Order and Chaos: A Homocentric Fallacy

The concept of a balance between order and chaos has been around for quite some time and has indeed served a useful purpose. Like all models of reality we construct to help us understand the world around us, even a flawed model can serve a purpose for a while but we must eventually refine our models to more precisely match reality if we hope to understand reality properly and continue our journey of discovery and development.

The idea of order and chaos is basically a representation of predictability and unpredictability with a touch of magical thinking. If we can easily predict it, it is orderly. If it is unpredictable, it is chaotic. While this might have been some of the impetus behind these magical labels, it is not an accurate description of the inner workings of the balance between order and chaos.

In chaos theory, the path a drop of water takes is described as chaotic. This leaves the mechanism of the motion in a magical state. It is a religious label rather than a description of the event. The truth of the matter is that there are so many factors involved in the resolution of the path of a single drop of water that it is very unpredictable. This lack of predictability is only because of the lack of knowledge of the observer.

These magical explanations of phenomena have existed throughout the history of mankind. Once it was the god of fire that makes water boil and demons that make people crazy and the world was held up by atlas or a turtle. Now, because of the lack of understanding of electrons we have a model which predicts via probability but instead of understanding that it is a model we believe that electrons magically appear in a  single place when our holy minds observe them.

Order and chaos are better represented by the (still homocentric) terms simplicity and complexity. Or perhaps uniformity and differentiation. Over time it can be thought of as stasis and change. In every explanation of this concept we must understand our bias. In  the terms simplicity and complexity there is an inferred reference. Zoom in on a single portion of a complex system and it seems simple. Zoom out from a simple system and the way it interacts and interconnects with the rest of reality makes it complex. The same is true with uniformity and differentiation. There is an inferred reference of human perspective. Even when considering a time perspective there is the assumption that a picosecond isn’t a near eternity though there may exist a perspective in which it actually is a near eternity.

Do not limit your mind with homocentric arrogance. Do not give credence to any magical explanation.

When you understand that there is a mechanism to everything and that the whole of existence is comprehensible you can be comfortable with your temporary ignorance. Do not let your fear of innocent ignorance cause you to grasp a magical explanation as anything more than a temporary placeholder for future understanding. There is nothing in existence that cannot eventually be explained. All that we have explained does not even touch upon all that exists.

In a desert we can see that the balance is toward simplicity. In a rainforest we can see the balance is toward complexity. We can also see that logic and efficiency are balanced toward simplicity while reason and creativity are balanced toward complexity.

The understanding of the balance of simplicity and complexity can be seen throughout all of nature and the use of this concept in science will help humanity to advance in understanding, but we cannot advance until we eliminate magical thinking which causes us to stop looking deeper into complexity.

Probability Preference and Exception Handling

In our minds we store a vast array of probabilities. It is more likely when you hear a noise overhead that it is an airplane causing an air disturbance rather than an asteroid. Both are within the realm of possibility. One is usually our automatic choice because of probability.

Probability is context based. Take one of us back in time to a point at which an asteroid is actually plummeting through the atmosphere and me may never even look up because latent inhibition has made us determine that information is useless when because of a change of circumstances, our context fails us. It causes us to incorrectly calculate probability.

Furthermore, it seems that when trying to determine a cause of an event or to predict a course of events that there can be many possibilities that fit but we typically show preference to what we believe to be probable based upon our personal context.

The first thing that would occur to most people is that you should always prefer the thing which is most likely as the explanation. This is “rules based” logical conservative thinking. There are however circumstances in which the less probable selection may be selected. This is choosing the exception as the truer possibility.

Selection of a lesser probability explanation is usually only done because of extension of a variety of modeled paths. We can think out differing scenarios and see that the more likely first explanation becomes less likely upon further examination. What is the mechanism behind this?

This is how we are capable of figuring out what someone means when they say “nice try” after a failed attempt at something. If your context is that people typically are helpful then you assume this person meant to bolster your confidence. If your context is that people typically ridicule mistakes then you assume they are being sarcastic. Regardless of which is the higher rating of probability in your mind, if you have doubt of your first guess, you then weigh other subtle cues to determine if this is the rule or the exception.

The glance to a buddy could denote a simple regard of secondary opinion or input or it could be looking for a shared hidden laugh. Again a probability is considered and now we have a probability stack.

Additionally there is a small laugh. The laugh could be to convey a feeling of “yeah that would have been hard for me too” or it could be “What a loser”. Another probability calculation.

If we have an understanding of this person’s personality we will lean to a larger and more reliable data set for resolving the probability. If we do not have a data set because this is a new person we may simply use a generalized (context based) template of behavior to resolve the stack of probabilities. This is a process that can allow us to categorize something as part of the exceptions instead of the rule.

Better yet we can leave the decision open until further data arrives. Later on upon seeing another small blunder the same guy says: “Hah, good one Einstein”. Suddenly we’ve used pattern recognition to resolve probability. IE a person who would do X would also do Y. It fits in a larger template of behaviors and we believe our general model of people types is more reliable because it has more data. Though we may have originally assumed the best of them, they actually fit in an exception category.

Had that decisive bit of information not come along, we may have had a string of circumstances which could resolve just as easily in one direction or the other, however, simply the frequency of exceptional occurances alone can alter original decision to categorize this person as an asshole or someone with a bad case of foot-in-mouth. A few more seemingly innocuous quips would certainly lead us to believe the guy was an asshole even though he is smiling and friendly to our face. The number of exceptions required for us to decide is determined by our generalized personality calculator. Further yet we have a general fear/trust calculator that underlies this and both are based on context. A person who expected less of people would decide the person was an ass long before a person who hopes for the best in people.

This ability to select a lower probability explanation is also what we use for self-delusion and social manipulation. When a person is actually jealous or some other vice, they know all the possible reasons for their actions and may simply decide that the most innocuous of the explanations is the correct one. The level to which this is checked against other possibilities can, and usually is, reduced to zero or it is checked against a faulty idealized model of self which immediately returns high probability for something that should have been low.

