This is the Occupy meeting held at the First Presbyterian Church’s, small chapel last week. As you can see most of the people were relatively old to be involved in a radical movement, but they are definitely concerned citizens. I don’t think these people can have any significant impact on American politics or the economy via this particular movement as I discussed in my blog post The Occupy Movement verses the real American elite, but they can have a real impact by giving the equal amount of time and effort to standard political causes and working through the usual channels.

This was part of The Occupy Wall Street movement in Bend, Oregon last October when standing in front of the Bank of America. It was as well organized and polite as a church picnic. The July 4th in Bend, Oregon, with Pets on Parade was another demonstration of polite but sincere public spirit.

Real political effect will be had by putting people into positions of power.

Elephants having a conversation – Photo flickr wwarby 

The usual statement of foolish blindness to an obvious problem is, “No one is noticing the elephant in the room.” The watchdogs of the world are failing us because they are refusing to respond to or even acknowledge the numerous elephants wandering around the world today and even conspiring with each other in a synergistic way . The biggest but rarely discussed publicly problems are the ongoing population explosion, the 30,000 unexploded H-bombs and the probable fact that we will run out of one time usage minerals within the lifetimes of young people.

We assume that the free press is  watching over our various public events and our public providers and expose excesses wherever they are found. One of the elephants in our room is that the watchdogs are in cahoots with with the bulldogs they are supposedly restraining. Tonight while watching the conclusion of Bill Moyers‘ PBS, former press secretary for President Johnson, interview with John S. Reed, the former chairman of Citibank and former chairman of the New York Stock Exchange and currently of MIT don, it became evident the watchdogs are well fed and in bed with the bulldogs and both are sleeping soundly. The disproportion of Wall Street lobbyists on Capitol Hill was mentioned. These two appeared to agree that there were approximately 25 times as many Wall Street lobbyists as there were their opposition – whoever that might be. Neither Bill or John contested this figure nor expressed even more than mild interest in that tremendous imbalance of political and monetary force being placed on our Congressmen.

Both of these men have been powerful insiders for half a century and are well known “critics” of the media and of the excesses of Wall Street. If these incredibly well connected and powerful men can not exert enough influence on our political world to bring about needed changes, then it would seem that the Occupy Movement will have no power or influence whatsoever.  Occupy isn’t connected with the real power brokers, it has no money, and what little contact it has with the media has a reverse effect. The only time the Occupy Movement gets even minimal media coverage is when someone does something illegal and violent. The majority of people watching the media will see Occupy only in a negative way as destructive malcontents. The more powerful the Occupy Movement becomes, the more threatened the media and their controllers will feel and the more they and their media will portray Occupy as unwashed rabble-rousers. The Occupy message is very diffuse to begin with and there is practically no media coverage of what these people want, so the only coverage is the ugly part. Until Occupy has an articulate spokesperson with clear demands they can be totally ignored. It is in fact counterproductive to their own ends because it distracts these people from exerting their energy influencing the coming elections.

I began to write this article to illustrate the numerous shortcomings of  the media and the lack of effective controls it pretends to be exerting and enforcing on the public institutions and the government. But, as this idea developed it becomes obvious that the supposed watchdogs are themselves ultimate insiders. This is another example of the watchdogs watching their own best buddies, just like my previous article The Occupy Movement verses the real American elite, on how the Supreme Court, which is supposedly set up to offer checks and balances to the Congress and Executive, is in fact selected from the very same very tiny pool of personal friends who occupy those positions of power. Now it becomes obvious that the same insider watchdog relationship goes on with the Wall Street insiders and the mass media insiders. That is a very bad thing for America because it means the controls on these powerful people are very weak and that leads to ongoing corruption and excesses.

The best way to affect America is political action from within the structure.

