We War, Or We Are Not: Chimpanzees On Patrol

WAR AS “COLLECTIVE INTENTIONALITY” IN CHIMPANZEES, And HOW:

Most advanced animals are territorial. (It’s also true at sea: that was discovered with Orcas, Killer Whales, recently: the high sea races don’t mix genetically and culturally with the land-hugging races!)

Where does this territoriality come from? Researchers have no guesses. I do: it’s as simple as supposing that animals are smart. I run through the woods all the time among dangerous animals, and I can see them thinking fast, across many species, and adjusting their attitude accordingly.

It’s easy to see why, economically speaking, territoriality should arise. Economy means: environmental management. At this point many feel like writing a few equations that would justify everything, and such equations have been written, and those who wrote them achieved fame.

Equations tie concepts together. Concepts which can be measured. However, one has to be careful. The case of gravitation is famous. The master equation, call it Einstein’s equation, says:

Curvature = Mass-Energy

As Einstein himself pointed out, the right hand-side is not well-defined. However, one can still draw non-trivial consequences from it. But do those “prove” the equation? No.

Posing With That Special Attitude Can Speak Louder Than Words!

Researchers used 20 years of data from Ngogo in Uganda to explore collective action in chimpanzees.

When male chimpanzees patrol the boundaries of their territories they walk silently in single file.

Normally chimps are noisy: it’s a deliberate tactic to scare everybody. But on patrol they’re like silent death. They sniff the ground and stop to listen for sounds. Their cortisol and testosterone levels are jacked 25 percent higher than normal. Chances of contacting conspecific enemies are high: 30 percent.

Ten percent of patrols result in violent fights where they hold victims down and bite, tear, hit, kick and stomp them to death. It has been observed that a chimpanzee tribe could completely annihilate one next door.

The result of these savage acts of war? A large, safe territory rich with food, longer lives, and new young females wandering into the group.

Territorial boundary patrolling by chimpanzees is one of the most dramatic forms of collective action in mammals. Patrolling, and killing, together benefits the group, whether individual chimps took part in the action, or not.

Some Chimps In The ASU Study, While On Patrol

A team — led by Arizona State University Assistant Professor Kevin Langergraber of the School of Human Evolution and Social Change and the Institute of Human Origins — examined 20 years of data on who participated in patrols in a 200-member-strong Ngogo community of chimpanzees in Kibale National Park, Uganda.

Males joined 33 percent of patrols that occurred when they were in the group and young enough to take part. Young females have been observed to join patrols.

The behavior is evidence of what’s called group augmentation theory. What is good for the group is ultimately good for the individual. Some sacrifice from each member translates into a larger, safer group. By 2009, the Ngogo chimpanzees expanded their territory by 22 percent over the previous decade.

“Free riders may increase their short-term reproductive success by avoiding the costs of collective action,” Langergraber’s team wrote, “but they do so at the cost of decreasing the long-term survival of the group if it fails to grow or maintain its size; nonparticipants suffer this cost alongside the individuals they had cheated.”

“Cost” though, is a human concept tied to record keeping.

Chimpanzees are one of the few mammals in which inter-group warfare is a major source of mortality. Chimps in large groups have been reported to kill most or all of the males in smaller groups over periods of months or even many years, acquiring territory in the process. Territorial expansion can lead to the acquisition of females who bear multiple infants. It also increases the amount of food available to females in the winning group, increasing their fertility.

The researchers found no consequences for those chimpanzees that did not join patrols (but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist). Most studies have focused on short term benefits of cooperation, said lead researcher Kevin Langergraber, “but our study shows the benefit of long-term data collection, and also that we still have a lot to learn from these chimpanzees.”

Male chimpanzees remain in the group they were born in their entire lives (females wander to settle somewhere else). Because they can live for more than 50 years, patrolling when they’re young produces personal future benefits.

However, if they don’t patrol, there aren’t any consequences — no sidelong glances, snubs or being chased out of the group, claims anthropologist David Watts of Yale University, who worked with Langergraber on the study.

“We know from a lot of theoretical and empirical work in humans and in some other specialized, highly cooperative societies — like eusocial insects — that punishment by third parties can help cooperation evolve,” Watts said. “But it doesn’t seem to us that chimpanzees punish individuals who do not patrol. Sometimes individuals will be present when a patrol starts, and thus have the opportunity to join the patrol but fail to do so. As far as we can see, these individuals do not receive any sort of punishment when this occurs.”

Chimpanzees are extremely intelligent, but usually they aren’t considered to be capable of what’s called “collective intentionality,” which allows humans to have mutual understanding and agreement on social conventions and norms.

“They undoubtedly have expectations about how others will behave and, presumably, about how they should behave in particular circumstances, but these expectations presumably are on an individual basis,” Watts said. “They don’t have collectively established and agreed-on social norms.”

What Watts seems to want to say is that he didn’t see punishment. Thus, he says, there is no enforcement of norms. Thus there are no norms. Thus norms were not collectively established.

There are several problems with this reasoning. First all is not stick: there is also the carrot. A chimp may not be punished, but them he may lost opportunity. One opportunity lost? The pleasure of the hunt of the biggest game, fellow chimp, the pleasure of killing.

To expects animals establish norms as we do is, with all due respect, a bit silly. They do it, as we do when we don’t have language at our disposal.

“… this tendency of humans to cooperate in large groups and with unrelated individuals must have started somewhere,” Watts said. “The Ngogo group is very large (about 200 individuals), and the males in it are only slightly more related to one another than to the males in the groups with which they are competing. Perhaps the mechanisms that allow collective action in such circumstances among chimpanzees served as building blocks for the subsequent evolution of even more sophisticated mechanisms later in human evolution.”

Yes, sure. And what are these mechanisms? Can we imagine them?

We know how WE do it in civilization, and the million of years before that: we talk. We talk digitally, enabling us to communicate extremely precise information: this is the interest of equations.

What did we do before digital speech? Well we could whistle and do other sounds… which animals readily understand: a whining sound in humans of the sort my seven-year old daughter is expert at when she wants cake, is readily understood by a dog from 100 feet away. And by another 500 species besides.

There are other languages: action, gestures… They can vary. Most animals though, understand man is the top dog. I have been charged by bull elks, weighing 1,000 pounds, horns down, until they realized I was no mountain lion. Similarly, a bear or lion will immediately be reminded of human supremacy, from just the proper attitude. Then they instantaneously deduce they should moderate their rage, hunger, and other animals spirits inhabiting them.

The point is that they reason. They fear humans not “instinctively”, but because they were taught, by parents, or circumstances. Chimpanzees are also taught. From their first months on Earth. Then they deduce, in particular, friend from foe. Friends are in the tribe, foes are not in the tribe.

When I run in a National Park, all the dangerous animals out there, even the dangerous snakes, not just the bears, lions and various ungulates, know who I am, even before meeting me in person. They also know what a creature such as me is expected to do: left alone, I, and my ilk, will leave them alone.

So the missing link is that animals spent a lot of time thinking: their lives depend upon it.

“Collective Intentionality” results from all this collective thinking out of the same initial conditions. Chimps, from the earliest ager, learn that defending their traditional fruit trees enable them to survive, because they need to eat, to survive. And so on… It’s basic neurogenesis…

Patrice Ayme’

I think, Therefore I Turmoil

TURMOIL DENIAL, & THE FLEECING OF SHEEP

Did you see experienced sheep being fleeced? The sheep lies on its back, in the warm embrace of the one fleecing, and rise its legs as needed to be completely shorn. Sheep fleecing is practiced in Australia. I sneered about the Royals to a top Australian mathematician. It surfaced that they cost more than 50 million dollars in direct subsidies last year (indirect subsidies are many times this). The prize-winning mathematician chuckled back that the Royals were a perfect opium for the people, they were extravagant just enough to make people think of other things besides inequity.

I keep fighting with some Buddhists, and their ilk. Actually they are on the attack, strangely enough for those speaking about clam all day long. I used to be attacked by Muslim Fundamentalists on this site, but, for some reason, they have completely given up. Maybe they died on the real battlefield? (Many have, but most of the Jihadists are fleeing to other countries, now that they are on the run in Syria and Iraq… But let me stick to the subject at hand here, namely those who scream for calm…)

Praying At The Foot Of Sequoias, California, June 2017. Praying & Meditating Are Good, But Not Enough For a Higher Human Comprehension. Turmoiling Action Is Even More Important.

So why are Buddhists so often calling names those who recognize conflicts as subjects of interest? To qualify my robust considerations, some have used terms such as”height of arrogance”, they ask me to look at the creature in the mirror, and conclude that I ask questions and criticize String Theory, or the Big Bang, let alone the concept of infinity in mathematics, because I suffer pain. As if other animals never suffered.

Pain can be suffered. Yes, it has to be suffered. Pain can also be ignored (cross-country runners, mountaineers are particularly good at ignoring pain, some of their training being to learn to ignore pain!). And, of course, pain can be inflicted. All top thinkers, throughout the ages, have inflicted pain on lesser minds: the revelation of deeper truths is literally painful when the neurology does not exist. I will give an example with mathematics further down. 

***

Typical of the Buddhist-New Age objection complex is Nathan Daniel Curry , who opined that: “ I am going to step away from our interaction Patrice for quite some time. All hatred, as far as I have seen, is a form of self-loathing. Those who understand this do not judge. This is the difference between insight and recrimination.”

Hatred? Which hatred? And why would hatred be so terrible? Hating Hitler is OK in my book. Speaking of Hitler, he could have done with quite a bit of self-loathing. Or, more exactly, we would have done better if Hitler had proceeded with self-loathing in a timely manner, killing himself before his niece, or another 100 million people (5% of humanity then)…. Rumors of the badness of viciousness are much exaggerated, sometimes.

***

Pain is part of the human experience:

Pain is a teacher, even a master. Also one best to be overcome, when fully grown-up. Those desperately searching for pain avoidance are fussy lifers. Roll over Buddha, and stop whining!

