static and dynamic images of perfection

An ancient Greek statue is made with a static image of perfection in mind. Other more improvised artforms have a dynamic image of perfection.

why things remain as they are

Why things are as they are.

Imagine something boring and pointless like the opening of parliament.

But you are the big cheese.

You get a load of attention.

You get vip treatment.

You get the red carpet.

Suddenly it all makes sense.

When you’re a candidate voting makes total sense as it is about GETTING IN and not about doing stuff- which ordinary people realise you can't so they stay away.

Being part of a simulation is fun when you are a big cheese, or kinda fun, especially if you are starved of attention, or bad at getting it in everyday life as many politicans are, or you have some dents from childhood in your personality.

Being in a SIMULATION when you are well regarded is like being at a party- social fun and games. SO the games run on as they cater for people’s attention needs. But they have little real function. 

tipping point for games

In all games there are limiting rules and enabling rules.

The same exists for any human activity that mimics or substantially shares characteristics with a game.

The enabling rules are what make the game attractive- it is what you CAN do. In monopoly you can gain wealth, you can own properties and enjoy building hotels on those properties. The limiting rules make the game possible, but some may seem arbitrary- paying income tax, going directly to jail, not allowing more than one hotel per property.

The limiting rules mirror the enabling rules, almost like a negative mimics a positive print. But since a game must be fun to play the limiting rules are always kept to an absolute minimum.

There are two tipping points worth thinking about- when the limiting rules overwhelm or dominate the enabling rules to such an extent that the game becomes distorted. Or the obverse- when the enabling rules have no real limit and run away with themselves. In this case the game ceases to be a game and resembles a natural disaster, a growth, an explosion. The situation whereby the ever increasing nature of limiting rules begins to distort the enabling rules to create a new game also presents problems.  The game can only continue for so long, after that it will fracture and widespread cheating will tend to occur. The simulation of the game - played with widespread cheating - can continue for a long time, but the rewards are increasingly viewed with disdain (at first they can be compared with the real rewards but over time this is forgotten (though the cheaters will try to remind people of 'the past' more and more, this will backfire because the real differences (rather than merely the similarities which the cheaters want to display) will eventually become obvious). An alternative path is one in which cheating is ever more harshly punished, but that again results in terminal decline.

Another scenario is when the enabling laws become way more powerful than the limiting laws. A catastrophe is predicted but the limiting laws/rules lag too far behind. Or are applied to the wrong things because people are having so much fun with the extravagant enabling rules. Eventually the game loses interest since the key thing is the symbiosis of the enabling and limiting rules. Unless you start a new game it may prove very hard if not impossible to reset this symbiosis.

the way of love

Sufism is often known as the way of love. Christianity is known as the religion in which love is paramount. St Paul goes so far as to say that all virtues are nullified without love. So naturally love became a high value commodity. And high value things attract clippers and fakers just as much as coinage does. People 'clip' by telling themselves they are using love when they aren't. They fake when they use the word to get credit for themselves. So the word goes out of use with sincere people. But the problem then is that a whole generation(s) grow up not really knowing what that thing that was once called 'love' is.

It certainly isn't what is called love now- slushy romance/attachment/obsession.

In fact in pre-romance, pre-Christian times loves was a technical term about as emotive as the word attention is now. What you give attention to, grows. What you deprive of attention, withers. This is why Idries Shah refined and promoted the use of the word attention and didn't emphasise 'love' in his writing. If you use attention like a fertiliser, a technical tool for good in your life you will see the benefit.

weaponising technology

Every development in technology produces a new weapon. And history shows that if man gets a weapon he WILL use it.

Cars are wonderful but cars beget armoured vehicles.

Aeroplanes are like magic but planes drop bombs.

Nuclear power is marvellous but nuclear missiles are not.

Travel to the moon using a rocket that will threaten a country in another continent.

Even GM foods are used to threaten countries to get in line over their seed buying policies.