This is the slippery path of deception that most people follow in their minds and are never aware of it. They simply look back at what they did or said and assume the best possible scenario. That is why someone can can say ‘nice hair’ and mean to criticize but when put on the spot about it they may actually feel like their initial intent was to give a compliment. They will give this deceptive answer with confidence and truly believe it themselves. This could be a mark of a very small short term memory and therefore less executive function.  IE these people have less ability to examine their own actions because they’ve forgotten them as they happen. But I think it is more likely that people train themselves to notice the actions of others and remember them but they do not track their own actions in short term memory. They live an unexamined life.

Obviously we must be able to select lower probability ideas and follow them to further conclusions to be able to deal with exceptions. Unfortunately this same mechanism can be used badly. When it becomes progressively worse, the extension of probability becomes ridiculously tenuous without the person realising it. This usually occurs from poor controls on the updating of models. The exception becomes perceived as the rule.

Poor control over the updating of models is unfounded belief. Belief can come from social proof or it can come from experiential knowledge or a combination of both. Inter-model back-checking and comparison can be the difference between a healthy mind and an insane one. The level to which we question our own accuracy/confidence is equal to the level of assurance we need before updating a model. IE some people only need one good source of information or even one simply highly regarded to update a model. Others may require volumes of personal experience.

Frequency of model updates is another important balance of the mind. Requiring too much proof reduces the number of experimental avenues that can be examined. Requiring too little proof can reduce accuracy. When we consider something to be likely or unlikely we must know without doubt that we are biased. There is always a situation in which the exception becomes the rule.

On the path of enlightenment, self-realization/actualization and self-examination, we all must look at our ideas and concepts honestly. We must determine where they came from and if they fit with the rest of reality regardless of how favorably we may view them. We must always be aware of how much our ideas come from social proof and how much come from experience. We must try to see the myriad possibilities we consider and determine our biases. We must be aware of our natural tendencies to automatically view ourselves in a light that may be inaccurate. We must consider our own context and the possible and probable flaws it has.

To become more truthful with ourselves and others we must closely watch our actions with a third party perspective. We must occasionally be skeptical of our own motives and drives and be aware of self-delusion. We need to always know why we assume something to be the rule or the exception.

Belief: What it’s for

While belief, as most people understand it, is usually a horrible force of destruction, it has a reason to exist, and when it’s the right kind, can actually be useful.

Believe in yourself. Don’t believe yourself.

The distinction between these two is huge. Believing in yourself can be most one of the most important things in the world and nearly as important is not believing yourself. Believing yourself is all about thinking that your current configuration is correct and the information you’ve been given throughout your life is flawless. This sounds absurd but most people become angry and feel attacked when you question their beliefs. They cannot separate themselves from the information they were given. They cannot see their own innocence in aquiring incorrect beliefs.

Believing in yourself is knowing that you are capable. That you can change and adapt. Seeing your potential as valuable. When you are full of fear you think you must believe yourself or you somehow are not valuable. You lack the ability to see potential as value. You fear that being wrong or being fooled somehow proves you are bad. Mistakes become proof that you are less valuable instead of simply one less step on the road to success.

Belief is what we use to deal with infinity. When your belief system becomes dysfunctional in one direction or another you become either OCD: Flip that switch or check that lock one more time, can’t be too sure! Or you become schizophrenic: It occurs to me that it is possible that someone is following me, therefore they must be!

Why is belief part of our brain then? Because we must be able to assume X to continue to calculate Y and Z. The world is more uncertain than ‘believers’ think; there are more possibilities. Additionally there is a point at which consideration of the possibilities can become cumbersome and consume more time than the value produced by the consideration of those scenarios.

When we consider probabilities and create possible scenarios for dealing with the future we make certain assumptions. We plan our day at work considering that we won’t have a blowout on the way there. Every plan has a variety of hidden assumptions; these are beliefs. The further we plan into the future the more we are presuming a stable environment. The further we plan, the more belief we have.

Belief is a limiting factor. It limits consideration to a few ‘likely’ sets of data. This is necessary to keep us from becoming locked in infinite consideration of the possibilities. This is a presumption based upon a specific context. If people have stolen from you at every opportunity throughout your life, you will plan you life around securing things most people would never consider. If you’ve left extremely valuable goods unprotected all throughout your life and never had them stolen, you will take risks that most people would balk at. You can see how your mind and those around you are balanced either towards consideration of posibilities or reliance upon probabilities. This is typically a left/right brain balance. It can be seen when considering the mindset of mathematicians and artists, republicans/conservatives and democrats/liberals. Most arguments that occur between people can be broken down to two sides: the rule (51+%) versus the exceptions or simply which context is the rule and which is the exception.

With this consideration you begin to see that probability is not real but context driven and dependent upon a stable environment. It is a guess because stable environments are not very common. Given enough time all things change. In addition to this, if your belief in your context is ironclad you may see changes in environment as simply exceptions unworthy of consideration or may see them as so threatening that an exception may cause an entire re-write of expectations. (for instance: totally losing belief in god if alien life is detected)

Each one of us has a context. We have a set of beliefs about the world around us and even ourselves. If we believe in our context we are bound by it. If we instead believe in our own ability to change and adapt then we have no fear of mistakes or being wrong. We see mistakes as a failure of our context not ourselves. We see the error of belief as a simple problem of misinformation. Only through a separation of our beliefs from our value can we have the boldness required to take on an ever-changing landscape.

When you consider your place in the blanace of rules versus exceptions remember the flaws of each side of the argument. ‘The rule’ is expedient and has proven to be useful but may be fundamentally flawed because of an innacurate context. The exception may herald a coming change to ‘the rule’ or may even prove ‘the rule’ as a skewed context but it is usually unproven and may hinder progress because of the infinite mutability of exceptions.

Belief and skepticism both have their values but it is more important to simply try your best to have the best context possible (through education) and then believe in it as necessary to develop theory. But when your best theories fail or even have some problem you must also be aware of the possible flaws in your knowledge and be eager to fix them. You must have balance, and consider that even your idea of balance may be unbalanced!

Your value is your potential not your knowledge or context. If you believe in yourself your potential is unlimited. Never believe in your ‘limitations’.