Pain, of course, can be an atrocious thing: it defines atrocity. However, precisely, it has to be respected. Ignoring, or deriding others’ pain, is lack of compassion.  

Buddhists, or New Age neo-Buddhists, have ordered me to find “inner peace”, as if I suffered from inner war. I remember facing this famous San Francisco architect, a devoted Buddhist, Tibetan style. His mansion if full of expensive Tibetan paintings representing various “Buddhist” deities. He thundered across the table:”And if you want to change the US Constitution, nobody will take you seriously, ever!”  Wow. That reminded me of when close associates of the Dalai Lama killed each other in Darjeeling, for obscure reasons…

Some are desperate, religiously searching for inner calm. If they had it, they won’t search for it.

Solo climbers have inner calm. Or they won’t be. Instead of going to the temple, it’s certainly more educative to go to the cliff! The cliff definitively selects those with inner calm. The others stay on the ground, or crash.

***

Inner Calm Does Not Replace Mental Force:

Quanta Magazine had a very interesting story of a 34 year old Korean mathematician who became one through the friendship of a now 86 year old Japanese stars of mathematics, who got the Fields Medal in the past. The youngster may himself win the Fields Medal. However, he feels he betrayed his mentor, because he left the subject (singularities) of the mentor, to forge his own. And why did  he do that? Because (basically) he didn’t understand the senior mathematics, which is too advanced. I know this feeling well. One can feel completely incapable of understanding some pieces of mathematics others fly through. It’s similar, but worse, than listening to a language never heard before. At least in that case, one can point at something known, and associate a sound to it. In mathematics one does not understand, one points at something, and one has absolutely no idea what that is. And the more the other explains, the less one understands.  

***

Much turmoil, for a better brain! Wisdom, key to peace, if not self-satisfaction, is a child of mental storms:

A slug is calm. However, not brainy. What made our ancestors increasingly brainy? The will to power, the will to know, the will to experience, the will to imagine. In any case, the will NOT to be satisfied with what they had. Thus they created new ecological niches, new worlds they could colonize. The first amphibians were refugees from the ocean. However, they didn’t ask continents to respect oceanism. Instead, they changed themselves.

The first fishes who walked on their fins, in the mud, were not calm. They were no clams, full of inner calm. Instead, they struggled. They fought the elements.

Those who, full of turmoil and invective, ask for inner calm should ask themselves: why all the turmoil about turmoil? Turmoil is an excellent, indispensable mental tool..

Turmoil is irreplaceable when it fosters mental activity. Creative mental activity always causes turmoil, because mental creation means mental annihilation (of errors), or (energy costly) neurological construction of otherwise absent neuronal circuitry. (This is why those who don’t have the circuitry don’t get the math; learning math is about building circuits, and the brain can use up to 43% of a human’s energy!)

***

Summer, Interrupted In Its Anticipated Splendor:

Turmoil comes from the Middle (Ages) French tremouille “mill hopper,” in reference to the hopper’s constant motion to and fro, from Latin trimodia “vessel containing three modii,”  related to modus “measure.” Attested earlier in English as a verb (1510s). Turmoil is also related to the contemporary French “tremousser” (funny sort of writhing).

Submitted to some of the preceding, Nathan Daniel Curry opined that:”Only fear begets pain Patrice. Hate is one of the paints in fears palette. You may go on with your tired neurological palette. For a while. Yet, pathos, ethos and logos go deeper than the shadows on Plato’s cave.”

Well, Plato didn’t know the word “neuron”. Had he, maybe he would have realized networks of neurons could make his “forms”.

To claim that only fear begets pain means one has lived under deep anesthesia, all of one’s life, perhaps because one’s heart has been torn out. Fortunately, I had the occasion to experience raw physical pain recently:

I broke 2 bones, tore three ligaments, 6 weeks ago. I was not afraid, but it hurt. And ruined the most ambitious version of my summer to come. I still had to run 4 miles. First thing I did was to yank on the affected limb, to settle the articulation back into the joint. No fear, no hatred. No hatred, although the fall was caused by a city having put straw in a steep ravine. (Straw is nearly as slippery as ice…)

Reading this, I tried to stay calm under this traditional Buddhist broadside, similar to been attacked with a wet noodle full of tomato sauce. Confusing “pain” and hatred is similar to confusing victim and perpetrator. Weirdly common. Perhaps from suffering too much, or too little!

Humanism in full is what I defend. No drug, no placebo. No claiming that it is not, what it is. Face it, and love it.

And war is part of it, as even Islam has fully observed. Jihad, a war-like effort, inside oneself, or outside, is a central concept of Islam. It’s superior to laying supine like a sheep. This is why Islam could implant itself so powerfully (and not so nicely!) in India (pervaded, as India is, by various derivatives of Brahmanism. Much of the long and sorry deliquescence of Asian civilizations has to do with metaphysics too friendly to the fleecing of sheep being pervasive in too many minds. This stasis of Eastern progress is of course over now, as most of Asia has adopted much Western secular aggressively progressive metaphysics…  

Patrice Ayme’

Entangled Minds, Entangled Knowledge

HOW DOES THINKING WORK? Not straight, and beyond twisted!

Does thinking work linearly? No, not at all. Linear logic is how mathematics is presented to the masses. Yet, research mathematicians do not proceed that way the first time they figure out theorems. Mathematicians typically work out explicit baby examples, and then try to generalize, guided by these particulars; physicists do the same; they are all following the same method used by all small children!

Not only is linear logic not really the way the mind explains things to itself, but there is plenty of evidence that even what are viewed as the foundation of basic logics need to be discarded, if one wants to understand the way things are really understood.

What’s below is increasingly supported by neuroscience. The brain “connectome” is ever more important. As I have said in the past, it lives (so to speak) in high dimensional space. Plato had a two-dimensional wall and a three-dimensional world. But now we understand dimensions better!

This illustrates a research article on the importance of the Brain “Connectome”, a much more general spaces than those used to depict experiments in Quantum Physics

A professional philosopher opined in Aeon that Indian philosophy which is more than 3,000 year old compared knowledge to a banyan tree, whereas Western philosophy just said it was a vulgar tree as they are known in Europe, with a single trunk. Silly stuff, because, in any case, knowledge is a forest (knowledge of how to write haikus, or making beer, has nothing to do with ship hull construction!)  

Silly stuff, because we have learned so much more in the meantime! Overall the philosophy of 35 centuries ago can carry a long way, indeed: all our civilization rests on it. Indian mathematicians completed the so-called “Arabic numerals” which they got from the Greeks in a very tentative form. Actually the origins of writing and counting systems are probably 8,000 years old (that we know of; counting animals, and communicating that, is probably a basic hunting skill hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years old).

Lots of thinking has enabled, meanwhile, to establish certain knowledge which we can know reverberates towards general wisdom. “Certain knowledge” is another word for science.

***

So several points, in  support of the ENTANGLED MIND, as the state-of-the-art of civilization has it:

First modern logic (post Turing) shows that a logic can pretty much be anything. None of the axioms viewed as mandatory in the past are actually necessary: even allowing (A and Non-A) works.

Second, how is that wealth of logics possible, and still we call them logics? The answer is simple: logic is actually neurology, and neurology is a collection of sets of networks in what physicists call a “configuration space”. In neuroscience this is now called the “Connectome”. In Quantum Mechanics, those spaces are Hilbert Space. In neurology, hence logics, those spaces are much more general. In any case, at the very least, the topology of these neurologies and logics is not simply connected. Here is your banyan tree, 35 centuries old, as mathematical concept:  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simply_connected_space

Unions of banyan trees and the ground they arise from, are not simply connected. Well beyond that, thinking is a superbly high dimensional activity involving extravagant topologies and geometries: 

Many, many dimensions therein this “connectome”!

Third, evolution itself is not simply connected. All sorts of genetic messages go this way and that, across species. Co-evolution of species actually show that beyond the evolution and co-evolution of species and the ecological niches they evolve, what matters most is the evolution of traits inside ecological systems. Yes, quite a bit as in the movies “Avatar”!

https://www.nature.com/news/biodiversity-moves-beyond-counting-species-1.22079

Or, more generally, the co-evolution which matters most is that of the traits of ecosystems.

Quantum Physics posits that reality is much more, infinitely more, than multifaceted. Reality is not just multispecified, but multispacified. Indeed, each quantum experiment defined well enough to exist posits the existence of a Hilbert space. Each different experiment has a different Hilbert space. Some can be two-dimensional, some can be infinite dimensional. Measuring a quantity is identified to an “operator” inside said Hilbert space.

Science is certain knowledge. But it is subject to circumstances, conditions and context. In a sense, it is more important how we established sciences and guess new ones. We don’t need yesteryear’s quaint concepts. Too much knowing nothing kills better thinking (Internet civilization, as it is, is going nowhere intelligent.) Example: Monads (- single entities) exist, say those infused with obsolete philosophy. Instead, we moderns have the quantum & neurological networks!

There all the interconnections of the human mind, its incredible spaces of immensely complex topologies and geometries come in play mixing logics, pathos, ethos, wishful thinking and metaprincipled stances within, and against, the universe.    

“The Greeks are barbarians,” said the Garga Samhita, a Sanskrit text on the life of Krishna, “yet the science of astronomy originated with them and for this they must be reverenced like Gods.”

The Greeks invented astronomy, precisely because they were rough. Passions lift the spirits, after resting them in their vigorous embrace.  The Gods are barbarian, just go out there in nature, listen to thunder roll, and tremble.

Patrice Ayme’

 

Why This Site Shouldn’t Interest Most Americans

Very few Americans don’t believe in a God, or Life Force, Spirits and other Superstition (according to many polls, one of them reproduced below). I of course believe that all those who believe in superstition or divination are victims of a lack of introspection, resulting in a regrettable submission of (their) perception to domination. This the foundation of their political subjugation. It’s also the royal road to subjugation. Thus countries friendly to superstition and the religions attached to it, are typically submissive to mighty plutocracies.

