Midwives hold the
newborn baby girl named
Danica Camacho,
the seven billionth baby,
Fabella Maternity
hospital. Manila, 31 October 2011.
.
Source and
some background information are at
A brief look at Wikipedia informs us, that
“All people today are classified as Homo sapiens. Our species of humans first
began to evolve nearly 200,000 years ago in association with
technologies not unlike those of the early Neanderthals. It is now clear
that early Homo sapiens, or modern humans, did not come after the Neanderthals but were
their contemporaries. However, it is likely that both modern humans and
Neanderthals descended from Homo heidelbergensis.”
On a recent visit to Munich I saw Gunther
von Hagens’ exhibition KÖRPERWELTEN; it is an absolute MustSee if it should
ever be shown anywhere near you. Elsewhere it is also known as BODY WORLDS or
LE MONDE DE CORPS, [catalogue by Arts and Sciences, Heidelberg, 2013] From
the blurb of the bodyworlds store: “Never
before has an exhibition moved the public as profoundly and changed the view of
personal corporeality as strongly as has...
During those 200,000 years of the existence of Homo sapiens all those ~110 billion of our ancestors were invariably gestated and born by the female half of the species, that wonder of evolution revered throughout history as Venus – whether by, or of, Willendorf, Milo, Urbino, Botticelly, Courbet, Giorgione, Velazquez – to name some well-known European examples, not doubting there being many more names and versions of reverential idols of our genesis in cultured regions of other continents and traditions.
In my earlier posting – BRAINology…The Bits – I briefly related some considerations regarding the physical aspects of
our existence as humans, with the summary that “The chief function of the body is to carry the brain around,” in the words of Thomas Edison, and
emphasizing the need, and obligation, to maintain the body in good health – “..ut
sit mens sana in corpore sano” – so that a sound mind may be enabled to
function. After all, it is the sapiens
part of the definition of our species that appears to be the singular
evolutionary reason for our unique (as far as we can ascertain so far)
existence in the whole of the cosmos.
What an obligation to live up to!
And similarly to our bodies being
constituted from what we have inherited through genes, and were
nurtured by the umbilical cord during gestation, or followed later by what
we ingested through mouth and nose, so our minds similarly are formed from genetic
instructions followed by what we have learnt through processes akin to osmosis
even during gestation, and later mainly via our five senses. Let me call all thoughts and memories that we
carry around individually, however they may have got there, as memes.
The capacity, and the wish to learn – to
discover things – is inborn in every human brain:
“In
fact, there are interesting generalizations about language that are worth
studying, but universal grammar is the study of the genetic basis for language,
the genetic basis of the language faculty…. So that means, for example, if an infant from
a Papua New Guinea tribe that hasn’t had contact with other humans for thirty
thousand years comes to Boulder, Colorado, it will speak like any kid in
Colorado, because all children have the same language capacity. And the converse is true. This is distinctly human. There is nothing
remotely like it among other organisms…. The newborn is barraged by all kinds
of stimuli. If you put, say, a chimpanzee or a kitten or a songbird in that
environment, it can only pick out what’s related to its own genetic capacities.
A songbird will pick out a melody of its species or something from all this
mass because it’s designed to do that, but it can’t pick out anything that’s
relevant to human language. On the other hand, an infant does. The infant instantly picks language-related
data out of this mass of confusion. In fact, we now know that this goes on even
in the uterus. Newborn infants can detect properties of their mother’s language
as distinct from certain – not all, but certain – other languages.
And
then comes a very steady progression of acquisition of complex knowledge, most
of it completely reflexive. Teaching doesn’t make any difference. An infant is
just picking it out of the environment. And it happens very fast, in a very
regular fashion. A lot is known about this process. By about six months, the infant
has already analysed what’s called the prosodic structure of the language,
stress, pitch – languages differ that way – and has sort of picked out the
language of its mother or whatever it hears, its mother and its peers. By about
nine months, roughly, the child has picked out the relevant sound structure of
the language….”
So advises Noam Chomsky, quoted here from
Chapter 7: learning how to discover, in POWER SYSTEMS, Hamish Hamilton, Penguin
Books, London, 2013.
Another remarkable illustration of the
innate human drive to learn is related in Der Spiegel of December 28, 2012: “A US aid organization has handed children
in the remote Ethiopian village of Wenchi tablet computers in an experiment
aimed at enabling them to teach themselves. They are now speaking their first
words of English -- without ever having encountered a teacher.” Read the full story here: http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/ethiopian-children-handed-free-tablet-computers-to-teach-themselves-a-874936.html
Beyond such early ‘natural’ learning we all
of us reading this are likely to have experienced statewide organized formal
schooling of many kinds, varieties of knowledge and skills, spread over levels
from the three ‘Rs’ – reading, ‘riting, ‘rithmatic – to highest academic levels
and beyond. It is probably fair to say
that no two human brains were ever anywhere near identical in memetic make-up
forming an internal model of the world to help us steer throughout life in the
external myriad of individually situate realities in which we find us.