The Mutability of Preference and Opinion

Think back in your life for a moment and try to remember times your preference or opinion changed. You used to like one sort of music or another. You used to hate one kind of food as a child but love it now. There should be a number of examples you can immediately think of and many many more if you put your mind to it.

“Happiness is not getting what you want but wanting what you’ve got”

Each of us has within us the ability to change our desires. The reasons we do so are usually brought about by environment though. We once liked a certain style of clothing because everyone else did, but now we see that same style as absurd… because others do.

There are many tools available for changing one’s psyche and overcoming the animal within and usually those tools manipulate our base desires to a more productive end. For instance, a philanthropist can overcome the immediate selfishness of wanting to keep all his possessions by instead turning his selfishness to longer term goals. By giving away his money he gains respect, admiration, self-worth and gratitude. All of these things can sate the lust for self advancement we all have while bettering the world as we better ourselves.

Another tool that can be used to manipulate your psyche to a better long-term end is rebellion. Once you have grasped that many of your desires and ideas were shaped by those around you without your permission or even knowledge you can turn your rebellion and lust for freedom against that programming which was put inside you. You can rebel against a part of yourself which you no longer grant validity. In doing so you break the hold that others have over you and gain true freedom.

When you can journey down this path you can begin to see how there are movies like waterworld or a variety of other “hated” movies which you could actually find a way to enjoy. You may so strongly believe that it is your own will that makes you hate waterworld that this example may not have the ring it needs but it is unlikely that early in your progress you will be able to even find your own unaltered opinion. I hope for your sake that you can think of at least one thing which is “universally hated” that you either secretely or openly like. If not then it should be blatently obvious to you that your will has been utterly taken from you by mob mentality.

With the supposition you are not utterly a drone, then find an example in which you differ. Find that spark of individuality and nurture it. There is a feeling of satisfying rebellion that goes along with it. Knowing that you are your own person and you have decided that others opinions be-damned you will like whatever you want to like.

If you can do this you can expand it every day. You can expand it to every part of your life from your taste in food and movies, to what clothes you wear. Once your individuality has expanded and the slavery of your mind is ended, new options will open themselves to you.

When you can begin to find the good in every situation. When you can decide to not only accept every situation but love it and all it has to offer. Only then are you truly free. Difficulties simply become learning experiences. Trials become a challenge to overcome and a contrast which make other times even sweeter.

Rebel against the preferences put in you. Fight againt the opinions that were slipped into your mind. Free your mind from slavery. Why should you not feel utter joy and contentent at every moment? Why should your life ever feel incomplete?

If you have changed your opinions then you can change your opinions. If you have changed your preferences then you can change your preferences. It’s time to become the master of your mind and to love life at every moment.

It will not happen instantly; it never has before has it? Then patiently work towards being easy to please. Inexorably move towards needing nothing but what you already have to feel complete and satisfied. It is the feeling you’ve been after all this time anyway. Why not try changing the inside instead of the outside to achieve the happiness you want? You’ll find it is far easier and always more successful.

One place to start is money. Do you need to get a promotion so you can work more long hours and fret more? Do you need to have more to protect from others and more to lose? Do you need more money to get more stuff to make more money which will never make you happy?

Look at you life and ask yourself what you really want. Do you want to feel good inside? Peaceful and content? Or do you want to try for more of something which you will likely never get. Do you want to waste your life desperately trying to get happiness or do you want to start feeling more happiness right now no matter what is going on? Isn’t searching for something more simply just another way to say that what you have isn’t good enough? …that your life isn’t good enough. Isn’t it just a way to convince yourself you are unhappy and therefore actually make yourself unhappy?

Do you really think that something from the outside caused you to feel good? Isn’t feeling good simply chemicals/electricity inside your brain? Didn’t your own brain produce the feeling of happiness you’ve felt before? Wasn’t there a time as a child the simplest things enthralled you? Satisfied you? When someone slays a monster in a video game, are they relieved because they have ended some real threat to their person? Was the adrenaline coursing through their veins there because they were actually in danger?

Why have you been so desperately searching for things to give you a feeling when you’ve had the power to simply produce the feeling inside you all along? Isn’t that silly?

Gullibility, Innocence and Love

Gullibility is seen as a bad trait but it is in fact part of the loving and trusting aspect of humanity. It is to be revered if it is not because of willful ignorance. If a person is a willing student of life yet they can be easily tricked it is simply because they trust people easily.

Part of being a good person is being tricked sometimes. Without a level of trust, you are showing no love towards others and in your defense you certainly offend. That is to say that the best defense is a good offense and you will subconsciously maneuver to screw people before they screw you when you ‘know’ they are up to no good. But there will be times when you ‘know’ they are up to no good and it will turn out you are the one causing pain and taking from another.

We must be at peace with the necessity of being tricked, abused and swindled. It’s part of being a good person. Once you accept this as a price you pay to make the world a better place, you can be at peace with even what seems to the fearful to be the most embarrassing oversights.

“I don’t donate to charities because I heard about how 90% of the money goes to the people who run them”

“I don’t give money to homeless people because they’ll just drink it away and I don’t want to add to their problem”

Policeman: “I shot the bum because he looked like he had a gun! A fourteen year old kid shot someone for no reason just the other day for god’s sake…”

“I can’t perform CPR on that dying man! Do you know that the families of those that die frequently sue and take everything from a person who was just trying to help?”

If you were a man with a prosthetic nose who had been laughed at many times, you might not know that the guy you just punched when you couldn’t take it anymore was laughing at something else. Maybe many of those others weren’t laughing at you after all?

There are so many times throughout our lives that someone says something they are unaware might mean something different to us. Many times we then take the misunderstood slight and hold it against them. Later we then say some passive aggressive remark “retaliating” for the hurt we misinterpreted because of our skewed expectation. We in fact are the aggressor many times because of these subtleties and misunderstandings.

“I don’t mean to be “nosey“, but where did you get that tie? Haha”

To our prosthetic nose wearer it is obvious by the needless emphasis on “nosey” that this fellow just approached him and insulted him, merely using the pretense of asking about his tie. But this is only because he didn’t know that the approaching fellow had just finished telling his buddy that he liked the tie and was going to ask about it and is oblivious to the prosthesis. His friend who knows this ”asking people” is a common behavior calls him “nosey” which he frequently does in such a situation. He then walks over to ask, using the phrase above. The emphasis was self-deprecation. The laugh was just a little self-consciousness about approaching a stranger with such a question.

