I THINK, THEREFORE I JUDGE.

Wisdom has to be judgmental… Or it’s not. So why is “judgmental” such a curse adjective in the US? Why is wisdom all too often cursed in what is, de facto, the leading democracy?

Indeed, thinking is noble, the most defining human activity. But to think is to judge. 

Thinking consists in contemplating one or multiple choices, and then deciding upon one or some of them as true, or optimal, and then to observe what entails. So thinking involves not just judgment, and choice, but also will and execution… and whole body feedback! In that sense, one thinks, in part, with one’s entire body.

The preceding is obvious neurologically. Thinking consists in finding circuitry, paths, which fit reality better. Each path can be viewed as a dimension (as things happen along it, as they do along a dimension in the mathematical sense). How these paths are found is a matter of judgment.  

The human nervous system is partly composed of more than 100 billion cells called neurons (from Galen’s neuron for nerve). A neuron’s function consists in receiving, mysteriously tweak and then transmitting processed information. Neurons are made up of three major parts: a cell body, or soma, which contains the nucleus of the cell and keeps the cell alive; a branching treelike fibers’ system surrounding the soma, made of dendrites, which collect information from other cells and send the information to the soma; and a long, segmented fiber known as the axon, which transmits an electric action potential away from the cell body toward other neurons or to the muscles and glands.

The nervous system also contains glial cells which also make networks, can compute, support neurons, direct their growth, and same for synapses. The regulation of neurotransmitters and the modulation of neuronal signaling by glial cells influences brain activity and impacts mental states, including emotional experiences. 

Some neurons have hundreds or even thousands of dendrites, and these dendrites may themselves be branched to allow the cell to receive information from thousands of other cells. Moreover the dendrites have countless tendrils to get information from. The point is this: the circuitry of the brain, its homotopy (to use mathematics) is astoundingly complicated. Often thousands of paths in, thousands of paths out of a single neuron… Each of them is chemically or electrically entangled with thousands of information channels to, and from one, a single, neuron. Some parts of the circuitry are certainly advantaged, for example when an axon fires. We also know this can all be trained from experience, thus neurons can learn to choose which inputs and outputs matter more, or cause more pleasure, or more pain, etc. Such circuits tend to be used more, in a generalization of so-called Hebbian training [1].

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A time honored trope in the US is that if one is educated, one should not be judgmental…. in other words, one should not let one’s neuronal circuitry deviate from the neurological pathways provided by the outcomes US society considers beneficial. Instead of “Vive La Difference”, it’s “Vive La Concurrence” (in French “concurrence” is akin to competition, but in US English it means agreement!) 

The idea that one should not judge is very old, and central to US anti-intellectualism. To justify it, tolerance is evoked… But in practice it means tolerance for the practice of being ruled by censors…. And it also means that people get trained to not train their own judgmental capability, so they don’t learn to think on their own on big questions (that, in turn, enables them to be very pragmatic by being focused on their direct, actionable world… while the plutocracy is in charge of the rest…)

Anti-intellectualism is so strong in the US, because, overall, the profit motive, that is the plutocracy, has been most rewarding, as an entire continent was wrestled from the American Natives and exploited. Anti-intellectualism helped in not questioning how it was done while slavery, genocide, rapacious magnates, all sorts of abuses, ruled… The Pilgrims in the early Seventeenth Century wrote to their fellows back in Europe, that they should come to America, it was a land of plenty, they would become instantaneously wealthy. It was sincere and true… all the more as a few discrete massacres already helped, on top of ravaging pandemics which had just occurred.

On the progressive side, if one is not judgmental, one will be more tolerant, not just of crimes, but also of more progressive choices… At least, in theory. So the USA went in a generation from a land where, in many states, “inter-racial” marriages and homosexuality were unlawful to one where they present a career advantage…

Judgment is one step away from racism we are told by the masters of Politically Correct Wokeness… However, upon careful inspection, the ban of the judgmental attitude applied only when it arranged the authorities

An old trick of fundamentally fascist regimes, and often of armies, has been to train people to obey stupid orders even though those giving orders know that the obedient ones know those orders are stupid.This way the inferior ones are trained to disrespect reason and judgment.  

The notion that we shouldn’t judge, and thus shouldn’t think, is crucially important to masters of the universe who employ the masters of thought and their guard dogs.  

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There are guard dogs, and philosophy professor, friend of Sartre, Paul Nizan lambasted them already in his book, Watchdogs: Philosophers and the Established Order. Many philosophers’ bread and butter is as propagandists for the establishment.

Nizan enlisted to fight in the French army with the onset of World War II, and was killed in action against the Nazis on 23 May 1940 at the Château de Cocove in Recques-sur-Hem, during the Nazi offensive against Dunkirk.

Yes, much of today’s world connects to World War Two, like much of Athens in 420 BCE connected to the assault of Persia against Greece 80 years earlier. Except now the situation is even more complicated, as the actors are much older and the stakes higher.

Patrice Ayme

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[1] Hebbian training, named after Canadian psychologist Donald Hebb’s research from 1949, is a learning rule or principle used in the field of neural networks and computational neuroscience. It describes a mechanism for synaptic plasticity, which is the ability of the connections between neurons (synapses) to change in strength.

The Hebbian learning rule is often stated as “cells that fire together, wire together.” It proposes that when the activity of a presynaptic neuron consistently precedes and helps activate a postsynaptic neuron, the connection between them is strengthened. In other words, if two neurons repeatedly activate in succession, the synapse connecting them becomes stronger, facilitating the transmission of signals between them.

Hebbian learning has been influential in the development of artificial neural networks and has inspired various models and algorithms for training neural networks. However, it is important to note that the actual mechanisms of learning in the brain are much more complex than the simple Hebbian rule, and other factors, such as inhibitory mechanisms and other forms of plasticity, also play significant roles in shaping neural connections.

Hebbian learning is based on the idea that learning occurs through the modification of synaptic connections in the brain. It is a form of unsupervised learning, as it does not require explicit external feedback or a specific desired output. Instead, it relies on the correlation and temporal association of neural activity. Above, I added supervision by pain, pleasure, and no doubt in humans, strategic considerations. The entire organism then decides, because of such feedback, to engage in the activity repeatedly, and its entire circuits which get reinforced. Thus decision, judgment, and whole body action are what brings thought.

Regurgitating Is Not Creative Thinking. In Chomsky And Other Chatbots

Those Who Regurgitate Thoughts Are More Akin To Chatbots Than Noble Thinkers

What is thinking? Using a brain to produce motion (e-motion, electric potential, jumping in the air…). That means cockroaches are thinking. Yes, they are. Cockroaches think, thus they are, as Descartes pointed out. Once a cockroach thought he had tamed me, so it wouldn’t flee when I appeared (that was revealed as a mistake in the fullness of time)..

Some “thinkers” believe that the quality of knowledge coming from Artificial Intelligence “Chatbots” is fundamentally flawed. Ironically, they exhibit what they pretend to censor. “ChatGPT and its brethren are constitutionally unable to balance creativity with constraint. They either overgenerate (producing both truths and falsehoods, endorsing ethical and unethical decisions alike) or undergenerate (exhibiting noncommitment to any decisions and indifference to consequences). Given the amorality, faux science and linguistic incompetence of these systems, we can only laugh or cry at their popularity.” (Noam Chomsky: The False Promise of ChatGPT, New York Times,March 8, 2023.) [1]

Chomsky then gives an example which is beyond strange. I quote it in full, and in context in the appendix [2]. Fundamentally Chomsky confuses knowledge and the most advanced creative thinking.

To claim, as Chomsky does, that: “ “The apple would not have fallen but for the force of gravity.” That is thinking.” is a very strange assertion. The notion of force pertaining to motion (force as the time derivative of momentum) was discerned only around 1350 CE by Buridan in Paris. Previously, Aristotle did not have the notion of momentum, or the correct notion of force. Let alone the modern notion of gravity.

Gravity was described as an inverse square of the distance, proportional to mass, by Bullialdus (Ismaël Boulliau) also in Paris in 1645 CE. Does that mean that people could not “think” about falling apples before 1645?

The authors claim that:  “The apple falls.” That is a description. A prediction might have been the statement “The apple will fall if I open my hand.” Both are valuable, and both can be correct. But an explanation is something more: It includes not only descriptions and predictions but also counterfactual conjectures like “Any such object would fall,” plus the additional clause “because of the force of gravity” or “because of the curvature of space-time” or whatever. That is a causal explanation.”

Do they view “whatever” as an “explanation”? 

Sorry but that opinion describes science as only a fraction of science. Kepler’s laws are highly non obvious (equal areas swept in equal times, planets follow ellipses with sun as focus, and a non linear relation between period and radius). However, they are just descriptions, curve fitting of what is observed: science starts with observation.

A baby observes, 24/7. Even when the baby dreams, the baby observes (inside the baby’s brain). Then the baby tries to re-create…. 

Tellingly enough, Chomsky quotes a minor author, Conan Doyle as the creator of the thought: “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” So doing Chomsky exhibits QUOTATION MISATTRIBUTION, a basic problem with Chatbots (which steal content right and left, up and down on the Internet…) The thought is actually an idea written down, and widely advertised by Émilie de Breteuil Marquise du Châtelet… a major philosopher and physicist who discovered the concept of energy in the 1730s (Newton had confused momentum and energy; Émilie, arguably more important than say Einstein or Maxwell, or roughly any other physicist is not well known, on account of her gender… which caused her demise…).

