Government for the Many, Anarchy for the Few.

I was talking to some guy in a bar the other day. A self-proclaimed Anarchist. I was drunk, so we had an argument. He told me that no such creature as government actually exists, and what we have in reality are scaled-up versions of the 'friendly' skills and commodity bartering systems of old - hierarchies arising spontaneously and organically within anarchic states, without the need for the artificial contrivances and paraphernalia of elections and politic structure.

In short, he said that governence is an illusion, unattainable in any perfect form, and as such only pursued by fools, and that an acceptance of our true 'anarchic' statehood is a more practical, realistic POV.

There are a few things wrong about assuming a social system can be scaled up without distortion - a system which works well in a community of a few hundred people may not work so well when applied to a society of a few million. There are reasons for this. Reasons perhaps most succinctly outlined by game theory.

You may be familliar with game theory in its most well known form of prisoner's dilemma - two suspects, held incommunicado in separate interrogation rooms, deciding whether or not to implicate the other - mutual co-operation (enabled by a faith in the good faith of the other) leading to freedom for both.

This is however, only the tip of the iceberg.

When applied to larger groupings of people, game theory - an attempt to outline the variables affecting co-operation, betrayal and recidivism; punishment and forgiveness and analysing the stability of different individual social strategies within a non-homogenous behavioural community - shows that unfortunately OG's assertion of a scalable 'gentlemen's agreement' system becoming a 'natural/anarchic' government, to be unrealistic.

There is a numerical limit, beyond which a group begins to factionate and schism. For humans, this number would seem to be around 150-200 people. This is extrapolated from brain capacity - of the neocortex, in comparison with average group/brain-size ratios in our fellow primates (Dunbar).

I do not claim it to be especially accurate purely from scientific grounds - rather I draw more confidence from historical observations of military units - the Roman century for example - why hundreds not thousands..? And more modern army units - the largest grouping being (before the command structure splinters into a complex hierarchy) the 'company' - consisting of a max. 250 men, composed from platoons. Also the observance of primitive communities - for example the Australian Walbiri and the Ammassalik of Greenland - all possessing an average of 148.4 people in their villages. (Maybe the 0.4 had a boating accident or something). Also observe the more modern 'primitives' - such as the Amish and the Hutterites. Their leaders observe that "keeping communities below 150 keeps management efficient - beyond that people become strangers to one another". ("The tipping point" - pg. 178)

ie: An anarchic government of gentlemen/gentlewomen does not scale up.

The basis of any co-operation is trust. And trust is not based on friendship so much as predictability. A predictable enemy - the devil you know - is easier to live with than a complete unknown. Anyone that went around trusting everyone on sight willy-nilly, would soon get burned.

And this is where an archy, with a convoluted judiciary system, wins out in the "large population co-operation between strangers" front. By routinely limiting the extremes of behaviour - rape, theft and murder for example - ritualising interactions between people and most importantly being seen to punish prohibitively those who trespass, they provide a proxy for prediction between erstwhile strangers and hence a basis for trust between those interacting with each other for the first time.

The function of a law, a rule or a moral is not to erradicate totally the behaviour against which it proscribes but rather to reduce the probability that the majority of that society faces of ever becoming a victim of that particular behaviour to such a low degree that it becomes more reasonable, from a cost/benefit basis, on the part of any given individual member of that society to forgo taking prohibitive precautions against such an occurence in their day to day lives.

What I want to express, but perhaps have not done so well enough is to highlight that as a member of a 'lawful', archic society I do not need to become expert in say some defensive/offensive discipline - such as fencing or shooting or a martial art - because the penalties I will incur in terms of the time invested and risk of injury involved in their pursuit are no longer outweighed by a reduction in the risk of injury and death from - I don't know - a duel for example, or a mugging.

In being a member of a society where such an option exists - ie. paying through taxation for a judiciary system and accepting the governmental veto on my expressing dissatisfaction through direct violence against another person or persons - I incur less penalty than would be entailed by having to aquire the skills and equipment necessary to maintain a reasonable degree of protection within an anarchic society without such an externalized system.

In short, Some kind of X+archy fosters co-operation in ways anarchies cannot. It also frees us all from having to become Jean Claude Van Damme in our spare time.

More free time coupled with less violent disruption = more work. Well, more something anyway.

On another tack - that of 'alpha personas' - anarchists are right to emphasize the natural arisal of leaders, but they are forgetting duration. With an anarchy leadership is faddish - a leader lasts only for as long as there is no other serious contender, or he retains the imagination of his group (think literally highschool popularity contests and playground bullies) the anarchist leader may be king for a day or king for a year - he has no way of knowing - producing 'slash and burn' crowd-pleaser strategies which though may ensure the alpha's continued leadership, will not necessarily benefit the group long term.

Even if the anarchic equivalent of a totalitarian despot arises and rules for his or her entire lifespan - that is still a very finite spell - not even the three-score and ten is guarrenteed - which though may be a long time in politics is a short time for anything else. The cathedral in my home town for example, took 400 years to complete back in the day. Anything is possible I suppose but I would bet most of this month's salary that the social attention-span of an anarchic body-politic would veto such an endevor.

However, with an 'archy', a leader - once come to power - usually has a certain period of power guarrenteed by an established social dictate - be it a lifetime or a four to eight year span, perhaps even a multi-generational lineage or at least an itterated political-party presence - which allows him or her to put, realistically, into effect plans which though not paying off in the short term, pay off big in the future.

ie. Anarchic leadership is short-sighted, and any autopoietic hierarchies thrown up, are mayfly in lifespan, subject to whim.

All of which puts me in the position of performing my own version of OG's 180° tyre swing in saying that rather than being 'unrealistic and ivory-towered', the pursuit of government, of archy, however flawed and cruel it may be or become, is the only realistic reaction to a species that cannot keep its collective legs together and the burgeoning populace this inevitably produces.

Let me repeat, a romantic adherence to the vice of anarchy, however soft or hard, applied now, to a population as big as the one present would only condemn humankind to the old cycles of growth and mutual culling at a hugely accelerated rate.

But then, romance has ever been cowled in blood.

See also: http://writeitorbust.blogspot.com/2008/11/why-archy-beats-anarchy.html

Moral Universals: Just Say No.

There are a variety of different conceptions of what “universal human morality” means, all of them involving varying degrees of absurdity. Perhaps the simplest definition would be an 'innate' morality which all human beings share. Trouble is though, it's just wishful thinking, and ignores something, well, huge: The world around us.

Why are we so obsessed with morality and absolutes anyway..?

Hmm. I think it's because we are all natural scientists at at heart, and have come to expect that what looks like chaos on the surface, is nothing but a smokescreen that conceals a hidden order underneath. I mean hell, it works for stuff like tornados and wave-patterns, why not human behaviour..? Like my friend said to me the other day:

"In the science realm this comes in the form of things like Cymatics. It is interesting that the universe shows so much complexity and elegance, and undeniable order, because we haven't been able to figure out parts of it, some are quick to claim there a lack instead of a possible unity."

 Cymatics. Well, that was a new word for me too. So, underlying order in the macro-cosmic chaos hmm..? Sexy. But I think the opposite - that we are lured into nonsensical concepts like universals with regard to human behaviour exactly because of our infatuation with (and general misapplication of) mathematic principles in the broader world. We long for the sense of finality they lend, the stability; a panacea for the troubled human condition.

I mean sure, no-one's going to overly dispute the validity of things like the universal laws of motion for example - even if things do get a little screwy at relatavistic levels, they remain perfectly good for a huge class of masses and velocities.

Thus intuitively, we go on to think "Ah - so if we can find universal principles governing things so astronomically huge as planets or as tiny as quanta - it shouldn't be so difficult to sort out a few universals for a bunch of retarded homo sapiens."

Afterall, though it's hard to measure a planet's mass and velocity, it's comparitively easy to measure or own - all we have to do is stand on the bathroom scales and carry a stop watch while we move. Surely then, intuitively, human behaviour, in comparison to astrophysics, must be child's play..?

You wish. We wish.

It's all about variables. Universal laws in the mathematic world only work because phyicists have reduced the number of variables a particular formula deals with down to the absolute minimum. In the case of motion/gravitation - mass and velocity and distance of separation. Like this:

Now, imagine if Newton had also had to take into consideration how many moons a planet had. How old they were. If that planet was in a commited relationship with a comet, or liked pepperoni on it's pizzas, or was molested as a dust cloud,



or was orbitting in a dreary, monotonous solar system with no possibility of promotion to somewhere interesting. If that planet was depressed or on medication perhaps.

That would make his lovely short equation into something very weird indeed:

I think it must be accepted that human behaviour is an infinitely more complicated process than any of the situations we have so far managed to successfully find and apply universal principles to.