If Prosthesis just punches the guy, eventually someone will figure out the misunderstanding but what if Prosthesis says to Nosey, “I bought it at an expensive store, I’m sure you wouldn’t be interested”? Or “The tie store…” Because of the indirect nature of the responses, they get off on a bad foot, each believing something bad about the other. If this had been in a situation where they might see one another frequently, more misunderstandings will likely escalate into a situation which makes them enemies. Notice that the abused Prosthesis fellow becomes the abuser who is at fault in this relationship. Is it really his fault though?

Justice needs to be served to those who abuse others but not by treating everyone as guilty. I recently was on a trip to Moldova where nobody ever seemed to smile. I’ve found that in cities and depressed areas when compared to rural areas there is an obvious difference in how much someone smiles. It is easy to figure out this discrepancy if the right perspective is given.

When a used car salesman walks up to you with nothing more than greed and exploitation on his mind what does he look like? (Big smile) When a con artist of any kind talks to you what does he look like? When you do not suspect someone of malicious intent who smiles at you, what do you do in return? You smile. Your smile shows trust and signals the success of the con artist. When exploiters abound, smiling is a mark of innocence and ignorance. It marks you as an easy target. In places where there are too many exploiters, (wolves) smiling means you are either a con-man or a dupe. In small rural communities there are no anonymous dealings. Lives are too interconnected for anyone to get away with an abuse without people finding out and it coming back to bite them. However, the flip side of this is that good deeds don’t go unnoticed and those come back around as well. We used to know who made good chairs and gave them the money they deserved for those quality products. In those communities smiling means that the two of you are going to try to cooperate to achieve best outcome for each other and the community.

Without justice, a society crumbles into an untrusting and divided state. It becomes a feedback loop in which abuse -accidental and purposeful- become a norm and true cooperation, love and the deluge of benefits that come from those things are snuffed out entirely.

“Why should I spend more time in hand-crafting a chair that will last a lifetime when my competitor will make one that will last a year for slightly less, make a huge profit and push me out of the market?”

We as untrusting consumers have no choice but buy the cheaper chair because both manufacturers say they have quality construction. There is no way for us -other than to learn chair making- to determine a difference because our trust level is zero from all the lying and liars who are rewarded by those who trust. Therefore we must buy the worse quality product because the price is the only variable we can actually judge. Eventually those who used to trust feel foolish for rewarding evil people and then add to the problem in a more direct way by not trusting.

Deception has become a subtle and fine art which animals have been using for millions of years. Unfortunately for a system of justice, a bird which walks around with it’s wing limp could just as easily have had a cramp in a muscle or could have just felt like stretching repeatedly. It never “said” it was wounded. Deception is a tool of exploitation. It is a tool of pure competition for the purpose of raising one individual above another in some way. Every tiny deception we perform is for personal gain over another.

The second critically important aspect of innocence is the ability to disbelieve what everyone knows is true and to disbelieve in personal experience. Everyone knew the sun went round the earth and everyone knew a man can’t fly. Everyone knew the earth was flat and everything was made of the four elements. Even the gullibility mindset which allows us to believe easily will allow us to believe something else which has more evidence to support it just as easily as we believe something we already know to be true. Innocence and gullibility are a type of humility about our own knowledge which is absolutely essential for invention and innovation.

If you flip a coin ninety-nine times and each time it comes up heads, what is the percentage chance that it will come up tails on the one-hundredth time? It is hard wired in our brains to believe that it will be strongly to one side or the other but the truth is that it is still exactly 50/50. One of the truths of reality is that anything truly random will also stack up at times so that a small perspective will give an inaccurate idea of probability over time. Sometimes you really will flip a coin ten times and it come up one side all in a row but it doesn’t mean anything.

Many of us have a few unlikely bad events happen to us in short succession and it causes us to expect unlikely bad things to happen more frequently than is realistic. By expecting it, we interpret small inconveniences as bad things to prove our theory correct. In turn we lower our mood and miss opportunity because we know it won’t turn out well. The flip side of opportunity is risk. Even if the risk is so small we lose nothing other than the feeling of failure, we begin to steer clear of risks and the opportunities they offer. We create our own bad luck. This is the mechanism of the “Law of Attraction”.

Part of innocence is fearlessness. When we decide to disbelieve past failure as a predictor of the future we open ourselves to possibility. Many times, because we have not struck at rich by thirty(or some better goal), we believe we actually have less possibility of great things happening than younger people. This is an obvious fallacy that nearly all adults fall into. It is fear that holds us back from our dreams. It is the heedless ignorant innocence of youth that empowers people to accomplish the impossible.

Innocence is what allows us to see possibility instead of improbability. Bravery and humility can make you innocent again. Only when we face our fears, deny our misgivings and bravely engage the future with the humility to say, “I might be wrong. Everyone might be wrong.” can we forgive our failures and let go of guilt and inadequacy.

Only when we forgive ourselves and forgive others their missteps and offenses can we reap the limitless rewards of cooperation and love. If you lose your innocence and allow yourself to constantly believe ill of others, you will become one of them. You become an abuser by default.

There is a price to pay for exploitation as a way of life. We pay it on a societal level though, and over time. It is only because others like you stop trusting and stop willingly paying the price of gullibility that a society crumbles. There is universal justice in this world even if it is on a longer time line than you might prefer.

The Zen of Christianity

Many who are not christian can not understand the pull of it. They can understand a social club but cannot conceive of anything else to be gleaned from it.

If anything, there is significant current reasons to despise it with it’s pedophile pastors, faith-healing hucksters, TV evangelizing charlatans and a marked penchant for child abuse. In addition we can point to historically enlightening events such as the crusades, the inquisition, witch trials and other slaughter of innocents on a large scale. Anyone with an understanding of history and lack of blinders can fall off a wagon into a pile of reasons to abhor christianity. At the same time there are so many positive values taught in christianity and many positive things come from non-fundamentalist christians. There are many decent honest and loving christians to be found.

