Why Is the Same Different?

 
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

 

By George Templeton

Gazette Columnist 

Where is consciousness?

If you are not a liberal by age 25, you have no heart. If you are not a conservative by age 35, you have no brain.

No one chooses to believe things they think are wrong. We follow the dictates of our consciousness. But can we learn what we do not already believe in?

Reality is not simply objective, concrete, so you can stub your toe on it. It is like a musical fugue. It goes right side up and upside down. It goes forward and backward simultaneously and it ends on the same chord. Even physics is about relationships. Our eyewitness is part of them.

Jamie Diamond, the CEO of Morgan Chase investment banking explained that he was a Democrat because of his humanitarian concern and the desire for progress. He was a Republican because everything significant requires the management of money.

Jamie argues for a government department of intelligence, which would propose solutions to the problems of war, global warming, education, sustainability, and inequality. Capture the world with intelligence instead of dogma.

Money has potential energy, like “MGH” in physics. It can perform work. It is not money which is the root of all evil. It is the lack of money. It is true that what something is worth is what you can get for it. But it goes far beyond this. We value everything. There is no independent standard.

Where should we look to find meaning? In my previous article, I wrote about information versus knowledge. Now I turn to the media, to the rise of the image and the fall of the word. Humanity has not changed, but we express ourselves differently.

Technology lacks universal morality

The Imperial Wizard exclaimed, “What’s yours is ours (mine).” And to prove it he had a 100 million ton continental destroyer rocket so big that it required at least 8 million pounds of thrust just to launch it. It took a 160 wheel trailer just to haul it through the city so patriotic gullible people could worship it. And his people thought, look at how wonderful we are when they saw this idol, paraded through their streets. They thought, “God is on our side. We will destroy the evil other. Oblivious to this reality, the headline was “Can We Go to Heaven with Tattoos?”

Human nature is like electricity. It always takes the path of least resistance. We are now headed into an uncertain world where permissiveness will transform nuclear arms into an effective alternative. When will we ever learn? There is just too much readily available destructive energy and not enough sustainable energy.

Are we born with the way we think?

Our schools need to teach critical thinking. It would not be commensurate with “what was good enough for me is good enough for my children”. The drawback of ideology is that it desires to prevent educating youth about the importance of evidence. When there are no facts, everything is possible.

Samuel Butler in this 19 th century novel, The Way of All Flesh, wrote ““There are two classes of people in this world, those who sin and those who are sinned against; if a man must belong to either, he had better belong to the first than to the second.” And there are politicians who win by deceit. They have learned that the best lie is one which is outwardly true, one that makes the smallest dishonesty go the longest way.

We choose narcissistic leaders having “exemplary character” representative of “our kind”, just like us. It is” I am me, me first, and me only”. But are these values for us, you, or them?

God’s Own Party, the GOP, believes in hubris and force instead of persuasion and truth. The Democratic Party wants to make everyone identical, not balanced in opportunity, not competitive. But nature has winners and losers. Generosity is not always redemptive.

Authoritarianism distrusts reason, values conformity over free thinking, and denies human equality. We don’t bear the burden of responsibility when we don’t choose. The news warns us to not even think about it.

It is only decisions that change the future, not just the feelings leading to them. Sometimes you will be required to choose between wrong and wrong. Relax. You are going to make mistakes. There will be imperfections. But that does not mean that you should not work to improve them.

Empowering Psychology

If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing it is stupid! Is perception part of psychology? The Frenchman Merleau-Ponty wrote about it in his 1947 philosophical work. Are human nature, morality, ethics, religion, politics, and monsters from the Id, part of psychology? Are good and evil more than “thou shalt not”?

When self-interest turns to self-destruction things have gone too far. Science focuses on simple things like whether feathers fall as fast as cannon balls. It knows that it could be wrong and that it is at best incomplete. The world’s religions think they have the absolute truth. They can’t be wrong. If conscience is how God speaks to us perhaps freeing him from the constraints of rigid dogma would be helpful.