AI Machines are like most people: they regurgitate what they picked up in a subset of the information space. As AI steals bits and pieces of data all over, that will include pieces of logic, whether flawed or not flawed. 

The banality of evil: plagiarism and apathy and obviation is something attached to culture, and will vary as cultures vary. For example, to ask for someone’s race is viewed as moral in the USA, whereas in most societies the notion of race is itself viewed as racist, and asking for someone’s race even more so (and is historically tied to genocide). So a US trained AI will automatically be racist… If it sticks to US convention. However if the AI reads somewhere a critique of the notion of race, it may hit on a moral ground higher than US convention…

The meta message Chomsky always gives is the same: only he knows how to speak, or even what is language. Better: only he and his ilk from MIT and other top universities  can think. The loud message is: you don’t know, but me, and thus, implicitly, my plutocratic sponsors from the establishment, know how to think.

The saddest part is that regurgitator Chomsky has achieved cult status among many progressives. And what of the Chatbots? They just lift stuff from the Internet and regurgitate. They are extremely advanced dictionaries… right now full of errors but potentially they may enlighten by helping listeners to get out of their information boxes. 

But chatbots can be more. Can chabots be innovative? Yes, by gluing together with fantastic logical connections disparate pieces of information. I am actually afraid that a Chatbot will (pretend to) fall on my Dark Matter theory…. And claim authorship…

Patrice Ayme

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[1] Chomsky, a MIT prof,  is famous for the universal grammar (UG): a 50 year old theory in linguistics that claims that the ability to learn grammar is built into the human brain from birth regardless of language. In the 1960s, linguists became interested in a new theory about grammar, or the laws of language. UG is obviously completely false, as some languages have no grammar (Mandarin Chinese). Petit Negre.. French spoken long ago by African without French grammar whatsoever, but sill perfectly understandable, I speak it myself, ha ha ha…. When one speaks or has studied a dozen languages or more, as yours truly, one knows there is no universal grammar: grammars can be very different in languages which have lots of words in common… And this is why machine translation is still often imperfect, eighty years after its beginning… Chomsky is an error. Can Chatbots quote me, please?

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[2] Here is Chomsky in full about his crazy apple example: “Indeed, such programs are stuck in a prehuman or nonhuman phase of cognitive evolution. Their deepest flaw is the absence of the most critical capacity of any intelligence: to say not only what is the case, what was the case and what will be the case — that’s description and prediction — but also what is not the case and what could and could not be the case. Those are the ingredients of explanation, the mark of true intelligence.

Here’s an example. Suppose you are holding an apple in your hand. Now you let the apple go. You observe the result and say, “The apple falls.” That is a description. A prediction might have been the statement “The apple will fall if I open my hand.” Both are valuable, and both can be correct. But an explanation is something more: It includes not only descriptions and predictions but also counterfactual conjectures like “Any such object would fall,” plus the additional clause “because of the force of gravity” or “because of the curvature of space-time” or whatever. That is a causal explanation: “The apple would not have fallen but for the force of gravity.” That is thinking.”

Musk Bot… Early director of “Open AI” a “non profit” which then evolved into Chat GPT…

DREAMING AS META THINKING, Creating, Jumbling And, Or, Inverting Causation

FROM JUMBLING DREAM LIKE FANTASIES, HARD CORE REALITY LOGIC ARISES

Before we have really new logic, we often have a dream.

Dreaming can be so detailed it becomes a world with its smells, sounds, locales, individuals, situations etc. Typically they are a patchwork of what was encountered prior. For example I just had a dream where the main activities happened in a place which had the characteristics of two lodged in the Sierra Nevada I was at in the last two decades. They are located 200 kilometers and 4 hour of driving away from each other; one is characterized by many separated buildings and that feature was kept; the other is more panoramic, with fewer trees is that feature was kept. The ensemble was located by the dream machine in a climbing area I used to climb a lot at, more than two decades ago. That area is completely protected, in a park, and enjoys a magnificent panorama above a large lake, far below, and the panorama, north of lake Tahoe, extends 50 kilometers. So three distinct geographical elements, hundreds of miles and experienced decades apart, were mixed and matched in an harmonious whole. And then the intrigue enfolded, involving some significant others, in enlightening new circunstances… And out of this some strong latent emotion emerged… A new element of subconscious, not that much sub, actually… because it’s not exactly the first time it shows up: dreams can reappear…. 

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Elements of (what seems to be) reality is all we have [1;consider Plato]. What the brain can do is to combine them, and order them, according to causality. But causality is often deduced from correlation, and the causation can well go the other way. An obvious example is that the sun turns around the sky, at first sight, when in reality it’s actually the sky which turns around. 

At some point, an ancient astronomer had a dream that the sun was far away, and it was the Earth which was moving below his/her feet. To do this, the Earth, which looked enormous, had to be made smaller than the sun, which looked small. 

Reality builds neural networks in our minds. Consciousness manages them according to the practice of daily necessity. Thus our perception of daily reality is captured by pragmatism. But this daily practice lives in a much bigger context, namely what is really going on.

A standard flaw is to inverse cause and effect. This inversion is often used in war: X starts by attacking Y, typically because X is stronger than Y. Then Y, being weaker, defends itself more ferociously, in the hope of extracting a higher price in horror to X. Then X accuses Y of being hateful savages… justifying the war that they launched, retrospectively.  

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For example, English speaking European colonists in America held for centuries that  Native Americans were savages who killed European colonizers cruelly, so hating those “Indians” was the epitome of morality…. Not false, right, but wrong in a larger context. 

Indeed, in reality, Europeans came to America, and killed Americans to start with. Or more exactly… we know this from the French Jacque Cartier, circa 1530s… Europeans came to America and were told very reasonably by the inhabitants of Canada that there was no room for them the continent was full. It took generations for the French to show to the Americans that more intensive agriculture freed room for everybody. When the French, led by Champlain, around 1600s made a detailed exploration of what would come to be called “New England”, they arrived to the same conclusion: not enough room for French colonization, the land was fully occupied by Americans.

However, pandemics struck the Americans within a few years. Then the calculated brutality, racism and militarization of the Venture Capitalism of the “West Country Men” establishing Virginia, which aimed at exterminating the Americans, caused a war, a war of extermination… naturally enough, the resulting savagery, although real, was attributed to the Americans when in truth it originated with English capitalist conquest…. 

That causal inversion made it possible for the colonists to hate until they exterminated the Americans… as was intended all along by the English plutocrats for the very practical reason of stealing America from its inhabitants. This cruel inversion made morally, thus physically possible the world’s greatest empire… as the US is the progeny of Europe’s two faced medieval super power, Franco-Britannia; now Euro-American power is overwhelming as the deranged, weak minded, unimaginative Czar in the Kremlin must find out…

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In a variant of this, the innuendo becomes the reality by association. Putin and his collaborators do not behave any differently in Ukraine, accusing the Ukrainians to be “Nazis” or “nationalists”, and genociders… When actually the context, and the causation were originally created by the Kremlin…. which conveninetly forgets that France  was defeated in May-June 1940, thanks to Russian oil: without it, Nazi tanks and planes would not have moved (Russian help to the Nazis extended to all sorts of metal ores, cotton, rubber and even food which Nazi Germany could not have done without). 

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Reality, as it is perceived, is made of personal, and cultural facts, which are actually generalized neuro-hormonal networks, united by axonal chains of human theorization, most of them culturally grounded… The mind invents meta-causal chains between elements of perceived reality and causal chains viewed as elements of reality.

Causal chains, meta or not, right or wrong, make remembrance easier, so they are ubiquitous. They tend to go according to the principle of economy of energy: the simpler the inference, the more seductive it is. This is why math and science are hard, because they are not, at first, the simplest (although they are the simplest in the long term, as they deduce enormous multitudes, from few axioms). 

Those causal chains may well be wrong, and evolution became aware of that fact while the human mind became ever more an evolutionary advantage. To palliate for lack of imagination or inverted causation, and other fantasies, the dreaming state jumbles everything in all sorts of ways, leaving faint implications chains behind. So doing, fantastic dreams may stumble accidentally on a closer picture of reality which leaves a trace as potential axonal pathways, and even potential associations of emotions…. This is what is called the subconscious…

It maybe very far removed from first impressions: at first sight, the sun is small, and turns around. Culture says otherwise and is correct. The full logic of astronomy is simpler, but could only arise from the (then) fantastic dreams of ancient astronomers.

A higher sense of reality is a higher sense of morality, because it fosters in a civilization a higher probability of survival. Thus a diversity of strong experiences has its own moral advantage. These experiences do not have to be pleasant while experienced, far from it. Avalanches’ roaring, mountain lions’ and rattlesnakes’ music is most engaging. But the most worthy of a deserving audience is stinging wasps’ buzz… https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/…/01/sting-operations/ All these are guaranteed to achieve strong elements of reality.