This dichotomy is a great mystery to all non christians. Why is there such a gigantic scope of behavior among them. What do the decent christians get from it? While I could elaborate on how easily the religion can be twisted and catered to fit any agenda, I prefer to elaborate on the mechanism of the positive aspects of the religion.

In particular there are two guiding principles that those familiar with a broad variety of religions and/or a grounding in modern psychology may be able to recognize. There are two components common to a “path to enlightenment” that can be found. Forgiveness and submission to god’s will are what christians call them. To the rest of us it is guiltlessly living in the moment and the freedom of giving up control. Or more concisely: freedom from responsibility of the past and the future.

When as a christian you are told that Jesus forgives and absolves you of all your wrong doing, you are capable of shedding guilt and responsibility and are no longer acting out on your belief in your own worthlessness. Those who are burdened with guilt and negative self beliefs are doomed to repeat them; this is psychology 101. By gaining the forgiveness of Jesus, a person is able to shed the belief that they are as worthless as their parents told them they were. They can stop believing for a moment that they are “bad” and instead blame satan or their “sin nature”. Once freed of these oppressive beliefs, they can finally believe in their ability to change and be considered a new person by others and more importantly different from their own perspective.

The second principle helps in maintaining a focus on the moment by freeing a person from responsibility for the future. When you are repeatedly told that “god is in control”, that it is “god’s will”, and that “all things work together for the good of them that love the lord”, the burden of trying to over plan the future and the feelings of guilt or failure and inadequacy that come from the vagaries of fate, are pushed away. As we age, we are all pulled into the swirling current of “responsibility” wherein we are told that we have control over our world and are required to exercise it. Even when we give our best within the bounds of what we are given we fail. Without a scapegoat for this failure we can become obsessed with planning or believing in our own inadequacy.

It is my hope that with the understanding of the roots of christianity and relief that those roots can provide that we all can incorporate the valuable lessons without the pitfallsthat so many christians suffer. So many christians forget their early lessons of redemption and cannot always feel like a new person so they begin to feel guilt for their continued “failings”. They can fall prey to judging others and therefore judging themselves too harshly. They begin to feel responsible for their future instead of leaving it up to god.

By understanding our own helplessness in the face of the universe and fate we can focus on changing ourselves without guilt slowing us down. We can begin the cycle of improvement while seeing each “failure” as just one of the many steps to success.

By understanding our own helplessness against the universe we can forgive ourselves and therefore others even when they do us wrong or do things in a worse way. We know that the credit for our “betterness” belongs to circumstance, the universe, or even god. And their “worseness” is also just a function of their position and starting conditions. When we see those who are actually better than us we can feel peace that they had unfair advantages over us just as we have unfair advantages over others. And of course we can also see or at least assume the unfair disadvantages of others.

This results in yet another principle of christianity: humility. Not humility that leads us to believe we are somehow bad or less than others but instead a humility that lets us know we are no different than others in a certain way. Though we may actually be more effective as a person and may do more good things which everyone can agree makes a better person, we still know that the ability to do such things are a function of circumstance so a lesser would still be a equal to us if given perfectly equal circumstance. (genetics and experiences) We humbly remember our unfair advantages.

Once we forgive ourselves and others we can focus on changing ourselves. Though even this tiny amount of control may be illusion, at the very least we can see things the way they are and have peace.

Knowledge of self is the only power that we have and the only control that matters. Forgiveness helps us overcome self-delusion which hides our faults and makes us repeat them. Giving up and being satisfied with even failure allows us to keep plodding along at improving ourselves without the guilt that leads to self-delusion.

Free Will Revisited

As with nearly every thing in existence the idea of free will has two sides. These sides tend to correspond with logic and abstraction/emotion. While in “The Illusion of Free Will” I highlight the logical fact of our input-output nature, this view can ‘feel’ helpless. This helplessness is the reason we all have a need to reject the idea of absolute destiny. We must ‘feel’ the ability to change our world and impact our destiny or we give up. The idea of free will must be redefined within workable boundaries. It is a concept that is useful in dealing with other concepts such as time, but in the end it must be realized that all these concepts are only tools for dealing with now.

SGMS considers that there are two sides to our mind with extremely different purposes. The two sides must hold the differing but complementing memes to function optimally. This can sound like contradiction but only to those who give a cursory examination.

We must emotionally feel okay and along for the ride of life. We must feel a peace about the world that comes from knowing that we are not actually in control but we must also feel a sense of control and ability to improve our situation in life. We want control without responsibility and fault. We have seemingly conflicting desires but when all of reality is considered it is no so conflicting; they are simply differing tools for differing situations. Taking these tools and directing them is a critical part of happiness and fulfillment in life.

We have three areas to deal with about experience and we often mix up their importance: The past, the present, and the future. There is only truly the eternal ‘now’ but the concepts of time are very useful and necessary. We must be able to focus on the experience of now but using the context of the past with a little consideration of the future.

Now is the most important by far because your past experiences and context are always one-sided and can be completely contrived. At any moment, if you have an open mind, you can again have the ‘Aha!’ moment that you did when you were a teenager and realized your parents had you believing some really ridiculous things. However, this time it might be that you realize your group of friends were wrong, or your spouse was wrong or the television was wrong. You realize you’ve been lied to and you need not feel foolish for believing the absurd. So we must concede that our context is flawed, biased and always to be looked at with incredulity though still useful in certain situations.

Though you seem to be able to predict the future generally, when it gets down to specifics you always find that your plans rarely go as planned. The more specifically you plan the more inaccurate the plan unfolds. We all know this yet we still roll the dice like a gambler hoping that this next time it will pay off. On a rare occasion it does and keeps us gambling but the success rate when examined is just as much a waste of resources and time as gambling is a waste of money.

Our perpetually skewed picture of the past adulterates our prediction of the future. In the face of these facts, the most useful strategy seems to be the ability to be adaptive. To have ability and talent rather than raw knowledge alone. We must be like a child, assessing the nature of the present and appreciating every moment for its new uniqueness and its variety of hidden qualities. We must remain aware of our excusable ignorance but always working with wonderment and excitement to eliminate it.