Ministries of Education continually produce
laws to regulate institutions and teaching methods in keeping up with evolving
societal needs and best evolving knowledge of methods and of tools for learning
and teaching, from blackboards and chalk, to paper and pencils, on to
telescopes and microscopes of which the biggest and most expensive for looking
at the smallest ‘bits’ possibly is the CERN [European Organization for Nuclear Research] facility straddling the border between France and Switzerland.
Let me recap something I wrote in an
earlier context [Thinking About the Organization
of Design, at http://cleanenergypundit.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/tyger-cubs-in-course-of-preparing-to.html
]:
<<<<<<<<<<
Benevolent legislation remains useless
until the technology, the wealth, is created adequate to individual needs. And
that, definitely, needs designing.
Biologists tell us that
"Life or the livingness of a substance
or conglomeration of substances can be defined as the measure of the rate at
which it can increase the organization of its surroundings with which to
increase the level of its own organization", in the words of Isaac Asimov.
That is not different from Fuller's
definitions of real wealth,
"…the total organized capacity of
society to deal with `forward event controlling', that is with future contingencies".
At both levels of organization — biological
or social — we deal with open systems: organizations that depend and interact
with their environment.
The most important characteristics of open
systems are summarized by the Law of Requisite Variety as stated by
W. R. Ashby [“Self-regulation
and requisite variety” in SYSTEMS THINKING, F E Emery ed., Penguin Modern
Management Readings, Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1969]:
"Let 'D' stand for all external
disturbances impinging on an organization or system; (R) for any regulator; (T)
for a table of moves, i.e. a list of disturbances against which are set a list
of possible regulating responses; (E) for the outcome which the regulator is to
hold stable or within certain limits for the system to survive.
“It will be easily seen that for the outcome
to be held stable, the
regulator’s responses (R) must at least be
equal to the variety of disturbances (D)
reaching the system. For any survival
margin to exist, (R)’s variety of
responses must exceed all
possible outside influences. "
"Only variety in (R) can force down
the variety due to (D) — only variety can destroy variety, and keep a
system stable or alive".
This concept lies at the root of our
understanding curiosity as the source of creativity.
"The second way to read this diagram
is to consider (R) as a transmitter:
from which can be seen that (R)'s capacity as a regulator cannot exceed (R)'s capacity as a channel of communication".
from which can be seen that (R)'s capacity as a regulator cannot exceed (R)'s capacity as a channel of communication".
This concept forms the basis of our
understanding what we mean by competence.
__________________________________________________
This brings me to a further observation by
Noam Chomsky op.cit. which may
illustrate Ashby’s Law of Requisite
Varitey:
“The
conflicts about what education ought to be go right back through the early
Enlightenment. There are two striking images that I think capture the essence
of the conflict. One view is that education should be like pouring water into a
bucket. As we all know from our own experiences, the brain is a pretty leaky bucket,
so you can study for an exam on some topic in a course you’re interested in,
learn enough to pass the exam, and a week later you’ve forgotten what the
course was. The water has leaked out. But this approach to education does train
you to be obedient and follow orders, even meaningless orders.”
All akin to the famous Nuremberg Meme Funnel to produce instant geniuses or devotees:
A modern version Funnel control is Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, written in 1932, now not only still in print, but also within reach of genetic engineering.
But Chomsky continues:
“The
other type of education was described by one of the great founders of the modern
higher education system, Wilhelm von Humboldt, a leading figure and founder of
classical liberalism. He said education should be like laying out a string that
the student follows in his own way. In other words, giving a general structure
in which the learner – whether it’s a child or an adult – will explore the
world in their own creative, individual, independent fashion. Developing, not
only acquiring knowledge. Learning how to learn.
That’s
the model you do find in a good scientific university. So if you’re at MIT, a
physics course is not a matter of pouring water into a bucket. This was
described nicely by one of the great modern physicists, Victor Weisskopf, who
died some years ago. When students would ask him what his course would cover,
he would say, ‘It doesn’t matter what we cover. It matters what you discover.’
I should
say that I learned about this not from books but from experience. I was in a
Deweyite experimental school. That was the way things worked. It seemed very
natural. I only read about it later.”
Lucky Naom Chomsky! But he still had to do all the discovering –
it doesn’t just happen by itself – it needs determined searching to find things
out.
One of the paragons for ‘finding
things out’ is, of course, Richard P Feynman; not only because he is a
grandmaster of the art but because he could also write and talk about it
masterly for us to share in his ‘Pleasure
of Finding Things Out’:
Penguin
Books, London, 2007
I would like to share, and hopefully
inspire you to become a ‘finder-outer’
yourself, by quoting short excerpts of the range of topics covered in the
thirteen chapters of this collection of writings and lectures, as inducements
for your further reading. Before I do
this, I would also want to mention who induced me to Feynman, namely Freeman
Dyson through reading his The Scientist
As Rebel [New York Review
Books, 2006] – “From Galileo to today’s amateur
astronomers, scientists have been rebels”, writes Freeman Dyson. “In their
pursuit of Nature’s truths, they are guided as much by imagination as by
reason, and their greatest theories have the uniqueness and beauty of great
works of art…” advises the description
on the back cover. Apart from Richard Feynman, this book by Dyson also introduced
me to Vaclav Smil about whom I have written earlier. But back to the Pleasure of Finding Things Out:
Chapter 1
The
Pleasure of Finding Things Out
“…You
see, one thing is, I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it’s much more interesting to live
not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong”
Chapter 2
Computing
Machines in the Future
“…If
we somehow manage to make an atomic size computer, it would mean that the
dimension, is a thousand to ten thousand times smaller than those very tiny
chips that we have now…..The energy requirement for a single switch is also
eleven orders of magnitude smaller…so there is plenty of room for improvement…
and I leave this to you… as an aim to get to.”
