Friday, 15 April 2011

One click at a time

The shift from the silent majority to the grumbling majority - the power of the internet giving voice to people. A few clicks and anther protest email sent, another protest app launched - view expressed – approval of this, disapproval of that, request for action on this, requests to stop doing that. There is no longer any need to feel disconnected – you may well be ignored, you may well be despised or disregarded by those in power - but you need no longer be silent. So easy, so simple, so immediate, so consumer friendly, maybe so in tune with gen-y, the echo-boomers, coming politically of age.

The silent majority is no longer silent: there is a revolution coming, one click at a time.

Thursday, 14 April 2011

Meanwhile next door

Meanwhile, next door, the Sport of Priest Frightening
http://dee2lockyer.blogspot.com/2011/04/sport-of-priest-frightening.html
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Read the full satanic horror story - well, it would be a story if it were not true!

Tuesday, 12 April 2011

What are we?

What are we but a bag of skin and bone burning with the fire of life for a while as it passes its way through us from the beginning of time to who knows where.

Layers

We build our lives out of layer after layer of meaning, each piled chaotically one on top of the other, each weaving in and out of the rest, each binding us into place, each binding us into believing that those meanings are what we are, that those meanings are the sum and total of us - but they are not. They are only some of the possibilities of what we could be. They are only some of the paths we could walk. Even if we walked every pathway, even if we realised every possibility, they are still not what we are but only what we do, or could do, and, at the last, what we have done.

Snowflakes and rainbows

Snowflakes are important because they are, each and every one, the result of a causal process, and are, each and every one, different. You can predict exactly when snow will form, but it is impossible to predict the shape of any one snowflake. Understand this and you understand the interplay between strictly deterministic causality and chaos theory. The fine grained variability that limits what can be predicted. The fine balance between order and disorder as each flows into the other. It is the fundamental entropic flow of all existence.

And rainbow - well, they are curved because light travels in straight lines. There, in front of our eyes, the visible evidence of quantum theory - the paradox of light being both a wave and a particle. Which, of cause, results in Heisenberg's uncertainty principle - that if you know the speed of a particle, you must be uncertain about its position, or if you know the position you must be uncertain about its speed - you cannot know both about the one and the same particle.

Now throw in Godel's incompleteness theorem - not even numbers work, they are not provably consistent - and Turing's halting problem - that you cannot know if a program will stop or not in advance of running it; and the result -

now why should I do the thinking for you?

Embrace the uncertainty, love the chaos, wonder at the creativity that results.

Which way?

The realisation that there is no internal world, only the external world internalised.
The realisation that there is no external world, only the internal world externalised.
Both are truths,
Both are untruths.

Descartes's "cogito" sees the world from the inside looking out and attempts to construct the outside from within.
Zen's "one-hand" sees the world pouring in from the outside and collapsing the self.

Beware the naming

Beware the naming of "God" for in that lies much danger and the building of temples. Soon fatwas and schisms, hight priests and sacraments, and "is the wine really turned to blood or do we spill blood so that we can say that it is?". Beware the naming, for in that there is so much prescription and hatred and communities split asunder. Do not go there, but rather place your fingers on your lips and say not a word. So, what is the name of - shoos, not a word, not a word!