Just as ‘Now’ is more important than the other concepts of time. True understanding is more important than knowledge of facts. Knowledge is transient and context dependant. Knowledge is only useful for building a picture of interaction and dependency. It is only useful for building understanding. Only through understanding are we able to predict and adapt.

The universe is a collection of interrelating information. Only by becoming a center of interrelating information do you become a larger ‘rock’ in the stream. The way things interact shape the universe and the ‘behaviors’ of the universe that we see around us. The things that happen are only because of the underlying schema. Events are the product of interaction, but not just interaction but a specific type and order of interaction. In this way, understanding is a model of the universe. By having understanding that matches the universe, we become a small model of the universe itself. We become a machine that better mirrors the machine which created us. In this way we also become creators, just like the universe creates.

As information flows through the interaction schema that we call the universe, it is shaped and changed and caused to to interact in a specific fashion. As we understand more, information flows through us and interacts in the same way as the universe. We are better able to predict the universe because we are more like it. As we understand more we become an agent of the universe. We become a tool for shaping and ordering. Our ‘will’ becomes more like the ‘will’ of the universe. What is will but desire and what shapes desire but understanding.

As we understand we gain an ability to change the things around us, we become a larger and more important part of the machinery of the universe. As the information and events of the world flow through us we change it and move it, but we do so because the flow of information accumulated in a way which created us and continues to shape us.

Because we are a part of the universe we take part in changing it and forging it because of our presence. The form and function of our presence was because of the culmination of all the interactions before us. In this way we have the free will to act within our nature but just as a tree cannot act outside of its nature, neither can we at any moment behave outside our own momentary nature. But because we are part of the universe and able to guide the flow of the universe as it touches us, we can cause a feedback loop to begin within ourselves. We can guide the evolution of our current self.

With a little understanding we can get more understanding and expand ourselves. Through expanding our tools we expand our impact and therefore our perceived ‘control’. By causing our mind or spirit-meme to match the universe we gain more of the power of the universe because of our similarity to the universe.

Control is still essentially an illusion but as we gain understanding we become more the author of ourselves and by becoming the author of ourselves we change the way things flow through us. Though we might not have been the initial spark we still become the tool that accomplishes the task.
We can still have pride in ourselves but that pride must also accompany understanding. Though one officer might actually run down and capture a serial killer that he sees on a patrol he did not do the detective work, the forensics, the profiling and he did not design the microscopes or the radios or the cars or the myriad other tools that allowed him to make the arrest. He likely didn’t make the coffee that kept him awake nor did he even make the decision that he would be on patrol that night. He didn’t make any of the decisions that identified the perpetrator but he was the eventual tool of the system that made the arrest.

Though we can have pride in our value and the impact we have we must realize what contributed to who we are in the context of the entire universe. The source of our value and impact is not our own but it is nice to admire the impact of the thing the universe created. Once we realize our smallness and become okay with it, we no longer see free will in the same way. Once we realize we are and integral part of the universe we can see that we are a thing we created through the power of destiny and that we are part and parcel in that process.

When we gain understanding we see our ‘will’ as created by the universe and how we are currently the universe’s tools by which destiny is played out. In this way we can see our power as part of the universe but realize our smallness and eventual lack of fault in the workings of such a greater thing.
Life is a creation of the universe and life created us. We have a choice to become larger or smaller in the universe. That choice or ‘arrest’ may have been set up by the universe but we still make it. By making the decision to become something better, we increase our domain and power within the universe even though the decision was the eventual result of the universe’s working. When a person chooses to remain ignorant and destructive they simply become a tool for the force of unbalance.

If we strive for better then we were meant to strive for better. Without striving there is no success. If we sit in the corner and accept a lack of control then we were meant to and never do accomplish great things. We accept and therefore create our destiny as a broken tool.

Exercise the power of change granted to you by the universe. Accept the gift of understanding by seeking it. Be at peace with your place in the universe and enjoy the ride but be all that you can be and you may find there is no limit to what you can and were meant to be. You may be the tool of change the universe uses.

Our wants and our will are simply a product of the complex machinery of the universe which we are an integral part of. We are just as much a part of shaping the universe as gravity is. Our will and thoughts are just as much a mechanism (tool of change) of nature as gravity is. Logically, we have no free will, but abstractly (through the grasping of complexity via abstraction), there is something that might be thought of as free will.

We can do what we want but what we want was done to us.

Cycles of Life and the Contrast Principle

The secret to happiness is thankfulness. Thankfulness is the ability to see the good of every situation. To see the good in every situation one must be able to change focus from broad to narrow and back again at will and to have patience.

All things that live do so in cycles and harmonics of cycles. From meal to meal, and from days to seasons to years and from extinction events to ice ages, life is all about cycles. This is very well known but there are few that can quantify what is common about those cycles. Strength and unity versus growth and diversity; times of little and times of plenty; fact and probability; logic and reason; life and death.

Those who have had little can see that the rich are often unhappy because there is nowhere to go from the top. The very best becomes mediocre and mundane. Those that are rich can see that the poor are often unhappy because they do not understand how simplicity and peace can be the most valuable things in the world. The young see the old and how they do not appreciate their freedoms and the old see the young and realize how they cannot see their freedoms either.

Every thing in the world can be seen as a problem or adversity or can be seen as an opportunity, blessing or challenge. Our experience in life is entirely up to us. It is our focus and thankfulness. There is one thing that that always stays the same about life: it always changes. The changes can be met with open arms or fear and loathing. Every change brings us a shift in perspective and can give a better ability to appreciate life or it can become an excersize is yearning for something other than what we have.

Yearning and unmitigated desire are the source of unhappiness in every person’s life. A focus on what “could be”, was, or “might have been” is the essence of thanklessness for what “is”. A focus on how things might or will be better some day is the very best way to miss out on every little joy of now. Even sadness about the loss of a loved one can turn into a passion to honor them, their life and what they stood for or it can become an obsession with one’s own personal loss.