Firstly - each of us are pretty much unique beyond a certain threshold of resolution - look at even Siamese twins closely enough and you'll discern differences of temprement and will - and as such cannot really be catagorized as being uniform in property as we would say, a given mass, a chemical element or particle.

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, no two situations to which the wannabe universal-izer may wish to apply a universal morality are the same either.

Let's take as an example something so mundane and everyday as "aquire food".

How would we begin reducing the elements of this scenario to a small enough array of behavioural variables to ever extract some sort of universal - "works for everyone - no matter what" - Kantian moral laws..?

I mean, for a start, how many ways are there of aquiring food..? How many fingers do you have..? Enough..?

Take one extreme. Self-canibalization. You could take a quick course in surgery, another in local anaesthesia, lop off a leg, fry it up and eat it. There you go, your belly is full, you aren't dead, and no other lifeform was exploited or damaged in any way. Super. Moral as hell.

But then, what about those who are dependent on our newly peg-legged friend - his selfish unselfish action has perhaps damaged his ability to look after his children, perhaps emotionally scarred his wife, decreased his usefulness to his colleagues at work... Blah blah ad infinitum.

The other extreme, bop someone on the head and eat their liver. The Hannibal Lector option. Surely that is pretty cut and dried. Immoral. But then, what if we're on a lifeboat, starving to death, one of us is in a coma, dying, and I take it upon myself to hack the guy up into cutlets and fricassé his ass for dinner. Not only have I saved my fellow survivors from starvation, but also, in shouldering the burden of conscience entailed by this act of 'murder', saved them from a mental/spiritual trauma POV. too.

I'm a fucking hero.

Any attempt to universalize human behaviour into black and white "this action is moral, this is not" equations - ones suitable for any individual, in any situation - are doomed simply because for all intents and purposes there are no sets of standard humans, nor sets of standard situations to which to apply morality to.

Now to move onto something else that's been bugging me thoughout the whole debate so far:

This whole "Do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the law" version of morality that ILO are proposing. I always had morality down as a thing that required more than one to play.

I don't get this 'individualized morality' bit at all. I'm getting flashbacks of ILO's anarchist arguments, but this time substituting morals for law/governence. I mean, it didn't even sound convincing the first time.

Trolling around the net to find if indeed there have been *any* real-life examples of such a minimilist morality the best I can do is Aleister Crowley and Thelema.

I mean, actually now I've seen the picture, I'm convinced. He looks like a deeply moral man.

In abstract, and purely in the rarefied and unemotional medium of text, it's easy to declare 'morality is X.' but when we get down to cases and start comparing real individuals...



It becomes a no-brainer:



Equally moral..?

Morality and the designation of moral act/immoral act, is, like most of human observation and judgements, a process of comparison, and as such, needs at least two to play. Declaring a morality of one is like expecting to meet new, fun people by playing solitaire.

It's a catch 22 situation - a 'universal morality of one' is a meaningless concept, but expanding it to encapsulate two with any maintainance of rigor is equally impossible to achieve, without equally matched sets of people, and identical situations.

Universals, schmoonivershalz.

It's Hard Just Being Yourself

In my book, Sartre's got a lot to answer for. His existentialist novels espousing the seed-crystals of every goddamn Disney-film plot in creation "Be true to yourself... Follow your heart Littlefoot... Just be yourself..." make me want to puke, for they have condemned a legion of tweedy-pipe-smokers to an unfulfilled existence of endless soul-searching for their 'authentic self' and guilt when they come up short and realise on their death beds that, despite their constant striving for something 'real' something 'different', they ended up pretty much like any other Joe Schmoe on the planet, or worse still, become convinced they simply strait-jacketed themselves into a life-long affectation, and lived only as a hollow antonym of Joe Schmoeism.

Anyway - before we get down to business, let's kick off with defining terms.

Individual:

in·di·vid·u·al
1.a single human being, as distinguished from a group.

3.a distinct, indivisible entity; a single thing, being, instance, or item.

Authentic/Authenticity:

au·then·tic
1.not false or copied; genuine; real: an authentic antique.

Authenticity (philosophy)
"In philosophy, the conscious self is seen as coming to terms with being in a material world and with encountering external forces, pressures and influences which are very different from, and other than, itself. Authenticity is the degree to which one is true to one's own personality, spirit, or character, despite these pressures."

As we see, both definitions stress the need for a state of being distinguishable from the group, of being distinct, of not being a copy, and the philosophic slant on authenticity requires a certain purity, inviolate of outside influence.

Put very simply, in my view, true individualism is not something achievable by humanity, nor was it ever meant to be. And as for 'living authentically', well that particular crusade is absolutely doomed from the start, so pervasive are the external drivers of groupthink, and so numerous are the internal fifth-columnists that have infiltrated our bodies and brains over the millenia.

Before I move onto the more specific 'how', I'd like first to sketch out the 'why' of it all.

The Why.

Having become, however grudgingly, a certified member of the old bastard demographic I take some certain measure of solace in my new-found freedom to gently take the piss out of the more youthful sectors of society as they scramble about for some from of identity separate from the previous generations. It is a classic old-git story - the situation of the uniformed or otherwise conventually-dressed mid-lifer bumping into a bunch of spotty youths and having some form of the following conversation:

"Hey kids - whassup..?"
"Fuck-off Grandad."
"Aww -c'mon - Why so serious..?"
"You iz like a faceless slave to the establishment."
"Really, how can you tell..?"
"You iz like wearing the uniform of the drone dog-soldier of the oppressed."
"Really..? Damn, I quite liked this sweater too. So - not into uniformity huh..?"
"Shah - as if."
"Is that why you're all wearing black, like the same music and spout the exact same half-assed socio-politic rhetoric..?"
"Yea - it's like an expression of our individuality innit."

Young people. Priceless.

But why, since we seem to put such stock into being something unique, someone special, do we seem doomed never to achieve anything near it..? Simple, because true individuality is fatal. Or at least, fatal enough.

Imagine a colony of ants. Or a hive full of bees. But not the normal kind, these bees are all individuals, so are the ants. None of them act as the others do. They dance to different beats, sniff to different scents, build to different plans. can you imagine what a completely fucked-up mess they'd be in..?

"Oi - where's that honey..?"
"Hey - don't stress man, Jamiroquai's on sabbatical in the South of France trying his feeler's at abstract pollenization."

etc.

Seriously though, humanity is based along the lines of a distributed super-organism - many acting as one - in much the same way as the eusocialities of Bees, Ants and Termites. Except bigger of course, and wearing jeans. It makes sense, as evolutionary gambits go, to go for two basic options: (A) Big, solitary and (usually) fucking dangerous, aka - T-Rexes, sharks, bears, tigers - or, (B) Smaller, communal, and comparitively weedy. The two gambits tend to become exclusive over time - because if you try to combine them either way they tend to either fail outright, or become hugely inefficient. ie. A lone but weedy and totally undangerous predator will keep getting his ass handed to him by every Wildebeast he tries to take down, until he dies of starvation, and the communal but massively dangerous/agressive/deadly shark-rabbit will tend to kill itself off every season.

We of course, are examples of B. So why did we end up dominating the world..? Us and not the Sharkbears..?

Because we co-operate. We become of one mind, one purpose. Some huge and many-armed Kali, a sword in each hand, raining down death and destruction all around, for as long as we can keep it all together and not run away in different directions. Evolution may have spent a long time making us intelligent, making us inventive and selfish and quarrelsome and curious and stubborn, but it's spent an equally long time keeping that intelligence and that self-centredness in check, ensuring that when push comes to shove, especially if the pushing and shoving is being done by a sharkbear, we pull together and work as one to kick our enemy's furry behind.

As much as an apparant individuality has been fostered during our meandering path from the trees into the city, it has also been supressed by our need to act, and think, as one.

I think that's probably enough 'Why' for starters.

The How.

Some people collect butterfies. Some people collect the numbers of trains they've stood on rainswept and dreary platforms especially to see. Some still sadder people, like me for instance, collect web-pages of cog-sci and sociology articles on human synchonicity mechanisms.

That's just the way I roll.

Anyway - remember the philosophic definition of 'authenticity'..?

"encountering external forces, pressures and influences which are very different from, and other than, itself"

Here is a quick round-up of the forces external and internal, operating upon us.

Perceptual.

How our body is feeling effects how we act. http://www.jdnews.com/articles/span-79872-affects-study.html. Basically Over a series of studies, scientists found that they could easily manipulate people's feelings and perceptions based on nothing more than what the subjects were touching. Holding heavier objects, for instance, made men think more seriously about things, which in turn made them more likely to donate money to charity if asked. Men holding lighter objects were less likely to donate to charitable causes. People handling rough objects were more likely to see neutral social situations in a bad light, saying that other people were obviously in a bad mood. Perhaps the most shocking find was that your hands didn't have to be the things doing the touching. People who sat in hard chairs were more likely to maintain a hard line in negotiations and were less receptive to their partner's way of thinking. [cracked.com].

ie. People in similar physical locations, carrying similar objects, wearing clothes cut of a similar cloth... Would tend to exhibit similar perspectives.