Chapter 3
Los Alamos
from Below
of which the introductory description
reads: ‘And now a little something on
the lighter side – gems about wisecracker (not to mention safecracker) Feynman
getting in and out of trouble at Los Alamos: getting his own private room by
seeming to break the no-women-in-the-men’s-dormitory rule; outwitting the
camp’s censors; rubbing shoulders with great men like Robert Oppenheimer, Niels
Bohr, and Hans Bethe; and the awesome distinction of being the only man to
stare straight at the first atomic blast without protective goggles, an
experience that changed Feynman forever.’
Chapter 4
What Is
and What Should Be the Role of Scientific Culture
in Modern
Society
The introductory description: ‘Here is a talk Feynman gave to an audience
of scientists at the Galileo Symposium in Italy, in 1964. With frequent
acknowledgements and references to the great work and intense anguish of
Galileo, Feynman speaks on the effect of science on religion, on society, and
on philosophy, and warns that it is our capacity to doubt that will determine
the future of civilization.’
Chapter 5
There is
Plenty of Room at the Bottom
From the introduction: ‘In this famous talk to the American Physical
Society on December 29, 1959, at Caltech, Feynman, the “father of
nanotechnology,” expounds, decades ahead of his time, on the future of
miniaturization….’
Chapter 6
The Value
of Science
Of
all its many values, the greatest must be the freedom to doubt.
The introduction: ‘In Hawaii, Feynman learns a lesson in
humility while touring a Buddhist temple: “to every man is given the key to the
gates of heaven; the same key opens the gates of hell.” This is one of Feynman’s
most eloquent pieces, reflecting on science’s relevance to the human experience
and vice versa. He also gives a lesson
to fellow scientists on their responsibility to the future of civilization.’
Chapter 7
Richard P
Feynman’s Minority Report to the Space Shuttle Challenger Inquiry
From the introduction: ‘When the space shuttle Challenger exploded
shortly after its launch on January 28, 1986, six professional astronauts and
one schoolteacher were tragically killed. …A commission was formed, led by
Secretary of State William P Rogers and composed of politicians, astronauts, military
men, and one scientist, to investigate the cause of the accident and to
recommend steps to prevent such a disaster from ever happening again. The fact
that Richard Feynman was that one scientist may have made the difference
between answering the question of why the Challenger failed, and eternal
mystery…’
Chapter 8
What is
science?
The introduction: ‘What is science? It is common sense! Or is
it? In April 1966 the master teacher delivered an address to the National
Science Teachers’ Association in which he gave his fellow teachers lessons on
how to teach their students to think like a scientist and how to view the world
with curiosity, open-mindedness, and, above all, doubt. This talk is also a tribute to the enormous
influence Feynman’s father – a uniform salesman – had on Feynman’s way of
looking at the world.’
“….I
think we live in an unscientific age in which almost all the buffeting of
communications and television words, books and so on are unscientific. That
doesn’t mean they are bad, but they are unscientific. As a result, there is a
considerable amount of intellectual tyranny in the name of science….”
Chapter 9
The
Smartest Man in the World
The introduction: ‘Here is that wonderful 1979 interview of
Feynman by Omni magazine. This is Feynman on what he knows and loves best –
physics – and what he loves least, philosophy. (“Philosophers should learn to laugh at themselves.”) Here Feynman
discusses the work that earned him the Nobel Prize, quantum electrodynamics
(QED); he then goes on to cosmology, quarks, and those pesky infinities that
gum up so many equations.’
Chapter 10
Cargo Cult
Science: Some Remarks on Science,
Pseudoscience, and
Learning
how to not fool yourself
The 1974 Caltech Commencement
Address
The
introduction:
‘Question: What do
witch doctors, ESP, South Sea Islanders, rhinoceros horns, and Wesson Oil have
to do with college graduation?
Answer: They’re all examples the crafty Feynman uses to
convince departing graduates that honesty in science is more rewarding than all
the kudos and temporary successes in the world. In this address to Caltech’s class
of 1974, Feynman gives a lesson in scientific integrity in the face of peer
pressure and glowering funding agencies.
“…In summary, the idea is to try to give all
of the information to help others to judge the value of
your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgment in one
particular direction or another…
We’ve learned from experience that the truth will out.
