Author: James

Al will be taking over the guest editor spot Monday, I am told, and like the devil, I know I have a little time left. Now I get to shoot and snipe!

James, the PT editor, has suggested a post that I find rather attractive for this last one. James sent me two quotes:

“America is like a healthy body, and its resistance is threefold: its patriotism, its morality, and its spiritual life. If we can undermine these three areas, America will collapse from within”
__Joseph Stalin

“To achieve world government, it is necessary to remove from the minds of men their individualism, loyalty to family traditions, national patriotism and religious dogma”
__Brock Chisholm, Former Director, World health Organization

And James concludes with a statement of his own:

“It seems this is a fence i wish not to climb over and escape from. Loyalty is the undermining concept of these(above) two quotes. They are reinforced by religion; religion that demands just that: traditional values”.

My basic thrust in the past humongous number of essays is to point out that all forms of human government ultimately breaks down to algorithms, or decision procedures by which we function.

The US Constitution was not designed as a system of algorithms by which people would be governed, but was actually designed as a limitation of the federal government, so that people could be reasonably free to live by their own decisions. James Madison well understood the difficulty in relating any set of laws to “God”:

“When the Almighty himself condescends to address mankind in their own language, his meaning, luminous as it must be, is rendered dim and doubtful by the cloudy medium through which it is communicated”.

Madison hit on an interesting concept here, because a man named Claude Shannon would develop a mathematical process known as information theory. The basic idea of information theory is that the more probable a message is, the less information it contains. We could state it another way: the more a message is repeated, the less information it contains.

Based on Madison’s observation, if God actually DID speak to men, his message would have a high information content, so much so that it could never be reduced to a fixed set of principles recognized as law. If God did speak to men, “His” language would have to be translated into the medium of their language, and that, said Madison, would render it dim and doubtful. We “see through a glass darkly”.

I presented a parallel to that earlier, by pointing out that we cannot program a computer such that it represents God. If it could, it would have to also represent the various differences we would perceive between a physical “brain” like a computer, and what we recognize as God.

If we have over 38,000 versions of God within Christianity alone, and another uncountable number of versions outside Christianity, it is most likely we will never have a computer that can even come close to representation of God, and therefore we can have no human government that will come any closer, either church or state, and that is summed up convincingly in Godel’s theorem.

So what is religion for, in terms of James’ assessment, above? It can obviously have only one purpose, and that is to block the efforts described by both Stalin and Chisholm, in the above quotes. In short, humans cannot ever find the “answers” within themselves. Does that prove God’s existence? No, but it does show that there is always “something” that will forever lie just outside of and representing a completeness just beyond human understanding.

How do I know this? Godel’s theorem: In any consistent axiomatic formulation of number theory(or any formal theory of sufficient complexity) there exists an infinity of undecidable propositions.

How does this break down to Constitutional theory? The founders, especially the “Anti-Federalists”, argued repeatedly that no system of laws could ever be answerable only to itself. If the Supreme Court was the final arbiter of all law, the natural tendency would be for the Supreme Court to decide all cases in a light that extended the power of its own decisions, or as one Supreme Court Justice put it, “We do not have the last word because we are infallible. We are infallible because we have the last word”.

In fact, that is one aspect of Godel’s theorem. There exists no such system that prove its own consistency from within itself. It must look “outside” itself to determine truth and justice. That, basically, is why the founders decided on a confederacy of states.

Karl Marx, in his earlier writings, however, realized that if you can change the economic system of any government, you can change the government itself. It is not necessary to attack the content of people’s beliefs, but to by-pass those beliefs by establishing a decision procedure or algorithm that rendered their beliefs and traditions unenforceable.

Marx, conclusions were basically simple: If you can establish a form of currency that is a “universal equivalent” of all value, then everyone is ultimately forced to operate completely within the power of that “universal equivalent” no matter what their beliefs or opinions.

If money becomes the universal equivalent, said Marx, then everything is ultimately exchangeable for money. But a thing can only be exchanged for money, said Marx, if the owner has divested himself of its intrinsic worth, or if the owner has been “alienated” from that thing.
The so-called inalienable rights, and the fixed property relationships corresponding to them, said Marx, break down before money.