Our own facial expressions, and those of others around us, directly effect our emotions and our ability to feel them. Courtesy of our mirror-cells, we internally 'copy' the emotions of those around us. See someone smile brightly, or laugh, and suddenly you feel a little smilier and laughier yourself, despite however much of a gloomy bastard you may believe yourself to be. But you know this. You're yawning, oops - damn , now so am I - those infectious expressions again. Anyway, more surprising still http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37861005 scientists found that those with faces more or less rendered imobile via botox couldn't experience the same degree of emotional response as others with 'normal' facial motility. Do people scowl all the time beacuse they are 'authentically' dour, or are they dour because they scowl all the time..? How would you know..?

ie. People in proximity would tend to gravitate toward an averaged emotional state.

Cultural:

Too many to list here really.

Ancestory: In Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell he talks about how the general professions of your ancestral groups cause knock-on effects many generations later. The two main groups are those who stem from herders and farmers. Those with herder backgrounds, even if the modern cultural standards denigrate casual agression, are far more agressive and far more quick to anger than those with farmer backgrounds.

Situational: "The Lucifer Effect" by the guy who conducted the Stanford Prison experiment pretty much demonstrates beyond doubt that stereotyped stressful situations impose behavioural norms - massively altering people's apparant personas very quickly. He managed to turn a bunch of student libertarian hippies into authority-mad sadists within days. He was further vindicated during an investigation into the abuses in Abu Ghraib POW prison.

ie: People in similar situations, especially if the roles usually played out within them are known (and socially approved) will act (usually) as is expected, whatever pre-existing personal characteristics they may have professed to prior.

Status: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35836844/ http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2010/04/27/power-breed-hypocrisy-%E2%80%93-the-powerful-judge-others-more-harshly-but-cheat-more-themselves/ http://www.psychologicalscience.org/media/releases/2008/vankleef.cfm http://scienceblogs.com/observations/2010/04/does_money_lessen_pain.php

It would seem that increased social status lends a whole plethora of characteristic traits, everything from a reduced abilty to feel pain, to hypocrisy, a talent for lying, and a reduction in your ability to feel compassion.

ie. Social status to some extent synchonizes personality type.

Language: http://www.cracked.com/article_18823_5-insane-ways-words-can-control-your-mind.html The language you speak would seem to impose certain perspectives and traits upon you, whether you like it or not.

Priming: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priming_%28psychology%29

Priming is thought to play a large part in the systems of stereotyping[30]. This is because attention to a response increases the frequency of that response, even if the attended response is undesired[30][31]. The attention given to these response or behaviours primes them for later activation[30].

This can occur even if the subject is not conscious of the priming stimulus[30]. An example of this was done by Bargh et al. in 1996. Subjects were implicitly primed with words related to the stereotype of elderly people (example: Florida, forgetful, wrinkle). While the words did not explicitly mention speed or slowness, those who were primed with these words walked more slowly upon exiting the testing booth than those who were primed with neutral stimuli[30]. Similar effects were found with rude and polite stimuli: those primed with rude words were more likely to interrupt an investigator than those primed with neutral words, and those primed with polite words were the least likely to interrupt[30]. A Harvard study showed that something as simple as holding a hot or cold beverage before an interview could result in pleasant or negative opinion of the interviewer[32].

 In summary:

We move almost entirely within a world of understood information. Adverts, billboards, overheard conversations, editorials, TV programs - there is almost no avoiding it. We are constantly bathed in an all-pervading sea of suggestion. You don't notice really, unless you suddenly remove yourself from it. As I did.

One of my most clear memories of my early days in Turkey is of walking down the mainstreet for the first time. People walking, talking. Music blaring, billboards emblazoned with legends of every shape and size. And I could understand absolutely nothing of it. An immensely peaceful experience. Like walking in silence, alone. Even the facial expressions of the crowd were altered subtley, the framework of bone beneath ever-so-slightly alien.

The second is of coming home, after a year of meditative non-understanding, to travel across London on the Tube. Surrounded by people talking English on their phones, surfaces plastered in stickers, newspaper headlines and book-titles on every side. I felt literally brain-raped.

There is no neutral state of being anymore. Our information-rich society no longer allows it.

Again, enough of the 'how' for now. It's late.

In summary - In my opinion, it is impossible to be 'authentic' beacuse we as a species were never geared to form a true individuality of character (upon which to build authenticity) in the first place, as individual interests conflict with group survival during direct confrontations with other groups/predators. Doublely so now in our modern world it becomes impossible to form/maintain individuality due to the twin norms of high population density in urban areas - leading to high levels of active/passive informational exchange between people, and the general and pervasive background informational overload courtesy of modern media and the net.

Once upon a time, when I wasn't so old and wrinkley, I used to frequent a nightclub called the Cookie-Club in Nottingham. It was small, and had a great Goth-night on Wednesdays. One of my favourite songs of the time was The Cult's She Sells Sanctury. Anyway, to get the DJ to play it, among other things, I'd locate the most beautiful woman in the club, rush up to her and shout (it was a loud club): "S'cuse me, I need your help." What would follow would be a quick sob story about trying to get a song played - but that I'd told the DJ it was for her birthday - having pointed her out (at random) to him as my girlfriend, and that I needed her to go over there with me, and tell him it was true.

Okay, lame factor high. But it worked as an opening event, more often or not. Better than "do you come here often" anyway. The general aura of rush was key, plus the requisite arm-flapping, and boyish smiling.

What's that got to do with anything..? Aha.

Above I proposed that true individuality was impossible, because of the constant barrage of outside influences worming their wicked ways into our forebrains. However that isn't really the death-knell for individuality per-se. We could think of ourselves, as 'individuals', as being metaphysic DJ's. Okay, so we don't create the music we play, but maybe that doesn't matter - we've all been to clubs, and know that a good DJ puts his own spin on the records he plays - the sequencing, the fades in and out, the quicks, the slows, the DJ can make a good night a great one, or equally, really fuck everything up. ie, he manages to express his individuality, musically, despite not actually composing any.

That would be all well and good, and I'd obviously now have to admit defeat, were it not for people like 80's-Goth me, constantly pissing the metaphysic DJ off with stupid requests for a fictional (but perhaps not for long) girlfriend. To the point where the poor bastard DJ is so swamped with people clamouring for "I did it my way" and "Ra-Ra-Rasputin" that whatever record he eventually plays, he's no longer sure whether he chose it himself, or some other son of a bitch just shouted it in his ear a moment ago.

I don't want to turn this into a free-will/determinism debate. So I won't. But I will just point something out, something possibly quite fatal to the position of achievable authenticity. It is the assumption made, right off the bat: Logically, for a person to attempt to live an authentic life, they must have some fairly concrete idea of who they are. That old "know thyself" chestnut.

But I don't think we do.

Of course, however - we all say we do.

A long time ago, there was a guy I knew, a psychologist.. Mad as a hatter, apt to shout a lot. But one thing he said I took to heart, he said "do not listen to what people say, as much as watch carefully what they do." So I break people up now, in general, into a 'narrative self' - this being the person they say they are, and a 'behavioural self' - the person they demonstrate themselves to be. Afterall, which would you trust..?

"Hey mate - do you know who you are..?"
"Well, duh, of course I do - I'm blah, from blah, I'm a practicing blah, and believe blah, I work as a blah, I'm blah, blah and blah."

They say. But despite that,  let us look at what we do. Flop open any glossy magazine and you're almost certain to find a quiz along the lines of "How X are you..?" The X being sometimes 'honest' sometimes 'monogamous' and sometimes, I dunno, 'fun at parties'. Look at the net - how many IQ tests are there..? And don't tell me you've never done one. You do the quiz, you get points. An exact figure. You are Y clever, you are Z honest. Does my bum look big in this..? - you ask your friend.

Why don't you know..? It's your brain, and your bum. Why do we seem to need these tests..? These second opinions..?

Because we have no real fucking idea of who we are, in any concrete, exact sense.

And why..? Well that's simple, our perceptions do not work on exact figures, but on comparatives. I do not know instinctively that I am 1.81 metres tall, but I do know that I'm taller than Paul, and shorter than Bill. Likewise I know I'm smarter than Phil, but not as sharp as Audrey. This state of comparitive-based knowledge permeates everything. Can you imagine a world where everyone knew themselves, their capabilities, exactly...?

"And yes, the contestants are lining up for the men's Olympic 100m finals. Now they are each telling each other how fast they can run. And it's over, the Canadian runner says he can run a 100m in 9.56 seconds. An amazing victory for Canada."

But we do not, so we run our races, take our tests, ask for the opinions of friends, write what we have done on our resumés, rather than what we say we are capable of, what we think we would do in situation X. Whenever we tell someone, including ourselves, what we are, we confabulate. We aren't sure.