Other experimenters will repeat your experiment and find out whether you were
wrong or right. Nature’s phenomena will agree or they’ll disagree with your
theory…
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself
– and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about
that. After you’ve not fooled yourself, it’s ease not to fool other scientists.
You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that…”
Chapter 11
It’s as
Simple as One, Two, Three
The introduction: ‘An uproarious tale of Feynman the precocious
student experimenting – with himself, his socks, his typewriter, and his fellow
students – to solve the mysteries of counting and of time.’
Chapter 12
Richard
Feynman Builds a Universe
The introduction:
‘In a previously unpublished interview made
under the auspices of the American Association for the Advancement of Science,
Feynman reminisces about his life in science: his terrifying first lecture to
Nobel laureate-packed room; the invitation to work on the first atomic bomb and
his reaction; cargo-cult science; and that fateful predawn wake-up call from a journalist informing him that he’d just won
the Nobel prize. Feynman’s answer: “You
could have told me that in the norming.” ‘
Chapter 13
The
Relation of Science and Religion
The introduction:
‘In a kind of thought experiment, Feynman
takes the various points of view of an imaginary panel to represent the
thinking of scientists and spiritualists and discusses the points of agreement
and of disagreement between science and religion, anticipating, by two decades,
the current active debate between these two fundamentally different ways of
searching for truth. Among other questions,
he wonders whether atheists can have morals based on what science tells them in
the way that spiritualists can have morals based on their belief in God – an
unusually philosophical topic for pragmatic Feynman.’
“I
put it up to the panel for discussion.”
Thus endeth Chapter and Book.
ooo 0000000000 ooo
Amongst the many other Feynman books in the
series of Penguin editions there is a later collection of lectures given in
1963, titled The Meaning of it All with
its three chapter headings
·
The Uncertainty of Science
·
The Uncertainty of Values
·
This Unscientific Age
which throws more light on how to navigate
through life’s uncertainties, remembering the thought from Chapter 1 quoted
earlier, “You see, one thing is, I can
live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it’s much more interesting to live
not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong.”, together with that other consideration from Chapter
10: “The first principle is that you must
not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be
very careful about that.”
The best way to cope with the uncertainty
of ‘brain bytes’, or memes [‘meme’
rhymes with seem, deem or dream] is to remember the definition of information given by Vlatko Vedral in
his DECODING REALITY – the universe as
quantum information [Oxford University Press, 2010]:
“So
in summary the modern definition of information is exactly this: the
information content of an event is proportional to the log of its inverse
probability of occurrence:
I
= log 1/p
This
definition is very powerful because we only need the presence of two conditions
to be able to talk about information. One is the existence of events (something
needs to be happening), and two is being able to calculate the probabilities of
events happening. This is a very minimal requirement, which can be recognized
in just about anything that we see around us. In biology, for example, an event
could be a genetic modification stimulated by the environment. In economics, on
the other hand, an event could be a fall in a share price. In quantum physics,
an event could be the emission of light by a laser when switched on. No matter
what the event is, you can apply information theory to it. This is why I will
be able to argue that information underlies every process we see in Nature.”
And the
interactions of ‘bits’ and ‘bytes’ certainly are natural processes – inside and
outside of brains.
An earlier description, by Tom Stonier in
his INFORMATION and the INTERNAL
STRUCTURE of the UNIVERSE, An Exploration into Information Physics [Springer
Verlag, London Ltd, 1990] appears refreshed by Vlatko Vedral’s book.
Anyone who has bet on horses, has invested
in stocks or shares, has taken out an insurance, or from the other side of the
coin, is a bookmaker or part of an insurance company, is familiar with weighing
probabilities as in Vlatko Vedral’s formula. This formula covers, of course,
all probabilities between 0% and 100% and it is especially illuminating when
considering these two endpoints.
Anything claimed or asserted to occur with
100% certainty under any circumstances would make the result for information
content ‘I’ equal to log 1/1 = log 1 which is zero. That would leave anything so estimated or asserted something
to be simply believed without question, or to be discarded as unusable; it
would certainly not offer any survival value when considered in the light of
Ashby’s diagram described earlier. Or it
could give rise to doubt – and that would bring us straight to the pleasure of finding out – unless the
powers that be might make it unpleasant, unrewarding, or lethal (Galileo
compared to Giordano Bruno, say).
If I have understood even from what little
I have read, it appears nothing in the whole of the Universe can be ascertained
with 100% certainty – Schrödinger’s cat won’t let us.
On the other hand, nothing could be
declared as absolutely impossible, with p=zero, or the value of information ‘I’
would become infinity.
“You
see, one thing is, I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it’s much more interesting to live
not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong.” advises Feynman; seems
none of us can do any better. But if Karl Popper is anything to go by, we can
at least find out which of our memes are wrong – shedding some of our meme-obesity.
“Gravitation
is not responsible for people falling in love”
said Einstein, reminding us that the human mind is capable of more than mere
rationality – there are hopes, dreams and emotions, doubts and the capacity to
invent questions, music, art, literature, fiction and science fiction, and
beliefs adopted pro tem to get on
with the business of living. Yes, I am a
firm believer -- in humanity being able to understand the universe and ourselves sufficiently to find means and
methods for surviving in health and with enjoyment on Earth beyond the next
inevitable ice age.