As Paul Virilio pointed out: invent a ship and you invent a shipwreck. Technology is not neutral; it not only leverages our ability to do harm it changes our behaviour. People in cars behave differently to people walking. But then people who run behave differently too. Perhaps it is just the speeding up that changes our behaviour; we weren't designed to go so fast.

Try and think of a technology that only benefits? Only basic ones surely; tables, cheese, making fire...but fire causes more destruction than almost anything. You can't get away from the double edges sword of technology.

Since this is very obvious we should be careful about technologies that are slow to reverse. 

Since we invent new technologies to fix errant old ones we should be aware that some damage is irreversable. Surely it makes sense to pursue only that tech which produces zero waste, or zero non-recyclable waste. At some point this should become a new convention of human activity.

the tube and the singularity

sometimes you have to earn money. you get a tube job, that is tube as in toothpaste. in this kind of thing you get squeezed out over time. by the end you are fully squeezed and maybe all bent up to get the last drop out of you. no dignity required or involved though former generations who did the same job were awash with dignity. now the opposite to this is the singularity (nothing to do with ray kurzweil). the singularity is a genuine one off, a raised finger would be the obvious thing to say but actually it is NOT a rebellion it is an act of contradictory alliance. things in opposition may be working together. facing the global as we do you can beat yourself trying to come up with universalisable ideas (democracy for all, free trade, stop global warming, stop war) or you could realise that all that has ended and now the only way to avoid being a tube, getting used up, is to create or be in singularities...

why sceptics always fail to convince...in the end

We all know them: the professional sceptics who make a living debunking such things as the paranormal, uri geller, psychics and tarot card readers. Yet as soon as one generation of sceptics dies, their work, seemingly never finished, is taken up by a new generation. But just as the Gellers of this world can never convince everyone, neither can the sceptics.

By the way, for the record, I am sure that Geller is a fraud (I met an Israeli who knew him before he was famous and claims he originally did the psychic stuff as a magic trick...like Derren Brown he only became famous when he claimed it was FOR REAL.)

But really the reason the sceptics fail to convince is because they suffer from 'it's-nothing-but-itis". They are knee jerk reductionists. And just try telling a painter that red and green are 'nothing but different wavelengths' and you'll get an inkling of what's afoot. We can be sure of one thing- life is NEVER 'nothing but'.

The problem lies in what is going on. The sceptic is looking for a way to make the uncomfortable implications of the psychic go away. The sceptic is, in fact, a kind of believer. He or she has seen that if telepathy is true then it changes everything. It means that a lot of science is based on wrong assumptions- and that's too big a contradiction for their thin shoulders to bear. But a scientist needs broad shoulders; a good one will know half of what he took for gospel as a student will be overturned in his lifetime- or else be like Rutherford denying Einstein to his grave. And a shrug of the shoulders is all that is needed for something as peripheral to everyday life as telepathy.

For therein lies the rub- psychic phenomena are always singular- I have just read a very convincing case of an adopted boy who was suddenly plagued by dreams that his real mother was being plagued by bears in a cold northern place. His adopted mother was concerned and rang hospitals in Alaska which was all she could think to do. Finally she connected with the real mother who was dying of AIDS in...Alaska. So the son, who was able to finally meet his real mum, got to assuage his fears (to some extent) before she died.

But mostly this sort of thing doesn't happen, and science needs regularity to make its predictions.

Of course we all know science doesn't run as Karl Popper suggested- a single 'negative' where there should be a positive is airbrushed away- Ptolemaic astronomy was more accurate than Copernican, at first, owing to the number of ingenious workarounds that had been developed. So the sceptics shouldn't fear- they should have more faith in the stalwart strengths of science.

So a sceptic is revealed as someone who actually hasn't much faith in anything, but a lot of belief instead. Belief in this case means an intellectual drive to assert what ought to be the case. Whereas faith is a confidence that when something works you don't try to fix it, you use it.

We, the ordinary punters, torn between sceptics and psychics, don't need belief in 'our system'. We have faith in the world as a mysterious place that will always surprise us, but not every day. Especially if we live routinised lives within well worn boundaries.