Is Jack hardworking because he's ambitious, or has he become ambitious because finds his penchant for hard work allows him to be so..? And just how hard does he have to work anyway, to work 'authentically' hard..? Does he smoke because he likes to..? How many cigarettes in a day before he's smoking 'authentically'. Who knows..? Not me, and certainly not Jack either.

Hard to find yourself when you don't even have a map.

One question I have failed to raise so far is ironically the most obvious: "Why, if we are not individuals, do we appear as such..?"

I mean, go outside, watch everyone. They all seem different - they talk differently, have different opinions, do different things, at different times, make different choices even though they are in the same sitiuations. To see all this and still say that people have no real individuality is either madness, or at the very least, unintuitive.

Sorry, but here I go back to the lowly bee. The same bee that I introduced earlier. Watch a hive. All the bees are buggering about in a seemingly random fashion, much as we do. Let's lower the temperature of the hive just a little bit. A degree or two. Brr.

Look, look there - Bee number 144,735 has begun to buzz its wing furiously. Damn him, he's trying to re-heat the hive back to its normal homeostatic temperature. Hah-ha - do not fuck with me bee, I will now lower the temperature a few degrees more. Hmm. Now more Bees are all beginning to buzz their wings. Arrgh - down with the resistance..!!! - I now lower the temperature even lower, to the point where it's bumping up against the lower limit of what bees can stand before dying. Boom - the whole hive is buzzing furiously - a million teeny-tiny muscles pumping furiously - converting movement into heat.

A minute ago however, they were all doing their own things. Apparently individually. And now they're all acting in concert, effortlessly. Naturally.

Hmm.

Why..? Why didn't they all start buzzing like crazy all at once when I first lowered the temperature by a degree or two..? That would have restored the correct temperature quicker afterall...

...Actually, no it wouldn't have. It would have overshot it by a mile, then the poor bastards would have had to clear out until the hive cooled down, or at least remain torpid for a while. Then the hive would have cooled, and damn, gotten too cool, then they'd all have started buzzing crazily again, and the whole overshoot-undershoot cycle would have begun again, never actually, to stop, and they'd never get anything done.

Giving each bee a different threshold of "Ooh, isn't it getting a bit chilly in here..?" makes evolutionary sense, because it ensures a stepped response to temperature, ensuring that a homeostatic level is maintained - a reaction of near equal strength to a given provocation.

Now, let's transpose that thought onto human behaviour. Say there is a fire. It's no more than a burning cigarette-butt thrown from a car. It lands, still smoldering, in front of a group of people. What happens..? Do they:

(a) All shout "FIRE!!!!" and climb over themselves to either run away, or to stamp it out - probably squashing each other in the process..?

Or does:

(b) Whoever's closest grind it out and go "Tut-tut, people today eh..?".

ie. the most efficient level of response given the magnitude of the event.

However, now, if that cigarette lands on a bunch of trash, and the trash catches fire... Then you get collective action - people trying to put it out - bucket chains for example, people phoning the fire department. People grabbing each other and saying "Oh look - there's a fire."

Same with agression and mob-behaviour. First, to produce a mob, you have to synchronize their mood. Do that with a good firey speech concerning a common grievance, then mirror-cells, collective body-language and facial expression will do the rest. Bingo, one synchronized, collectively angry mob. Now you take them on the warpath, and find someone to fight, or something to break.

Damn. Police line.

Now watch. Look - there's the first bee, oops, I mean person, throwing a rock. The police close in. Look again - a couple more people have been pushed over the "Goddamnit I'm so angry I could spit" threshold, and they are piling in. And boom - there goes the crowd. Everyone wailing in, fists, curses, and spittle flying.

It's all about thresholds. A coward isn't always a coward, it's just they have a very high tolerance for affront. Give that guy enough provocation though, and suddenly he's trying to bite through your leg along with the rest of them.

Acting individually doesn't mean you are an individual.

We can expand mob behaviour. Call it a "diffuse localized harmony of behaviour and perspective". ie, a wider society, with the mob's firey speech lessened into a general cultural background hum, specific to that area, tailored to the specific needs of surviving happily in that location along with the accompanying accent.

And that's the trouble these days, a new technological advance that's screwing up even that localized group individuality (sorry - now it's my turn to be oxymoronic), the globalized media. For example.

Black rap culture - (massively stereotyped sorry) - as smack your bitch, get into gangs, sell drugs, baby-mothers and all that unjazz, does kinda work (for the males anyway). As long as you stay in the ghetto. Inherrent, and to some extent subliminal, racism in American white culture - for example simply having a black-sounding name results in a statistically lower chance of getting a job, even without a picture, or any other context - means blacks are sidelined into unemployment and crime. With normal avenues of social advancement cut - ie. employment, promotion or higher education - it begins to make sense to explore criminal avenues, a risk taken being better than just sitting on your hands and rotting. And with a significant portion of suitable males in prison or dead, the black women are sexually disempowered, competing as they are among themselves, for a smaller pool of males - forcing them to accept chauvanistic and self-seeking behaviour on the part of those males, even to the point of bearing their children without the normal contracts and pledges... etc. etc. etc.

My point however is that without the net, and instant world-wide communication, this culture would have stayed pretty much within its borders for a lot longer and worked there to some kind of end-point, good, or more probably bad, whatever. But now - because that culture is a 'first order' culture - ie. sex, violence and money - and as such is vastly and instinctively attractive to the young and impulsive - ie. pretty much all male teenagers worldwide - it has exceeded its natural bounds and gone viral - igniting the youth of the world - white, black, and all colours in between.

Trouble is though, you've got nice white rich kids with educations trying to out pimp each other and hook their equally nice, educated and emancipated female colleagues on drugs so they can prostitute them out on Youtube.

In ending, I accept that obviously this is an extreme, and to some extent willfully exaggerated example, but it serves to illustrate my final point, that as the world becomes ever more interconnected, so, inversely, our chance of preserving an authentic identity at both an individual and a localized group level lessens, as our psyches become flooded not only with the influences of our native cultures, but also those of invading cultural memes, carried via the mediums of the TV and the net.

Sad AD&D Nerd Stands Revealed

I came across some of my old minatures when I was cleaning out the Cupboards: I painted them when I was in my early teens.

Mechanisms of Authority.

I just passed a happy half-hour on the motorway thinking about authority.

As far as I could decide, auothority at base starts with ownership. As defacto owners of our bodies, by means of direct control over it, we could be said to have authority over its behaviour, and the ends to which it is put. The caveat of ownership being a means of adequate defence. You do not truly own what you cannot defend and protect. A kid with a gold brick possesses it only at the retraint of those around them.

Anyway, we cede that authority over ourselves to others in a number of cases - which I've loosely grouped into 3 basic types: Impositonal assumption of authority, intrinsic and situational. The lines between them are a bit fuzzier in real life, but then, they always are.

Impositional: This is the most powerful, and also the most useless way to assume authority over others. Brute force. The classic "I have a gun/sword/kung-fu, do what I say, or I will feed you your own spleen." means of assuming control over others. Effective, because whilst you hold the gun, others have no choice but to obey, useless, because they will not respect your assumed authority, and attempt to wrest it from you.

Why..?

Because as a species we naturally form fixed heirarcies and, unless that heirarchy is based solely on brute force and no other criteria, are quick to notice cheaters. Grabbing an automatic weapon and taking over a post-office is not the same as working there for long enough to go up through the established (merit-based) heirarchy to the level of postmaster general, or whatever. The gun-gambit, to use a very English metaphor, is a form of queue-jumping, and as such... Frowned upon in polite society - perpetrators to be brought low for their temerity.

At a conceptual level however, this kind of authority ammounts to theft, those who impose it effectively 'steal' our bodies from us, stripping us of the defence that supports self-ownership.

A second version of brute force is disguised by monopoly. If I control a vital resource, you are obliged to do what I say in order to achieve it. The brute-force bit here is indirect, because my monopoly depends on my ability to protect it from those who would take it from me, and the ownership of that capacity (for violence) guarrentees my ownership of the resource, which I use to control you.

It doesn't really need to be said that authority at the governmental level is of this sort, the irony being that the thing governments monopolize is the capacity for organized violence itself.

Institutional/Situational: This the most common means of assuming authority over others, one operating within an already established heirarchy/social infrastructure. Example: Me. I'm a teacher. But the question is whether or not my students (or rather those who find themselves occupying the space commonly accepted as that of a student) obey me in the classroom because I am me in particular, or because I simply occupy the space in the classroom where a teacher (to whom students are expected to cede temporary authority over their behaviour) would be.