An ‘informative, thought-provoking and
entertaining’ book of the world of art is
written by John Carey, ‘who (to quote from the front cover) has been at various
points in his life a soldier, a barman, a television critic, a beekeeper, a
printmaker and a Professor of Literature at Oxford…’: WHAT GOOD ARE THE ARTS? [Faber
and Faber Ltd, London, 2005].
I mentioned earlier that it was Freeman
Dyson with his book THE SCIENTIST AS
REBEL who made me not only aware of Richard Feynman, but also pointed me to
Vaclav Smil, who in turn also touches on the role of religions in his GLOBAL
CATASTROPHES AND TRENDS – The Next Fifty Years [MIT Press, Cambridge Mass., London England, 2008]. It contains in Chapter
three unfolding trends over the next fifty years of the ‘New world Order’. Amongst
separate descriptions of possible trends in various specific regions of the
globe, Smil also devotes one section to ‘Islams’s Choices’ with points of view
not seen elsewhere. They need to be read
in full in their context as I find them too complex to summarize.
A brief look at the global
bulk of religions may be appropriate. How
many religions are there in existence? Best
estimates put the number around four thousand two hundred (4,200).
Most, if not all of us, will have been
raised in one of these, and adhered, changed, or disengaged during adulthood,
or adopted lesser or more fervent adherence.
Because consciousness and
conscience exist only in the singular, in the last resort, everyone has to
personally decide which, or none, of these meme constructs to follow;
and not only that, but even
within, possibly in most of them, there
are choices to be made
between extreme stances.
****************************************************
To wit :
[found on TED Talks and added on 12 September 2014]
[found on TED Talks and added on 12 September 2014]
"If you’re raised on
dogma and hate, can you choose a different path?
Zak Ebrahim was just seven
years old when his father helped plan the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. His
story is shocking, powerful and, ultimately, inspiring."
https://www.ted.com/talks/zak_ebrahim_i_am_the_son_of_a_terrorist_here_s_how_i_chose_peace
[found on change.org and added on 21 January 2015]
[found on change.org and added on 21 January 2015]
“The Muslim who risked his life at a Paris kosher market to save seven Jews
On Friday [7 January 2015] a string of terror attacks roiled France, 24-year-old Mali
citizen Lassana Bathily was at work in the underground stockroom of a
kosher market named Hyper Cacher near the Porte de Vincennes in eastern Paris.
He heard gunman Amedy Coulibaly enter the store and open fire, killing four
customers, it was later learned. Then, according to witnesses interviewed by the Associated Press and
accounts in French media, Bathily ushered more than a dozen customers
downstairs. He then killed the lights and turned off the stockroom’s freezer.
“We were locked
in there,” the Muslim man told French channel BFMTV, as the New York Times reported. “I told them to calm down, not make
any noise, or else if he hears that we’re there, he can come down and kill us.”
****************************************************
Karl Popper describes Judaic/Christian
extremes in his published talk [given at the Liberales Forum, St Gallen
University, 1989, published in THE LESSON OF THIS CENTURY, With Two Talks on
Freedom and the Democratic State [Routledge, London and New York, 2003].
From the last chapter of this book, here
a brief excerpt:
FREEDOM AND INTELLECTUAL RESPONSIBILITY
“…
The most important of the ten commandments says: Thou shalt not kill! It contains almost the whole of morality. For
example, the way in which Schopenhauer formulated his ethics is only an
extension of this key commandment.
Schopenhauer’s ethics is simple, direct and clear. It says: do no harm or
injure anyone, but help everyone as much as you can.
But
what happened when Moses first came down from Mount Sinai with the tablets of
stone, even before he could utter the ten commandments? He found a heresy that deserved to be
punished with death, the heresy of the Golden Calf. Then he forgot the
commandment ‘Though shalt not kill’ and shouted:
‘Who is on the Lord’s side? Come to me!’ […] ‘Thus
says the Lord, the God of Israel. Put your sword on your side, each of you […]
and kill your brother, your friend, and your neighbour!’ […] and about three
thousand of the people fell on that day.
(Exodus 32:26-28)
That
perhaps was how it all started. What is sure is that things kept on in that way
– in the Holy Land and then here in the West, especially after Christianity
became the state religion. It is a terrible history of religious persecution in
the name of orthodoxy. Later – above all in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
– other ideological themes and beliefs were invoked one after the other to
justify persecution, cruelty and terror: the themes of nationality, race or class;
political or religious heresy.
The
idea of orthodoxy and heresy harbours the pettiest of vices – ones to which we
intellectuals are particularly susceptible, the vices of arrogance, thinking we
are always right, pedantry, intellectual vanity. These are petty vices, not as
serious as cruelty. But even cruelty is not altogether unknown among us
intellectuals. In this too we have done our share. We need only think of the
Nazi doctors who, some years before Auschwitz, were already killing off old and
sick people – or of the so-called ‘final solution’ to the Jewish question….”