As the first Baron Rothschild is alleged to have said, “Give me control of the issuance of money, and I care not who makes the laws”.

The decision procedures, the algorithms once driven by the de-centralist values of human traditions, are now completely subject to the algorithms controlled by the ones who control money issuance, or to put it in more ancient terms, “The love of money is the root of all evil”.

Not money itself, but the love of money, that is, the use and control of issuance of money, to determine how a society must live. Money itself becomes the centralized “information” that completely controls a society, regardless of what they believe!

In contradiction to that idea, people will seek for a truth that allows them personal freedom, but in seeking that personal freedom, they will likely seek also to establish a “higher” authority which they will refer to as God.

One problem: you can’t prove the existence of God. There is no way that God can ever be represented in any single human system of government or religion.

BINGO!

That is what our founding fathers referred to as “inalienable human rights”. There exists NO collective human system, by any name, that can ever rise above the rights of a single human being!

How can a central government ever recognize and define the rights belonging to humans? It can’t! That’s why we have this little thing in the US Constitution called the Ninth Amendment.
The rights enumerated in the Constitution cannot be construed to deny or disparage other rights retained by the people.

First Amendment: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

In fact, congress cannot authoritatively make such a law, since it has no ability to define “God”.

The fact that there is no proof of a defined God is the best insurance of freedom that we can ever know. If there were such proof, imagine one world government, one neck ready for one leash. The freedom of a single mind reduced to a collective. Shades of Ayn Rand!

Just as Chaos science seems to show that chaos is necessary for order, it seems that an uncontrollable power called “God” is supremely necessary to offset the absolute power of law.

The “inalienable rights of man” demands always that there exists something beyond the range of human thought, human conceptions, and collective human power.

I choose to call that “something” God.

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Talk to most any of the usual “Christians” today, and you will see them resort to Romans 1:20, assuming they know anything biblically at all.

“For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and godhead; so that they are without excuse”.

There’s their “proof”. Now, let myself, or Ex-Android or Corky, or perhaps even Byker Bob, say, “What proof? Where is the undeniable proof of God so that I am without excuse?”

“The bible says so! God says so!” They will probably shout.

Circular reasoning, tautology, at the best. But is Paul actually saying that every person on this earth today is “without excuse”?

Well, if you back up to verse 17, you see that the “just shall live by faith”. You gotta think about this for a second. If Gods’ power is so evident that we are without excuse, why in the world would we have to live by faith? Faith in what? Faith that God will save us? But if we know without excuse there exists a God, then we know that by simple acceptance, there is no doubt we will be “saved’. No faith required.

besides, according to the usual christian teaching, before we “accepted Christ”, we ourselves were “ungodly and unrighteous, and held truth in unrighteousness“.

That is, while we were still “sinners”, we “held truth in unrighteousness”, but once we “accept Christ’, we must live in faith?

Obviously, by that reasoning, to ‘accept Christ”, you must be dumbed down, unable to know what was obvious when you were a “sinner”.

Of course the good “Christian” folks use this argument to condemn homosexuals. God revealed himself to those “queers”, and they’re going to hell unless they stop their perverted ways!

That’s not my statement. That’s the “good ol‘ “Christian” statement. And like all such statements, it’s wrong.

So what exactly was Paul talking about? Why not take a look at Romans 1:19:

“Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them, for God hath shewed it to unto them”.

“Them”? Who’s “them”? God hasn’t showed anything to me. I’m sure Corky or Ex-Android would say the same thing. I haven’t been shown the first bit of evidence so that I’m without excuse.

Obviously Paul was referring to a certain group of people, and since he was a Pharisee, and since he was talking about revelations, we can simply look to Deuteronomy 4:35: “Unto thee it was showed, that thou mightest know that the Lord he is God…”

To whom was it showed? Obviously, ancient Israel. Who else? Look through the rest of that chapter, you see it was only ancient Israel.

For further confirmation, look at Amos 3:2 “You only(Israel) have I known of all the families of the earth: therefore i will punish you for all your iniquities”.

Simple enough. Paul was talking about ancient Israel.

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Is the universe a collection of random mutations and accidental assemblies? As I pointed out before, new evidence suggests that there is a process of intelligence that seems to transcend individual decisions. So what’s the process? If we could figure it out, then we’d have the meaning of life.