How much authority is ceded, and how unswervingly that authority is obeyed is governed by socially inculturated archetypes. Imagine a generalized 'teacher', you'll find you have a fairly distinct picture, both in physical appearance and demeanor, already in your head. Statistically, a student judges the 'teacheriness' of a new teacher within the first few initial seconds of meeting them, and sticks to that first impression quite rigidly throughout their time together, acting accordingly.

In my profession, the main requirement is being able to 'fit' myself into that archetype. Actually having a clue about what I'm teaching is a plus, but secondary, at least from an authority-POV.

It is this same authority mechanism that makes us unthinkingly obey Doctors when they say "take off your shirt please madam", priests when they tell us to do penance for our sins, and parking-attendants when they say "move your fucking car please sir."

This kind of authority is largely impersonal, lent almost entirely by the situation involved, and as such transient. The magic rubbing off as soon as that situation is no longer at hand. Put a teacher in an ambulance, and his authority is overruled. Take the priest from the church, and put him in burning building, and some hulking guy with a fire-axe will boss him about. Put a parking-attendant almost anywhere, and they'll be ignored. It is also dependent on accoutrements - the trappings of power - whether it be a cloak and sceptre, or a pipe and a pair of leather patches on the elbows of your tweed jacket. Remove those symbols of position, and authority wears off. Superman without his cape is just some fucking douche journo, ignored, at least until he falls back on impositional authority and punches some guy through a wall.

However, institutionalized authority does rub off on the person occupying that place, if they spend enough time there. Leading us to the last version of authority.

Intrinsic: This, being the opposite of impositional, is the hardest to achieve, but the most useful. This is the authority assumed by natural leaders. It is asserted by physical and vocal presence, and a personality of utmost confidence - one that is so used to being obeyed that it behaves as if that act of submission has already occurred. The person involved, if you like, carries and generates the situation in which it seems natural to those around them to cede authority without question. Appearance-wise they 'fit' enough of the key qualities general to many of the archetypes of institutionalised authority of the time, enough at least to automatically impress.

This form of authority is useful twice, once because it alows the assumption of authority in many/all situations and is thus 'portable', and twice because those ceding authority over themselves to the person in question do so willingly, unresentfully in the main, and for a much longer period.

The Brain that Talked to Itself.

I was talking with a friend the other day about language and thinking, and how the brain does it. He said, quite emphatically:

 "brain chemistry must have something in it that represents a statement in a linguistic way"

And I was pretty much tsaying that it doesn't.

Not as he imagined anyway.

Linguistic representation is to the brain is as sky-writing in a plane is to us. Effortful, showy, slow, and kinda dumb. Imagine Shakespeare writing all his plays with the aid of a funky single-prop plane.

First, let's talk about speed. I'm just gonna write "I want to go to town and get a pizza" on a bit of paper. Okay, it took me 14 seconds. Now, I'm gonna type it. i want to go to town and get a pizza. I cheated a bit with the capitals. Still it took 10 seconds. I am only a three-and-a-half finger typist however, I imagine their are faster typers out there.

Now, I'm going to risk a few weird looks and say it out loud, at a normal conversational pace. Took about 2 seconds. And one weird look. Now I'm going to say it as fast as I can. awannagotatownangettapizza. About a second. Now I'm gonna think it.

That's where it gets tricky. If I simply mentally speak it, it takes the same time as the speakasfastasican version. Which is no surprise as the systems are the same, except during 'speech thinking' your brain simply supresses the movements of your tongue and mouth. However, if I don't really try to 'say' it seems just to hover there whole. Taking no time that I can measure on my watch anyway.

Quick. Imagine a pizza.

You did didn't you. Bing - there it was. Now, if I'd asked you to describe a pizza using words, you'd have been half an hour or so, depending on how diligently you undertook the task. But its visualization, seeing it in your mind full of steamy pepperoni goodness, took absolutely very very little time at all.

That's as fast as your brain can go. Except it isn't because in this case, in the case of speech acts and conscious thinking acts, your train of thought tends to stop at each station along the way. We stopped at 'pizza junction' and stayed a while, before moving on. But in 'unconscious' processing, that train doesn't stop ever, until it reaches 'action station'. What's more, it pretty much calves off other trains along the way, sending them off down other routes to the same destination. All the points are open, all the guards are frantically waving them through with green flags. All the cows are cleared off the lines. ZZZooooommmm.

To continue. You're prolly thinking right now "Yeah okay, so the brain talks really fast, but it's still talking - so what..?"

Aha.

I want you to imagine some wires. Most of these wires are very very thin, like the ones you get in the guts of cheap chinese toys. Their insulative sheaths are even thinner. Imagine them all lying very close to eachother. Let's zoom into two. One is the hunger wire. The other is the pizza wire. The hunger wire, being a basic drive, is comparitively big, and carries quite a bit of current. The pizza wire is thin, and carries just a trickle.

Now. One day you are at home, and you're hungry. The hunger wire is firing. Someone's left a half a pizza uneaten in the oven. Pizza wire fires. You eat the pizza, pizza wire and hunger wire are firing separately, but at the same time.

Let's say you do that a lot.

Pizza wire and hunger wire spend quite a bit of time firing at the same time. The wires get hot, and where they lie very close together, their sheaths touching, one day, the sheaths melt due to the heat, and suddenly, in a flash, the two wires join at that point.

They technically become one wire. So, whenever you feel hungry, the hunger wire fires, and automatically its charge also flows through the pizza wire, now cojoined, instantly. But also the reverse happens, and when you see a pizza, the pizza wire also fires a charge through the cojoined hunger wire, and you get hungry. A bit.

But the story doesn't end here. Adjacent to the pizza wire are other wires. Citymap wires, transport wires, location wires. One day, when there is no pizza at home, you dig out the menu, find the location, and get out the car keys. You do that a lot too. More wires, firing together often, burn through their sheaths, and become cojoined.

Pic time.

You see, at this level of brain function, there is no language, only clusters of neurones firing at the same time. Hit the hunger button and the choice is already made, the action of hitting the hunger button contains all the rest in one, due to the connections involved.

What happens though, when we do engage our conscious minds to say things like ""I want to go to town and get a pizza" is different.

At the single wire level, the wire is just a conduit. All the biochemical causes of hunger siphon into this wire, and at the other end, the feeling of hunger comes out. Same with pizza, all the perceptual and conceptual properties of pizza siphon into this wire, and come out - bing - as the brain's composite map of pizza. Its spacial location, its connectivity contain the meaning built in. The wire is the thing.

But when you get a cojoining of wires - of Hunger and pizza, that nodal point in the network gives you the brain's version of a phrase. "Hunger pizza". Another pic.

Now as the picture shows simplistically, the conscious mind is like an eye above the brain. When our consciosness formulates language, about what we are doing/going to do etc. It checks the net, portions of which are firing as one, and focusses on the nodes of cojoinment, puts them in a cocktail shaker, shakes, looks at its watch for tenses, and adds grammar.

Hungerpizzapizzahutcar becomes "I'm hungry so I'm gonna get a pizza from pizzahut in my car."

Now, there are two ways to go from here.

The first path "no conscious involvment in choice": Here, the neural net firing in a certain pattern due to the initial input of hunger, or pizza, or a pizzahut advert on the telly, makes the choice automatically - the firing and the 'choice' are combined. And the conscious mind, examining the net's state gets its answer like some ancient Delphic oracle asking "What am I doing" and receiving Apollo's reply. "Oh right" the conscious mind says "I'm doing this apparently." as his body is already moving.

ie. it arrives too slow at the choice party, and sits in the corner sober, while all the neurones get off with each other.

The second path: "Conscious involvement in choice": The conscious mind, examining the neural net, finds out what the neural net has already decided based on the input so far, and excersizing an executive function either goes with it, or vetos it and re-runs the series with added inputs.

But as to which of those paths is the 'true' one... I have no idea.

New Avatar

The Inevitabilist goes to the Theatre

One sunny Tuesday afternoon the Inevitabilist was sitting at home when the telephone rang. It was Goldie. He liked her because she possessed the uncanny ability, when presented with three options, to always choose the one that was just right.

"Hey Mr. I, I'm bored stupid, y'wanna take me out to the theatre..?"
"Sure. One condition though."
"Okaay - what is it..?"
"Whichever one we go to, it's gotta have gravity..."
"You're never gonna let me live that one down are you. I said sorry about a million times already."
"Can't help it - we sat there for 14 billion years and nothing happened. My arse got so numb I forgot I had one."
"Gravitygravity I get it, no more minimalist art. Okay -
"And planets this time, gotta have planets."
- fuck, okay planets too - I'm checking the listings here. That leaves us with three."
"Fine, let's go check them out."
"What..? Now..? It's far too early, none of the plays are even scheduled to start till seven or so."
"Well, you know me, I like to know the initial conditions."
"Oof - can't you just get off the whole inevitabilist schtick for one fucking second..?"
"No."
"Jesus. You're about as spontaneous as a concrete beam you know that..?"
"It's my nature."