So much for a brief reminder by one of the
best meme-field illuminators of the 20th Century as to how much meme-clearing
is still required.
Let me recap from the introduction to
Feynman’s Chapter 6: ‘In Hawaii, Feynman
learns a lesson in humility while touring a Buddhist temple: “to every man is
given the key to the gates of heaven; the same key opens the gates of hell.” ‘ If I regard the description of Popper’s appeal
for intellectual responsibility just quoted, as a description of how ‘the gates to hell’ came to be opened so
spectacularly during the 20th Century – and similar gates to hell
still open, as any newspaper almost daily finds headline descriptions for, we need to look also for memes that might
open ‘the gates to heaven’.
But before, a brief reminder of the hells
from memeocides and physical, psychological incl. economical, memeomaiming on Earth,
still extant from religious memeocracies
alone (apart from power-political memeocracies)
is mentioned on a slide from Reality Check #5 at
If you can practice your
religion without fear of aggression or murder,
then you are luckier than
another three billion fellow human beings.
The memes that open ‘the gates
to heaven’ are actually easy to find once you found your way to means of
sorting the chaff from the wheat by employing the one overriding Occam’s Razor:
Primum
est non nocere
The
supreme consideration is: do no harm
For my own practical purposes I have, so to
say, put this single-bladed Occam Razor through a prism and found a composite
of seven blades which I use as ” ...my own ‘Traffic Signs’ in my
‘Whole-Earth-Sat-Nav’ through the Buckminster Fuller’s CRITICAL PATH as a pointer to Democracy
needing what appears to me like a never-ending minimum seven-voices,
ricercar-like unending spiralling quest that might help mankind to ‘make it’ to
the next interglacial.” My reasons are mentioned at:
[http://cleanenergypundit.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/why-some-haveasked-what-it-actually-is.html?spref=tw]
·
“Libraries are not just
depositories of books, but cornerstones of democracy. True democracy – based
upon the informed consent of the governed – cannot exist without full free and
public access to knowledge”.
Deborah Jacobs, Seattle City Librarian
Deborah Jacobs, Seattle City Librarian
·
“For only a short time, in most
countries, has the individual human had the right of trial by jury. To make
humanity’s chances for a fair trial better, all those testifying must swear ‘to
tell the truth, all the truth and nothing but the truth.’….. If we don’t
program the computer truthfully with all the truth and nothing but the truth,
we won’t get the answers that allow us to ‘make it’ “.
Buckminster Fuller CRITICAL PATH, Hutchinson, 1981
Buckminster Fuller CRITICAL PATH, Hutchinson, 1981
·
“Truth is a purely human
construct but facts are eternal.”
Alexius Meinong
Alexius Meinong
·
“There is no opinion, however
absurd, which men will not readily embrace as soon as they can be brought to
the conviction that it is generally adopted.”
Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer
·
“The Creation speaketh an
universal language, independently of human speech or human language, multiplied
and various as they may be. It is an ever-existing original, which every man
can read. It cannot be forged; it cannot be counterfeited; it cannot be lost;
it cannot be altered; it cannot be suppressed. It does not depend upon the will
of man whether it shall be published or not; it publishes itself from one end
of the earth to the other.”
Thomas Payne THE AGE OF REASON
Thomas Payne THE AGE OF REASON
·
“In a time of universal deceit,
telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act”.
George Orwell
George Orwell
·
“Whenever a theory appears to
you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither
understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve.”
Karl Popper
Karl Popper
[…
who deserves special mention by referring if only to these five tokens from his
legacy, from The Logic of Scientific Discovery [1934], to The Open Society and
its Enemies [1945], to Conjectures and Refutations [1963], to the latest and
most important: The Lessons of this Century [1997] and All Life is Problem
Solving [1994,1999]
Let me finish by quoting the
incomparable Feynman with the last paragraph from his collection of three 1963
lectures published as THE MEANING OF IT
ALL already referred to earlier with his result of searching for the ‘good’
memes. I myself, have not read any Encyclical I hasten to add, but I
have no reason to doubt Feynman’s views on the subject:
“I
therefore consider the Encyclical of Pope John XXIII, which I have read, to be
one of the most remarkable occurrences of our time and a great step to the
future. I can find no better expression of my beliefs of morality, of the
duties and responsibilities of mankind, people to other people, than is in that
encyclical. I do not agree with some of the machinery which supports some of
the ideas, that they spring from God, perhaps, I don’t personally believe, or
that some of these ideas are the natural consequence of ideas of earlier popes,
in a natural and perfectly sensible way. I don’t agree, and I will not ridicule
it, and I won’t argue it. I agree with the responsibilities and the duties of
people. And I recognize this encyclical as the beginning, possibly, of a new future where we forget, perhaps, about
the theories of why we believe things as long as we ultimately in the end, as
far as action is concerned, believe the same thing.
Thank
you very much. I enjoyed myself.”
And yet, consciousness and conscience remain to exist only in the singular, and every individual remains responsible for the maintenance of the memefield each of us has been 'Funnelled' with.