Recently there was the discovery of what is known as “mirror neurons” in the brain. Scientists discovered some amazing things about these mirror neurons. For example, if you see someone pick up a glass of water, the mirror neurons in your brain will be stimulated exactly as if you picked up the glass yourself. Behavior is learned and adapted into the brain by this method, and infants can quickly learn to control certain actions by mimicry, simply because observing the actions trigger the same sections of the brain required to perform that action.

This happens throughout our lives as we observe others. The reason why we know it is not “us” that performs the action is that our skin has sensors that send messages to our brain and allows us to realize that it was another arm, and not our own, that performed the action.

However, it was discovered that if the arms are numbed so that there is no sensory message to the brain, there is no difference at all in the brain as to whether “you” pick an object, or whether someone else did it.

If you keep up with the TV series “House”, you might have seen an episode where a man had his hand blown off as he was reaching to grab a child. His muscles remained in that clenched, spasmed conditions for many years after. Dr. House “cured” the problem by taking the man’s good arm in front of a mirror in a box, and his stub arm was also in the box, but he only saw the mirror reflection of his good arm. House asked him to then clench and relax his good fist.

Within seconds, the man’s muscles on his stub arm began to relax. This has actually been performed as a cure for such people, but not so miraculously as on the TV series. People actually were able to relax muscles on disabled limbs simply by flexing the muscles in their good limbs and watching that same action in the mirror image, which their brain told them was the other limb!

This is so powerful that when we select heroes or leaders, we not only “identify with” them, but we develop actual mirror images so that we “become what we behold”!

This collective identification with “American Idols” can lead to what Hoffer called “estrangement from the self”. The power of mimicry is so powerful that certain behaviors are selected and coordinated to the exclusion of other behaviors, leading to ultimate death of a species or culture.

As we see from history, humans have little problem with organizing and centralizing cultures. They’re quite good at it. There’s Egypt, Babylon, Persia, etc, all of which showed greater capacity for larger organization.

The problem is, the greater the capacity for imitation and centralization, the less ability for freedom to adapt to change as individuals. If there is a “higher intelligence” that directs such activities, that intelligence would actually tend to produce, no collective centralism, but an increasing tendency toward diversity.

In other words, if human intelligence naturally tends to centralize its knowledge and eliminate diversity, there would have to be a kind of “antibody” or “inoculation” that would tend to cause a reversal of the process.

In short, all attempts to discover order and harmony in the universe would tend to reveal that “God throws dice”, as Einstein said.

In “Guns, Germs, and Steel”, Jared Diamond points out that empires grew from the Middle Eastern sections around Sumer and Babylon because of geography. The environment favored a type of grain that was gradually harvested, and in the harvest, the people naturally selected those grains with the biggest heads and healthiest “fruit” for re-planting. Wheat and oats went through a natural selection process that created larger, healthier crops.

At the same time, said Diamond, the people domesticated various animals such as cows, oxen, horses, chickens, pigs, sheep, and in living alongside them, the people exchanged “germs” and viruses with the farm animals, so that when they invade other countries, they actually caused widespread death and destruction among cultures that had not raised such animals.

In this growth and adaptation of favorable environments that led to empires, we have the history of the Jews, who developed strict dietary, religious, and civil laws as a result of the harsh, demanding environment of the desert. It was, in fact, these very wandering Bedouin types that became highly influential in their cultures because they were, in fact, not able to completely integrate with a fixed, specific environment..

While these Bedouin societies did carry their animals with them and were “cross pollinated” with the germs of the animals, they develop certain resistance to infectious diseases as they traveled to new areas, and their strict dietary laws allowed them to maintain certain resistance to diseases caused by less strict observance.

The general difference between Jewish culture and the usual cultures, is that, while other cultures developed alongside their environment, Israel was not allowed to inhabit a “Promised Land” until they learned to behave in a way deserving of the land. This is a reversal of the general process of social evolutionary development.

Their history suggests they were unable to keep the laws they were given, so they were forced to constantly adapt to their environments in which they found themselves. Not only to the environment, but to the cultures in which they found themselves.