A mystery in this is where the meta-consciousness driving dreams is located. Well, maybe it’s not located anywhere. As parts of the brain shut down and others get excited during dreaming, a great show starts, with elements of traditional consciousness trying to establish causal chains. Those elements and causality chains most worthy of interest (from greed, fear, pleasure, whatever…) are those most memorable, and most instructive…

Patrice Ayme    

  Pata, but all too real logic exhibited:

Elements of reality are neuro-hormonal networks. Causality chains between them are also (meta) neuro-hormonal networks. The latter are easier to erase than the former, because the latter depends upon the former to exist, and the former are typically more detailed in memory, being associated from many sensory inputs, typically. So it’s possible to remeber elements of reality without remembering the causality. However, causality makes memory easier to arrange… Hence drastic rearrangement of memorized causality may well occur. I call this CAUSAL INVERSION. Dreams can facilitate, but also demolish, such patalogic.

[1] Plato claimed that all and any element of reality could be shadows on a wall. Socrates describes people who were chained all their lives, facing a blank wall. They watch shadows projected on the wall from objects passing in front of a fire behind them. They name these shadows. The shadows are the prisoners’ reality, but are not the real world. The shadows are elements of reality that we can perceive through our senses, while real objects can only be perceived through reason. Three higher levels exist: the natural sciences; mathematics, geometry, deductive logic; and the theory of forms. The essay above is revealing HOW logic is evolved, and how “elements of reality” are correctly guessed, established and questioned. Socrates’ elements of reality were often nonsensical. He described his dreams as “daemons” not the activity of neuro-hormonal networks, etc…

The hard edge of today’s quest for “reality”, the forefront, is called Quantum Theory, and it’s full of questions, solutions and technological wonders… Techno-logical: notice the apparition of logic in techne… But how was the logic elaborated? Dream on…

No Faith, No Thought

Takeaways: Faith is the complete trust or confidence in someone or something. It is at the core of what is called thinking (present day AI is primitive in the sense that it does not have to use faith).

It is traditional to oppose reason based thinking, with “faith” (typically faith in the Abrahamist religion, which is supposed to be above any suspicion). However, that opposition is an illusion, and a strategic error in deploying the advancement of understanding: faith is used constantly, in minute but crucial ways, because we cannot verify everything, all the time. 

If using faith is ubiquitous in life, in minor and major ways, and everything in between, it, and the way it is created, should be examined thoroughly, just as the rest of life. There should be no exception, and even the gods should be examined. No exception for the faith of fanatics [1]. 

When we walk we walk, we take it on faith that we know how to walk. Opposing reason and faith is an example of obsolete thinking. As everything that is obsolete, it hinders the progress of Enlightenment. 

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Too Much Faith In Some Elements Of Mathematics Can Hurt Mathematics:

Euclid’s elements are generally viewed as the model of what reason should be: everything is deduced from five set theoretical axioms and five geometric “postulates”.  At least, that’s what was believed for more than 20 centuries. Even Euclid’s elements were full of faith: it turned out that many crucial assumptions were missed among said axioms and postulates. When Hilbert reviewed Euclidean geometry, he posited twenty assumptions…then others intervened, such as the famous Polish mathematician Tarsky, who postulated other axioms for Euclidean geometry… which did other things Hilbert couldn’t do (going from second order to first order logic, etc.)…

So, in the end, the situation with the most basic geometry was revealed to be much more complicated than was assumed for 24 centuries… To phrase it differently, what was viewed as the archetype of reason, rested on faith to a surprising degree. 

That faith was far from innocuous, it had a fascist aspect: the obsession with Euclidean geometry. Indeed, why should one only do geometry on a plane? A century before Euclid, Greek mathematicians had thought about making geometry on a sphere, or a saddle: out of that came something very practical: the size of the Earth, and the sizes and distances of the Moon, and the Sun (basically proving the heliocentric theory, if one thought about it deeply)… All of which was done at the same time as Euclid, thanks to a Marseillais…

The faith in the perfection of Euclidean geometry had then, for similar reasons to the faith in whomever or whatever, the effect of depriving more worthy subjects.

Similar shortcomings were revealed in Set Theory, making Bertrand Russell famous… A modern pirouette is to use so-called “NAIVE Set Theory” and ignore subtleties like sets which are not elements of themselves…   

Basic arithmetic was deficient too: it turns out that traditional arithmetic assumed implicitly something called the Archimedean Axiom, the violation of which creates infinitesimal and infinite numbers (that’s called non-standard arithmetic). 

The reaction to all this, in the end, was more trust and less verification. Although mathematical logic kept on growing inside mysterious thickets, real mathematicians (if I dare to use the expression) decided to ride their faith in the rigor of mathematics until hell and high waters: instead of establishing the deepest foundations, mathematicians decided to explore the complexity of imaginable foundations. Category Theory became the powerful queen of math, developing a gigantic theoretical castle of theories floating up in the air. Never mind if CT is really true or not: all the proof we need is in the complication it handles with . In other words, LOGIC BECAME LOCAL.

Don’t expect all mathematicians to understand much of the preceding: their craft depends on believing their faith in mathematics is no faith, but megalomaniac certainty. 

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Not all faiths are good all the time. Faith can be misused by plutocracy. An example is Abrahamism, whose basic foundation is a criminal folly that binds: if the boSS orders you to kill a child, even your child, you should obey, no question asked. So Abraham ties up is fully conscious son to execute him, because a god in his head told him so. It is impossible to make more vile, and thus it is an excellent foundation for a religion which killed at least dozens of millions of people directly, and much more indirectly, by being the mythology of plutocracy… Yet, misuse of the faith instinct does not mean that we can do without it:

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Beauty is to some extent in the eye of the beholder, and so is greatly a matter of faith.

The FAITH INSTINCT Is Necessary For Thinking:

René Descartes sought to doubt the truth of all beliefs in order to determine which he could be certain were true. Descartes’ statement, “Cogito ergo sum” (I think, therefore I am), in its fuller version reads: “dubito ergo cogito, cogito ergo sum” (“I doubt therefore I think, I think therefore I exist”). What Descartes is talking about is the fact that thinking consists in adjudicating reality, and this requires first doubting all evidence presented. 

My example, as usual, is trail running: on a roaring basis, a torrent of information is presented to the visual system, with the question of branch vs root vs shadow vs ground depression vs ground prominence vs snake vs where to put foot next analyzed and debated in real time by various part of the brain, which do not even have time to synchronize and cohere. So doubt figures prominently all too often when trail running, and doubt is processed too fast for global consciousness, only local consciousness can process it, and generally too slowly to override automatic systems [2].

After we have doubted all relevant elements, we think, that is we decide what is real and what is not real. 

Thus, we certainly must have faith, faith in what we decided is true, if we want to think: not everything can be doubted 24/7 (Cartesian doubt is to be used parsimoniously).

Belief in a mind-independent reality is itself an act of faith…. But one well supported by facts…

Thinking without faith is like flying without air. Can’t be done, without redefining flying, or thinking first.

Nathalie Delima Graza: “or just like put your faith in parachute and trust in it.”

Faith is when we decide reality: experienced parachutists know that parachutes generally work… but they also know they do not always work, and that’s why they often wear another chute… Trust, but not fully. Cartesian doubt was to distrust everything 24/7… But it can’t be done! Hence the use of faith… Fisth is when we decide reality.

Bertrand Russel was superficially full of faith… against faith. Said he:

“All faiths do harm.” Here is Bertrand Russell in full: “All faiths do harm. We may define “faith” as a firm belief in something for which there is no evidence. Where there is evidence, no one speaks of “faith.” We do not speak of faith that two and two are four or that the earth is round. We only speak of faith when we wish to substitute emotion for evidence. And the substitution of emotion for evidence is apt to lead to strife, since different groups substitute different emotions.”

— Bertrand Russell, Human Society in Ethics and Politics (1954), Ch. VII: Can Religion Cure Our Troubles?, p. 213

We may not speak of faith, but we practice it. Bertrand Russel was full of faith, and also, hot air: during World War One, he believed, he had faith, that Europe would be better off under the Kaiser’s fascist boot. British justice was unimpressed, and put him in prison for a very long time, for this ludicrous and war criminality promoting opinion… He later tried to redeem himself with anti-nuke, anti-Vietnam War positions…

Can anything be rescued from Russell’s statement above? Sure. Any faith where one “substitutes emotion for evidence” should be viewed with extreme suspicion. Not that it is always bad: emotion has a logic of its own.

My point is that, contrarily to what Russell asserts, most faiths have evidence. No evidence that Muhammad flew to Jerusalem on a winged horse… But that Muhammad’s religion, in some, amd many, ways is a good thing (for example it brought down the murder of girls, and improved the treatment of slave girls)…

By admitting that faith is not just good, but indispensable, and that most faiths have evidence to support themselves, that faith is just an indispensable abbreviation and determination of thought, we are far from giving succor to the fanatics and those who disrespect critical thinking. Verily, just the opposite. We deprive those with lethal and unjustifiable faith (such as faith in tyrant Putin)… of the argument that everybody has a sacred right to all and any faith… Instead we point out that faith has to be examined, like everything else, and actually more than anything else.

An example of unhinged faith is that HAARP technology and its ability “to accelerate cataclysms“. High Altitude Aurora Research Project could do no such thing. At best, create a little artificial aurora.

