SatNav for the soul®

we’re intelligent.  And being intelligent we look for patterns in things which, once spotted, allow us to predict certain outcomes. It’s how we operate as human beings and so to imagine a different intelligence is very difficult - how does a finite mind conceive of infinity?

Let’s take the guinea worm as an example (see the previous post).

As it emerges it causes a burning blister at the exit site. This is so painful it causes the sufferer to find relief in the coolest place she can find; water. As the worm detects water it releases its eggs to continue the life cycle.

On the one hand, this could be seen as intelligent design; the ‘clever’ worm forces the sufferer to look for the very thing it needs to continue its life cycle. But on the other hand, this outcome could be the result of pure chance.

Imagine evolution plays dice; it throws a billion dice using trillions of throws. Eventually a combination is going to arise that ‘works’. Certain dice are withdrawn because they don’t work with this process and the remaining dice are continually thrown with certain results reinforcing the existing process. Over time the ‘intelligent’ process gets refined by pure chance.

For example, a chance combination could have been that the guinea worm emerged from the body without producing a burning sensation. The need for relief didn’t occur so the chances of the life cycle continuing were diminished if water was needed for the complete process. So that particular set of chance combinations ultimately failed.

And just how ‘clever’ is the worm? The chances of death for the host are high, not really what you want if you are a parasite. A head louse is still a successful parasite today in the western world because it is a nuisance rather than a killer, but all that matters in evolutionary terms is the end result - does the complete process survive or not for the parasite?

So with an infinite number of chance throws of the evolutionary dice, our finite minds - which are trained to see patterns - sees incredible ‘intelligence’ in the world. We see the end result and try to reverse engineer to a creative intelligence starting point. This is a lot easier than trying to imagine something beyond our own particular template (an infinite number of chance combinations) but rational thinking tells you the possibility is there.

This article raised an interesting philosophical dilemma for me. Which species can we willingly exterminate?

In relation to the guinea worm, most people would have no trouble at all in condemning it to extinction - it’s the stuff of nightmares, but what about other parasites?

Malaria kills approximately one million children every year, surely it would be good and right to eradicate this disease. But what do you eradicate? If the only way to get rid of the malarial parasite is to get rid of the mosquito carrying it then is that still okay?

They obviously thought it was in the near past when they tried to get rid of the disease with DTD. However, the mosquito is as much a victim of the parasite as we are, it’s an innocent bystander caught in the crossfire. But the mosquito is still a parasite which sucks our blood so does that make it fair game?

To complicate matters, the number of species that depend on mosquitoes for their existence must be huge. Do we take into account the effect that destroying their food source has or is the inadvertent extinction of co-dependent species acceptable collateral damage?

If we so readily destroy parasites, why stop there? Surely if we are looking at this problem from a human perspective then we can think of many creatures that make life hazardous and unpleasant for humans beings. Do we get rid of them as well? What about poisonous snakes, spiders, jellyfish, ants? What about plants?

Are we not all, in some way, parasites? Do we not all have to live off other species?

It has been suggested that parasites are a way of keeping the balance in nature; if one species becomes too dominant then parasites will take advantage of that imbalance through host specific infestations. So what about the plague of humans that is devouring the planet? Are AIDS and bird flu the new parasites to keep our numbers in check?

Is it okay to view the world from an anthropomorphic perspective? Is it just about us or is it about life in total?

Do we have the moral right to decide what lives and what dies? It is so easy to rationalise the answer in respect of the guinea worm but it is equally easy to go on and extrapolate the answer into genocide.

Let’s think about this. How can less be more?

I used to go skiing. I loved the huge mountains gleaming in the brilliant sunshine and the sense of freedom as I hurtled down them. So then I thought, ‘if I took my Walkman I could listen to my favourite music at the same time as I skied down the mountain - the experience would be twice as good!’

But of course it wasn’t. It was half as good. I couldn’t concentrate on the music because I had to concentrate on the skiing and visa versa.

The first time I went into the recording studio with a band I was reminded of this paradox. To make a piece of music sound more powerful, we thought, you simply keep adding more sound.

But if you didn’t know what you were doing, adding more sound didn’t make the music sound more powerful, it made it muddier. That’s because frequencies interfere with each other and if you’re not familiar with how frequencies operate and some of the illusions that they can create, you are left disappointed and confused with your attempts to make something ‘good’.

Then I tried my hand at creative writing. The more words the better, right?

Wrong.

Isn’t life like that. You imagine by adding more and more things to your life you are going to make it ‘good’. On a purely materialistic level (which, let’s face it, most of the world operates on) the concept of adding to your material wealth is doomed from the outset but we keep doing it. We never seem to learn this fundamental truth. More material goods simply devalues the sum total of the goods in your possession.

If you don’t have an ultimate purpose for these material goods, what value are they? An example is an art gallery; more paintings can lead to a greater appreciation of art and the human condition. The art raises consciousness. Material goods for their own sake does nothing for you except to distract you for a while before you need to relieve the boredom with yet more stuff.

How many times are we told this and how many times do we fail to grasp the profundity of this wisdom?

It’s astonishing how some companies treat their customers and continue to survive. They must achieve a critical mass which inures them from customer attrition for a certain amount of time.

I have another small but important website which suddenly went down this morning. I immediately rang the service provider and spoke to their customer services. When he checked my account he said that their invoice for this year had been paid recently, however, that amount had been used to pay off last years invoice which had been outstanding for a year.

It took me a while to take this in as it was so ludicrous. I got out my bank statement and told him that his company had taken money from me for last years invoice. He then proceeded to tell me to start sending copies of my bank statement to them to prove that this had happened along with a covering letter.