And thus, as we see inequality rising around the world, it can be tracked to the imposition of the American “neoliberal” model, a modern ideology to impose the grossest traditional plutocracy!  Only 2% of North Americans do not believe in the supernatural: a god, life-force, spirits. This means that most North Americans are superstitious. In comparison, 11% of South-East Asians do not believe, in a god, life force, or spirit. One could say South-east Asia is five times less superstitious…. In France, a whopping one-third of the population don’t believe in a god, life force, or spirit. Thus the French are less ready to believe that plutocrats are benevolent, philanthropic spirits, under a merciful god… (The Market?)

The cult of all things religious has been reinforced top down in the USA since 1954, date of enthronement of “In God We Trust” (which displaced the Republican “E Pluribus Unum”).

For example, Americans are taught to venerate Pastor Martin Luther King. To esteem MLK is honorable, but his cult, at the exclusion of the cult of others, and not learning what exactly happened, arguably even more meritorious, is dubious. After all, President Eisenhower, an ex-general, and Earl Warren, head of the US Supreme Court, did the the heavy lift and courageous combat against segregation in the 1950s.  

***

Forget God and its “Pastors”: Presidents, Generals and Judges are who Order Progress:

Here is Earl Warren:

Segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children. The impact is greater when it has the sanction of the law, for the policy of separating the races is usually interpreted as denoting the inferiority of the Negro group…Any language in contrary to this finding is rejected. We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.

—Earl Warren, Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court

Much clearer than “I have a dream!”. To desegregate schools, Eisenhower sent the army. Conclusion: if you want to fight injustice, clear legal, republican thinking and the army, in other words, force, is what is needed.

This Is Why The French Revolution, Core to the United Nations’ Charter, Happened in France, and Not America!

MLK was made into a living god, a sort of Muslim-like “Messenger”. In truth he was part, and rather at the end, of a much more powerful wave he surfed on. Heroes may be useful, but the cult of the providential man prepares that of the “philanthropist” as plutocrats call themselves. (Just as in the Middle Ages plutocrats modestly called themselves, the “best”.)

Thus, when I criticize Islam, many Americans feel I defend the Bible (which is actually the source of Islam, something i know, but they don’t…)

The entire left of the world, not just the USA, suffers from searching for heroes, rather than clear thinking on the Republic. But this is precisely what the plutocratically owned media and the masters of public opinion, wanted. It’s the result of meta teaching, inculcating impotent forms of thought.

I should speak only to the French agnostics (but they don’t generally read English well enough to understand me, as a French professional philosopher once told me, thus he asked me to translate my thoughts in… French; a full-time job I couldn’t possibly do. Actually, I have no time to write a book. As Socrates implicitly pointed out, thinking per se is a full-time job… Socrates, going overboard, famously called writing “the semblance of truth”; that would make all of math, physics and now biology the “semblance of truth”… Although I do agree for Plato…)

***

Cult Of God, One & Only, Came From the Hydraulic Dictatorship Zone:

Verily, much of the roots civilization we use today appeared in what I call the Middle Earth (earliest writing is from there; although it was completely independently evolved in Mesoamerica). Egyptian civilization appeared 6,000 years ago, and the first city known in Anatolia, a few millennia before that.

However, the Middle East, central to the Middle Earth, suffered desiccation of the land, and then the minds, as it veered into . Thus it is natural that this physically sick region came up with a sick metaphysics. It is also of some import: it’s no coincidence that the Roman empire collapsed when Christianism was imposed to it, and countries such as Syria collapsed when Islamism was imposed to it (in the Seventh Century already!)

Some have noticed an analogy between “Ra” as in the theology of Egypt, AbRAhamism, and BRAhamism. This is not as ludicrous as it sounds. First, Abrahamism clearly arose in Egypt (as the Bible recognizes sneakily). Secondly Brahamanism, which gave rise to Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism itself came from the old Vedic religion, which, in turn, comes from the Middle East. Wikipedia says:

According to Anthony: “Many of the qualities of Indo-Iranian god of might/victory, Verethraghna, were transferred to the adopted god Indra, who became the central deity of the developing Old Indic culture. Indra was the subject of 250 hymns, a quarter of the Rig Veda. He was associated more than any other deity with Soma, a stimulant drug (perhaps derived from Ephedra) probably borrowed from the BMAC religion. His rise to prominence was a peculiar trait of the Old Indic speakers.[27]”

The oldest inscriptions in Old Indic, the language of the Rig Veda, are found not in northwestern India and Pakistan, but in northern Syria, the location of the Mitanni kingdom.[40] The Mitanni kings took Old Indic throne names, and Old Indic technical terms were used for horse-riding and chariot-driving.[40] The Old Indic term r’ta, meaning “cosmic order and truth”, the central concept of the Rig Veda, was also employed in the Mitanni kingdom.[40] Old Indic gods, including Indra, were also known in the Mitanni kingdom.[41][42][43]

The preceding illustrates well the concept of the Middle Earth. It also means that 72% of the world’s population derives its metaphysics from Egypt, or thereabout). More or less (the Egyptian empire often encroached deep on the so-called Fertile Crescent, which is anchored in the West by Israel, Lebanon, Syria…

Ultimately, Egypt, soon after a remarkable attempt at monotheism (which promptly spawned Abrahamism), decayed. Why? Some will point at the invasion of the “Peoples of the Sea”, which Egypt, alone among the Great Powers, was able to defeat (at considerable cost).

***

Egypt’s Government Model Was So Obsolete, Its Civilization Became Senile:

However, shortly after, Egypt exhibited a lack of animal spirits and was durably overrun by Libyans, and then Assyrians, Persians…  Tellingly, it’s the very fierce Greeks and their uncouth students, the Macedonians, who freed Egypt.

What happened to Egypt? Long drawn out dictatorship, when the rise of new technology called for start-ups, basically Greece was full of startups. Startup city states…

True, Egypt got invaded by vast empires, modernized versions of itself. When the Persians came around and colonized Egypt, so they did because Achaemenid Persia was a multinational empire, ultramodern in many ways.

However, ultimately the tiny Athenian startup defeated Persia at Marathon, and then insolently landed an army to free Egypt (its mental benefactor) from Persia!

***

Puritanism Does Not The Best Minds Make, Deep Thinking Is Dirty:

Last week I went out with a number of friends of the Anglo-Saxon persuasion, aggravated by reactive vegetarian ethics. I was retrospectively surprised by the lack of animal spirits. How can one have artful, constructive mental intercourse without the blossoming of passion? It certainly can’t happen when all conversations are guarded. After all, that’s why the divinity was imposed: the divinity imposed a subdued mentality, a submissive morality, and, definitively, a lack of inquiry.  

Thus it’s no accident that the French, long at the forefront of the battle of ideas against the obscurity of stupor, are the ones most aware that all past superstition is just that, superstition without foundation, as reckoned by its own definition.

And these are not words without foundation: in the Twelfth century, Pierre Abelard reinvented Classical logic (and went further). In the Fourteenth century, another Parisian, Jean buridan (Johannes Buridanus), went even further with the Cretan Paradox (rendered famous by Kurt Godel). Buridan also invented the hard part of Newton’s laws (three century before Newton). Actually Buridan anticipated not just Newton, but also Riemann’s force theory (used by Einstein and Al. in the Theory of Gravitation aka “General Relativity”!)

Both Abelard and Buridan were involved in colossal struggles, fights to death, with the catholic Church. Buridan had refused to enter the faculty of theology, so that he would not have to take an oath to the god of Abraham. Abelard fought Saint Bernard to death. Saint Bernard was then the most important, and most fanatical Catholic. At the time, it looked as if Saint Bernard sort of won. But history showed he lost. Buridan’s work were outlawed by the church, under the penalty of death, except in far eastern Europe, where they were taught to the young Copernicus.  

During the period 1100 CE to 1700 CE, Christianism caused an unending succession of terror, major wars, crusades, holocausts and massacres throughout Europe, and from there, the world. How come Europe didn’t collapsed as Rome did? First Europe was governed mostly by a plutocracy which was severely related and intermarried. They killed the poor a lot, themselves, much less. And actually that plutocracy was firmly in command, in secular command.

For example a fanatical Catholic such as Saint Louis put his mother, Blanche de Castille, ex-ruling queen, in charge several times as he made war through the Middle East (and letting himself be made a prisoner by the one and only female ruler that Islam ever had, in Egypt!). So he let a woman in charge, but he also had organized a modern justice system, now copied everywhere, including the USA.

Rome collapsed, because emperor Theodosius, around 390 CE unleashed the office of “Inquisitor” he had just created, against the “Heretics” (“those who made a choice”). Inquisitor, heretics: two terms, dripping with blood and terror, bathing in fire, imposed by Roman Catholic emperor Theodosius. By 400 CE, the empire was collapsing so much that the bishops put the Franks in charge of three provinces.

The Franks were Pagans

Hopefully, they still are!

And will stay that way! Maybe Americans could join their forefathers the Franks, and realize that, if they want paradise, they can get it only on Earth. Let me rephrase this a bit: If one wants paradise, one has to work hard, because one can get it only on Earth! It means in particular that on eschews the seductions of the rule of hell (plutocracy), and better start with free universal healthcare, as those who believe it’s their task to create and make a really Good God!

Patrice Ayme’

Two Monks And A Woman

All knowledge is belief, but not all belief is knowledge

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“Two monks and a woman” is a well-known “Buddhist” story (although Taoists also view it as theirs). Let me recount one version of the story, and its most common explanation. Then I will add that there is much more to this version of the story than said “explanation”. The usual explanation criticizes the younger monk, whereas I will explain the older one’s motivations. Trust my devious mind for twisting fairy tales into other dimensions!

Two Monks and a Woman – a Zen Lesson

A senior monk and a junior monk were traveling together. At one point, they came to a river with a strong current. As the monks were preparing to cross the river, they saw a very young and beautiful woman also attempting to cross. The young woman asked if they could help her cross to the other side.