Hugo Chavez, an uneducated tropical tyrant, believed Northern Lights (Aurora) launched earthquakes… Because he was told so by other fools, not knowing the subtleties of Alaskan politics, among other things he didn’t know… (The Alaskan senior Senator wanted the government to spend in his state. HAAARP cost 300 millions, and then provided employment…)

Faiths have their uses: believing HAARP could launch nine Richter quakes, provides believers with the illusion that their complete lack of scientific knowledge and scientific common sense is an excellent thing, as it made them superior to Physics PhD…. And freed them from scientific reason in myriad ways…

Those who believe Putin is not a genocidal tyrant, but a worthy president also tend to believe that a Kremlin centered empire will provide them with glory, empire, or a general way to criticize “the West” without thinking too hard. 

Faith is actually what enables thinking to decide, saving energy, but most importantly, having decided reality, enables the brain to switch to implementation of the chosen strategy.

Faith in others is called trust. Culture and complex society can’t work without it.  

Faiths, and trusts, have to be examined and verified, not thrown under the bus.

The Enlightenment has to throw a light on all and any reason, emotional or nonlinear… Just proscribing some forms of reason, while subscribing to them secretly, as the occasionally eminently irrational Bertrand Russell did, is only hypocrisy… a form of thinking that should be consumed only in extreme moderation.

Patrice Ayme

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[1] Va de retro, Islamophobia phobia.

[2]: Once, on a turning and slightly descending trail, I came across a large rattlesnake. I was going around 15 feet per second (perhaps 5 m/s). The decision to accelerate and jump over it was taken consciously (there was no other choice), but only by the part of my conscience which supervises running (the rest of me became horrified later).

alk we walk, we take it on faith that we know how to walk. Opposing reason and faith is an example of obsolete thinking As everything obsolete, it hinders further Enlightenment. 

Euclid’s elements are generally viewed as the model of what reason should be: everything is deduced from five set theoretical axioms and five geometric “postulates”.  At least, that’s what was believed for more than 20 centuries. Even Euclid’s elements were full of faith: it turned out that many crucial assumptions were missed among said axioms and postulates. When Hilbert reviewed Euclidean geometry, he posited twenty assumptions…then others came, such as the famous Polish mathematician Tarsky, and postulated other axioms for Euclidean geometry… which did other things Hilbert couldn’t do… So, in the end, the situation with the most basic geometry was much more complicated, and much more resting on faith than was assumed for 24 centuries. Similar shortcomings were revealed in Set Theory, making Bertrand Russell famous… A modern pirouette is to use so-called “NAIVE Set Theory” and ignore subtleties like sets which are not elements of themselves…   

Basic arithmetic was deficient too: it turns out that traditional arithmetic assumed implicitly something called the Archimedean Axiom, the violation of which creates infinitesimal and infinite numbers (that’s called non-standard arithmetic). 

The reaction to all this, in the end, was more trust and less verification. Although mathematical logic kept on growing inside mysterious thickets, real mathematicians (if I dare to use the expression) decide to ride faith until hell and high waters: Category Theory became queen of math, developing gigantic theoretical castle of theories floating up in the air. In other words, LOGIC BECAME LOCAL.

Don’t expect all mathematicians to understand much of the preceding: their craft depends on believing their faith in mathematics is no faith, but megalomaniac certainty. 

We certainly must have faith, if we want to think: not everything can be doubted 24/7 (Cartesian doubt to be used parsimoniously).

***

Belief in a mind-independent reality is itself an act of faith…. But one well supported by facts…

Thinking without faith is like flying without air. Can’t be done, without redefining flying, or thinking first.

Nathalie Delima Graza: “or just like put your faith in parachute and trust in it.”

Faith is when we decide reality: experienced parachutists know that parachutes generally work… but they also know they do not always work, and that’s why they often wear another chute… Trust, but not fully. Cartesian doubt was to distrust everything 24/7… But it can’t be done! Hence the use of faith… Fisth is when we decide reality.

Bertrand Russel was superficially full of faith… against faith. Said he:

“All faiths do harm.” Here is Bertrand Russell in full: “All faiths do harm. We may define “faith” as a firm belief in something for which there is no evidence. Where there is evidence, no one speaks of “faith.” We do not speak of faith that two and two are four or that the earth is round. We only speak of faith when we wish to substitute emotion for evidence. And the substitution of emotion for evidence is apt to lead to strife, since different groups substitute different emotions.”

— Bertrand Russell, Human Society in Ethics and Politics (1954), Ch. VII: Can Religion Cure Our Troubles?, p. 213

We may not speak of faith, but we practice it. Bertrand Russel was full of faith, and also, hot air: during World War One, he believed, he had faith, that Europe would be better off under the Kaiser’s fascist boot. British justice was unimpressed, and put him in prison for a very long time, for this ludicrous and war criminality promoting opinion… He later tried to redeem himself with anti-nuke, anti-Vietnam War positions…

Can anything be rescued from Russell’s statement above? Sure. Faith where one “substitutes emotion for evidence” should be viewed with extreme suspicion. Not that it is always bad: emotion has a logic of its own.

My point is that, contrarily to what Russell asserts, most faiths have evidence. No evidence that Muhammad flew to Jerusalem on a winged horse… But that Muhammad’s religion, in some, amd many, ways is a good thing (for example it brought down the murder of girls, and improved the treatment of slave girls)…

By admitting that faith is not just good, but indispensable, and that most faiths have evidence to support themselves, that faith is just an indispensable abbreviation and determination of thought, we are far from giving succor to the fanatics and those who disrespect critical thinking. Verily, just the opposite. We deprive those with lethal and unjustifiable faith (such as faith in tyrant Putin)… of the argument that everybody has a sacred right to all and any faith… Instead we point out that faith has to be examined, like everything else, and actually more than anything else.

An example of unhinged faith is that HAARP technology and its ability “to accelerate cataclysms“. High Altitude Aurora Research Project could do no such thing. At best, create a little artificial aurora.

Hugo Chavez, an uneducated tropical tyrant, believed Northern Lights (Aurora) launched earthquakes… Because he was told so by other fools, not knowing the subtleties of Alaskan politics, among other things he didn’t know… (The Alaskan senior Senator wanted the government to spend in his state. HAAARP cost 300 millions, and then provided employment…)

Faiths have their uses: believing HAARP could launch nine Richter quakes, provides believers with the illusion that their complete lack of scientific knowledge and scientific common sense is an excellent thing, as it made them superior to Physics PhD…. And freed them from scientific reason in myriad ways…

Those who believe Putin is not a genocidal tyrant, but a worthy president also tend to believe that a Kremlin centered empire will provide them with glory, empire, or a general way to criticize “the West” without thinking too hard. 

Faith is actually what enables thinking to decide, saving energy, but most importantly, having decided reality, enables the brain to switch to implementation of the chosen strategy.

Faith in others is called trust. Culture and complex society can’t work without it.  

Faiths, and trusts, have to be examined and verified, not thrown under the bus.

The Enlightenment has to throw a light on all and any reason, emotional or nonlinear… Just proscribing some forms of reason, while subscribing to them secretly, as the occasionally eminently irrational Bertrand Russell did, is only hypocrisy… a form of thinking that should be consumed only in extreme moderation.

The faith instinct is so fundamental to thinking that Artificial Intelligence will become mature when it has to use it… to decide which axioms it will use next.

Patrice Ayme

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[1] Va de retro, Islamophobia phobia.

***

[2]: Consciousness is also local. See “Split Brains and Multiconsciousness“. Once, on a turning and slightly descending trail, I came across a large rattlesnake. I was going around 15 feet per second (perhaps 5 m/s). The decision to accelerate and jump over it was taken consciously (there was no other choice), but only by the part of my conscience which supervises running (the rest of me became horrified later).

… P/S: And what of the Quantum is all this? Well, you guessed it, the paradoxes of Quantum Mechnaics have to do with the localization of decision… And we saw it appear above already in a seemingly classical context. That means classical thinking already contains the Quantum in hiding….

Split Brains And Multi Consciousness

Wisdom forges ahead of the self, however full of books the latter may be. New wisdom arises from beyond, and putting the mind out of the culturally expected zone.

Trail running means a potentially fully different world every couples of seconds. It takes one second to go from routine to head first at several meters per second (with potentially a terminal outcome [1]). Exactly what will happen if one quits concentrating. Foot landing is an adventure at any step, or bound, or leap (downhill mountain running is truly a succession of leaps, and a good runner can achieve dangerously high sustained speeds). Not surprisingly, command and control tends to be extremely localized and automatized. Here is an example, today:  

***

Suddenly wiggly is detected. There are no words, no thought, just wiggly is generating motion. The quickest part of the brain, and I literally felt to be in the back of the head going straight from visual area to cerebellum and legs, orders a general danger emergency jump, with particular lift of the left leg, where wiggly has been perceived. The wiggly input also launches an adrenaline burst. And a visual, directed inspection of wiggly.

Meanwhile the frontal cortex, and one literally feels it’s in the front, retorts with a slower analysis. Wiggly has got to be a root because of its general location, on a piece of asphalt, and it was not actually dynamic, and strong winds have brought innocuous wigglies down. 