After this other shock I started to get my senses back so I asked the customer services advisor how many reminders they send out before they take the drastic step of suspending someone’s website. He did not have an answer for this (I had received none by the way for this supposed outstanding amount). I then asked him if that was his companies policy - to send out one invoice, wait one year without any reminding notices then suspend the site as a reminder. He did not have an answer.

I was then made to pay by credit card the ‘outstanding’ amount just so I could get my site back on line as soon as possible. He then told me which hoops I would have to jump through to get a refund.

So, for their obvious error, they want me to do their work for them and overpay them for the privilege as well.
Needless to say, as soon as I get the refund I will be saying good-bye to these cowboys.

As a footnote, my initial research in moving this site has revealed I am paying way over the odds anyway with these people, so at least there is some saving to be made from this outrage.

I’ve been banging on about the role of the editor for years now. Initially it was just an intellectual exercise for myself to discover how it worked and who was really pulling the levers. My discoveries made me more and more suspicious of mainstream media.

But now, a story which reveals the true extent of the abuse of this power and the terrible consequences of it’s duplicity.

You probably won’t have even heard much of this story because the media don’t want you to.

Read it, get angry and question everything that comes out of the media - always ask, “In who’s interest is this?”

On a ‘how do they make that’ television programme an item about the manufacture of golf balls was shown. Inevitably they came to the dimples on the ball and it was explained that these dimples make the ball fly twice as far as smooth balls that do not have them.

My wife then said something which demonstrated the creative process perfectly.

“Why don’t cars have dimples then?” she asked.

She had taken one idea and applied it to another idea in an unrelated area (the car). She had done that by observing a pattern and filling in the blanks. ‘Filling in the blanks’ are the new ideas, the new connections. This is how creativity works.

To answer her question, the dimples do not reduce drag, they affect the laminar flow of air which keeps the ball aloft for longer. As cars do not fly, this phenomenon is not applicable. And aircraft don’t use it either because the dimples would significantly weaken the structure of the wing.

But hey, nice idea.

There is some debate about what happened to the Neanderthals. One suggestion is that they interbred with Homo Sapiens. Let’s look at the circumstantial evidence.

Apart from Africa, where the large mammals had time to adapt to the ingenuity of modern man, every other place on the planet suffered a loss of their large mammals within centuries of humans appearing on the scene. A Neanderthal could be classed as a large mammal.

Is it too uncomfortable to imagine that our ancestors killed and ate the Neanderthals into extinction?

As Dave Pollard keeps pointing out, we have now painted ourselves into a corner regarding the way we live. There are simply too many people on the planet to abandon the globalisation model that has allowed this house of cards to come into being for any viable alternative model (whatever that might be). As a result we feel we are trapped in our roles as robot workers for the system.

This life that we do know would be tolerable if it made more sense. But my experience is that most people have a sense of cognitive dissonance about their lives. We intuitively divine that this is not how we were meant to live. So what is missing?

It is a bold person that attempts to live another life. Most of us do not possess the knowledge or the passion to try and live in a commune, or on very little or in a different, simpler, part of the world. So how can we ever experience another life, if only to compare it with the one we have?

Reflecting on this, I realised that we have all, in fact, lived another life and it is from this life that we know we have been short changed by society.

We were once children.

As a child, I grew up on a street that had dozens of other children living on it and we played happily together. We were all poor (I realise now) in comparison with most of the United Kingdom (but rich, I also realise now, as compared with Third world countries). As a child I had no concept of poor. I was a stranger to hunger, I had shelter and education and a community. We lived on the edge of nature; moors, woods, streams, abandoned quarries, which were all explored fully. I didn’t know what prejudice was, I didn’t comprehend status nor privilege but I knew what it meant to belong to a community.

It was only when my knowledge and understanding of the world grew and I became aware of these other concepts that the prescribed poisons were introduced into my education and carefully massaged into my consciousness.

This probably explains the cognitive dissonance; we do remember a happier time, a more rational time. It also explains the appeal of gang culture; at least you belong to something bigger than yourself, somewhere where you are accepted when the rest of society rejects you.

What we need now is a new gang culture - gangs of intellectuals, gangs of artists, gangs of bloggers who roam the landfills of humanity challenging and transforming the bewildered scavengers they find into the noble producers they once were and helping them reclaim the joy they only dimly remember.

When we visit a doctor or a lawyer we like to think that this person has been trained, measured and assessed by their peers before they are allowed to sell their skills on the open market. If you needed brain surgery, you would be very unhappy to use someone who had read a few books and who was confident that they could ‘have a go’. After all, your life is at stake.

But when it comes to being leader of the most powerful country in the world, you don’t need any qualifications whatsoever (as far as I can tell) apart from one - wealth. And yet, the entire world is entrusting their lives with this person. What sort of system is that?

What a fabulous public service Channel 4 has provided with its Ofcom result.

We now know how little regulation there is in television regarding the veracity of any programme that is not considered a news item. That means any lobby group, fundamentalist, white supremacist or capitalist can sponsor a programme about any scientific idea, make stuff up about it and get it shown on television with impunity.

In the past, anything that was shown on television was accepted as fact because someone had gone to a lot of time, trouble and expense to make a programme. As a result most people got their view of the world from television and believed it was a true one.

We now know different; it’s all made up half truths, statistical lies, misinformation and misrepresentation. So if Channel 4 are doing it, who else is and why? What are they protecting? Ultimately, this means we can’t believe anything that we see or hear on television. This can only be a good thing because it is true (I once saw something on television about it [Americans beware; irony!]) and we need to know important stuff like this.

So thank you again Channel 4 for alerting us to this truth.

Incidentally, you would be amazed how even the ‘news’, which is supposed to be protected, can be doctored within the parameters of the law to suit a propagandists point of view.