Michaelangelo – Thoughtful cherubs in the Sistine Chapel 1920×1200

Religion at its root is based on a claim of special access to supernatural processes. These supernatural things which the prophets of any given religious belief system claim, are what give the religion a basis which can not be challenged by rational thought or experiment. That claim to special wisdom, which cannot be challenged, permits the believers to be led by their leaders to perform actions which are normally considered immoral. Such things as taking another person’s property and even their life is stated to be a good thing to do because the spiritual leader said it was a good thing. They can make clearly illegitimate claims like - GOD has given us this land - which the other people have been occupying from time immemorial, and therefore they can kill those occupiers and take their property for our own. Only a religious system can make such viscous claims with impunity. A group with a strictly secular system of belief would be forced to make rationalizations before they could take another people’s land, and these arguments would always be weak and subject to quibbling and logical challenges. The religious people can generate more conviction and cohesion within their group with their supernatural claims and thus they will typically triumph over those with weak conviction and little cohesion. Religion gives people the power to kill other people while maintaining a clear conscious, because they are doing god’s work and that is a good thing. They know they are right and good because their authorities told them they were right. They may be wrong in any logical sense but they are powerful.

Supernatural authority must be paid in loyalty and in cash. If a person is to live within a society they must abide by the laws and conventions of that society. If they disobey the laws they are punished by the powers of the state, and if they disobey the conventions of the land they are avoided by the other people of the land and are forced to live a substandard existence. Loyalty is demonstrated by voluntarily participating in the activities of the group and obedience to the group is shown by performing necessary acts to defend the groups cohesion. A secular group is reasonable in its demands and can defend the needed actions of its people with reasonable arguments, but these are always contingent on events, and the group is weak. A religious group isn’t saddled with the need to be reasonable because its members can claim to be following the directives of their supernatural entity, and it cannot be challenged, because it is accepted as being infinitely correct. In a struggle for existence the group with the most cohesion tends to win, and thus we still have religions even though everyone knows they are based on a fabricated supernatural claims. The whole religious thing is riddled with accepted lies, but they are beautiful lies which appeal to people’s emotions and their existential needs and so they persist. When a serious problem comes along these hope filled thoughts will be so ingrained that they are easy to use to justify what ever behavior is needed by the group.

I was discussing these  things with my friend, Mike Schmitz, and when I asked him about the monetary value of religions and why people are willing to pay money to participate in them. He said, Religion provides a service by stroking people’s delusions. It’s a nice bon mot, and clarifies in a tight little statement why people participate and even pay good money to be a member, even though there are inevitably parts of the religion which even they believe are absurd. An easy example of stroking a delusion – people don’t want to die – so an authority figure telling them they will live forever in heaven if they are good and believe the churches teachings, gives them hope. All they need to do is believe in an eternal-soul-spirit inside of them and the rest becomes easy. Of course there isn’t the slightest shadow of evidence to prove any part of that claim and so there is the need for a prophet, out of the picture of course, to have had some sort of conversation with the supernatural entity. Then a sincere sounding person to convey the message to this fearful person and the hoped for life after death, or other absurdity is accepted. Religion has the ability to generate hope for absolute and permanent personal meaning and promise a better time to come. Those types of hopes keep the group together as it permits them to defend the group against all comers, and endure and reproduce.

Go the typical cross-eye experiments at Probaway.wordpress.com for more experiments and help on how to cross your eyes to get the weird brain effects. In this experiment begin the experiment by sitting well back from the computer screen, say two arm lengths, and cross your eyes so the two black dots fuse into one image. It helps to rotate your head slightly around your nose to screen axis, which will make the two dots seem to dance up and down relative to one another. That helps to make them fuse, but once they do fuse hold your head still for ten to thirty seconds and watch your brain try and make sense of the conflicting images. There will be a dancing of colors across the whole field of the flag.

After a minute of that strange fun move your head directly toward the screen until you are as close as your eyes will let you get without losing your fused dot. That will be about one foot away. After you practice that for a few times you can start moving slowly back and forth from you distant position to your close one without losing your fuse. Once you can do that successfully, remember rocking you head slightly will help you maintain your fuse, you can proceed to the new experiment.

Go out to your distant position and stay fused on the dot for a while, thirty seconds or perhaps a minute will do. The purpose of this is to color fatigue your eyes to the colors reaching each eye independently. After that fatiguing time move toward your screen about half way. A color fatigued image will appear around the dot, but that image will be smaller than the new flag image in your eyes retnia, and so it will behave differently from the portion of the flag that is still outside of the color fatigued area.