The two of them got out of the car and pushed open the gilt-framed doors of the first theatre. The receptionist agreed to let them tour the premises on the proviso they both signed the release forms, and called over the usher. The usher passed them each oxygen tanks and hard radiation suits. After instructing them in the basic safety protocols, he ushered them into the theatre.

Even with the masks on, it was hard to breathe. The air tasted of vinegar and the spotlights threw out such immense heat that the outer layers of their suits began to smolder. Beneath their boots the jagged terrain heaved as the magma underneath convusled to some unknown rhythm. They lasted about three minutes before they fled, noses streaming and sweat sluicing off their skins.

"Too hard" Said Goldie.
"Yeah, I'm guessing lichen at best, and even then only in the deeper crevices."
"Crick neck..?"
"Crick neck."

So they went to the next.

This time the usher passed them both aqualungs and flippers. Sunlight filtered down from the ornate ceiling, turning the water to gold. Green motes of dust-sized life hazed the tide. The water, warm nearer the top, cooled slowly, in steps almost, as they glided down to the sandy bottom of the theatre, weightless, turning fat lazy spirals in the deepening dark.

"So, whaddya think..?" Said the inevitabilist, dragging a towel through his hair.
"Too soft." Said Goldie.
"Dolphins can be fun you know - hoops and stuff."
"Hah, you're just testing me again you bastard. Can't have dolphins without an interim on land, even I know that. No land, easy life, no complex problems to solve - that place'll be just fish, fish and more fucking fish. Bor-ing..."
"You swear too much to ever be a real lady."
"And fuck you too." Goldie smiled, "C'mon - time's a wastin'."

The third theatre was vast, and they were told it had three salons, rather than just the one. The usher looked at them strangely when they asked if they had to wear any special equipment. Inside the theatre the air was cool, the spotlights were again huge, but dimmed - though they looked as if they could make things hot if need be. In the wings however there were titanic air-conditioning units, ready to pump out mini-ice-ages should events call for them. There was water, there were mountains. Trees to climb and grass to wade through. Animals in every shape and form rustled through the underbrush, whales and minnows flopped and tumbled in the waves.

"Just right." Said Goldie.
"Yeah - Diversity." Relipied the Inevitabilist. "Always a good sign. C'mon - Let's go for a drink in the bar and look at the programmes."
"k."

The bar was cool and pleasantly crowded. Goldie and the Inevitabilist took seats in a booth that had a good view of the room.

"Screwdriver please, amaretto if you goddit."
"I'll have a beer. No, just whatever comes without fruit stuck out of the top. Yeah, that'll be fine. Cold glass."


"That sea theatre reminded me of a funny story I heard yesterday. Y'wanna hear it..?" Said Goldie over the top of her cocktail glass.
"All ears."
"Did you know octopuses, -pi whatever, have elbows..?"
"Really..?"
"Yeah. Listen -

"A three-jointed human arm has only seven degrees of freedom, which are defined as the types of movements each joint can perform. Your shoulder and wrist each have three degrees of freedoms—each can tilt up and down, turn left and right, and can roll in a circular motion. Your elbow, however, only has one degree of freedom, which is tilting up and down.

Scientists consider each of an octopus' eight arms to possess a virtually infinite number of degrees of freedom, allowing them to bend and twist freely. But when it's time to eat, octopuses use their flexible muscles to form temporary, quasi-articulated joints that work similar to how human joints function.

Researchers recorded muscle activity in octopus limbs, and found that an arm generates two waves of muscle contractions that propagate toward each other. When the waves collide, they form a part-time joint.

This process occurs three times, forming a shoulder where the arm meets the body, a wrist where the suckers have grasped their food, and an "elbow" somewhere in between. The elbow typically exhibits the most movement during food retrieval.

The researchers say this is a remarkably simple and apparently optimal mechanism for adjusting the length of arm segments according to where the food item is grasped along the arm.

The similarity of structural features and control strategies between jointed vertebrate arms and flexible octopus limbs suggests that these configurations evolved separately in octopuses and vertebrates, a result scientists call an example of convergent evolution."

- so you see, they have elbows. Isn't that just like totally fucking amazing..?" Goldie said, eyes widening into great glittery pools of khôl.
The Inevitabilist waggled his head. "Not really, I keep tellling you there are optimal solutions to problems inherrent in the physical world, and that life will naturally arrive at them, from whatever direction. Eyes have been invented twice, and wings three times - they're inevitable, if there's light, if there's air. Just a matter of time."
"Yeah-yeah, so you've said. I get it I get it. But I still don't think that idea translates to human society." She let out her breath in an orangey-vodka tinted cloud, still thinking about octopi with elbows and wrists, suckered little fingers.

"You read that book I gave you..? Machiavelli..?"
"Sure, not exactly Mills and Boon."
"You remember when he wrote it..?"
"Uh - fifteen hundred and something I think."
"Yeah - 1513AD. What would you say if I said someone else wrote damn near the same book half the world away in India about 1800 years before he did..?"
"I'd say you were fucking shitting me."
"It's called the Arthashastra written by some guy to advise the Maharajas of the Maurya Empire."
"Okay, so I'm suitably amazed at the depth of your useless knowledge, but so what..?"
"What I mean is the Prince is still read and put into practice today, except by business execs rather than kings. And stuff like 'The Art of War' by some Chinese guy back in 6th century BC - still on the syllabus of military service examinations in many East Asian countries."
"And this is relevant because..."
"Because it means that some social situations demand the same answers, whenever these situations arise. These solutions are timeless - doesn't matter if it's cavemen or techno-fetishist geek droid soldiers. The underlying rules of obtaining power, keeping power, protecting power within a group of sentient beings with conflicting interests never changes. A bit like your octopus and its elbows. The same solutions arising time and time again throughout evolution, except this time throughout social history as well. The time, the people, not as important as you'd think, you know..?"
“Yeah, well those are just books, I mean maybe Machiavelli just like got that Indian guy’s book out of the library and totally ripped it off y’know – ever think of that..?”
“Okay. Not utterly impossible I suppose. Massively unlikely but still. Okay. Jesus.”
“Haha – I killed your theory.”
“Jesus.”
“Stop saying Jesus, it’s disrespectful.”
“No, I mean Jesus.”
“I said stop –
“No I mean Jesus for another example. ‘Turn the other cheek’ and all that jazz. Do you think Jesus and Von Neuman ever knew each other..?”
“Now you’re being ridiculous.”
“You ever heard of game theory..? Well, think about the old testament – ‘eye for an eye’ - vengeful God and all that..? And then Jesus saying ‘forgive those who fuck you over’ – at least once depending on your number of cheeks..?”
“Yes, yes, yes and yes, but again – so what..?”
“Well, it turns out that game theory, when run as a basis for computer models proves that the second best strategy for producing stable populations of co-operative agents is eye-for-an-eye, where an agent repays another agent’s trespasses with a trespass of its own… And the best strategy is turn-the-other-cheek, where an agent forgives another’s first trespass on the off-chance it was a mistake, and the pair resume mutual co-operation without falling into vendetta. And don’t tell me Jesus had a laptop stashed under his robe.”
"Well, he was supposed to be the son of God, that'd probably boost his IQ a bit -
"Hah - The point I'm trying to make is that there are underlying rules to any system, physical, social, doesn't matter, and that these rules were as good two thousand years ago as they are now, as good as they will be two thousand years hence."
"'Hence'..? Why are you coming over all shakespearean on me..?"
"Yeah-yeah, but you know what I'm saying right..?"
"All I know is I need another drink. Are we gonna look at these programmes or what Mr. Scintillating..?"
"Kinda, I'll do you a deal."
"Arrgh."
"You verry funnee. Anyway - You just show me the pictures of the cast and the set, and I'll tell you what's gonna happen in the play, okay..?"
"I love it when you come over all prophetic..."

Salon 1:

"Hmm. Okay. A weary and defeated people in the midst of severe economic crisis, looking for any kind of solution, any way to restore some kind of national pride, looking for scapegoats toward whom to shift the blame. I'm thinkng - huge power vaccuum. Guy with moustache and an eye for symbolistic art. Dinky uniforms. Eagles. A hearkening back to earlier, more heroic ancestors. Probably some kind of exceptional gene-stock forefather myth thang going on. "Pure race brought low by injudicious interbreeding" blurb maybe -


- huge expansionist drive. State takes over the economy. Everybody gets crappy jobs. Hard times, low pay, sacrifice. Severe work ethic requires propping up by propaganda. Deification of traits necessary to support wobbley economy embodied as inherrent in the ethnic group in power, demonization in contrast of any ethnic group conflicting with the still flakey control of the dictatorship...


...This one's gonna end in tears. I'm seeing genocide at least, world-wide dominance of the ruthlessly expansionist regime at most, if they aren't stopped early enough. Am I right..?"