There are many versions of a story that relate a single bit of wisdom that has endured the ages but I prefer the one where a king is building a new monument in a city to inspire his people and asks all the wise men of the kingdom to help him bring humility to the people in times of plenty but hope to them in times of need. One phrase was written upon the monument: “This too shall pass”

That single bit of wisdom is a lesson of focus. Enjoy every moment for what it holds and know that change is coming. When things seem all lost, know that there is something to be appreciated now and there will be more to appreciate in the future. When you are at the highest of hights, cherish it and share it with others because it will pass away. If you grasp onto it too tightly it will hurt you more when it is gone. Greed is pain.

When you seek to break the cycle of life you also seek to break the renewal it brings. When you attempt to unbalance life, the balance finally comes and it is that much harsher. When you seek only plenty and ease you become fat in spirit. You become weak and unhealthy of mind. Seek out challenge and face it head on. Embrace hardship as an exciting challenge. Live in the moment of even the pain and focus on the lessons it brings just as you would any other workout. Know that there will be a time of relaxation, freedom and enjoyment so long as you are in the moment to enjoy them instead of pining for something else.

Memories are the bones of the spirit. Good memories should not be something to long after but a lesson about the inevitable goodness of the future. Harsh memories shouldn’t bring fear and trepidation but a proof of survival and triumph. You made it through and you will continue to.

There is a strange dichotomy of focus that is hard to grasp but the sum of which is optimism or pessimism. We must keep a view that considers the whole of our lives and the smallness of the moment, while we must also focus on the experience of every small moment and the precious gift of experience whether it be triumph or disaster.

If you experience nothing but pleasure throughout your life, nothing is pleasurable; it is all mundane. If you only see what you are missing you cannot see what you have. A rollercoaster is no fun without both the ups and the downs. It’s time you enjoyed the ride with a moment by moment love of both the challenge and anticipation and the experience itself. Every fearful and difficult experience can either show you how you are able to eventually overcome or you can be thankless and decide it’s proof that the future will “be bad too” and thereby befoul the good experiences when they come because of your search for the evils of every moment.

When you feel like there is nothing in life that you can control you may be right with one exception… you can control how you perceive it. You are the source of your joy or sadness.

Perfection is Imperfect

What is perfect? Many of us spend our lives searching for the perfect mate, the perfect car, the perfect cup of coffee, the perfect life. Do we realize what we are asking for though? Picture in your mind a perfect tree. No, not a general idea, I mean every branch and leaf. Nature has already figured out that perfection is a state of versatility not a moment of configuration. When you ask for perfection, most of the time, you are requiring fate to produce something that is actually imperfect because of your short-sighted view of the universe. If a tree had one particular configuration then it might be too tall and stiff to stand alone against the wind or too short to get light in a forest. The leaves might not gather light properly at certain latitudes or be too vulnerable to the wind because of the configuration of hills around it.

What about a perfect tool then? Certainly a tool can be perfect, it’s designed to be so… What on earth could be wrong with my 1/2″ wrench?
Well, it could be a 3/4 bolt.
Then I’ll pull out my 3/4.
But what about metric?
I’ll buy another set.
A stripped bolt.
My locking pliers?

You’ve added flexibility because no tool is perfect without the perfect job/situation to match it. The more perfect a tool is for one job the more imperfect it is for other jobs. If you could have only one tool would it be a 1/2 wrench or a medium sized pair of pliers? The pliers are not really perfect for most any job but it will certainly do a lot more jobs. You can be dissatisfied with the lack of a perfect job it does or you can be happy with how much it does pretty well. Every situation, posession, relationship is similar to this in that there are always ways in which it is imperfect. The perfect toolbox or toolshed would have to contain everything in the universe because only then could it be prepared for absolutely every eventuality. The pursuit of perfection will lead to constant dissatisfaction in an attempt to own and control everything in the universe.

Every law ever made also creates some injustice because of the infinite possibilities of the universe creating unforeseen situations. To every rule there are exceptions. Nature shows us this through the diversity of life. Each life form is perfect inside its environment and situation but imperfect for other situations. As environments change, life must evolve or be eliminated because of obsolescence.  Even the individuals within a species adapts to its particular resources, dangers, surroundings and experience to become the perfect tool for their particular job. Individual variance is necessary for survival in a number of ways. If all individuals of a species were the same, the situation and niche they could fill would be hyper-fragile and narrow. If a disease appeared that could kill one it would kill them all. Just like a law, each individual is perfect for many situations but certainly not all.

Each individual person is perfect for their upbringing, experiences, and genetics but they may also be narrow in their usefulness. There is a balance of flexibility and specificity that each of us maintains. The pursuit of perfection is the pursuit of narrowness and specificity. It is specialization and the more specialized something it is, the more situations it is imperfect or even useless for. A flexible person may be suitable for many situations but be a more imperfect tool for the job than a specialist.

With this in mind, there is no such thing as a perfect person because there is no such thing as an unchanging universe. There is no such thing as a pursuit of perfection there is only an adjustment between specialization and generalization. Each has flaws. Each can only be judged for merit based on a particular configuration of the universe and because the universe always changes, the judgement of merit can only be accurate for a single instant of time.

In light of how we are utterly at the mercy of the seeming randomness of universe (see The Illusion of Free Will) all we can control is our own ability to adapt and change with the times. We must copy nature and become the most effective configuration for the moment and future. We must accept the limitations of current configuration and embrace change.

We must love the moment and love our current selves and love what we are to become. We cannot know the future specifically so we cannot plan for the future specifically. That is a formula for failure. We can remain open to the change we will inevitably encounter and remain able to change between specialized and generalized as we re-examine our environment each day. But because the only thing we know about the future is that it will change, we are what we hope and try to be. Failure does not exist so long as we continue to try. Each mistake made is one less we must make on the road to success.

Give up your illusion of control over the universe and stop trying to make it fit your current configuration. Appreciate what you have and embrace what you can and will be. Be satisfied with your trying and do not feel guilty that you do not have god-like powers of controlling your situation. To be perfect we must also be imperfect. You will always be imperfect but if you remain flexible you will also be perfect.