Women Caused Lots Of Problems To The Wisdom Of Old

The two monks glanced at one another because they had taken vows not to touch a woman.

Then, without a word, the older monk picked up the woman, carried her across the river, placed her gently on the other side, and carried on his 
journey.

The younger monk couldn’t believe what had just happened. After rejoining his companion, he was speechless, and an hour passed without a word between them.

Two more hours passed, then three, finally the younger monk could contain himself any longer, and blurted out “As monks, we are not permitted a woman, how could you then carry that woman on your shoulders?”

The older monk looked at him and replied, “Brother, I set her down on the other side of the river, why are you still carrying her?”

***

Here is the traditional pious comment on this story:

This Zen story reveals a message about living in the present moment. How often do we carry around past hurts, holding onto resentments when the only person we are really hurting is ourselves? We all go through times in life when other people say things or behave in a way that is hurtful towards us. We can chose to ruminate over past actions or events, but it will ultimately weigh us down and sap our energy. Instead we can choose to let go of what doesn’t serve us anymore and concentrate on the present moment. Until we can find a level of peace and happiness in the present circumstances of our lives, we will never be content, because ‘now’ is all we will ever have.

***

There is much more to this story than just that it feels good to let go of resentment, and thus that eschewing resentment maximizes contentment: The older monk exerts judgment. He goes meta, comes out of the box: the senior monk captures the fundamental meaning of “not touching women”. Clearly crossing a dangerous river does not engage the same neurology and neurohormones as those involved in sex and reproduction. Instead, the older monk realizes that this is all about engaging the mental machinery of survival and care, a completely different mindset, noble and human in the best way.

(The preceding, realizing which neurology is appropriate to a situation at hand, relates to the problem of US healthcare: it conflates fundamentally two opposite mentalities, two neurologies which hate and contradict each other, care and greed.)

Thus the older monk sees the higher purpose, and sets himself to accomplish it. As it has only to do with surviving a river, it’s easy to forget, when the river is long gone.

However, the mind of the younger monk focused on the woman being a woman, and what monks are not supposed to do with women, although he wants very much to do it; the junior monk does not focus on the noble observation that the woman is in danger from the river.

***

Don’t Make Fun Of War, It Will Always Win, And Some:  

One can go one step further in the meta-analysis: why should we resent resentment? Resentment is a mental agency. It’s not exactly the CIA, the Central Intelligence Agency, but it has a somewhat similar inner purpose, providing a motivation to find out what really is going on. As all mental agencies, resentment evolved because it responded to some purpose. Here is a little Taoist story to enlighten us here:

All the people in the world are gathered in one room, and God asks, “Who wants world peace?” Everybody raises their hand except one man. God asks, “Who wants a war?” The one man raises his hand. God points at him and says, “He wins!”

Right, mosquitoes don’t care: their social interactions with human are limited to bloody penetration. Lack of enlightenment is only a problem to those who are evolved enough, who are already enlightened, and suffering from the actions of the unenlightened… or a problem to those in the process of enlightening themselves and perceiving their inadequacy. Mosquitoes don’t resent, either: they don’t have enough of a brain to relive old emotions. However, slightly more advanced insects  have more advanced emotional machinery: even flies know fear, recent stories show!

The older monk crosses the river with a woman on his back, because he cares about her in a non-gender, non-sexual, non-prurient, non-predatory way. Mosquitoes care only about one thing. When men think only of penetrating a woman, they are behaving like mosquitoes. The older monk cares about accomplishing a good action, which will make him feel good, enlightened, and light, thereafter. The younger monk cares too, but not the sort of care which is just a gift to the other: he is reliving issues surrounding penetration… as if he were just a self-glorifying mosquito.

Resentment can be good when it leads us to feel again (that’s what re-sentment means!) what the emotional landscape was, and whether it was handled optimally thereafter. Not just handled optimally by us, but by others, and by the hand of fate. Amusingly, modern neurology is on the side of resentment: most of “feelings” felt by the brain actually originate in re-entrant circuitry. So most perception can be looked at as resentment! (Roll over, Friedrich Nietzsche!)

Homo is a thinking being, or is not. A wise human explains things, makes theories about them. A wise cockroach, with its million neurons takes care of number one, itself! Munching over what happened, and why, and whether it could have been different, and better, if it had been different is not necessary idle thinking, because establishing theories is what humans do, and what human culture is made of. If resentment helps, so be it. Just as, if lower principles obstruct higher principles, they have to make way.

Patrice Ayme’ 

Abuse of Muslim Women Ignored By Western Leadership, and Why

The tolerance of inhuman, hard core Islam is symptomatic of the venality of elites and their “elected” servants, who we have to endure, all around the world. That’s not very surprising: the very principle of letting a few thousand people (“elected” or not) decide the fate of the biosphere, and, in particular more than seven billion people, is intrinsically demented and immoral.

Pseudo progressives claim “all religions have to be respected”, but then why not religions ordering human sacrifices? Answer: they do, because hard-core Islam does order human sacrifices of the many types of people the Qur’an orders to kill.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali (@ayaan) and Asra Q. Nomani (@asranomani), are authors (and in the case of Ayaan, an ex-Member of the Dutch Parliament) who were born into Islam, and got mutilated and abused as a result. The New York Times allowed them to write an “Op-Ed” (a vicious notion, as if the usual editorials of the New York Times had no opinion!))  Ms. Nomani is a co-founder of the Muslim Reform Movement.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, once a Dutch MP, was hunted out of Europe by murderous Islamists and various lethal fatwas. Authorities there proved unable and unwilling to protect hurt from rabid Islamists. Whereas there are very few Muslim from most fanatical Islamist region in the USA (yet!), where she took refuge, there are orders of magnitude more in Europe.

The New York Times blocked my comment on this excellent editorial (showing its duplicity: it claims that my comments are blocked by editors at the New York Times, but Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a friend and does not block me in social networks, far from it!). The true reason for the NYT blocking me? Because those posing as “liberals”, who are part of the elite, are more often than not, not “liberal” at all, but simply, venal, corrupt, greedy!

Gender equality is a fundamental human trait. Any ideology ordering otherwise should be unlawful to preach, especially to the youth. Not all variant of Islam are sexist: they are outliers in the “Sufi” tradition, for example in West Africa. However mainstream Islam is deeply sexist, women being literally at best only a fraction of men.

That present day “liberals” refuse to see this means that they are just taking orders from the powers that be (the ones which got them elected to start with). A basic triangular conspiracy exists between oil-producing monarchies, international finance and elected politicians. It was set in stone when president Roosevelt met with Abdulaziz Ibn Saud, king of Saudi Arabia, in 1945.

The attitude of present day “liberal” leaders relative to Islam is revealing of their general attitude relative to the elites and the mighty: they join them rather than contradict them. Their positions arise from greed for their personal power, rather than principle for humanity.

****

(Part of) Text from Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Asra Nomani below:

The so-called “left”, or self-described “liberal” elite, verily, an elite of leeches, has never read Voltaire, or Montaigne. All it read is that Wall Street and Saudi Arabia have all the money. Compare Ayaan’s saying with Voltaire’s own:”One must crush infamy!”

June 22, 2017

… “Senator Harris took her seat in front of us as a member of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. We were there to testify about the ideology of political Islam, or Islamism.

… just moments before the hearing began, a man wearing a Muslim prayer cap had stood up and heckled us, putting Capitol police officers on high alert. We were girding ourselves for tough questions.

But they never came. The Democrats on the panel, including Senator Harris and three other Democratic female senators — North Dakota’s Heidi Heitkamp, New Hampshire’s Maggie Hassan and Missouri’s Claire McCaskill — did not ask either of us a single question.

This wasn’t a case of benign neglect. At one point, Senator McCaskill said that she took issue with the theme of the hearing itself. “Anyone who twists or distorts religion to a place of evil is an exception to the rule,” she said. “We should not focus on religion,” she said, adding that she was “worried” that the hearing, organized by Senator Ron Johnson, a Republican from Wisconsin, would “underline that.” In the end, the only questions asked of us about Islamist ideologies came from Senator Johnson and his Republican colleague, Senator Steve Daines from Montana.

Just as we are invisible to the mullahs at the mosque, we were invisible to the Democratic women in the Senate.

How to explain this experience? Perhaps Senators Heitkamp, Harris, Hassan and McCaskill are simply uninterested in sexism and misogyny. But obviously, given their outspoken support of critical women’s issues, such as the kidnapping of girls in Nigeria and campus sexual assault, that’s far from the case.

No, what happened that day was emblematic of a deeply troubling trend among progressives when it comes to confronting the brutal reality of Islamist extremism and what it means for women in many Muslim communities here at home and around the world. When it comes to the pay gap, abortion access and workplace discrimination, progressives have much to say. But we’re still waiting for a march against honor killings, child marriages, polygamy, sex slavery or female genital mutilation.

Sitting before the senators that day were two women of color: Ayaan is from Somalia; Asra is from India. Both of us were born into deeply conservative Muslim families. Ayaan is a survivor of female genital mutilation and forced marriage. Asra defied Shariah by having a baby while unmarried. And we have both been threatened with death by jihadists for things we have said and done. Ayaan cannot appear in public without armed guards.

In other words, when we speak about Islamist oppression, we bring personal experience to the table in addition to our scholarly expertise.

Yet the feminist mantra so popular when it comes to victims of sexual assault — believe women first — isn’t extended to us. Neither is the notion that the personal is political. Our political conclusions are dismissed as personal; our personal experiences dismissed as political.

That’s because in the rubric of identity politics, our status as women of color is canceled out by our ideas, which are labeled “conservative” — as if opposition to violent jihad, sex slavery, genital mutilation or child marriage were a matter of left or right. This not only silences us, it also puts beyond the pale of liberalism a basic concern for human rights and the individual rights of women abused in the name of Islam.