"Scarily."
"Next plz."

Salon 2:

"Okay, let's see... A restless people under the rule of an imperial power, one -
"Look, no offence, this is all very entertaining and everything, but any grade-school kid with an interest in history could do what your doing right now."
"Um."
"I mean, blah blah, unrest, blah blah, civil disobedience, blah blah happy ending. What's your point..? Bad shit happens and someone always steps out of the crowd and saves the day - Hitler picks up a fucked-over post-WWI Germany and turns it into a juggernaut, India gets sucked dry by the Brits and up pops Ghandi and saves the day - and so it goes. What's that got to do with you claiming to know the future..? All this shit happened in the past, of course it's fucking obvious now... That doesn't mean it was obvious then. Things get all fucked up, and someone special comes along and unfucks them."
"Yeah, okay, you got me. Okay, question for you now."
"Shoot. I'm feeling fucking smart right now."
"Why Hitler..? Why Ghandi..? - I mean they both saved their countries, however temporarily on Hitler's part - but why wasn't Hitler like Ghandi, and why wasn't Ghandi like Hitler..?"
"Er. I dunno. Hitler wasn't Indian for a start."
"Exactly."
"I always worry when you agree with me."
"What I mean is we live under the illusion that just *anybody* can stand up out of the crowd and suddenly the world spins around their little finger. But, it's not true. Do you know how many others there were, pre-Ghandi who tried and failed to do what he did..?"
"No."
"Of course you don't cos no-one ever talks about them. "Did you hear about that guy who totally didn't succeed in freeing India..?" Never comes up in conversation. No-one makes movies about the losers, not unless they lost in an utterly heroic fashion."
"You've seen 300 Spartans once too often."
"THIS IS SPAR-[spit]-TA!!!!"
"Euww - a bit of your phlem went in my drink..! Get me another one right now."
"In a minute. Look - the Indian independence rumblings started in 1857, nearly 60 years before Ghandi ever set foot in India. The independence movement had any number of leaders, the first being the Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah II - a fucking emperor for God's sake."
"You swear too much to ever be a real gentleman."
"Screw you too. Anyway, the emperor and all his cronies totally fucked the situation up, made it worse in fact - the Brits abolished the East India company and replaced it with direct rule. And after that there were at least five or six other leaders between them and the arrival of Ghandi."
"Still lacking a point to all this."
"All these guys - heroic, charismatic, full up to the gills with convictions etc. etc. and none of them could fix India."
"Well, they weren't Ghandi. Duh."
"No. That's not it - the trouble was that none of them could fit into the Ghandi-shaped hole in the universe."
"What, you're saying that the man doesn't matter..?"
"Yeah, that's kinda what I'm saying. From my perspective the situation in India 'waited' for 60 years, until the right-shaped man fell into the right place, and if Ghandi hadn't come along in 1915, it would have gone right on waiting, for as long as the situation persisted."
"Whooo - straight over my head. Maybe I won't have that other drink."
"Okay look. You remember those toys you had when you were a kid - the ones where you have to put the right shapes in the right holes..? Course you do. Imagine the world is a really big one of those - some of the holes are pretty simple, and they get filled real quick. Some of the holes are really complicated. Thing is though, the world's in no hurry, and there are tonnes and tonnes of shapes knocking about. Millions, billions of them. All the world does is sit there and shake the box patiently, and wait for each hole to be filled. And when the world is fucked up, all it does is shake harder."
"Fuck, I must be drunk. That kinda makes sense."
"Study the situation hard enough, and you'll find the man or woman to fill it. Or wait long enough, and the situation will manufacture that person for you."
"Now I've completely lost you. People make their own decisions, they have free-will and stuff... Don't they..?"
"You've heard of something called the Stanford Prison experiment..? and Stockholme syndrome..?"
"Yeah, I remember you talking about that stuff before. Cut to the chase."
"Okay, basically, they make me think we're led into becoming who we are not so much through any personal aesthetic, but by the situations we find ourselves in, and the social expectations of the circles we move in. You with me..?"
"Let's just say I am, but after all the evolutionary crap we've been through to develop these huge and, I dunno, 'unique', brains of ours why would we suddenly chuck it all in for group-think..? What's so fatal about striking out alone..?"
"It's all about Hydra and Hercules."
"Er... Okay, I'm getting the many heads vs. one vibe here - but didn't Hercules win..?"
"Sure, but why was the Hydra so feared that they had to send Hercules after it in the first place..?"
"Erm, because the Hydra had killed a fucking huge bunch of people beforehand..?"
"Bingo. The Hydra lost one battle out of a gazillion, and Hercules had help anyway. Some chariot guy with a torch - Iolaus. Plus, he was the son of Jupiter."
"Okay, I'm starting to get your drift now. Let me do the next bit. You're trying to say that from an evolutionary POV. It's always better to be part of the Hydra, than to go it alone. That way, the only thing that can beat you is a real out of context problem - hah - gotcha now - "son of Jupiter" - a fucking huge meteorite or something - a real planet killer."
"Go on."
"Okay. So if you say Hydra represents the majority, no, hang on, represents whatever part of society that is winning all the battles, it's better to join 'em, rather than fight them - that way your kids get to live, especially if you haven't had them yet. And for humans, it's not enough to just say 'Gee okay, I'm gonna join you guys', you've gotta work out how they got to win all those battles in the first place - because it's indicative of them being, I dunno, somehow 'fitter' within the socio-political/physical enviroment or something. But that's still not enough, you've gotta do more - you've gotta become them."
"Because..."
"Goddamn you - because the situation has already dictated what strategies will succeed the best, not them in particular. Fuck. I'm convinced - I'm a believer. I mean - basically you're saying that we're like psychic chameleons or something, except we end up believing we were always the same colour we find ourselves to be, even if we only turned that colour like, five minutes ago..?"
"Yes - right on the money. But you're forgetting something. Ghandi - and people like him - the real paradigm changers - don't they seem different..? Truely unique..?"
"Er. I've a feeling you want me to say "Oh yeah" and then you'll turn out to have an ace up your sleeve..."
"Hah. You know me too well. But yeah. Y'see, Ghandi didn't just drop out of the sky and land in India with a solution he made up on the spot. He'd already been molded by his experiences in South-Africa."

"Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (also known as Mahatma Gandhi), had been a prominent leader of the anti-Apartheid movement in South Africa, and had been a vocal opponent of basic discrimination and abusive labour treatment as well as suppressive police control such as the Rowlatt Acts. During these protests, Gandhi had perfected the concept of satyagraha, which had been inspired by the philosophy of Baba Ram Singh (famous for leading the Kuka Movement in the Punjab in 1872). The end of the protests in South Africa saw oppressive legislation repealed and the release of political prisoners by General Jan Smuts, head of the South African Government of the time."

"What I mean is, he wasn't a man alone, he was just another head of a successful hydra that grew in another country. His only difference - He moved."
"Whoo."

The two sat back, and slugged back what was left of their drinks contemplatively.

"Anyway - What's the last play..?" The Inevitabilist asked.
"Ooh - this one you won't get so easy - it's set in the future, so your fucking history books won't be any help to ya."
"Whatever - just show me the pic and I'll tell you exactly what the aliens are going to look like...

Salon 3:

...Okay they'll -
Goldie held up her hand. "No, don't fucking tell me - they'll be so like us it'll be scary... Right..?"
"Someone give the girl a gold star."
"Suddenly I'm bored by the whole idea of the theatre."
"Me too, seen it all before. Hmm... We could go back to my place and I'll put on my bear suit..?"
"Thought you'd never ask."

Free-Will. Two Men & A Bear.

Funny how inspiration strikes sometimes. I was sitting on the balcony thinking about the debate with a friend, and about free-will. And that old joke about the two guys running from a bear popped into my head. You know the one - one guys says "Shit, we gotta outrun that bear." and the other guy says "Nah, I just gotta outrun you..."
And for some reason, something clicked.

We experience having free-will, and yet it seems to contradict everything else we observe. Something aloof from the usual clunk-clunk cause-effect universe.

If I were better at computers, I'd have produced a wonderful simulation to illustrate this next bit, but unfortunately, I'm not, so we'll have to do with imagination. Imagine a board, a bit like a chessboard, but bigger perhaps.

In the middle is a cafe. The cafe makes and serves only two kinds of food, blue food, and pink food. Dotted around the edges of the board are the homes of blue and pink people. They stay in their homes until they get hungry. Each get hungry at specific times, on utterly clockwork cycles, three times a day. When they get hungry, they move at a rate of one square a second, along the shortest path between their home, and the cafe. The blue people eat blue food, the pink people eat pink food. That's all they ever eat. After they've eaten, they go home, retracing their paths, to await the occasion of their next hungry cycle.

The chef in the cafe, knowing what they will eat, when they will eat it, and the exact times that each will appear in the cafe, buys stocks and prepares it accordingly, there is no lack, no waste, the food is always hot and ready as soon as the patrons sit at the tables.