The Illusion of Free Will

When speaking about the mechanistic nature of the universe to a friend I commented on the illusion of free will and he responded with: 

“I know I can’t imagine this world not having free will in humans; or, at least, free will in myself. (As for others, well, you all look like you have free will, so I’m prepared to assume that you do; it certainly makes more sense of people’s actions that assuming that they don’t.)”

To which I responded: 
Yeah, I gave up the sacred ground of free will long ago. For one thing the idea of free will fosters thoughts of superiority and inferiority. It’s fosters the naive belief that people get what they deserve. “The poor are poor because they didn’t work hard enough. The rich are rich because they are better.”
 
One thing that I share with religious and non religious people is this. Is there a future? Do you know that future? Of the myriad of seeming possibilities, only one will come true therefore proving all the others to never to have been possibilities. It’s just a small and fallible demonstration of immutable past and future. Have I mentioned the movie 12 monkeys?
 
The real reason to give up the idea of free will is chaos theory and the butterfly effect. You can see it everywhere you go and in everything on the planet. You believe you have the simple choice to go to work or not but that choice is only an expectation, not truly a choice. Your prediction of the event does not make it actually possible. Your prediction and intent could be utterly thwarted by a butterfly in Brazil 2 weeks ago. It flapped it’s wing suddenly which caused a frog to go for it, which caused a snake to strike the frog, which spooked a cow walking past, which started a herd running, which kicked up a dust cloud, which added to the precipitation value of a cloud which gathered water and energy and more clouds on it’s trip over the ocean, which started a torrential downpour in home town, which caused another driver not to see a puddle that caused him to hydroplane and slam into your careful driving and kill you. Your life was in the hands of that butterfly… or the chain of events that went even further back that led to the butterfly.
 
Every moment of your life has a history that is intricately tied to the rest of the universe in billions of ways.
 
If you think you brain some generator of magic then you can believe in free will. If you believe your brain is only a complex machine then you know that it works on principles and reactions. Inputs lead to outputs. Your life experiences as a child were not of your making yet they made you who you are and gave you the opinions you have. Without that information could you make the same decisions? Is your life really all that different as an adult than you were as a child or do you simply believe yourself more in control? Brains are simply a mixing pool for events. Like a stone in a river, you are moved and shaped by the river and you are part of the river itself and effect the motion of the individual particles nearby. Without the stones to guide it, it wouldn’t be a river. Without the force of the river to dig up the stones, they wouldn’t have been there to guide it. Random numbers clump. In the real world they become a feedback loop and therefore an accretion engine.
 
Where did the river begin? When the first two drops came together? No, they had to have somewhere to go. What made that “somewhere to go”? The addition of all the events in the universe is the only and eventual answer. The beginning of the universe was the start of the river.
 
There is no such thing as random. Random is another word for magic. There is only complexities nested in complexities surrounded by complexities. That which seems random is only random to us because we cannot know the billions of interacting events spider-webbing out across eons that contributed to the final product.
 
If you have done programming then you know that a random number generator is actually not random. It is simply a complex equation with an input and an output. If you know the input and the formula you can perfectly predict the output. Even if you have 80 billion random number generators starting at random times seeding off each other… the output is never ever truly random.
 
 Therefore, you must forgive others and yourself for wrong-doing. You must not take too much credit for your achievements and you need not believe others better than you because they have achieved more. They had different starting conditions and different advantages and disadvantages. Did you know there is a gene that causes a person to experience less pleasure than normal and causes their brain to start out in a condition that normal people would only reach after damage from drugs? Did you know this causes them to seek out drugs? Did you know they literally can feel more pain and less pleasure from exactly the same stimuli as others? Did you know that a few small changes to your brain chemistry can cause you to feel a more excruciating torment than you can imagine? Did you know people who abuse drugs are in a cycle of living hell. They don’t use drugs to feel good, they use them to feel normal. They always did.
 
 It begs a question of why even try. But since we do not know the outcome we do not know if we might be successful. If we sit in a corner and chant “I give up” then it was your destiny to fail. If you try hard and succeed then it was your destiny to succeed. It was your destiny to try. Simply because it seems we have no choice from an outside view, it doesn’t mean that trying isn’t valuable from our perspective. All we can do is try and never stop trying. Never seeing past failures as anything more than a random number generator failing to pay out instead of some personal fault or some proof that trying doesn’t work. The purpose of trying is simply making yourself available to fate. Being there for the payout. We must never believe that past failures truly predict future ones. We must give up our supposition of control over the world and simply do our best knowing that we are only making ourselves available and that it is simply the nature of the universe that thing go wrong and things go right. You suffering or triumph really has little to do with you. Give up guilt and shame, vanity and hubris, they are all false assumptions.
 
The starving children don’t deserve to starve and the rich CEO doesn’t deserve to thrive. All we can do is focus in finding the good and happiness in the lives and the things we have and if we have the strength to try to shoulder the burden a little for those less fortunate. We should not give more than we need nor take more. We should always strive to need less to be happy and by doing so we automatically help shoulder the burden because we can begin to produce more than we consume and do so easily.
 
 
You can see the infinite in the finite and the inverse. Those who assume free will become incensed at the assumed intent of harm. If dog they have trained usually doesn’t disturb food but jumps up and eats the thanksgiving turkey. That dog was purposely being bad and deserves a good beating in their mind. A child may see a leaf blowing in the wind and think the leaf is purposely evading it. If one of today’s robots weld a perfect line, we can think of it as intending to do so, though we still know there is no intent. Recently a specialist in AI who is also a science magazine author chatted with what he thought was a human occasionally for 2 months before figuring out it was a very complex chatter program. He was no different than the child with the leaf. Ever noticed that children under 8 have all the same sayings and gestures as their parents?
 
In the end, if you believe in free will you must also believe that your brain is magic. You must disregard the fact that we know how memories are made. You must disregard that chemicals can utterly alter your perception and your experience of life. You must disregard that we know so much about the brain that a chip can now be placed in a human’s head that can control a cursor on a screen via thought alone. You must believe that your experiences did not shape and create you. That your neurons cannot be numbered. That your decisions are not based on experience. You must believe in some spark of magic.
 
Magical thinking is the enemy of truth and the seed of all that which is evil in the world. Ignorance.