There is a real discomfort among progressives on the left with calling out Islamic extremism. Partly they fear offending members of a “minority” religion and being labeled racist, bigoted or Islamophobic. There is also the idea, which has tremendous strength on the left, that non-Western women don’t need “saving” — and that the suggestion that they do is patronizing at best. After all, the thinking goes, if women in America still earn less than men for equivalent work, who are we to criticize other cultures?

This is extreme moral relativism disguised as cultural sensitivity. And it leads good people to make excuses for the inexcusable. The silence of the Democratic senators is a reflection of contemporary cultural pressures. Call it identity politics, moral relativism or political correctness — it is shortsighted, dangerous and, ultimately, a betrayal of liberal values.

The hard truth is that there are fundamental conflicts between universal human rights and the principle of Shariah, or Islamic law, which holds that a woman’s testimony is worth half that of a man’s; between freedom of religion and the Islamist idea that artists, writers, poets and bloggers should be subject to blasphemy laws; between secular governance and the Islamist goal of a caliphate; between United States law and Islamist promotion of polygamy, child marriage and marital rape; and between freedom of thought and the methods of indoctrination, or dawa, with which Islamists propagate their ideas.

Defending universal principles against Islamist ideology, not denying that these conflicts exist, is surely the first step in a fight whose natural leaders in Washington should be women like Kamala Harris and Claire McCaskill — both outspoken advocates for American women.

We believe feminism is for everyone. Our goals — not least the equality of the sexes — are deeply liberal. We know these are values that the Democratic senators at our hearing share. Will they find their voices and join us in opposing Islamist extremism and its war on women?”

According to Aischa, child-bride of Prophet Muhammad, the Qur’an as written by the Third Caliph, Uthman, was extremely sexist. Less sexist version of Muhammad’s message were destroyed under the order of Uthman, who ended assassinated as a result. Aischa fought with an army for her anti-sexist views, but, differently from European women, she was defeated at the famous “Battle of the Camel”.

***

Straight out of Qur’an and Hadith:

To divorce a wife, a Muslim man can just say “Talaq, talaq, talaq” That’s called the instant divorce law. It was controversial even in Muhammad’s times, and Muhammad criticized it. However, according to the Hadith, the Prophet practiced it. Even the New York Times recognizes this instant divorce law is a problem today, all the way to India.

All the more as, according to Hadith, “irrevocable divorce” does not allow for any sort of allowance or remittance.

The Qur’an Surah An-Nisa, 34 defines the relations between husbands and wives. Quran 4:34 reads:

Men are in charge of women, because Allah hath made the one of them to excel the other, and because they spend of their property (for the support of women). So good women are the obedient, guarding in secret that which Allah hath guarded. As for those from whom ye fear rebellion, admonish them and banish them to beds apart, and beat them. Then if they obey you, seek not a way against them. Lo! Allah is ever High, Exalted, Great.

— Qur’an 4:34, [5]

Some of the relation of Islam with sexism is nearly hilarious. Here is a Hadith showing how much of lala land Islam is: “Narrated ‘Abdullah bin Zam’a: The Prophet said, “None of you should flog his wife as he flogs a slave and then have sexual intercourse with her in the last part of the day.”

However, a bit of discipline is good for the ladies:

— Sahih al-Bukhari, 7:62:132 see also Sahih al-Bukhari, 8:73:68

In Sunni Hadith, violent sexism rules, and is reiterated ad nauseam. here is an example: “Narrated Umar ibn al-Khattab: The Prophet (peace be upon him) said: A man will not be asked as to why he beat his wife. — Sunan Abu Dawood, 11:2142”

The unending litany of verbal and “Sharia legal” abuse hurled at women in Islam sacred texts is properly astounding. It goes against human nature so deeply that any civilization submitting to it can only fail.

***

We Already Knew This, But A Slightly Different Angle Is Instructive:

Making women uneducated and submissive make them stupid, and thus, so for their children, and the grown-ups who follow, insuring a vicious circle of less than optimal intelligence and culture. Thus Islam’s sexism is self-reproducing, and self-defeating.

Islam is not just in contradiction with the present (“Western”) civilization, and the United Nations Charter (whose foundation is basically:”All Persons Are Created Equal”). Any preaching otherwise should be outlawed. Islam is also in contradiction with human ethology itself, the core of human strength, as human sexual equality is a genetic given.

But so, of course, is plutocracy. In Islam, plutocracy sees an enemy of its enemy, humanity. So they are friends!

Patrice Ayme’

[The integral version of the text above from Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Arsa Nomani was published first in the New York Times under the title:“Kamala Harris, Speak Up. Don’t Be Silent on Women’s Rights.” I spent an hour trying to persuade the New York Times to publish my comment, it replied by interfering with my computer, erasing text. Then the New York Times changed the title to “They Brushed off Kamala Harris, Then She Brushed Us Off.” So, according to the New York Times, the text of the two ladies above is not about women’s rights anymore, but all about ladies “brushing off” each other.

A fight for human rights oppressed by a misogynistic ideology has been replaced, in its title, according to the New York Times, by cat ladies fighting for supremacy. Thus the New York Times manipulate minds, one moody detail at a time… All the comments are also doctored, selected, to present a biased view of what We The People are thinking. British tabloids have used that method for decade, hence Brexit. The New York Times is ever more brazen in its practice of it.]

Why The Anglo-Saxon Rage Against France

CROSSROADS OF THOUGHT, OR WHY THE FRENCH ARE SO SMART:

Another day, another explosion of a luggage full of high explosive in a public space, courtesy of Islamist terrorist, Oussama Z., a primitive Moroccan screaming “God is great” in Arabic. He tried to terrorize Brussels’ train station, but law enforcement spotted him before he could organize properly his devilish terror weapons. The fanatical barbarian was promptly shot and killed by officers. The Islamists have good reason to be enraged against France, and anything French-like, such as Belgium, ever since they attacked France in 715 CE… And got whipped. Before they invaded again, in 721 CE, to be whipped again. And again, in 732 CE. Some are gluttons for punishment. Islamist feel that the more punished they get, the closer to God. Which is great, probably because He is a homosexual in denial, who detest women. Different people, different nations, different mentalities.

***

France Alleged To Be “Liberticide”, Latest example of Anti-French rage and Hypocrisy:

Recently various major Anglo-Saxon media, including the crooked New York Times, preventively trashed new proposed anti-terrorist French laws as dictatorial. This is more than hypocritical. Those proposed French laws are nothing of the sort. Whereas US practice is beyond dictatorial, they are more police-state like (8 millions are under “Judicial Supervision” in the US!) 

For example a proposed French law says that the police could ask drivers of vehicles to have those inspected when they want to enter a security perimeter around major events (such as the “Tour de France”). This is a measure against car bombs. However, if the driver refuses an inspection of his or her car, to see if it carries a huge bomb, the driver can leave, no question asked. Try that in the US: you will be shot at, and everybody knows it (so nobody tries!) Everybody in the US knows that when the police gives an order, either you obey, or you get shot.

How “liberticide” is that? According to the crooked New York Times, enormously so (New York Times is crooked because it has banned me during the 2003 Iraq war, and for the last 6 years, although it denies it does, a further lie!)

By the way I have driven cars in the USA which way inspected for car bombs. Turning around was not an option, as I was dealing with the ladies and gentlemen of the US Secret Service, and that was nine years ago already. Major US media didn’t write editorials about it. I also found this to be no problem at all (because my car was not equipped with a car bomb!) I didn’t feel my right to carry a car bomb was trampled underfoot.

***

Conflicts between nations and versions of civilization arise from different mentalities:

These different mentalities do not just arise haphazardly. They often originate for a number of incontrovertible reasons. For example Fernand Braudel found that the desiccation of the Middle East brought increasingly dictatorial regimes, necessary to organize the enormous, increasingly complex hydraulic systems necessary for the survival of civilization. Thus the Pharaoh became “shepherd of his flock” (as official Egyptian propaganda put it, copied by the Bible a millennium later). Not surprisingly, Egypt, long at the forefront of civilization faded away as an engine of mental creation.

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Why The French Are Like The Franks Who Became Like The Gauls:

It’s a curious thing that the same mentality inhabits France now as it did even before the Romans showed up. The population changed significantly in the meantime from massacres, immigration, emigration, etc. Centuries before the Roman empire, though, the 60 states of France each had their own treasury (and currency). And, in many technologies they were best in the world. Much of the Roman military equipment was purchased in Celtic Spain and Gaul (light metal helmets, swords). Five centuries later, the 37 arsenal of the Roman empire made their own weapons, right. But that was five centuries later, and by then Gallia was arguably the strongest piece of the Roman empire, and with a mind of its own (there was even a “Gallic empire” within the Roman empire, for a while).

France: trade routes from Med to Atlantic, and from Med to North Sea, and from Med to Germany! Melting Pot Max!

So why the same? Precisely because France was the original melting pot, the three main trade routes between the Mediterranean and Northern Europe being there. A crossroad of trade and especially mental trade. The Gauls actually used Hermes, also known as Mercury, as their main imported deity. That was the god of commerce, and communications

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Why The Clashing Mentalities Between France and the Anglo-Saxons?

England has been in conflict with France since, paradoxically enough, the highly successful invasion and colonization of England by a French army led by the Duke of Normandy. As the latter and his barons took control on the other side of the channel, the new king of England, namely aforesaid Duke, became a vassal of the king of France. The king of Francia was not any king out there. After the de facto secession of the Western Franks from the rest of the “Renovated” Roman empire, the king of France was officially “Roman emperor in his own kingdom”.

This status of vassal went on for centuries. The situation became worse when the “Louve de France”, the She-Wolf of france, daughter of Philippe IV Le Bel of France, became absolute monarch of England. She was succeeded by her son Edward III, grandson of Le Bel, legitimate king of England and France. At that point, the leadership of England could claim that Paris was vassal to London, and the 475 years war (so-called “100 years war”) was on.