Then an arbitration area kicks in, and I feel it’s in between. Arbitration decretes that the quick reaction area probably got it wrong, but it does not hurt to jump, but arbitration sends a moderation order to the jump, because emergency jumps are dangerous.

Such is the human brain.

Or more exactly, the human brains. The human brain is made of many. 

Even with half his brain dead, from strokes, bullets and what not, the bloody tyrant Lenin could provide astute opinions about his successors…  

Human brains are made of different pieces, not all equal, doing different things, and then conferring at a higher level called “consciousness” or “thinking”. 

The situation above happened April 12, 2022, but I had encountered an ultra rare snake on cement, a few miles away wiggling away very fast, a few days prior. It was of a sub-species of Garter snake, mostly jet black and scarlet red, related to the colorful one represented. A few weeks prior, on dirt, the scene above repeated, but that time there was a real snake below my left shoe! It nearly got pancaked. (Those snakes are not dangerous)

Conclusions:

1. To speak of human consciousness is a simplification: a given brain has many coexistent consciousnesses, and they work at different speeds, in different ways, and are focused on non-intersecting inputs and outputs [2]. The wiggly = jump away is obviously a primitive form of hard wired consciousness (prehistoric men evolved in regions full of extremely dangerous snakes). 
2. What we call “thinking” is often high level arbitrage. That doesn’t mean that lower level areas and entanglement are not conscious and thinking.
3. The brain is a sort of democracy, with its own institutions: brain organs entangled through neural networks, and different areas get to vote.
4. Social organizations should mimic the brain and for the same reason: neural democracy is hardwired. The brain works the world in parallel, not top down. That means democratically, not fascistically. Why? Because this way the brain can do more, and some of it at extreme speed.

Some currents of Buddhism suggest to rest the mind by doing nothing, that’s supposed to be meditative. However, rock climbers learn to rest dynamically. I believe in dynamic meditation, and putting the entire brain to work, resting dynamically, not just breathing… The Dyonisos approach, embraced by Socrates, getting drunk to reach joy and perspective, is part and parcel of this dynamical meditation (I don’t drink alcohol… no need… Crazy enough already…) 

Ah, wiggly was just a sinuous branch thrown by the strong, cold wind. And the frontal cortex was right to suspect that, in spite of the sun, it was no snake weather. 

Patrice Ayme

***

[1] Once on Mount Tamalpais in California, my right shoe caught a thin piece of steel (!) which was sticking out after a (botched) trail repair job by rangers. I crashed over the next ten meters; the trail was straight, so the crash happened on the trail rather than the precipice on the right… Last summer I crashed twice in quick succession on icy rocks at 3,500 meters (!). Bad soles on those shoes I discovered. There again I was lucky not to have fallen off trail… Just got decorated with blood… Those crashes were actually more dangerous than the ones where I broke bones…

What I nearly stepped on a few years ago. (Actually a related subspecies, even rarer, as it is found just around one hill.)

[2] I think many things in many ways, all at the same times. Does that mean that I am many, Mr. Descartes?

Aphorisms April 2022: Truth Absolutism, Pain, Difference, Ukraine, etc.

Truth Uber Alles:

Human interactions, be they with people or objects, vary. Considerably. Reasons vary. Considerably. However, we will get a better society when we get better minds… from the habit of telling the truth no matter what… except in truly exceptional circumstances, such as reassuring someone who is dying.

In particular, all and any political or war leaders, at some points, tell some truth(s). I know of no exception Yes even Stalin, Hitler, Trump, Biden, Xi and Putin. They even may tell the truth, while telling lies.

***

Thus Free Speech Absolutism:

So that all potential truths can be expressed. Otherwise no verified new truths could ever occur. 

Elon Musk, a “truth absolutist“, bought for a few billion $ nearly 10% of Twitter. Musk also gave Starlink, satellite internet capacity to Ukraine, a safety mechanism to provide internet communications while Putin pursues his genocide. Not only is there no contradiction between being for democracy and for truth… but to optimize the genesis of the latter, the former is best. Reciprocally democracy without truth, thus transparency and significance, is impossible. This is why, under the insignificant Obama, neither truth nor democracy progressed: only Putin progressed, who is the opposite of all that. Putin had correctly observed Obama was insignificant. He assumed that it was the same for the fungible, and purchased, Biden, forgetting that plutocrats follow the battlefield like vultures carrion, and for the same reason: easy pickings…

***

Yet the Duty To Censor Genocide, Born From Genocidal Propaganda:

Some may object that I approve of censoring Russia Today, Sputnik, and other Putin propagandist media. Well, that’s different: we are in a war, even a world war and genocidal situation. Just like Hitler said, and actually repeated an old Christian idea, that Jews did not have a right to exist in Germany… or Christendom… Putin said that Ukraine, hence Ukrainian did not have a right to exist, except perhaps as full subjects of the Kremlin, hence Putin.  

As I could see in many personal communications I received, many repeated word for word Putin propaganda. That was quite similar to those who repeated, or espoused Hitler’s views in the 1930s… for example that the Versailles Treaty was a horrendous attack against Germany (in truth it freed Poland, and Eastern European countries). Similarly, Putin collaborators believe that NATO, a treaty of collective defense, was not something free countries had a right to sign, because only the Kremlin, or more specifically mass murdering tyrant Putin, can decide what countries do.  

I read Putin propaganda a lot… But just as in the case of my familiarity with Nazism, I do not believe it. Normal people, though, do not have in their moral genetic an obsession with truth. Instead they grab the first thing that comes to them, if it’s well packaged, and believe it. We saw this happen in the 1930s with fascism, be it Italian, Stalinian, or Hitlerian. They each had their unquestioning followers…

Such divided opinion, with some espousing fascism emotionally speaking is not innocuous. The French chief of staff took a whole flurry of disastrous decisions in the first days of May 1940, enough to lose the Battle of France irreversibly in 5 days (May 10 to May 15, day when he was fired). How did that happen, aside from sheer stupidity and hubris? (His second in command had warned him of what exactly happened!) Well, Gamelin admitted that, starting in 1936, he, and his colleagues, were more preoccupied by the French Popular Front (then elected in power in France), than by Hitler… 

This had direct consequences, such as not arming state of the art French fighter planes…

None of this would have happened if the Jewish PM Blum, heading the French Popular Front had overruled Anglo-Saxon opposition, and attacked Hitler’s Germany in 1936… At least in Spain… The french military could then have focused where it needed to focus…

***

True Hedonists Search For Pain

Why would a perfect world come with a heavy price? If a world is perfect, it is very worthy, thus pricey…

Human beings need contrast to distinguish, we expect pain, we need pain to help to distinguish strongly between alternatives. Rampaging against pain, per se, is not wise. Let alone making religions about pain avoidance (Buddhism avoiding pain now, Christianism, or Islamism avoiding pain in the after world…)

Verily, true hedonists search for pain… It is the price of the worthy world.

***

Vive La Difference!

In emotional discourse, passions themselves are words. And common words cannot replace emotional words.

Thinking discriminates. Being attracted to some forms of inequality is intrinsic to higher mental pursuits.

***

Time Is Local, Objects Are Nonlocal. So Says The Quantum:

Time, as measured by light, is local (relative to place and speed)… whereas objectivity, the very existence of objects, is nonlocal (yet not absolute, being consciousness dependent). Thus speaks the Quantum. This is what studying Physis shows (aka Physics, Nature in Greek). More exactly, what studying light shows… Let the sparks fly…

Indeed what does that mean, philosophically? When on a planet, time runs slower by one’s feet… And one’s mind may activate from nonlocal influences in a non neglectable way… 

***

I try to suffer to make myself better (but not too much). I think that makes me morally superior (to what I would be otherwise). Leveraging the enlightenment brings pain , elaborating a morality impervious to pain.

Don’t laugh… Serious sport and serious thinking always require pain.

“Analyze” means total destruction. Wisdom harbors mayhem.

Not kidding… From Etymological dictionary:

analysis (n.) 1580s, “resolution of anything complex into simple elements” (opposite of synthesis), from Greek analysis literally “a breaking up, a loosening, releasing,” noun of action from analyein “unloose, release, set free; to loose a ship from its moorings,” in Aristotle, “to analyze,” from ana “up, back, throughout” (see ana-) + lysis “a loosening,” from lyein “to unfasten” (from PIE root *leu- “to loosen, divide, cut apart”).

So why did Derida and company invent “deconstruction”. Just to “faire son faiseur de malin” (deliberately infantile semantics to describe the infantile behavior of pretending to have created a concept which is at least three millennia old).

***

Heavens And Hell Make The Human Mind:

All over we see people trying to show that they are better than children, and that’s infantile. Childhood is made to be overcome. Children overcome their own childhood, every day.

The Pope pointed this out: “some potentate” unleashed the threat of nuclear war on the world in an “infantile and destructive aggression” under the guise of “anachronist claims of nationalistic interests.”

“We had thought that invasions of other countries, savage street fighting and atomic threats were grim memories of a distant past,” said an outraged pope. “Once again, some potentate, sadly caught up in anachronistic claims of nationalist interest, is provoking and fomenting conflicts, whereas ordinary people sense the need to build a future that will either be shared or not be at all,” he said.

Yes, indeed.