If, in fact, as Paul said, the natural mind is enmity against God and cannot keep God’s laws, the natural result would be a continual increase in diversity and individual responses toward external problems. As we see in the biblical book of “Judges”, every man did what was right in his own eyes.

This very inability to adapt to a collective ideology by a “stubborn and stiff necked” people, actually created a kind of cultural “antibody” to the various empires and god-kings that had evolved by natural processes of growth. As historian Max DiMont points out in “The Indestructible Jews”:

“First, there have been twenty to thirty civilized societies in the history of mankind, the number depending on how one defines a civilization….Then the civilization has either stagnated or disintegrated. The Jews are seemingly the only exception to this ‘rule’.
“Second, the moment a people lost its country through war or some other calamity, that people either disappeared as an ethnic entity or regressed into a meaningless existence….Against the odds of history(Jews)survived for two thousand years without a country of their own.
“Finally, no people except the Jews have ever managed to create a culture in exile. The Jews, however, in exile, created not just one, but six different cultures, one in each of the six major civilizations within which their history flowed”.

In fact, it is DiMont’s thesis that the Jews were actually created to be scattered, to become a “diaspora” that spread the basis of their culture around the world. If so, it makes a lot of sense, because it was a process that forced groups to constantly re-adapt to their environment in more individualized ways, to “repent” as it were.

In more modern language, we might say that the Jews were created to “inform” civilizations, to act as the “salt” that retarded the “leaven” of excessive growth.

What is “sin” called in the Old testament? Leaven. What does leaven do? It expands and grows until it consumes all available fuel, and then it collapses of its own weight. And if those who seek truth are the “salt of the earth”, we know that salt acts to retard the excessive growth of leavening.

What emerges is NOT the traditional ideas of growth, proselytizing, and narcissistic expansion of centralized “God-Kings” as Christianity tries to tell us, but rather its opposite, a constant tendency toward greater individuality, uncertainty, breakdown, and re-forming according to new information.

In short, Christianity and government is the “Borg”, while intelligence favors individual adaptation to changes within the environment.

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A few years ago, I was introduced to the idea of transhumanism, as presented by Ray Kurzweil. The idea is that soon, technology will enable us to “upload” ourselves into a computer or robot consisting of enough artificial intelligence that we will no longer have to worry about dying.

When I pointed out that this was nothing more than an ancient religious impulse, I enraged a few “transhumanists” who said there certainly was no religious intent! Far from it!

I pointed out that, while it might not have been a conscious intent, it is still merely a continuation of the religious impulse. After, all what is religion, but an attempt to create a concept of men, give it a physical body, and “upload” ourselves into it so we can escape death?

By the same token, what is government, if not the same thing? Kurzweil talks of physical “substrates” into which human intelligence can be uploaded, even if not strictly into the mechanical processes we envision today.

It all boils down tho the same thing. We create a decision process, we become part of the decision process, and our lives become less than the decision process itself.

But why the mechanical extension? Why did we select this process of organization? Philip Slater, in a book called “EarthWalk“, which I highly recommend, says this:

“A machinelike response in the face of danger had no real value until men began to make war on each other–it was of no use either in hunting or in surviving other predators. The most mechanical peoples won over those less so, so that a profound cultural selection took place….When man invented the machine, for which there is no external model in nature, he invented it in his own image. The human is the only animal programmed to ignore the very feedback that it is simultaneously programmed to utilize, which is why only a human can make an animal, or another human, neurotic or crazy.”

If humans can create systems large enough, sufficient to enable others to sacrifice themselves to a common cause greater than themselves, then they have achieved a form of “immortality” by “uploading” themselves into the greater system, or as Hoffer wrote, becoming “estranged from self”.

The “internal circuitry” by which the group operates assumes greater importance than the “internal circuitry” of the individual. This extension of individual “circuitry” into a greater collective “circuitry” is also known as narcissism, a process by which a person extends himself eternally, in a linear fashion, into his environment. It is also known as the proselytizing zeal.

“God” becomes an extension of ourselves, which is, by definition, idolatry.