"All that we are is
the result of what we have thought:
it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts.
By oneself evil is done; by oneself evil is left undone.
it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts.
By oneself evil is done; by oneself evil is left undone.
Rule your mind or it
will rule you."
.
BUDDHA
__________________________________________________________________
****************************************
The events in Paris on 7th January 2015 have highlighted the results of choices made from the evil aspects of Nuremberg Funnel procedures to an extent that all of the species Homo Sapiens have been insulted, so that
je suis
tu es
il est
nous sommes
vous êtes
ils sont
tu es
il est
nous sommes
vous êtes
ils sont
CHARLIE
.
Article
by
Aayan Hirsi
Ali:
“We have to acknowledge that today’s Islamists are driven by a
political ideology, an ideology embedded in the foundational texts of Islam. We
can no longer pretend that it is possible to divorce actions from the ideals
that inspire them.
This would be a departure for the West, which too often has
responded to jihadist violence with appeasement. We appease the Muslim heads of
government who lobby us to censor our press, our universities, our history
books, our school curricula. They appeal and we oblige. We appease leaders of
Muslim organizations in our societies. They ask us not to link acts of violence
to the religion of Islam because they tell us that theirs is a religion of
peace, and we oblige.
What do we get in return? Kalashnikovs in the heart of Paris. The
more we oblige, the more we self-censor, the more we appease, the bolder the
enemy gets.
There can only be one answer to this hideous act of jihad against
the staff of Charlie Hebdo. It is the obligation of the Western media and
Western leaders, religious and lay, to protect the most basic rights of freedom
of expression, whether in satire or any other form. The West must not appease,
it must not be silenced. We must send a united message to the terrorists: Your
violence cannot destroy our soul.”
Ms. Hirsi Ali, a fellow at the Harvard Kennedy
School, is the author of “Infidel” (2007). Her latest book,
“Heretic: The Case for a Muslim Reformation,” will
be published in April by HarperCollins
Posted on this blogsite on Tuesday,
January 20, 2015:
Article by Soeren Kern:
““A 120-page research paper entitled "No-Go Zones in the
French Republic: Myth or Reality?" documented dozens of French neighbourhoods
"where police and gendarmerie cannot enforce the Republican order or even
enter without risking confrontation, projectiles, or even fatal
shootings."
In October 2011, a 2,200-page report, "Banlieue de la
République" (Suburbs of the Republic) found that Seine-Saint-Denis and
other Parisian suburbs are becoming "separate Islamic societies" cut
off from the French state and where Islamic Sharia law is rapidly displacing
French civil law.
The report also showed how the problem is being exacerbated by
radical Muslim preachers who are promoting the social marginalization of Muslim
immigrants in order to create a parallel Muslim society in France that is ruled
by Sharia law.
The television presenter asks: "What if we went to the
suburbs?" Obertone replies: "I do not recommend this. Not even we
French dare go there anymore. But nobody talks about this in public, of course.
Nor do those who claim, 'long live multiculturalism,' and 'Paris is wonderful!'
dare enter the suburbs."”
“Stringent guidelines from educational publishers, that
warn textbook authors off touching on topics from pork to horoscopes to avoid
offending students in other countries, have come to light amid widespread
criticism.
Their emergence follows the news earlier this month that
publisher HarperCollins had pulped an atlas designed for use in Middle Eastern
schools after outrage over its omission of Israel from the map. HarperCollins
said at the time that the decision reflected “local preferences”, with the
inclusion of Israel “unacceptable” to its Gulf customers.
The insistence that mentions of pork products in
educational material designed for use abroad is also prohibited was revealed by
Jim Naughtie on Radio 4’s Today programme, when he read out a letter he had
obtained from Oxford University Press to an author, prohibiting the mention of
“pigs plus sausages, or anything else which could be perceived as pork” in
their book.
“Now, if a respectable publisher, tied to an academic
institution, is saying you’ve got to write a book in which you cannot mention
pigs because some people might be offended, it’s just ludicrous. It is just a
joke,” said Naughtie, prompting a chorus of outrage in the Daily Mail, which
quoted Tory MP Philip Davies describing the situation as “nonsensical political
correctness”.
But according to authors, the guidelines are well-known and
widely used by educational publishers, encompassing a range of “taboo” subjects…..”
reeks of dhimmi quislingism
“Mock
Islam and expect a punch, says Pope”
FrontPage headline in
The Times on Friday January 16 2015
Urbi Orbi Dhimmi
Egyptian President Al-Sisi at Al-Azhar:
“We Must Revolutionize Our Religion”
Video
and we must face up to Reality:
https://www.youtube.com/embed/pCW2hxux3Ro?rel=0
>
> Swiss member of Parliament Oskar Freysinger ...truth with passion that
> few politicians in most countries speak. Maybe an awareness of what’s
> happening will dawn on both sides of parliament in all European
> countries, before it’s too late....