I think this proves that the dancing of the colors is taking place within the visual centers of the brain and not in the eyes themselves. The color fatigue is in the eyes, but the color dancing is in the brain.

Enjoy yourself and tell me what you see.

Each of these input flows could be from variable buckets similar to the one described but at these previous input buckets there would be external input events which determine what these first level buckets are processing. The secondary buckets described at the top would only receive inputs from the buckets which had received external stimuli, but they would receive it in a discrete digital form from the input buckets. If there were only one level of input buckets, each bucket feeding a single second level bucket, it would change an analog gradual input into a discrete digital output. That wouldn’t be very useful because there are easier ways to do that by simply measuring the first level’s output. However, if the second level bucket was receiving input not only from the first level bucket but also from third level buckets, which themselves also got input from fourth level buckets, then this second level bucket’s tripping behavior would be affected some even by the fourth level.

What happens when there is a wide sheet of primary input buckets, overlaying a sheet of secondary buckets, and that overlaying a third sheet and that a fourth, a fifth and a sixth, is that the last sheet is able to make integrated decisions based on comparisons from the input from the entire sheet of first level buckets. Each sheet can make simple discriminations about what is going on in the sheets above it because it gets support in its tripping behavior from the sheets below it. After a few cycles of the information about the first level bucket’s input, the flowing to the bottom sixth layer bucket and back up would stabilize and the sixth layer could make statements about what the entire first layer was perceiving.

With traditional digital computers the energy entering a transistor is limited to within specific limits to reliably get the desired switching effect, but within this new leaky-bucket type switch the trip point might be precise but the inflow rate versus the outflow rate is what determines when the switching potential is reached and the tripping effect occurs, and that switching is controlled by several different inputs from the different levels.

This type of layered sheets of leaky buckets linked together would permit a kind of computing which is more similar to the way a brain works and would therefore be able to get some kinds of results more quickly than either a digital computer or a brain. It would be quicker than a digital computer because its decision trees are much shorter and it would be quicker than a brain because these would be strictly electronic effects rather than vastly slower chemically mediated effects.

Thoughts are always associated with some physical substrate, which in the past were limited to electro-chemical reactions within a nervous system. Without the physical substrate there were no thoughts. With the creation of writing thoughts could be symbolically stored but it still required a physical substrate, usually called a mind within a brain, to process them and to become conscious of them. Now with computers reaching higher capacities they are capable of associating many things together that were previously thought of as requiring a human brain. It is all quite mechanistic but then at the root of human thought it is also quite mechanistic. The digital-bit computers will soon be, perhaps some already are, working by something closer to analog probabilities that have Gaussian like associations, or possibly have variable charge levels that must be surpassed in a period of time before they react. A leaky bucket decision process and not just a yes or no that digital computers use to compute. That seems to be how brains work. Biological brains are quite slow in detail but because of myriads of stored memory modules they process some complex things en masse very quickly. Once the proper arrangement of computer chip processors are created they may be able to do mental functions at near the speed of light.

When the emptiness of the void is at last reached and understood and the capability of generating things out of the void itself becomes possible we will certainly enter a new world for us living beings. The void brought us into being but it is impossible to know what this presently unknowable thing is or the limits of what it is capable of. For non-theists the void may be the ultimate supernatural entity and it is the thing to which they must turn for ultimate answers and help. This is possibly the supernatural thing which is testable and provable as opposed to the various god concepts which so far have failed the various tests.

The void is the source of everything including now and the future.

Women choose their mates only in part based on physical beauty but they choose their mates, hopefully to be their lifelong husbands, based on a large variety of other qualities too. Once the early human females developed the ability for rudimentary speech they began analyzing potential mates based on their combined verbal analysis with other women of the entire package of qualities possessed by the male potential mates. This selection process was particularly sensitive to the moral qualities of the men. The women would be very desirous of being protected by their potential husband, but also they would be very observant of how well he treated women. She would want him to keep unwanted men away but not at the price of being abused herself. Thus with a hundred thousand years of breeding with this as an important part of the selection criteria for a husband these moral qualities would be bred into the the human genome and human behavior, and we would see men of all the cultures of the world treating women with locally defined courtesy.

