Box - what box?

Multiverse not needed with bottom-up design

Stephen Hawking believes infinite multiverses dispense with the need for any intelligence in the process of this Universe. The other 'verses' are conceived to explain this one as just an accident of dumb matter. Is something being missed?

The multiverse story runs kind of like the old story with infinite monkeys, typewriters, time and bananas. Eventually one of them is supposed to crank out the complete works of William Shakespeare. In chronological order perhaps? If you really believe in this then by the same logic one of those monkeys would get it from the word go.

Since the existence of our Universe is so inexplicable, we are asked to believe in an infinite number of "multiverses," just so that one of them might accidentally have come up with the specific sequence of myriad events, forces and phenomenon needed for it to hold together and develop intelligent life (meaning us).

The multiverse route is an odd road for physicists to take considering the complete lack of evidence, measurements or even hints of anything other than the known Universe. Perhaps they take this road believing the only other option is an equally undetectable supernatural character who planned and designed it all - from somewhere else (like humans try to do). But an unsupportable theory in opposition does not prove the cloud cukoo land multiverse idea, heavens no!

There is another road to take and it doesn’t need a name (pantheism or animism come close).; it's just the way things are  Wherever we look in the world we see organization taking place from the bottom up. In the rainforest nobody plots the frog distribution, rainfall patterns and river routes; they self-organize. There is no one architect to the termite mound, with its buttressed walls, perfect ventilation, 'road' network, nurseries and even fungus farms. Entire weather systems self-organize out of water moisture, wind and solar power. Each human cell has 5-10 million inhabitants, functioning and  communicating with each other and other cells - doing life. The brain reading these lines has no central controller telling a hundred billion neurons what to do. 

There is intelligence within the system. It does not need an 'outside' agent to oversee it. We inhabit a living intelligent Universe that is the sum of its parts, not a dead and accidental accumulation of matter. Call it God if you like. Quantum physicists have noticed self-organization on the subatomic level, with the famed David Bohm describing electrons as taking on the qualities of living beings. We bandy about terms like Chi, Prana and the Holy Spirit without considering the implications of such a spirit being all-pervasive.

That this idea should seem strange is stranger than the idea itself.  Though unfamiliar at first, the concept of self-organizing bottom-up intelligence not only makes more sense than the logger-headed alternatives, it makes good sense.

Step into a Universe brimming with intelligence and design, which needs no Intelligent Designer.

Sun of gOd, Discover the Self Organizing Consciousness that Underlies Everything, the book by Gregory Sams, published by Weiser Books

 

Why did the Roman Empire go Christian?

I got sucked into a fascinating blog battle going on between two varieties of Christian, around Emperor Constantine, the one who set up the infamous Council of Nicea in 325. This was where a standardized version of Christianity was hammered out, and orders made to destroy all other gospel accounts and religious tracts. It's amazing how they argue over details and differ in irrelevant interpretations. In case they are too outraged to print my comment I publish it herewith. 

All this squabbling over trivia. What difference does it really make whether Constantine was properly baptized as a Christian or not? In any event, it was not until 43 years after his death that Christianity was mandated as the official religion of the Roman Empire, when anything else became expressly forbidden.

Rather than looking at the players we should look at the play. Perhaps the underlying driver behind Christianity's rise to power was its outright support of meekness. After all, when you are running something as brutal as the Roman Empire it is quite useful to have your subjects believe that suffering will get them to heaven. The concepts of loving your enemy, turning the other cheek, and praying for those who oppress you would come in handy too. It is no wonder that rulers throughout Europe embraced the Church for centuries thereafter.

Is it any surprise that the three Abrahamic religions have experienced more religiously triggered suffering than any other faiths, fighting wars between each other and between other versions of their own? Could their embrace of suffering as spiritually positive support this ongoing insanity? Hindus and Buddhists and Shinto and ancient Sun worshipers do not and did not fight wars in the name of their religions.

Unfortunately, after the Council of Nicaea there was little left to inform us of the nature of early Christianity,  Now we also have discovered the few tattered scrolls hidden long ago at Nag Hammadi.  The rich spiritual seam that should be explored is into the nature of Christianity before the Roman Empire got is hands upon it. Perhaps there is something of great worth to be discovered therein. What we usually end up with is chapter and verse on the conflict and players with little idea of what the actuality was like.