****************************************
Richard P Feynman
SIX BASIC PIECES The
Fundamentals of Physics Explained, Penguin Books, 2011
QED The Strange Theory of Light and Matter, Penguin,
Penguin Books, 1990
Don’t
you have Time to Think? , Penguin Books, 2006
WHAT DO YOU CARE WHAT OTHER
PEOPLE THINK? , Penguin Books, 2007
SURELY YOU’RE JOKING MR FEYNMAN? ,
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Freeman J Dyson
A MANY-COLORED GLASS
Reflections on the Place of Life in the Universe,
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2007
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WHAT IS LIFE? + MIND and MATTER, Cambridge University Press,
1967
Stephen Hawking & Leonard Mlodinow
THE GRAND DESIGN New
Answers to the Ultimate Questions of Life, Bantam
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Peter Atkins
FOUR LAWS THAT DRIVE THE UNIVERSE, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2007
Joseph Plummer
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Joseph Plummer
TRAGEDY & HOPE 101 - The Illusion of Justice, Freedom and Democracy, Brushfire Publishing, Grafton OH USA, 2014
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NO MORE SECONDHAND GOD and other writings, Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale, Illinois, 1963
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HOW THE WORLD WORKS, Hamish
Hamilton, London, 2012
POWER SYSTEMS, Hamish
Hamilton, London, 2013
Joseph A Klein
GLOBAL DECEPTION, World Ahead Publishing Inc, Los Angeles CA, 2005
Alan B Jones
HOW THE WORLD Really WORKS,
ABJ Press, Paradise CA, 1996
Bat Ye'or
EURABIA - The Euro-Arab Axis - Land of Dhimmitude, Land of Islam, Farleigh Dickinson University Press, Associated University Presses, Cranbury NJ, 2005
THE DHIMMI - Jews and Christians undr Islam, Farleigh Dickinson, Associated University Presses, Cranbury NJ, USA, (1985), 2005
ISLAM AND DHIMMITUDE - Where Civilizations Collide, Farleigh Dickinson, Associated University Presses, Cranbury NJ, USA, 2005
Karlheinz Deschner
GOD AND THE FASCISTS,
Prometheus Books, New York, 2013
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Ten Volumes + Index Volume, Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, Reinbek near Hamburg, 1996 - 2014
John Cornwell
HITLER'S POPE - The Secret History of Pius XII, Viking Penguin Group, London, 1999
Melanie Phillips
LONDONISTAN - How Britain is Creating a Terror State Within, Gibson Square, London, 2006
Ali Dashti
TWENTY THREE YEARS - A Study of the Prophetic Career of Mohammad, Mazda Publishers, Costa Mesa, California, 1994
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HITLER'S POPE - The Secret History of Pius XII, Viking Penguin Group, London, 1999
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TWENTY THREE YEARS - A Study of the Prophetic Career of Mohammad, Mazda Publishers, Costa Mesa, California, 1994
Christopher Hitchens
GOD IS NOT GREAT, Atlantic
Books, London, 2007
Aayan Hirsi Ali
INFIDEL - My Life, Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, London, 2007
Aayan Hirsi Ali
INFIDEL - My Life, Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, London, 2007
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I AM RIGHT YOU ARE WRONG, Viking, London, 1990
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WHILE EUROPE SLEPT - How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within, Doubleday, New York London Toronto Sydney Auckland, 2006
Andrew G Bostom
THE LEGACY OF JIHAD - Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non-Muslims, foreword by Ibn Warraq, Prometheus Books, Amherst, NY, USA, 2005
Oriana Fallaci
THE RAGE AND THE PRIDE, Rizzoli, New York, 2002
THE FORCE OF REASON, Rizzoli, New York, 2006
Paul Fregosi
JIHAD IN THE WEST - Muslim Conquests from the 7th to the 21st Centuries, Prometheus Books, Amherst, NY, USA, 1998
Christopher Booker & Richard North
THE GREAT DECEPTION - Can the European Union Survive?, CONTINUUM, London, New York, 2003, 2005
Dore Gold
HATRED'S KINGDOM - How Saudi Arabia Supports the New Global Terrorism, Regnery Publishing Inc, Washington DC, USA, 2003
Raphael Israeli
ISLAMIKAZE - Manifestations of Islamic Martyrology, Frank Cass, London Portland OR USA, 2003
Edward Mortimer
FAITH AND POWER - The Politics of Islam, Random House, New York, 1982
Robert Spencer
THE MYTH OF ISLAMIC TOLERANCE - How Islamic Law Treats Non-Muslims, Prometheus Books, Amherst NY, USA, 2005
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INFILTRATION - How Muslim Spies and Subversives Have Penetrated Washington, Nelson Current, Nashville Tenn, USA, 2005
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WHY I AM NOT A MUSLIM, Prometheus Books, Amherst NY, USA, 1995
Ibn Warraq edited with translations
WHAT THE KORAN REALLY SAYS - Language, Text & Commentary, Manas Publications, New Delhi, 2006
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A GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED,
Sphere Books ABACUS edition, London, 1978
C H Waddington
TOOLS FOR THOUGHT, Granada Publishing Ltd, Paladin edition,
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