Neurology will never solve the problem of social evil. Einstein knew that if you were not willing to change, nothing different would happen.  Shouldn’t we have a modicum of common sense? We have to go to a higher level in the mind’s hierarchy. Politics and religion have become identical. That leaves psychology as our last hope.

Marching backwards into the future

We live in the moment whether we want to or not. Our emotions arise out of our experiences, habits, and engagements in the world. We have not learned to control our own passions. We need not surrender to the world’s hostility. That is what makes psychology stronger than politics and religion.

Mr. Maga’s stubborn refusal

For Mr. Maga, it was not knowledge of facts which could be disproven and were independently verifiable. He had a personal knowledge of things that were true for him as an individual.

Mr. Maga checked his bank account on his computer. He had been ripped off before by internet thieves. He knew how much money he had spent on rent, food, and gas. He was a “winner”. In his mind, there were informal equations describing his financial well-being. And this time, at the end of the month, he had become a “loser”. That was impossible in his opinion.

The bank records deposits, withdraws, and rebalances each time. But Mr. Maga’s balance, at the end of the month did not agree. The bank had been right for at least 80 years, but now according to his arithmetic they were wrong. The whole thing was rigged and had to be done over again.

Mathematically it does not matter whether one adds it up as they go along or only at the end. The result is the same. This is what we call “linearity “. By linear superposition deposits and withdrawals can be taken separately or combined at the end. The bank was not plotting against Mr. Maga.

When you walk too close to the edge of a cliff and fall that is non-linear. The response is described by curvature. In math, it could be quadratic or cubic.

As for the straight line, our leaders do not understand what one is. How short can a line be and how far can one extend? How thick does a line have to be to exist? How many lines can you draw on a surface? Is the earth flat and how about our universe? All measurements are uncertain. They have a tolerance and often a rubber ruler.

When you look at the equation of a straight line, it has a couple of important parts. One concerns where you are at, the other where you are going. And this seems to mislead Mr. Maga. He did not get to be the “winner” and that was all that mattered. But linearity has other facets our leaders don’t understand. There is the question of how to draw the best straight line. A deviation of the data

from the line counts the same whether it is above the line (+) or below it (-), so we have to square the delta to simplify things. But this is a mathematical convenience, so our understanding requires that we back this out. The consequence is that ten times the data is only three times as good. Certainty is hard to come by.

Mr. Maga’s bank statement was not a random sample of deposits and withdraws. There was a reason behind the perturbations. His purchase of a big screen television last week did not directly influence how much he spent on groceries this week.

Nothing is “linked” as the news insists on saying. No test is perfect, as our previous president claimed.

There are things which seem to be random but are not because they have a hidden reason. Consider the digits of the constant pi. They look random and disordered but they are not. There are pockets of order in random collections, in things that are purely by accident.

Humanity is not random. We cannot behave randomly even when we intend to. There is a deep uncertainty in all things mankind.

The act of performing a correlation results in a number which measures the chance that something might actually have a cause. We don’t know what it is. We search for why in patterns.

There is a reason why a JPEG photo looks as good as a bit mapped one though it requires much less memory to store it. The sky is blue, so a pixel from the sky has a high probability of being blue like its adjacent one. When we erase the information about the color of that bit, we still know the color of the sky. We cannot reduce truly random data without loss of information. These are the reasons why Mr. Maga’s bank conspiracy is imaginary. This is the mystery of human consciousness and the reason why intuition is so important.

There are some things in reality that are simple. We say they are “lumped”. But some things are dispersed. A distributed parameter occurs when farm workers line up to speed the movement of a pile of bags. Each person hands a bag to the next adjacent one until the pile has finally been relocated.

In school, this starts with learning how to solve problems with simultaneous equations. From there it goes to matrix math. And from that, it goes to Thevenin’s theorem stating that you can add your subject of interest at the end instead of “having too many cooks making the broth”.

A chain is only as good as its weakest link. Focus on that.