Until anything more sensible comes along, I will continue to commune with the obvious source of the light of life, our local star. It's undeniably right there, nothing to argue about, and unquestionably the most important thing in our lives. And there is every reason to believe that our Sun is much much more than a dumb ball of hot gas, a very ungrateful attitude indeed.

 

Study finds child obesity due to overeating - who'd have thought?

Next thing they will find out that not eating makes us thin. 

Perhaps not eating might also be the cause of hunger? We need a proper study though, rather than be led by hearsay and conjecture.

The Daily Telegraph describes it as a controversial report . Apparently a debate has been raging "in the scientific communities" about whether obese children result from overeating or not exercising. Must it be one or the other - like they are not both connected and both causative factors? If you sit at a computer all day drinking coffee and smoking you will not get fat, but if you're drinking cola and eating burgers, chips and donuts then you just might. I wonder whether doing idiotic surveys contributes to some weird mental condition.

But now it has been decided - it is overeating and not under exercise to blame. 

Excuse me, I'm going to go beat my head against the nearest wall.

Peanut…peanut butter…yeah! My baby's made it big time!

 

It's nearly forty years since I stumbled into peanut butter making and my little baby is now being advertised on national TV. Whole Earth peanut butter, that's the one.

In the early days of Whole Earth Foods (when it was still Harmony Foods) my brother and I decided that peanut butter had to be one of our product lines. Soon thereafter I spotted a curious looking horizontal stone grinding mill at a used equipment seller's warehouse. It sort of called out to me, as happens. Turns out the stones were marble and it was made for hospital use, from the days when they used to make up ointments and salves in the hospital basement. And it was only £100 so I thought to give it a whirl on some peanuts and if it didn't work then not a lot lost.  

It worked, grinding brilliant peanut butter that was crunchy or smooth depending on how tight the stones were positioned together. I blended three different types of peanut originally, selected for flavour, texture and oil content. At the original Festival of Mind, Body and Spirit we put that mill on the Harmony Foods stall and sold it as fast as we could grind it. The British had never tasted good peanut butter before, the only brand being under-roasted and under-salted with a resultant taste of undercooked beans. Yuk.

We soon had five of those mills grinding away non-stop and I can assure you the next four cost somewhat more than £100 each. But we sold a lot of peanut butter and though I've not been involved with it since 1982 it is satisfying to see it finally hit the big time.

British Museum's surprise show

I'm just back from a great visit to the wonderful British Museum. It is always humbling to recognize  how civilized and sensitive people were thousands of years ago.

But the surprise "exhibit" that still has me smiling was experienced yesterday when I phoned to book a special disabled parking space. A real person answered the main phoneline after two rings and when I asked for the appropriate  department she said “I can do that, what time are you coming.” It was all over in two minutes – a beautiful exhibition of telecommunications history!

Dogshit or Catshit? – why I will never vote.

It’s an old line and as true as ever: Whoever you vote for, the government wins.

I will not be distracted by arguments over which variety of shit I prefer: Tory versus Labour or new flavour LibDems; nor wonder about UKIP and BNP. Sure the main dog and cat faeces smell worst, since they feed on our food chain waste, and perhaps less offensive odours emanate from the fringe parties. Perhaps the LibDems excrement is comparable to horseshit with the UKIP smelling of fox and the BNP of wolf.  But rest assured that if any of them came to power, their shit would soon smell the worst of all.

There is a chapter in my first book titled “Divide and Rule” and I reproduce a few paragraps from it below.

"One of the silver-linings for the state provided by the new multi-party system of government is that the rulers of the day (the In Party) can always blame many of the problems facing us, upon the last party that was in power (the Out Party).

Failing this, they assure us that the problem would be much worse than it already is if the Out Party were dealing with it. “Let us continue doing a bad job because the Out Party would do an even worse one.” After a decade or so, kings, emperors and dynasties could not continue to use this excuse.

The flip side of this silver-lining works for the Out Party because they can always point at the In Party and declare, with some justification, that most of our problems are being caused by what the In Party is doing. The conclusion we are expected to make is that because the Out Party can perceive the connection between the In Party and the problem, they will be able to fix it if we make them the In Party. The strong supporting evidence is that before the In Party took power, when possibly the Out Party was running things, the problem was not as bad as it is today. That evidence, unfortunately, is usually to hand.