Vlad the Impaler did what he had to do, give back to the Ottomans, some of their own medicine. Russia, the country which is, by far, the largest in the world, wants to gain even more territory. As the Ottoman did, for many centuries (and got it: the two states which expanded the most between 1350 and 1650 were Russia and the Ottomans). It’s high time to give back some of its own medicine to Vlad the Mad…

Patrice Ayme

The attack on Ukraine is a bigger threat on humanity than any prior threat ever, because, for the first time, tyranny attacks democracy while threatening to use nuclear weapons. This tsunami of hatred needs to utterly fail, if humanity is to survive. Hopefully young people will understand this, and put a stop to it, as many of the old, aside of course from Ukrainians, still do not understand what happened in Munich in 1938…

Want More Civilization? Debate More! That Is: Beat Up Completely!

REASON IS WAR BY OTHER MEANS, AND WITH OTHER GOALS. BUT STILL WAR. RUDE IS REASON.
Debate is central to humanity. Debate fosters intelligence. De-bate is intrinsically violent: it is a battle. Our ancestors won, and were not eaten, because they beat up the opposition completely.
Correct logic knows no alternative.
To debate comes from “to quarrel, dispute,” also “to combat, fight, make war” (senses now archaic), also “discuss, deliberate upon the pros and cons of,” from Old French, Thirteenth Century, Modern French débattre). Originally “to fight,” from de- “down, completely” (see de-) + batre “to beat,” from Latin battuere “beat”.

No total dichotomy between reason and passion. There is no reason without passion. Having passion for reason is the only way to have reason.

The noun debate was coined in the late Fourteenth Century in France. These were revolutionary times. Debates were everywhere. These were intellectual times. Once a year, the university of Paris organized a commencement ceremony, and the hooded cortege was so long, it extended from one end of Paris. These were the times when Buridan and his students established the core of what Anglo-Saxons and their white Anglo supremacists followers call “Newtonian Mechanics”. The core was the F = ma law. It overturned 17 centuries of erroneous physics from Aristotle [1].
Buridan, a revolutionary character, physicist, mathematician, logician, and adviser to kings, became rector of the University of Paris… although he had refused to study theology (an iconoclast attitude at the time).

The presidential debate commission, at the request of Biden clan’s, is studying “new tools to maintain order”. In other words: censorship. The US is a republic where the presidents get censored… even before they make it to the presidency.
 
Having “moderators” ask different questions at different times to different individuals who answer separately with their lies, is not a debate.
In France, the sister republic of the USA [2], the two presidential candidates talk to each other across a table. No moderator. They have to moderate themselves. If they cannot moderate themselves, how do we expect them to moderate the world? Or the climate?

The Enlightenment was the triumph of reason. It was the triumph of finding the roots. Reason finds causes of why something is right, and why the alternatives are wrong. Reason does that by beating up those alternatives completely. Reason is war by other means, and with other goals. The goal is to establish supreme logics, those explaining the most significant facts, and demolishing the most significant lies .
Patrice Ayme

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[1]. They also demonstrated, geometrically, the first theorems of differential calculus (with crafty geometric, that is, integral arguments).
***
[2] The French and US constitution were written down within three weeks of each other in 1789 CE… At a time when it took longer than that to cross the Atlantic. For generations, revolutionary French and American thinkers evolved hand in hand. American thinkers and influencers (Colonel Washington, etc.) interacted directly with the French in North America, and the influences were mutual. There was also a pervasive Native American influence: thereafter the American and French republics carried quite a bit of diffuse but crucial elements of Native America. In particular, the “Nature God” (not simply the Christian God) which was in the original constitutional documents of both republics. Christian god made its coup in 1954… but should be eased out… 

What Mishandling Ontology Of The Quantum Tells Us About The Coronavirus Catastrophe

Coronavirus and Ontology Of The Quantum: what could they possibly have in common? A failure to think deep and correct:

Many tales about the Quantum, most of them putting the cart before the horse. Same with COVID 19, and other biological problems we face: as I pointed out in a preceding essay, so far the COVID 19 mortality rate is 6% (ignoring cases we don’t know about)… And that rate varies dramatically according to states: for instance, Singapore was able to avoid any death and jugulate the disease, so far. Drastic logical failures are a characteristic of today’s governance… while the freedom to err is part of the learning process, i shouldn’t be part of the governing process. New diseases were predicted, and were seen. There was not enough publicly (hence deep) financed research.

Einstein’s fans want us to believe that we are watching the multiverse, when looking at this diffraction pattern from a single slit, as above. How dumb can one be, and still have a PhD? What I see, observing them, those multiversists, is the arrogance of stupidity of clerks whom the establishment bought. Similar arrogance has been in evidence from the idiotic leadership of the planet; it was obvious major pandemics were around the corner. Research in biology (and attending fields serving biology, such as computer science, mathematics, physics, chemistry) had to be massively boosted.

Errance in governance drove the Coronavirus pandemic: one can’t argue that catastrophic pandemic is a big surprise, there were many spooky and very lethal alerts before that: SARS 1, MERS, Ebola, H1N1, Zika, Influenza A subtype H5N1, etc. One of the Ebola epidemics killed around half of those infected, 11,500 people, dead. H5N1 had an even higher death rate. Each of these preceding epidemic was contained with drastic measures. In the case of Zika, containment nearly failed (France, Brazil were affected). In the case of COVID19, containment completely failed. Israel’s decision to put under two weeks observation any newcomer was the right one. 

Thinking is an art which needs to be improved. Thinking about the Quantum has been a laboratory of thought… and the rats have not exercised well, they have been lazy. Hence a general lack of performance in a situation which demands ever more deep and bold, truth-seeking. 

So out there, axiomatics for the Quantum have been rolled out. Generally they assume what one would want to prove from first principles. So what would be a fundamental axiomatics for the Quantum? That Quantum Processes are described by waves. That was actually De Broglie’s axiom of 1924. The other fundamental axiom is that energy is emitted in lumps (aka quanta), Planck established that one, through a tour de force. The logical consequence is that energy should arrive in lumps (quanta). Einstein got that idea, beautiful and obvious… and got the Nobel for it, because it explained the photoelectric effect. Then Einstein made what I view as a mistake: he deduced Quantum Processes were about lumps flying around (I call this Einstein’s Error, all the parrots have repeated that Error since, without any proof except for the presumably harmonious chorus of all parrots) [1]. 

How do we know this, that Quantum Processes are waves? From the one slit experiment: light passes through one slit expands after the slit, and creates a wavy pattern, characteristic of, well, waves…

Pretty obvious, isn’it?

Copenhagen physicists instead claim Quantum Processes just computes like waves… but are not waves but, instead, are lumps, like Einstein said (no objective proof of either of these two affirmations, which are instead founded, unfortunately for them, on a traditional haughtiness of the elite, the sort of mood an age can be pervaded with).

Similarly, it is pretty obvious that some fashionable mass behaviors akin to collective madness had to be terminated: such as flying all over the world like sardines in cans, just because we could go to an exotic beach for ten days. Or going on giant cruise ships which, when they idle in ports, pollute as much as two million cars. Or all these “businessmen”, or academics being busy flying around the globe to meet and greet, furthering their plots… When much of the activities they claimed to be engaging in could be done at a distance. In cases like that, the argument is made:’Oh, this is private!’ No, it’s not private, it’s tax supported, hence public. When the GAFA act private, it’s to pocket the public subsidies they profit from (watch: GAFA pay no significant tax). “Business” jets make 100% of the CO2 of the US, and, as all other planes, but worse, are massively publicly financed (no tax on jet fuel; usage of public air traffic control; tax deduction of the activity, etc.) 

But mostly what has to cease is under-financing research. Under-financing research, especially in fundamental biology, creates a lost opportunity in improving the human condition, that’s one thing. But the other thing which has developed is that we have altered the biosphere, and so doing, made it hostile to us more than it used to. So fundamental research in all fundamental aspects of all fields where we have altered the status quo, like the viral and bacteriological, or parasitic environment, but also the chemical environment, or the atmospheric or oceanic environment, has to be tremendously boosted… just to maintain the status quo ante… 

Quantum ontology is the logic of existence of the Quantum. The most fundamental, because most obvious, observation of the Quantum is that it makes waves, and waves direct where it tends to appear. By learning to focus on what is the most important, we learn to think.

A completely unrelated example: today Obama was all over the waves, crowing about “Obamacare”. All the Obama fans were probably ecstatic: they have been trained that way. However the fundamentals of Obamacare are clear: US spending on health has augmented relative to GDP, profits of the privates have augmented, and US life expectancy has gone down more years in a row than ever before. All of these were established trends before Trump came to power… and “Obamacare” is still the law of the land. But Obama can talk with that arrogance, because he knows those he addresses have been trained to think tribally, not critically, those his audience cannot focus on the biggest features of the big picture.

The faster we make the flow of history, the more we have to run to just stay where we used to be. And the run is mental. And if we want to run away mentally the right way, we have to learn to think right, and pondering that single slit will help.

Civilizations perish, when they can’t think at the speed of their environment.