Another problem is that the Duke of Normandy had to persuade the English that it was in their best interest to be ruled by him. First, of course, the french outlawed slavery in England, something that the 20% of the population who were slaves, loved. But William had to make We the People stakeholders in their nation: England had been crisscrossed by civil wars and invasions, with all sorts of Angles, and Saxons, and (“Fair”) Viking from Norway, and Dark Vikings from Denmark, for 5 centuries… Thus William of Normandy installed a sort of more direct democracy which was frowned on by the more traditional Franco-Roman plutocracy on the other side of the Channel. That “English” trick was increased in following centuries, for example when other (French) aristocrats tried to be elected king by the (English) Parliament, and hoped to do that, by first increasing the powers of said Parliament.

In any case, as France was much more powerful than England then, with several times the population and riches, and a closer connection to Roman inheritance, the leadership in England could survive only through more devious and militarily efficient means than those used by the French from France.

In the end, England became basically a more efficient version of France, and that included a mentality that the French could see as more pragmatic, less principled, more perfidious and hypocritical.

As French supremacy lasted until 1815, the English had to try much harder until then, with a more underhanded mentality. In 1815, the English monarch renounced his claim to the throne of France (a claim started by Isabelle and her son Edward III, and later reconfirmed in an accord to end the “100 Year War” which Joan of Arc and her operators would violate, relaunching the war for another 375 years).

After that, France was clearly the junior partner in the way of world empire… But not as a land power, where the French military stayed the most powerful in the West, most of the time, until May 1940.

The German empire was the world’s most powerful military in the period 1871-1914. However, in September 1914, it was nearly annihilated by a French counterattack at the First Battle of the Marne, shattering the conspiracy to take control of the world. The reason for french military might can be tracked all the way back to the Third Century, when the Confederation of the Salian Franks was created, and Franks went up Roman rivers in what would become the Viking style, five centuries later. The alliance between Romans and Franks arose from these earlier conflicts, when the Romans, and in particular Caesar Constantine, realized that Frankish military might was best co-opted, rather than fought.

The ascent of the Franks was defined by them militarily defeating all and any enemies who tried to encroach on present day France. The list is nearly never ending, and includes the Huns, the Goths, and the Berber and Arab armies of the three invasions of Francia by the Umayyad Caliphate (715-748 CE), which brought its demise in 750 CE (as the bones of its armies laid in France). The switch from “Franks” to “French” happened in the Twelfth Century, and the first unelected French king was Jean I, an infant who ruled 5 days, before being probably poisoned (by Countess Mahaut of Artois; now a region of pseudo-independent Belgium).

Thus the French are frank and aggressive. On this civilization grew and multiplied. Frank, to know and transmit the truth, which is the core strength of war. Aggressive, to impose the truth. Why so much war? Because France is at core of Europe, where the easiest main three trade routes pass (going across the Pyrenees, the Alps, the Carpathians, the Balkan Mountains or the Caucasus, all East-West ranges, mostly, is best done through… France!)

More details of European topography, showing better that the easiest trade routes indeed go through France… South of Massif Central (the volcanic range in the middle of France), going west, and up the Rhones valley.

The French state is the direct descendant of the Roman state. There is actually no discontinuity whatsoever, militarily, legal or otherwise. The first well-known elected French king, Clovis, was also Roman Consul and Imperator of the Roman army. Clovis succeeded to do what the Roman state couldn’t succeed to do in the preceding 150 years: Clovis crushed and evacuated the Visigoths (Battle of Vouillé, in 507 CE). Thus Francia and Constantinople, all the way to the Tenth and Eleventh Century, viewed themselves as part of the same Romanitas (resulting in common military campaigns, as when the Eastern Roman fleet operated on the French Riviera in the Tenth Century, in cooperation with Frankish armies in the interior, to extricate the Muslims who had been terrorizing Western Europe, in still another invasion; the First Crusade, 150 years later was the reciprocal courtesy…)

The philosophical method William the Conqueror used is exactly the same which Clovis used. And that’s not happenstance. Notice that, in both cases, those methods were quite opposite to the cool massacres, and thorough holocausts enacted by Julius Caesar when he conquered Gallia (Gaul).

However, the gigantic French empire was the object of US greed by 1914, and the envoy of hyper racist US President Wilson (a democrat, ex-president of Princeton University, a famous plutocratic university) conspired, encouraged, abetted and talked the German Kaiser into launching a world war, which he couldn’t win, with the result that, in 1945, the US was in perfect position to grab both the British and French empires, in the guise of decolonization.

This crowned the “American Century”, this worldwide empire, in the glory of which we are all presently basking.

So why the “Anglo-Saxon” anti-French rage?

This anti-French rage is a preventive measure, lest all the preceding be found out.

And should we be Zen-like, satisfied with this cognitive cover-up, organized in great part by the glorious US plutocratic universities? No. Why? Because we are getting through what promises to be maybe the greatest extinction of the biosphere ever since Snowball Earth. The simple US greed mentality is completely insufficient to deal with this crisis. Americans emit 16 tons of CO2 per capita, per year, in no small reason because they are such glorious, sensitive people, having attended their glorious super smart universities of greed, and they need to drive big truck as soon as they are 16 years old. By comparison, the French emit 6 (six) tons of CO2 per capita, per year. Because they are such losers. But, precisely, we need to learn to lose gracefully the battle of mental comfort and venal stupidity, to win the next war.  The ultimate war. The war of biosphere survival. A war against all of yesteryear’s mentalities.

Patrice Ayme’

 

Another Day, Another Islamist Attack: Outlaw The Preaching!

Ah, for a respite from heavy philosophizing such as pondering consciousness and the associated unconscious… We can trust the barbarians to provide us with what they passes for entertainment in the desert, namely, mayhem… (Desert raiding by nomads a la Muhammad, attacking traders and peasants, is even older than civilization…)

A French Islam practitioner attacked the Gendarmerie on the Champ Elysees. The assailant, complete with explosive, assault gun, etc. was badly burned and died at the scene (the Gendarmerie is part of the army, not the police, and is heavily armed).

Literal Islam, as depicted literally in the Qur’an, and, worse, the Hadith, is incompatible with Western civilization. This is not being insulting, unfair or racist to say so. It was explicitly designed that way by Muhammad. Muhammad expressed himself very clearly: he thought the Jews and Christians had failed to enact the Bible literally. He also wrote that the Greeks, Romans and Persians, with their empires, had prevented the Arabs to raid, for a full millennium. With Muhammad’s new religion, this was all going to change: demographics and Jihad would be cranked up. 

Core Of Western Civilization Under Siege. Notre Dame is not just a cathedral built nine centuries ago. It was also where what came to be known as the “UNIVERSITY” was located, for many centuries before that. By law the Cathedral Of Paris had (the best in Europe) secular teaching in Europe, already by the Seventh Century. It was an obligatory mandate, a law imposed ordered onto all religious establishment by Salian (secular) law.  When the old cathedral was demolished and replaced by the present one, the mandate went on.

That Islam is a war machine against Greco-Roman civilization  (and even against the related Persian Sassanid civilization) is the incontrovertible fact, made plain in the sacred texts of Islam. It’s written black on white. Ultimately, there are thus only two outcomes: 1) Literal interpretation and preaching of Literal Islam is outlawed, and the law against preaching murder of most of the population is enforced. Or, 2) Western civilization is destroyed (as Muhammad intended explicitly to do, and that’s why he personally led the first attack against the Roman empire).

This is simple, and it should not be very hard to understand to those with independent thinking capability. Those who have not spent, let’s say one hundred hours reading the full Qur’an and the most significant parts of the Hadith, should not be considered cogent enough to disagree stridently with this (and most Muslims have not read the Qur’an, let alone the Hadith; they only know some deceiving passages which carefully avoid the gist of the message of the Messenger…) The Qur’an for example, orders “a rain of stones” on homosexuals. On this particular subject, the Qur’an quotes Lot, in the Bible’s Old Testament.

And so on. Most people nowadays belong to categories of people which the Qur’an orders to be “thrown in the fire”. The Hadith 41; 685, repeated many times in different variants, says that: …”Allah’s Messenger… : The last hour would not come unless the Muslims will FIGHT against the Jews and the Muslims would KILL them…” Next time you consider Israel’s occupation of the Golan Heights, and its influence beyond that, remember this… 

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2015/01/16/thought-crime/

It is possible to construct variant of “Sufi” Islam which are fully compatible with Western civilization (as found historically in Senegal). Those should be encouraged, promoted. But they have been swamped by Literal Islam, deadly enemy of civilization.

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2017/06/10/islam-religion-of-fighting-says-caliph/

Preaching hate crimes should be considered to be a grievous crime, especially when targeting children. It does not matter if it is in the name of the Arab God, or the Aztec God Huichilobos. Preaching, or teaching hatred should be punished by very long prison sentences, and expulsion (when possible).

Notice that ordering to kill many categories of people, as the Qur’an orders to, is tantamount to order human sacrifices of most of the population. In the Roman Republic, religions ordering human sacrifices were outlawed into inexistence. So there we have a legal precedent, more than 2,000 years old.

***

This was in answer to an article in the Economist, typical of the cluelessness of journalists :”Why Europe’s Muslims do not chant in unison, as its politicians would like. The messy politics of European Islam [Erasmus, Jun 18th 2017]

IN THE realm of European Islam, nothing is going quite to plan. In the perfect scenario of the continent’s mainstream politicians, the law-abiding majority of Muslim citizens would be coming together now in a massive, thundering condemnation of terrorism. That in turn would create a renewed social consensus, paving the way for the defeat of terrorism in its latest, horrible forms, as it has been perpetrated in places like Nice, Brussels, Berlin, Manchester and London.