It is a very simple simulation. No variables, no random factors. It runs faultlessly, automatically, day in, day out. The chef knows exactly what will happen at any given time, however far in the future that time may be. The system is utterly predictable, each node in constant lockstep with all the rest. Determined. There is no free will - no choice for the people to restrain or pre-empt their hunger, no choice of what route they will take, no choice of what they will eat. They make no choices, they also know exactly what they will be doing at any given time.

Obviously - this 'bears' no resemblance to reality. [Bears geddit..? Arf.]

Let's shake it up a little. Now the Pink people eat blue food, but only on Tuesdays, and the blue people, if it's a Thursday, eat pink. But it's too simple, the chef still is able to predict and plan to cater perfectly for his clientelle. Still a determined system.

Again, we'll add complexity. They go for haircuts on specific times every month, again, predictably and in an utterly clockwork fashion. The length of their hair affects what they can eat - short and they switch preferences until it grows past a specific length. Again, now if there are more right turns than left as they move across the board from their homes to the cafe they switch preference from the one dictated by day, or hair length. And again, if they are preceded by two people of the same colour, they switch from their previous preference.

Okay, now the situation is a lot more complex, I couldn't work it out straight off the cuff, but still the system is determined - the computer can run it perfectly. The chef buys his produce, cooks it serves it, no mess no fuss no waste.

The point I'm trying to make is that as long as the behaviour and preferences of the people living on the board are known explicitly, are predictable by the chef, the system is inarguably determined, and there is no question of choice involved on the parts of the pink and blue people.

Here's where the two guys and the bear come in. Except this time one of the guys is the conscious experience of free-will, and the other is autonomic prediciton, determinism. The bear, well hell, the bear's kind of extraneous, so he can still be a bear.

And to complicate matters, both these guys are running inside of one head. Your head. You have two guys and a bear in your head. Okay..? Also might help to view your brain as a great big prediction engine.

So, now imagine the head of a pink person. Which guy is running ahead of the other..?

Well, prediction of course. Prediction looks at his watch, remembers the time he was last hungry, works out when he will be next hungry, remembers the path he takes to the cafe, the turns it takes, the time it takes, knows what day it is, checks the length of his hair, knows his colour... And knows absolutely what he will being doing at any point in his future. Each moment, each action, flows seemlessly into the next like clockwork.

The experience of choice, the experience of free-will, is eaten by the bear.

But the brain, this marvellous prediction engine we all carry within the confines of our skulls, is only so big. Prediciton can only run so fast. If the number of states, the number of variables it has to deal with during predicitive acts goes over a certain [and pretty small really] limit, poor old prediction starts to stumble, starts to run out of breath.

And I think, that is when the experience of free-will, of choice, of being able to have chosen a different food to the one we find ourselves eating, begins to overtake. The chef drops his wok, fucks up his shopping list and starts swearing at the staff. Now it's prediction's turn to feel bear-nibble.

Did you know you are effectively blind for around forty minutes of each day..? It's called Saccadic masking. Basically, to prevent your world from looking like the jerky camcorder movie all day, your brain shuts down your optic nerve while your eye is in motion.

I have a feeling that our experience of deliberation, leading to the experience of having made a chioce, of free-will, is similar. A masking process, to cover the periods in time when our (unconscious) predictive engines get their cogs in a twist and can't get up sufficient momentum to whip us across from one action to the next.

When we walk, or climb stairs, we have no consciousness of having chosen where to put our feet. It takes a minefield, or a tango class to wake us up to what we're doing. It takes complexity, processing lag, to wake us up.

We observe, albeit with a few quantum quirks, an utterly deterministic universe. We ourselves are made of matter, our thoughts are generated and supported by physical sysytems. Our systems of meaning, of relating or associating thoughts and thought images are also deeply emeshed in the physical world, and are laid down according to experience in the physical world, in relation to physically limited parameters of chemical and electromagnetic brain function. There is no magic lurking in our synapses. No get out of jail-free cards.

I think what we experience as free-will, of choice, is simply a kind of papering over of the cracks, akin to a sort of maintained cycle of surprise - the brain locked in a state of not knowing wtf. is going to happen next.

That said however, the illusion of free-will, if indeed it is illusion is a damn convincing one.

Part of the experience of having free-will - of choosing - is the existence of multiple alternate futures we could have chosen from. In one future, I chose the fish, in another I chose the steak, in yet another I said "fuck this" and walked out. All seem to have hovered before our eyes, equally choosable at that moment of choice. Why would these ghosts of future possibles haunt me so, if there is no such thing as freedom of choice..?

Next slide please:



Obviously this model is woefully simple and doesn't indicate that all causatives are not external - there are a great number of internally-generated causatives or 'wants' - hunger for one, as exemplified in the original post. But it does emphasize the recursive/reductive processing the brain is forced into doing by the limits of its processing power.

The aforementioned wants and other drives that we experience are the condensed reductions of a myriad of other lesser causatives generated by the body - when we experience hunger we are not aware of the individual detail - PH of stomach, blood-sugar concentrations, the hormonal tides of circadian rhythms etc. etc. etc. - we simply feel 'hungry'. The brain has helpfully simplified the inputs from the body systems into a single imperative.

Getting back to the diagram, you must extrapolate the numbers of recursions our brain-states undertake when faced with difficult high-variable situations - generating multiples of alternate futures, which in turn are then re-considered - becoming virtual causatives in turn - and plowed back into the heuristics our brains use for reducing effect-clusters into behavioural imperatives - forcing action.

But I'm getting technical, which is always a bad sign. In short, we experience as part of the process of determined causal reduction - deliberation/choice - sometimes a myriad of alternate futures. But that does not mean we are as free as we think to act upon them.

I think it's about time to dredge out the classic Socratic "He who knows what is right will do right" there are of course many interpretations of this quote but to me, the implication of not being able to undertake an action deemed as 'wrong' has always been apparant. Put into cognitive terms: The brain seeks the 'right action' in response to a set of external and internal causative variables.

And once it alights upon what it defines as 'right action' undertakes that right action - this is the important bit - and no other.

The alternates we are aware of as we seem to choose are merely ghosts, never to have been realized - not ends in themselves, but simply parts of the process.

Another pillar supporting the notion of free-will and meaningful choice is external to the individual rather than hidden coiled and invisible within the crenulations of the brain. We in the world have surrounded ourselves by choice. The open buffét of real life...



...is a long way from the deterministic Café's blue food/pink food combo. Why so much choice if there is no free will..? I mean, it's one thing to fool ourselves, but a wholly other thing to fool the world.

It comes down to prediction once again. Remember the chef in the BluePink café..? How easy he had it, with his utterly predictable clientelle..? No mess, no fuss..? What would have happened if he'd launched a menu of orange food..? Well, it would have just rotted on the plates, untouched, un-ordered.

Trouble is, when it gets to the point where not only can you not predict the actions of others, but cannot even predict what you yourself will do from moment to moment with anything like total accuracy... Then making orange food doesn't seem so foolish.

Whether choice and the ability to choose is real or not, it doesn't matter. Illusion and reality aside - choice begets choice. The chef, faced with an unpredictable range of punters, is drawn to follow the path of making best guesses. Creating a broader range of food, following a bell-curve diversity of stuff he's come to observe everyone likes, quite a few people like, what's in vogue right now, what's in season right now, what's cheap and what's expensive right now. He also, like a speculative investor, will try to create a new menu option from time to time - a long-shot. I dunno - fried ice-cream or something.

Some of these long-shots will pay off, becoming subsumed within the great collective cuisine of the masses, others will be spat out, and get struck off the menu. But always the number of choices made available will grow. It will be the same in any industry - fashion, automotive etc. etc. Ford's classic "you can have any colour as long as it's black" never lasts. In attempting to cater for a range of tastes beyond his capability to predict accurately, the great chef will always err on the side of too much, rather than not enough, or be out-competed by the fancy restaurant next door.

This last point is of dubious importance. It has to do with the idea of "shaping".

In the orignal model - the board-game world of predictable blue and pink people - the chef, because of his perfect knowledge of his patrons, was able to 'shape' himself to them. By this I mean he could perform his job so well as to become invisible to the person visiting his cafe. They would come in and the right food, at the right temperature, would have been placed on the table only seconds before their hand had alighted upon the handle of the cafe door. The need for interaction between the workings of the cafe, and the punter, drop to zero if prediction is total and accurate.

Now imagine a world that could predict you absolutely, and naturally shape its machinations around you, one that you could subconsciously predict perfectly yourself. Need you be conscious at all..? Would anything actually require your attention..? Or active involvement..?  All would in effect, be one indivisible system, and would have always been one.

In short, I have a feeling that consciousness, our sense of individuality, and imperfect prediciton are very closely involved.