Patrice Ayme  

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[1] Technical aside: My Einstein Error is serious. It is not the usual Einstein Error, which is frivolous. Einstein, in a crafty self-serving way, called his “biggest blunder”, something which was neither here nor there. Einstein had invented the Cosmological Constant (CC), to make the universe of local spacetimes described by gravity static (otherwise it would expand or collapse). Then a few years latter, when it was discovered that, for sure, the universe expanded, Einstein called that CC his worst error… Because not having invented CC would have led him to predict expansion (he self-servingly said; instead Lemaitre and Friedman did it…) But actually, this “biggest blunder” is all pretty asinine, as all this was pretty obvious in classical gravitation (which is the first order of the modern, present, gravitation theory, traditionally attributed to Einstein, although many others contributed, from Riemann, to Poincare, Hilbert, and all the inventors of differential geometry…). A classical universe would either expand or collapse, under gravitation, no? (MOND theories, which I don’t believe in would throw the entire Einsteinian gravitation threw the window, of course…)

To Understand Nazi Germany Well, Understand Twentieth Century USA

Why did the German army fight to the bitter end in World War 2?

Patrice Ayme

Truly the world war launched by Germany in 1914 (and plotted in a conspiracy as early as 1912), finished in May 1945. As soon as WWI was put in limbo (“armistice” of November 11, 1918), Germany prepared the next round, training its tanks secretly in… the USSR, of all places (hence the German delusion of knowing the Soviets well enough to defeat them).

One has to realize that Germany was at war again by 1936… In Spain… where its engagement was crucial to enable the fascists to win (the Luftwaffe carried the rebel army to Spain from Africa, among other things… thanks to US oil, from Texaco…) That is 18 years after the defeat of 1914–1918, Germany was at war again, with full US plutocratic help (the rebel army in Spain was completely US equipped, the equipment generously lent by crafty US plutocrats). (This Nazi war started in 1936 made the Wehrmacht fully trained, and thus it gave it a huge advantage for the crucial week after May 10, in 1940: by the time the French and British learned to sort out the crucial details, it was too late… The Battle of France, and its three million casualties had been lost. )

World War One, started by the fascist German Second Reich, nearly finished in tragedy for the invaders, after the tremendous French counterattack of the First Battle of Marne (5 weeks after the initial invasion). Then the Western front stayed static and hopeless, until the Second Battle of the Marne. By then the US had stopped sending ammunition material to Germany (the US had broken the Franco-British blockade, through the Netherlands!) By 1918, the French were outgunning the Germans something like one German shell to thirty French shells. The Germans were rolled back under tremendous French artillery fire… And then US troops got engaged, soon even accompanied by French tanks… 

French city of Saint Lo, Destroyed by US Bombardment, night of June 6 to 7, 1944. There were much more US bombardments in WWII destroying France than the Nazis ever did. By orders of magnitude. Some of those bombardments clearly targeted the French industrial base… and the presence of Nazis was just a pretext! (Not exactly the case of Saint Lo which suffered more than 11,000 US casualties: those Nazis could be hard to kill…)

By November 1918, the German army was finished, overwhelmed by tanks, shells and even Allied planes. All it could do was destroy and devastate north-east France as it retreated. Then came the armistice. The Germans had fought in the lands they had invaded… not in Germany itself.

The Kaiser quit, the German Fleet self-destroyed at Scapa Flow, but otherwise little changed. Germany was not invaded. Germany refused to pay French reparations (parts of France are still destroyed and forbidden, a century later!)

Germany even formally stayed the “Second Reich” (“Weimar Republic” was not the official term). The Germans behind the 1914 attack became partisans of what became the Nazi Party, and they invented the Nazi spirit: all what happened to Germany was other people’s fault (the “Slavs”, the French, the Jews, Versailles, Communists, and others who “stabbed the German army in the back”…)

The “stabbing in the back” myth was particularly strong. The theme was that the German army had not been defeated by the Allies, but by traitors inside Germany: so traitors were shot, starting in 1919. “Stabbing in the back” was scathingly suggested by a British general in jest to generalissimo Ludendorff (Ludendorff had claimed as much, that victory had been around the corner… but those pesky German traitors). Ludendorff, who was in the Nazi Party before Hitler, ran away with the concept.

German corpse at Toulon, August 1944. 16,000 French troops attacked, 17,000 Germans surrendered… And 8,000 Germans were killed… In total, more than 5.3 million German soldiers (including SS) died in combat. Most of them after, clearly, the war was certain to be lost, and the cause abominable…

So come 1945, no decent German wanted to surrender. The notion of decency in Germany had become indecent. All the more as the Germans knew, deep down inside, that they had committed crimes against humanity against Soviets and Jews, and others.

In 1919, German crimes against humanity had been ignored, because the USA wanted to own Germany, not punish it.

Instead, the French Republic, under no illusion that the German racist mass homicidal madness had been cured, wanted to defang Germany, rendering it incapable of another attack against the world and civilization…

However, another indecent, racist, mass homicidal German attack is exactly what the smartest, racist and most cruel Anglosphere influencers wanted. Hence top diplomat Lord Keynes (British) wrote that racist pamphlet: “The Economic Consequences of Peace…”… which inspired the Nazis in turn, one more reason to make them believe that the Anglo-Saxon elite had their back… just as their predecessors had believed the same about the USA in June 1914… Or they themselves had believed in 1933–1940… when the US favored the Nazis and opposed the French.

Hitler and a few others remembered that Frederick II of Prussia, faced by an enormous coalition of superpowers (France, Austria, Russia) was miraculously saved from extinction at the last moment…

First Bombing of Berlin Was By The French in 1940 (in retaliation for bombing of French cities…). Thereafter British Night Bombing started. This is how it looked in 1945…

In the end, Hitler, maybe realizing he had been a pawn of “US plutocrats” (a notion he used) hoped that, at the last moment, the Western Allies would regain their senses, make a unilateral ceasefire with the Nazis, and sweep away the Stalinian Soviets. That’s indeed what Patton obviously thought… So he pointed out his Third Army could be in Berlin before the Soviets.

And Patton was right. Zhukov and his armies around Berlin had only 200 tanks still functioning by May 1, 1945. Moreover, Zhukov, had he wanted to do so, could have easily made a coup against Stalin.

Many in the Nazi elite had been more than chummy with the Americans: Henry Ford financed Hitler massively, even before 1923. US plutocrats, through their ownership of the Hamburg Amerika Line armed the Nazis with contraband weapons in 1932. The civil war then allowed the nazis to kill 10,000 of their enemies inside Germany. A Nazi minister commented a bit later:”When I hear the word “culture” I pull out my Browning.” Indeed, the Nazis were armed with contraband US Browning pistols… The Nazi economic miracle was a US economic miracle. The Nazi economy and society was entangled with the USA (from IBM, which had a Nazi monopoly, to Harvard songs, recycled by the Nazis…)

Thus, in top Nazi circles, the hope was strong that the USA would turn around at the last moment. The Nazis had understood nothing, and in particular they had not understood why the USA had let them be.

What the top Nazis didn’t realize is that they had been played, all along: US plutocrats wanted the world, and the Nazis, and the Soviets, were their tools. That meant US plutocrats and their servants wanted half of Europe occupied by the Soviets.

General Eisenhower was on the plot. Patton, his old professor, who finished WWI as a colonel wounded in a tank attack, was not. So Patton went to the press, saying the five million men strong, superbly equipped Allied army, with its air dominance, could occupy all of Germany. In retort, Eisenhower wrote directly to Stalin, to reassure the latter that he would have half of Europe. (Notice that Eisenhower was far from the top: there were supposedly two layers of command between him and the heads of states of the West… Clearly Eisenhower knew something not yet in history books!)

Stalin occupying half of Europe justified the occupation of the other half of Europe by US forces…. Thus the USA was quickly able to seize all European empires, worldwide (so-called “decolonization” and the triumph of the “American Century” and “Neoliberalism”).

Trying to understand Nazism without understanding the racist, greedy US elite, which suggested, enabled and financed it, is like hoping to understand a world conquering carriage by interviewing the ass pulling it… instead of the driver directing it.

Patrice Ayme

 

OF MANY MINDS WE ARE, Therefrom Our Volition’s Enormous Inertia

“PENSÉE UNIQUE“, INTELLECTUAL FASCISM, MONTAIGNE, HOW TO BUILD A BEAUTIFUL VOLITION AND WISDOM IN FULL.

Many view the following as smart, deep and wise, what we could call the empty-headed view of wisdom:

““When I dance, I dance; when I sleep, I sleep; yes, and when I walk alone in a beautiful orchard, if my thoughts drift to far-off matters for some part of the time for some other part I lead them back again to the walk, the orchard, to the sweetness of this solitude, to myself.”

― Michel de Montaigne

I, myself, and me, Michel, or how to focus on numero uno? Is that the epitome of mountainous wisdom?

This thought of Montaigne reflects a whole current of thought back in Eastern Eurasia. Where is the wisdom in that? Right, sometimes one should confer with oneself, I do it nearly 24/7. But who established scientifically that mono-thinking is superior to multi-tasking?

What is the difference between mono-thinking and “Pensée Unique“?

“Pensée Unique” is the ultimate instance of intellectual fascism, organizing one’s thinking around few, all too few thoughts, and emotions. “Pensée Unique” goes hand in hand with Political Correctness, the latter being possible only with the former.

