Thursday, March 30, 2006

The Biosphere Is Irreducible

The biosphere has been notoriously difficult to model and predict with new interactions coming forth all the time .The interactions between all the millions of different species seems irreducible and that is because it is.Just as with a computer program where one cannot have an all encompasing proof whether it will halt because a fundamentally new program can be created by diagonalization so likewise a new lifeform can be created whose interaction with the rest of the biosphere cannot be predicted.This happens naturally by mutations which by definition are random.This means that there is no overriding plan to life and the result of new lifeforms introduced is as random as the group of terminating programs.The same principle applies to the economy and the introduction of a non halting value determiner.A free economy and the biosphere are both irreducible and as a result are continually searching the boundary of what is possible .No input- output matrix or group of equations can capture the complexity of the biosphere it must run in order to find the result.Life at it's core is constantly pushing the envelope into new phase spaces of possibility and how could it be any more beautiful?

Saturday, March 25, 2006

Persistence is Redundancy Made Manifest

In information theory one simple rule is that if you want a message to come through a noisy medium you must repeat it and the more times the greater the chance of it all getting through.This repeat of the message to overcome noise is analagous to repeating a physical or mental act to overcome obstacles.In both cases the message or the path to the goal is being degraded or opposed by extraneous influences either random or intentional.If a person is trying to attain a goal then there may be many obstacles or noise thrown in his path which will degrade the outcome or even nullify it.Only by trying again and again does he have any hope of succeeding.Failure is only the result of trying to transmit over a noisy channel where the noise overcame the message.Failure does not exist in the external world but is only shorthand for not enough attempts.This is the way the world is constructed filled with noise and obstacles and as a result persistence is a necessary quality of a successful person or ideology. A successful ideology incorporates this knowledge into itself and uses it and proclaims it uses it and becomes attractive because of it.

Saturday, March 04, 2006

The Holocaust Is To Religion What The Berlin Wall Was To Communism

Occasionally during the life of an ideology or grouping of ideas something happens which is so at odds with the predictions or spirit of that ideology that it's fundamental premises must be challenged and discarded.Now what has happened in the objective world is a manifistation of it's internal and perhaps unrecognized contradictions or incompleteness in the theoretical world.The Iron Curtain across Europe was a gross example for all to see of the internal incompleteness and incorrectness of Marxism.Never before in history had such a decrepit ideology been forced on a population by the so called intellectuals that a wall had to be built to keep the population in.However that never stopped "theoreticians" from expounding the socialist line.Nonetheless a thousand miles of barbed wire was there for all to see.This was a result totally at odds with theory and a moments thought should tell any thinking person that the whole edifice was built on sand .Likewise today sixty years on another event happened which is at least equally at odds with the religious viewpoint as the Iron Curtain was to economics and sociology.That event was the holocaust which was as far removed from religious prediction as the failure of central planning was to socialist economics. All the basis for religion for the last two thousand years will have to be swept away and here is why and paradoxically it depends on the brilliance of the many religious scholars.Religious texts have been studied for thousands of years by uncounted many brilliant people non of whom predicted the holocaust.It is fair to say with all those people studying religion someone should have predicted probably the most enormous moral calamity in history if it were possible to do so and if they could'nt predict that then what good are all their interpretations.That is what religion claims to be able to do that is give reasons for what happens and by implication predictions.Saying it is God's will is asinine and insulting in the extreme and an intellectual cop out which explains nothing.It would be as if no one had discovered the pythygorean theorem.Highly unlikely and if no one had discovered that theorem by now then the axioms of geometry would be useless.Likewise since no one predicted the holocaust then the axioms of religion are useless and the world is very different from what religion has taught.

A Robust Ideolgy Is Not Afraid Of Criticism

Sometimes one can draw parallels between divergent fields of endeavor and come up with a general rule connecting these things.For instance if someone is selling you an investment or filling out a rental application and they won't let you inquire into the details of what they are saying without becoming beligerent or not answering your questions then you know you are probably dealing with a charlatan and you had better run.Likewise but especially in politics or religion when someone won't let you question their beliefs the same conclusion applies.Two of the great failed Ism's of the twentieth century naziism and communism both carried this principle to it's logical conclusion.Imprisonment and or death for anyone daring to question the orthodoxy.Of course this death sentence was extended to anyone who wished to even leave the group ie the berlin wall.If the ideology which is being espoused can easily be shown to be nonsense either by logical deduction or empirical evidence then it must of necessity take extraordinary measures to silence it's critics and deter defectors and how else could it be?A robust ideology welcomes analysis of it's principles because it will grow as the weaker ideas are weeded out.By extension any ideology which cannot stand criticism is of necessity afraid that what someone will say which disagrees with them may make sense and thereby undermine the whole edifice so is to be disallowed in the most violent way. The weaker the logical and or empirical arguments for an ideology of necessity the response must be the most violent.Of course the act of questioning will be described in the most emotive and legal terms as if a great crime has been committed. That is as it always has been and always will be.