You probably had to read that last paragraph closely to avoid being confused by the terms In Party and Out Party. It is hard to follow the thread for the reason that there is so little difference between the two. H.L. Mencken summed it up much better when he wrote in 1956:

Under democracy, one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule - and both commonly succeed, and are right. 

But it is a handy mechanism for the state and helps to keep us divided in our support of one team or another."

Note: It was Leo Tolstoy, Russia’s most famous author, and noted vegetarian and pacifist, who first coined this dogshit/catshit analogy when ‘put on the spot’ to choose between Tsarist killers and communist revolutionary killers.  

Curiosity saves

I recently complimented a lovely new friend of mine on her curiosity. It’s one of the things that I love about life – discovering new things as you look between the pages, outside the boxes, and at the back of the shelves. Curiosity is one of humankind’s most essential  assets and the fundamental cornerstone of our natural education.   

Christianity - a bureaucratic necessity at the time

You may know about, or have heard of  the connections that Jesus and Christmas have with solar gods and their sons who preceded Christ. Extreme Christians react with horror that solar religions have “crept into” the fabric of Christianity, denouncing SUNday as a day of worship and 25^th Dec, the traditional Sun’s birthday, as Christ’s birthday. The pagan-inclined are, or should be, horrified at how something as hardwired as solar worship has been hijacked by Christianity, stealing dates and legends of former heroes and divinities.

I  recently realized that it is was all much more straightforward and less sinister in its conception than one had imagined. To be sure, ongoing and ceaseless brutality has ensued ever since but it started with understandable bureaucratic intentions. It was a simple matter of Emperor Constantine, a Sun worshiper himself, being driven to distraction by all the different religions and priests that he had to deal with across the Roman Empire.  Can you imagine?

 

So at the infamous Council of Nicea in 325AD his agenda was to hammer out a religion that would be instituted as standard throughout the Empire. To smooth the transition, as many existing dates, legends and stories as possible were incorporated into the fabric and dogma of Christianity. And orders went out to destroy all other gospels and spiritual records extant at the time, to pre-empt future confusion and conflict.

Constantine himself only converted to Christianity on his deathbed, presumably for  bureaucratic reasons. And the new religion of the Roman Empire conveniently provided a terrific charter for the oppressive rulers who were to follow – promoting suffering in this life as a sure ticket to heaven in the next, whilst advising the oppressed to love their enemy and turn the other cheek. Yet, without Constantine, the world’s biggest religion would be little more than a page in the history books.

So isn’t it time to get back to basics? That’s where we go in Sun of gOd, which re-opens the book on a very old subject, looking at it in a modern light. Emperor Constantine: it was an understandable idea but no longer serves the function intended. It’s time to return to the real “light of our life,” the Sun above.

Who are they kidding? (most of us)

So MP's scurrilous claims total ONE million pounds. Oh shame, what a waste of our money!

Meanwhile we find that 200 THOUSAND times that amount has been printed already and are expected to rejoice that they are not extending the program.

Every "quantitative" pound printed dilutes the value of the British currency by a pound. Whatever we've saved and whatever we earn is reduced in value through the inflation that inevitably follows. The people of Britain will be £200 billion pounds poorer through the mismanagement of our economy by these self-same MP's and all we get upset about is the paltry million with which they build their moats and buy their dog biscuits.

I bet that they won't forget to inflation-index whatever new MP allowances scheme they implement.

-----My book, Uncommon Sense - the state is out of date, sheds light on the bigger picture here. Online free to read.

Whoopee - Happy times are here again!

So we're out of recession at last - marked by economic growth during the last quarter of 0.1 %. I'm sure that the Prime Minister and Chancellor are delighted with this.

For those who are mathematically challenged, I must point out that this growth means we have added a further whopping 10p to every £100 of economic activity in the comparison period. Personally, I would not have made anything out of this but, of course, I am not in the business of politics. For instance, suppose you got a raise at work from an annual salary of £20,000 to an annual salary of £20,020. Would it be the first thing you told your partner/family when getting home. "Wow everybody, look at me, I got a raise at work  - let's order extra toppings for the pizza tonight!"