But is there something greater than ourselves? A professor at MIT many years ago named Ed Fredkin, decided that the atoms, electrons, protons, etc, were not actually physical sub-atomic structures, but were actually bits of information. Fredkin developed an idea of the universe as “digital physics”, with the universe itself as a kind of cosmic computer in which we can’t know the outcome of anything until the program actually runs.

Is it possible we are part of an intelligence greater than our own individual thought processes? Well, there is an emergent branch of study called “swarm theory”. I first didn’t care for this study because it implied, to me, collectivism and majority rule, which my conservative mind rejected. But I found it quite interesting, because it does suggest a power to “compute” solutions that are actually greater than individual calculations.

For example, one professor took a large jar of jelly beans and asked the class to each submit an estimate of how many jelly beans were in the jar. While some of the calculations were fairly close, the professor discovered that by taking the average of the class estimates, the estimated value was surprisingly close to the actual number.

Another example of the “swarm” intelligence was shown when researchers placed a dish of sugar water outside a beehive. The swarm of bees soon found it. Next day, a dish was placed twice as far away. The swarm soon found it. After several days of this, the researchers found that when they set the dishes out at these exact measured distances, they soon found the bees waiting for them. The swarm had somehow computed the next step in a mathematical series.

The point is, this computation process was not subject to the control of one bee, but a process of collaboration among the bees to determine a process that was precisely regulated mathematically.

David Bloom, in an imaginative book called “Global Brain”, points out that even ancient bacteria exhibited an ability to adapt and compute necessary changes to their environment!

Quoting from the studies of Eshel Ben-Jacob, Bloom points out that Darwin’s theory of evolution regarding random mutations, may soon give way to a far more complex concept.

“Since 1974…a growing body of evidence had accumulated indicating that useful bacterial mutations are not completely random. By 1999, over 880 studies suggested that some mutations might, in fact, be genetic alterations ‘custom tailored’ to overcome emergencies.
“Ben-Jacob’s studies suggested that far more than the self organization of inanimate matter was at work within the petri dish…Ben-Jacob contended that the package of genes carried by each individual bacterium is more than a mere carrier of construction plans(see James’ embedded video, “Bruce Lipton and ‘Biology of Perception'”). he wrote that genome can ‘recognize difficulties and formulate problems’….what’s more, the genetic bundle seemed to accomplish something even computers cannot achieve. Said Ben-Jacob, ‘The genome makes calculations and changes itself according to the outcome’….Concluded Ben-Jacob, in the bacteria’s case ‘evolutionary progress is not a result of successful accumulation of mistakes, but is rather the outcome of designed creative processes’.”

Assuming such an intelligence, its integrative powers would NOT be dependent on individual choice, but would actually involve a level of complexity of which we could not even be aware. In fact, the effort to control such intelligence and reduce it to our pitiful human concepts, whether we represent it as “God” or “natural selection” would be woefully inadequate.

Such an intelligence, based on the complex integration of life forms, would operate on a much higher level than basic human awareness and organization.

For example, I’ve often referred to Matthew 10:34-38. Jesus said that the effort to obey him would result in a “sword”, a cutting or slicing apart of ideas until a man’s enemies would be those of his own household.

Does this process have a biological advantage? Bloom makes an interesting comparison in regard to biology:

“Among the Yanomamo, the biggest clashes are between family members–and between the groups they head. How could evolution favor feuds which current theory says should never be? Creative bickering has been honed by natural selection because, in pitting father against son and brother against brother, it opens up new avenues to genes, clans, cliques and species. It slices through genetic bonds to generate diversity”.

Another biblical passage similar to this is found in 1 Corinthians 1:27-29. If “God chose the foolish things to confound the wise, the weak to confound the mighty, and base things which are rejected by the “builders” that “no flesh should glory in his presence”, we are not talking about anything subject to human concepts and organization. In fact, we are talking about things which would, to all intents and purposes, appear as random processes, or “natural selection”.

It simply would not be subject to human conceptual control.

Does that mean there is a God? No. But it does indicate that we are part of a process of intelligence that operates across species barriers and constantly re-organizes our life processes by both separation and integration.

If truth itself transcends theoremhood, then it is quite possible that there is a process of “truth” that is directing our lives in a way not subject to human thought control.

“For my ways are not your ways, neither are my thoughts your thoughts….”

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