Reality turns out to be messier…

[Prime Minister] Theresa May threw out a sharp-tongued challenge to British Muslims in the aftermath of the murderous attack that began at London Bridge on June 3rd. The problem, the prime minister declared, is ideological and cultural, rather than simply a challenge for the police and security services. In her words,

There is…far too much tolerance of extremism in our country. So we need to become far more robust in identifying it and stamping it out across the public sector and across society. That will require some difficult, and often embarrassing, conversations`…The whole of our country needs to take on this extremism, and we need to live our lives not in a series of separated, segregated communities but as one truly United Kingdom.”

… [Hundreds of British Imams reacted…] “But look closely at the prayer leaders’ declaration, as published by the Muslim Council of Britain, and you will see that they are far from following Mrs May’s hymn-sheet. The first batch of imams to sign the “no funeral” statement added some important qualifications:

The statement should not detract from the seriousness of oppression and persecution occurring around the world, especially to Muslims, whom we remember in our prayers by day and night…It should also not detract from deeply unfortunate statements issuing forth from some quarters, which seek to implicate the entire Muslim community and the religion of Islam, or insinuate that one system of values is ontologically superior to another.

Their message to Mrs May and her government might be paraphrased as something like: “If you want a broad conversation about ideology and culture, even an embarrassing one, let’s have one. But it won’t be the sort of conversation that you want or expect. You want to talk about imams with hardline ideas about gender, sexuality and self-segregation by Muslims, because you think all that is a gateway to terrorism. Well, we want to talk about Muslim grievances, including those over British foreign policy.”

In France, meanwhile, some lines of communication that used, for better or worse, to connect mainstream politics with Muslim community groups seem to have failed. One of the most widely organised Islamic bodies in France had hitherto been called the Union of Islamic Organisations of France (UOIF). It recently vowed to rename itself the “Muslims of France”. It is regarded as being ideologically close to the Muslim Brotherhood abroad, which it denies. During the 2012 presidential poll, it backed François Hollande, the successful Socialist candidate.

This year, Marine Le Pen, a far-right presidential candidate, repeatedly alleged that the UOIF and her centrist rival Emmanuel Macron were somehow linked in a disreputable pact. The charge completely failed to stick, or to prevent his victory, but it did force its targets onto the defensive. The Muslim organisation urged people to go to the polls but made no recommendation; and, in contrast with previous years, secular politicians stayed away from the organisation…

Staying away will not be enough. The essence of the problem has to be addressed. Neither the Bible, nor the Qur’an should rule the Republic. And serious death threats should be treated as such.

Republics are best at eradicating threats. Ah, yes, but the Republic is closer to a plutocracy in all too many ways, nowadays, and that’s the crux of the matter… The media are held by plutocrats and the meta teaching of plutocrats is how, not to think (so one won’t bother them). Then they can be like Amazon, telling you everything you need, and even feeding you (Amazon just bought “Whole Foods” for 14 billion dollars).

To make it easier on plutocracy, some in the French government announced that it was OK for Google not to pay tax. And I actually talked to a high level Intel engineer at a party in Atherton, California, 48 hours ago, and he told me, and others, that he didn’t see why large companies should pay tax. He added he didn’t believe in conspiracy theories… My answer discombobulated him, deeply, and he physically left the party. I guess I am a party pooper…

Patrice Ayme’

SUBCONSCIOUS (Theory Thereof!)

SUBCONSCIOUSNESS AS HIGHER DIMENSIONAL SPACES OF INCARNATED POTENTIALITIES:

I suggest the following: the “subconscious“, “unconscious”, or “preconscious” (“Vorbewusste”, Freud)  is, partly, the set of all weak synaptic (“Hebbian”) activity (in other words, all weak neural networks; yet, not only!). Thus, I propose that much of the so-called “subconscious” does not differ in nature from normal neuronal activity. The subconscious is not that… subconscious. A difference between conscious and subconscious is in intensity, the facility, of the neuronal pathways, not their nature.

(If you ask where I got this inspiration from, my own brain is a full lab at night, and not just at night; for example hard mountain running causes divided consciousness, but it also shuts down part of the brain, while opening others: thinking about the Foundations of Quantum Physics or Economics, or History, while running, or indulging in another passionate activity, gives completely different insights, contexts, and moods than when cuddling with one’s computer, precisely because parts of the brain shut down, including inhibitory regions… Introspection stays the main engine of philosophy, after all these years; see De La Mettrie’s fever, and his “machine man“, below)

The conscious would be where neuronal connections are strong, well-known. The subconscious would be WHERE connections are weak, and known only occasionally, during sleep, say. Thus the subconscious would be made, in part, of neuronal circuitry which got activated from UNUSUAL CIRCUMSTANCES, thus sparsely, rarely, occasionally, and thus established WEAK connections.

In Its Simplest Form, A Subconscious Connection Is Just A Little Used Neuronal Connection. There are more tentative engrams, and some just potential.

Where Are Consciousness & Subconsciousness Located? Configuration Spaces, Just As Quantum Spaces! 

Amusingly, yet deeply, some may ask where is this “WHERE“, I am talking about where the subconscious would be, in my opinion, somehow, somewhat located. They may sneer: ‘isn’t it all in the brain anyway? how can the conscious be in the same 3 dimensional space as consciousness?‘

So where is this “WHERE“? This “WHERE” is a mathematical space! Hey, why did you think Riemann invented high dimensional geometry for? Interestingly, tellingly, and somewhat connected, the same exact objection has been made when the likes of yours truly have claimed that “Quantum Waves Are Real“: some physicists haughtily sneered back that Quantum Waves couldn’t possibly be real, because they would have to be not just objects in three-dimensional space, like the average tsunami, but in so-called “configuration space“. No, seriously, guys, with Quantum Fields in zillions of dimensions superposed on top of each other, and an omnipresent non-zero “Higgs” field interacting with all other quantum fields, to give them mass, and an all too real as far as the LHC in Geneva has it?… Well, as far as I am concerned, configuration space is space, just like three-dimensional space, is space, it’s real… I am not a mathematician for no good reason!

***

Why Sentient Animals Sleep: So That They Can Think Creatively!

This little theory of part of the subconscious as weak neuronal connections explains in part why animals sleep. Indeed, how were those weak connections which end up constituting most of the subconscious  activated? How come they are not activated in normal, conscious life? Sleep! A trick to do so is by shutting down parts of the brain, and thus forcing connectivity in other parts and pathways. How to shut down part of the brain? With sleep or heavy exercise, or passion, including abject fear and mad hunger, tourism, etc…Shutting down part of the brain, including inhibitory circuitry and organs, forces the Will to Connect to use unusual pathways. If those make sense, they get pre-established, and should some real world situations INPUT resemble what was encountered previously in the inner brain, those networks, that means those logics, those solutions, will get activated…

The usual advantages of sleep are considered to be housecleaning and reviewing, and reinforcing the neurological pathways experienced during the day. What I am saying here is that sleep forces unusual neuronal activity, thus the imagination. It’s an essential way of obtaining creative intelligence.

***

Homme Machine, the Machine Man With A Twist: 

Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751), a physician born in Saint Malo, France, made observations on himself, during a feverish illness, referring to the action of quickened blood circulation upon thought, which led him to the conclusion that mental processes were to be accounted for as the effects of organic changes in the brain and nervous system. De la Mettrie argued that the organization of humans was done to provide the best use of complex matter as possible (this may have influenced Lamarck, and is as modern as possible: Quantum Field Theory find local minima of Lagrangians which depict energy; in a way a form of generalized economics…)

Julien Offray de la Mettrie, l’ Homme Machine! Obviously a Modern Psychology Animated Julien, But He Lived Only 42 Years (Same as his contemporary, Émilie Du Châtelet, discoverer of energy, infrared, etc.)

Most reasonable  Austrian-British philosopher cum physicist Karl Popper discussed de la Mettrie’s claim that man is a machine in relation to evolution and quantum physics:

“Yet the doctrine that man is a machine was argued most forcefully in 1751, long before the theory of evolution became generally accepted, by de La Mettrie; and the theory of evolution gave the problem an even sharper edge, by suggesting there may be no clear distinction between living matter and dead matter. And, in spite of the victory of the new quantum theory, and the conversion of so many physicists to indeterminism de La Mettrie’s doctrine that man is a machine has perhaps more defenders than before among physicists, biologists and philosophers; especially in the form of the thesis that man is a computer.”

From my point of view, this is not surprising. Indeterminism does not contradict the machine man. Far from it: it makes it possible. Indeterminism, the fuzziness of waves, smooths out and enriches everything, including in the brain: mechanics now does not mean wheels with teeth activating each other, but nonlinear waves crashing and interfering, a greater wealth of logic.

So, in my view, there is programmation, to generate pre-established connections but it’s self-generated, and those connections become self evolved… That’s a situation quite similar to what happens in biological evolution of the phenotype itself… And it’s related; namely lots of “instincts” are just evolved neurocircuitry. Evolved during one’s lifetime, even in a bee’s brain…

***

The Subconscious Is Not Reduced to Alternative Neuronal Networks: Influential Geometries and Topologies Are Crucial Too:

Are potential Hebbian networks all there could be to the unconscious? No. Some of the unconscious is of an even weaker nature. In that case the full neuronal connections were not made yet, but pathways still potentially exist, from the physical proximity of elements of potential paths…

The unconscious is the domain of possibilities and potentialities. The unconscious is a theoretician of the possible, the imaginable… So neuronal, glial, logical, emotional neighborhoods topologically close can well lead to unexpected, never experienced before connections. Those potentialities are also part of the unconscious. So the unconscious is not just (mini or pre-) Hebbian, about weak electric connections, but also about more subtle topologies (in the mathematical sense!). In particular emotional topologies. Thus the subconscious goes from weak Hebbian connections (what dreams are greatly made of) to topological conspiracies.

Take an example: why plutocrats love art so much; they will tell you that they have a sense of beauty, and I will tell you they have a sense of tax evasion; the plutocrats’ subconscious about art is that it enables tax evasion, by creating an untaxable, untaxed currency and store of value; but of course nothing a plutocrat in good standing will want to have pointed out in the plutocratically owned media. Nor anything that a plutocrat who wants to think highly about himself, or herself, would like to see pointed out, anywhere.

