’ Free Will have led them to the desert, since times immemorial. In the desert, they are more free to think.

Quantum Physics helps here. It is non-local. Actually some physicists are in the process to make really sure of that, by running entanglement experiments with haphazard impulses coming from the opposite sides of the universe.

Intriguingly, if the experiment turns out as expected, this variant of the famed Einstein-Podolski-Rosen Thought Experiment will show that local Free Will cannot exist. But, once again, so what? Free Will is obsolete, Meta Will is what one can help to free, by controlling more the contexts we think in.

The soul is most probably some sort of large scale Quantum effect. How do Quantum processes work? They extract solutions from geometry, or, more generally, form. Non-local geometry, and non-local form.

Thus, if we want to achieve soul control, we need to achieve geometrical and topological control on our environment. And this starts by being conscious that those control our outcomes.

Thus, instead of just talking about our morality, we have to start talking about the environment in which it is supposed to blossom, as the later will control the former. Thus individual responsibility shifts more to social contexts.

And therefore, the systems of thoughts which support social structures are the agents most responsible. This is where much of Free Will is hiding.

Let me give an example: Germans behaved deplorably for generations, more than people of other nations (that is more than the Italians, French, British, American, etc.). This nasty robotic aspect of German mentality allowed dictators to make the German armies behave in atrocious ways for generations (differently from the armies of the nations quoted above, which did not engage in systematic war crimes).

That unfortunate character of the German soul killed 22 million in extermination camps alone, due to the fascist, robotic nature of the dictatorships (the Second Reich, and then the Third Reich) in Germany, and the education it provided with (as Friedrich Nietzsche and Albert Einstein pointed out, deplored and condemned stridently, among others).

German genetics did not change that much. Yet, present day German souls are completely different. They have become French souls, so to speak. They are sister souls for Republican France against old German fascism.

German Free Will has become gentle. This shows that Free Will depends crucially of the universe it evolves in.

Patrice Ayme’