Oriental thoughts masters, and Montaigne were, and are, searching for a vacuum, where none is to be had.

In truth, the brain is an intensive, gigantic and ultimate multitasker: giving haphazard orders to the brain is like giving haphazard orders to the ocean. One has to be smarter, and more conniving than barking out orders to billions of entangled neural networks. (Yes, entangled, and probably not just classically so: quantum entanglement has now been demonstrated over 500 nanometers…)

When Montaigne danced, he could do so because many parts of his brains synchronized. OK, right, when a cockroach is looking for food, it probably does not let its thoughts wander. And the species has been around thousands of times longer than ours. Is that why we should imitate them?

In truth longevity of cockroaches has to do with their stupidity: were they more clever, they would have bigger brains, eat more energy, and thus would have been more prone to extinction, like T Rex. However, even coackraches let their thoughts wander: turn the light on, they will notice it, although all they thought about a second before was food. They are therefore multitasking: part of their brain is out to detect the exposition light brings them.

If we are into wisdom, we are into brains, and if we are into brains, we are multitaskers.

Drus, peak of death, Chamonix, Alps. I should have died at the location of the upper dust cloud, more than half way up, in the hidden very steep ice gully on the right. That I didn’t is a mystery (had I kept on falling, after huge rocks hit the ropes in the ice gully, by partner would have died too).

The ability to multitask does not mean that the wise should be incapable of concentrating. Just the opposite. Concentration comes naturally, when the situation requires it. I tend to be a scatterbrain, in the noble sense of the term, yet, I am a mountain climber, an activity which, like mountain running, requires concentration (so does deep-sea diving which I still do when next to a non-freezing sea).

More than once, I found myself in desperate situations when only hyper concentration and resulting superhuman strength and agility were required to bring my survival. However, the way survival was achieved reveals how the brain works. The last time this happened was 15 months ago, when I broke a crucial hold in an overhanging traverse where falling was an option implying death and, or, a very grave injury (and thus helicopter rescue, at best). But I didn’t fall, and i am still mystified by it.

I have faced, at least once, certain death, and I pulled it off. How? I don’t know. In cases like that the brain is so fully concentrated that the short-term memory system ceases to work. Motor neurons all fire together, and the frontal lobes, the strategic thinking is actually employed tactically, 100%.  Yes, it’s addictive. When I mountain run on snow, going down at high-speed, and I have to visualize trajectories carefully, to avoid blatant ice, and finishing in the trees, downslope, at 5 meters per second, I sure have to concentrate. I am not like the presumably half senile Montaigne, proud of being able to dance by only thinking about dancing, an occupation I could engaged in, with a blindfold.

So I don’t know what the admirers of  “Pensée unique” hope to achieve. An early death of the mind?

I go the other way:

When I run, I think. When I sleep, I think. In both cases I think, but not in the same way. That’s the trick of superior wisdom acquisition. By not thinking in the same way, I mean not with the same parts of the brain, not with the same neural circuitry, not with the same neurohormones. I try to approach any subject from many different paths, many different neuronal pathways, many different neurohormonal environment. Thinking becomes a sum over all neurohormonal and neurological pathways.

It is indeed amazing how different a subject become, when one is ten miles from the closest human being, running on snow on top of a mountain ridge, much of the brain monitoring the next ten strides, one after the next, besides searching for ice and other indications of various traps.

Of all the things I have thought about, all of them literally got run in the ground at some point. Thinking, when running, is conducted bare boned, as the brain eats oxygen (and I only do mountain running, which demands very high brain activity to select placements and trajectories whereas running around a track can be conducted with a blindfold, holding someone’s hand)

Thus, thinking about a given subject when conducting a brain intense sport forces the brain to consider only the essence of a problem. Similarly, and for the same reason, multitasking forces into concentrating into the essence of any subject, by forcing mental concentration on the bare bones aspects of said subject. Another effect is that reducing by force the usual neurological, and neurohormonal approaches to a subject enables said approaches to rest, and thereupon, reduce themselves to a more concentrated essence, and being approached afresh.

“Free will” or more exactly, volition, is not free: it is a prisoner of our own brain, its neural networks, its experiences, associations, theories and emotions. All those, in turn, were built progressively, over years and even decades, nonlinearly feeding on themselves, and back to the environment they evolved from and modified in turn (in that environment, typically, one’s family).  Volition is a house we helped built, and also a robot we inhabit.

This fits with the rolling cylinder metaphor familiar to the ancient Greco-Romans. Cicero, in De Fato (43), presents Chrysippus’ metaphor of the rolling cylinder as follows: “‘In the same way therefore, as a person who has pushed a roller forward has given it a beginning of motion, but has not given it the capacity to roll, so a sense-presentation when it impinges on the will, it is true impresses and as it were seals its appearance on the mind, but the act of assent will be in our power, and as we said in the case of the roller, though given a push from without, as to the rest will move by its own force and nature.”

Some impulse, say a sensation gets something to roll (or not) according to its nature, inertia does the rest.

The Greco-Romans didn’t have inertia as an explicit concept, they touched it there. Rolling cylinders were used as an important example which Galileo Galilei rolled away with, establishing deep laws thanks to smart experiences involving them. (too bad Greco-Roman society, then, had become adverse to too much thinking, they could have discovered Galileo’s physics)

This distinction between impulse and subsequent evolution, is actually fundamental to differential equation theory: the initial conditions are a different input from the structure of the equation itself. Different initial conditions can give completely different results, from the same differential equation.

The nidopallium in birds is involved in executive functions, and higher cognitive functions. One intricate behavioural process governed by the nidopallium in birds is migration. There is significant neuronal recruitment to this region of the avian brain during migratory flight. It enhances cognitive potency in the nidopallium.

Thus birds benefit from improved navigational capabilities during migration, prompted by the significant changes in spatial sensory stimuli. This illustrates that neuroplasticity in the brain, avian, or not, depends upon the mission. We build the cylinder we are going to roll, depending upon what we do, and, or, plan to be doing. But, once it’s mostly built, our existing neural networks, and the neurohormonal machinery bathing them, presenting enormous inertia, is how volition rolls.

The great masters wanted concentration? Well, the best way to get it is through deconcentration, and subsequent recreation.

One may wonder why so many sages insisted so heavily that “Pensée Unique” is the way of wisdom. The reason is always the same: the elite, the establishment is plutocratic in nature. That means it rules, fully using the Dark Side. That works best when the people’s operating system is a sort of sheep mentality, transforming them into the placid “sheeple” (sheep + people). This is a generalization of Nietzsche’s dual morality model of European civilization: Christianism for the masses, lion (“blonde beast”) for the aristocracy.

It goes without saying that all and any wisdom propagandized to the masses for more than a generation or two was sustained and amplified by the aristocracy (power of the best), truly a plutocracy (power of evil). By telling the masses they should concentrate on the task at hand with one and only one thought, “Pensée Unique” at any given moment, the elite told the masses they worked best as robots, and made sure no wandering thoughts would compromise the established order.

Montaigne was the first of his very wealthy family to achieve nobility status. That implied that Montaigne didn’t have to pay taxes (just like today’s plutocrats). He could just live off the considerable revenue of his immense domain, making wine (the domain still does).

Montaigne knew higher-ups intimately: not only his friends forced him to become mayor of Bordeaux, but he was a personal friend of the King of Navarre, selected and elevated later to King of France, Henri IV (and one of the best leaders civilization had).

Montaigne was a sage, one of the best groundbreaking thinker ever. He broke free of some of the stranglehold of wisdom, Greco-Roman style. He was not always right. For example Montaigne was against the colonization of America, whereas the Greeks’ spirit was to colonize away… And it’s easy to argue Montaigne was wrong on colonization: it’s impossible to pretend, that, in the fullness of time, we are not all descendants of colonizers, because, we are. Even inside Africa, colonization started long before Neanderthal genes made it all the way to South Africa.

Science can, and always does, beat back received wisdom, make it much more nuanced. Yes, the world is local, as field theory has it, but not really, as Quantum Physics, and the dismayed Einstein himself, established, and now confirmed with countless experiments. Truth is true, but in a certain context, thus will always surprise us, as contexts change. Thus so it should be with minds, especially when they think anew..

Montaigne objected to colonization. It was not really original: the first to object to colonization were the Native Americans Jacques Cartier debated with on ther Saint Laurent, in 1534.

So France bungled the colonization of America. Philip II of Spain, himself the son of a wise emperor native French speaker, didn’t have this pangs of conscience: he sent an armada, exterminated the French in the Carolinas, who left only a name behind (and maybe some genes among the Natives). To be a saint, when confronting evil, does not destroy evil, it helps it out.  

Montaigne objected to colonization on moral ground, he wanted the savages to be free and prosper. But, actually, the French “mission civilisatrice” and trade colonizing model, would have saved the Native Americans from the holocausts which lay in their future as they were left to the tender mercy of the English “West Country Men” and other Bible, holocaust stomping colonizers of the enslaving and scalping sort.

Montaigne would have discovered that possibility, had he debated all the possibilities. He wanted to save the savages, he insured their ruin.

Of many minds we are. And the more minds of which we are, and cultivate, the more human we get.

Patrice Aymé