***

Consciously Connecting With Socrates’ Daemon, Monism, and the like:

Historically, the subconscious was defined as the part of consciousness that is not currently in focal awareness. The mechanisms I evoked above explain how that work. “Consciousness” is, first of all, an efficient administrator, not forgetting that the brain consumes up to an astounding 43% of the energy that a human uses. Thus “focal awareness” will favor networks with strong synapses bringing action readily. You can’t hesitate when those saber tooth lions come around, lest you want to become dinner. Hesitation, inaction, will surely kill you. Errors may be survivable (and the source of instruction).

The word “subconscious” is an anglicized version of the French subconscient as coined by the psychologist Pierre Janet (1859-1947), who argued that underneath the layers of deliberative, and critical thought functions of the conscious mind lay a powerful awareness that he called the subconscious mind. In my vision that awareness which lays waiting is an enormous construction zone of potential logics. (Logics in the widest meaning of the term, not just mathematical, or neuronal logic, but also emotional logics and even what viciously spiteful “philosophers” tend to call “pseudologia fantastica“; once Professor John Searle qualified me that way, to give him an excuse to censor me; now Searle is the object of various prosecutions…)

That continual attempted construction of all sorts of new logics, that is, of new circuitry, and new geometry (dendrites!) and topology, of course, uses an enormous amount of energy, as construction sites tend to. This is what the brain does most of the time (and, as most of this activity is not spurred by “focal awareness”, most of the time, this explains why neuroscience does not know (yet) what the brain is spending so much energy doing, most of the time).

There is a big difference between the unobserved brain, trying to establish new logics, and the brain in a social, and in particular, in a war mode. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) as enabled some progress in envisioning how complex the brain is. The brain evolved as a social interface, not just as an efficient advanced calculus mathematician in charge of trajectories. As Wired UK put it in “Why does the brain uses so much energy?“: “Scans showed the inferior parietal cortex (IPC), an area that helps us control the amount of energy we use, became deactivated when people felt they were being observed. The IPC works with the posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS) to form what researchers called the “action-observation network” (AON). This area of the brain helps people infer what others are thinking based on facial expressions, body language and gaze.”

In any case we are now able to figure out what that “daimon (demon)” who advised Socrates was made of: logical potentialities writ into various material connections and entanglements.

In Plato’s Symposium, the philosophical priestess Diotima teaches Socrates that love is not a deity, but rather a “great daemon”. She explains that “everything daemonic is between divine and mortal” and describes daemons as “interpreting and transporting human things to the gods and divine things to men; entreaties and sacrifices from below, and ordinances and requitals from above…” In Plato’s Apology of Socrates, Socrates claimed to have a daimonion (literally, a “divine something”) that frequently warned him… The Platonic Socrates, however, never refers to the daimonion as a daimōn; it was always referred to as an impersonal “something” or “sign”. Thus Socrates seems to indicate that the true nature of the human soul is pertaining to self-consciousness.

Regarding the various charges brought against Socrates in 399 CE, Plato surmised that “Socrates does wrong because he does not believe in the gods in whom the city believes, but introduces other daemonic beings…” Well those daemonic beings were all potentialities in his head.

Notice that the preceding turns around the problem of the traditional opposition made in philosophy between “monism“(the mind is material) and dualism (body and soul dichotomy). This is true, even without evoking quantum physics, because, even without slipping the ephemeral and ubiquitous Hilbert Spaces of quantum physics in the debate, the argument above implies that the brain geometrodynamics, and topological dynamics are extremely high dimensional objects, always fluctuating (quite a bit in the mood of Quantum Field Theory, and probably, ultimately, for the same underlying reason…)

Also notice that the overall mood of the explanation above is that logical and emotional potentialities are embodied in the brain, and that the brain’s main activity is to further them ever more through imaginable twists and turns (in several manners, including, but not limited to weak Hebbian connections). This is very similar to the potentialities which arise in quantum physics experiments. I believe that’s not coincidence, and that it corresponds to even tighter identification deep down inside, namely that consciousness, which has a lot of characteristics in common with the quantum, originates there; the machine man is quantum mechanical. Or Sub Quantum Real (SQPR!) more exactly.

“Gnosis”, the knowledge of spiritual mysteries, was, for millennia, mostly in the eye of the beholder. Science is now excavating some, spearheaded by the philosophical method. For the longest time, the likes of Joan of Arc, Muhammad, Jesus, Socrates, claimed to have heard voices in their heads, or get otherwise in contact with entities not pertaining to their own consciousness. Maybe, but now we have explanation we can all understand. We also understand why we should take the subconscious seriously: it’s a sort of pre-explanation of whatever may unfold later. It’s both clairvoyance, and exploratory explanatory genius of whichever logics fit best the reality out there…

Run-of-the-mill knowledge should also be considered on the ground of synaptic capability. Thus “gnosis”, knowledge, and beliefs, should be evaluate according to the strength of synaptic connections, integrating Hebb theory…. Thus I am saying that knowledge is more or less known, belief more or less held, on the ground of how neurology works… Electronic circuits, the way we have electronics now either work, or they don’t (electronics is not yet quantum, and, presently, more akin to make water circulate in canal networks). Neurological networks works more or less. So do knowledge and beliefs then. When those networks work very well, consciousness. When they are barely there, subconsciousness…

Patrice Ayme’

Olber’s Paradox Solved, Yesterday, Now & Tomorrow

The oldest cosmological paradox considers the fact that the night sky should not appear dark in an infinite, ageless Universe. It should glow with the brightness of a stellar surface, because, if we look far enough, we would see some star.

Possible explanations have been considered to get rid of the problem. Here are the most obvious:

1. There’s too much dust to see distant stars. (This was Heinrich Olbers’ attempted explanation, in 1826. If true, it showed the universe was young! Olbers had several predecessors, including Kepler and Jean-Philippe de Chéseaux in the 1720s… But a German name beats a French one, in the matter of Anglo-Saxon fame….)
2. The Universe has only a finite number of stars.
3. The distribution of stars is not uniform. So, for example, there could be an infinity of stars, but they hide behind one another so that only a finite angular area is subtended by them.
4. The Universe is expanding, so distant stars are red-shifted into obscurity.
5. The Universe is young. Distant light hasn’t even reached us yet.

Galaxies Galore! Hubble Ultra Deep Field 2014. Other Hubble Pictures Within our own Milky Way giant galaxy, show nearly solid wall of stars, that is, the Olber’s effect!

The first attempted explanation is wrong, because dust will heat up too. If it didn’t heat up, that means the universe is young. (So Olbers could have predicted that! Or a finite universe!)

The premise of the second explanation may technically be correct. But that means that the universe is finite. The third explanation may be partially correct, because matter is very far from being uniformly distributed in the universe. We just don’t know how severe the lumping is: there are Great Walls (of galaxies!), Great Attractors (of galaxies!), Great Blobs (of quasars!), etc. If the stars are distributed in a lumpy way, then there could be large patches of empty space (which there is, because they have been seen!), so the sky could appear dark except in those directions.

Look far enough, you will hit a galaxy! At least if light does not somehow age…

The final two possibilities are presently viewed as correct by common cosmologists, and a cause of what’s observed. Some computational arguments suggest that the finite age of the Universe is the larger effect. We live inside a spherical shell of “Observable Universe” which has a diameter equal to the (“Cartan’s comoving”) distance covered by the expanding  universe during the lifetime of said Universe. That’s 95 billion light-years, according to the most esteemed conventional computation. Objects which were far enough to start with,  are too far away for their light ever to reach us.

The resolution of Olber’s paradox is found in the combined observation that 1) the speed of light is finite and 2) the Universe has a finite age, i.e. we only see the light from parts of the Universe which at some point in time where less than 15 billion light years away. Everywhere far away, say the conventionalists, we should see the fiery light of the Big Bang, and we do, they add: this is the 3 degree Kelvin background cosmic radiation. Initially it was hyper hot, but the light got stretched in the last 13.8 billion years, by the expansion of the universe, so now it appears very cold… (Except that I have a different explanation for it!)

And now for a word from our sponsor:

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Subquantum Cosmology’s Olber’s Paradox Resolution:

How does my own SubQuantum Patrice Reality (SQPR) theory fits in all this? Very well. In my theory, the universe also expands (that’s called “Dark Energy”, and it’s a direct experimental fact). But the universe expands slowly (that’s how I resolve the problems “cosmological inflation” is supposed to resolve, but doesn’t!).

As the universe slowly expands, every single photon wave gets stretched, as in the usual Big Bang Lemaitre metric. However now that effect is not enough to solve Olbers paradox (the expansion being too slow). So another effect comes into play: light ages, from the Sub Quantum Reality (SQPR). The average photon coming from far away is so spread-out, when it hits an object, somewhere, that part of said photon is too far to coalesce with the rest, thus gets disconnected from the main singularization, and is left, in the average, as a 3 Kelvin remnant.

***

Notice that Olbers and his predecessors could have deduced much from the simple fact that the sky was not all like the surface of the sun. Olbers said: that’s because there is dust. But ultimately dust would turn as yellow and hot as the sun too. It didn’t, either because the density of stars was not constant… Or then the universe was only 6,000 years old, or so (;-)).
This being said, dust should not be ignored. Recently, it was proclaimed a proof of cosmological inflation had been found, and eminent cosmologists such as inflationistas like Guth were already attributing to themselves the Nobel Prize, but it was only an effect due to galactic dust.

Conclusion: a simple observation can very well contain revolutionary science, when, and if, logically processed. But one needs courage to do this. An obvious candidate is the collapse of the “wave packet” in Quantum Physics. Attempts to ignore, or deny that collapse, have brought the “Many Worlds” Derangement Syndrome affecting physics (and not just physics, thanks to mood transmission…)

Patrice Ayme’