There are many facets which make up morality and there must be many genetically heritable genes underlying morality, but because of these genes people are now moral because it is now part of their genetic inheritance to be moral. We have bred into us the capacity to develop a refined and sophisticated morality just like we have bred into us the ability to learn and speak languages. These specific moral qualities are not fixed into the genes like the speaking of the English language isn’t fixed in the genes, but the ability to easily learn these things is there. We have at birth the ability to easily learn any of the thousands of languages spoken by humans, but we also have at birth the ability to easily learn any of the moral codes of the various groups of humanity. We are latent moral people from the beginning,  but we are also self-serving animals from the beginning. There is always a struggle going on within our behavior of how to balance the multitude of conflicting impulses. The basic animal needs for survival are always there to protect the life of the animal, but these necessities are overladen and often controlled by the human need to live within the strictures of human society and the genetically directed developments of a human moral code.

These moral genes were bred into us by our ancestral women choosing moral men just like they selected for men with all the other qualities that make humans what we have become as a species. Our innate moral propensity is as deeply bred into humans as is our propensity to learn a language. Of course we can do many things with our moral ability just as we can do many things with our languages. We don’t need much human interaction to learn basic morality, just like we don’t need much human interaction to learn to talk. Some people become wonderfully skillful with language and some people develop their moral sensitivities to a high degree too. Having a fine moral sense isn’t the same as taking graduate classes in ethics but it is an ability to see and do the best thing for our interbreeding group of people. To carry that idea to its conclusion would be to define morality as doing the right thing as discussed at some length by a group of gossiping women and marrying themselves and training their daughters to choose those men who possessed those moral qualities to the highest degree.

Human morality is based on carefully refined gossip entering our genetic code.

The current Occupy Movement is whimpering about the 1% having 50% of the money but they never even mention that the real power is controlled by a super select group. This means the government and anyone who wants to challenge any of its behavior must seek remedy from the exact set of unelected people who run the Supreme Court. Furthermore those Justices are chosen by the very people whom they are by constitutional law supposed to limit. This is an extremely inbred group of people supposedly monitoring and regulating their twin brothers.

Stated in generalized numbers this means 3,000,000 rich people make up the so called 1% who have the money. But the Harvard Constitutional Law graduates is a tiny number in comparison. I haven’t been able to get an exact number but 1,000 is a ball park figure and it may be fewer. It’s not 3,000,000 in control of the 300,000,000 people’s money that should worry us, but the 1,000 people slated to be in ultimate control of this same 300,000,000 people’s political power, and 7,000,000,000 world people, while still in school. The watchdogs and the bulldogs both come from The Kennel. It’s a very small kennel compared to the vast numbers of people they will rule. The watchdogs become even more ingrown because it is one of their own kennel mates, the presidential bulldog, who chooses the new Supreme Court watchdogs when an old one departs.

The Harvard Law School and especially the Constitutional Law branch is where the real political power bias resides and it’s 3,000 times more concentrated than the 1% monetary power that garners so much media attention. This excess concentration of political power problem should be addressed by removing people from public office who are part of that overly select group of power elite, and by having the Supreme Court Justices voted into office by the entire Congress rather than chosen by the sitting president. We need a more broadly experienced group of people running our government and the world.

That divestment of The Kennel’s power is a concrete issue in which the Occupy Movement might get some traction.

Of the 9 sitting supreme court justices 5 are from Harvard Law School
John Roberts
Stephen Breyer
Elena Kagan
Anthony Kennedy
Antonin Scalia

For a much longer list of this power elite power group see:

Harvard Law School alumni.

Even this long list is only a tip top of the power elite. Of course power soon converts to money and vice versa. The Occupy Movement’s foundation principles of absolute egalitarianism will easily be subverted and controlled by this super powerful elite. It has vast money, vast power and the absolute rights to control both of those entities to their very core. The Occupy moment is totally powerless as it exists. It has no power, it has no money, it has no media and perhaps worst of all it has no spectacular idea.

Nothing can stop an idea whose time has come but the current American idea is Freedom and it is controlled by the American elite. The Occupy Movement doesn’t even have a powerful idea.

Gods are volitional beings beyond our normal daily experience. They seem to be in control of things which we cannot control. At least these unseen beings seem to be in control because we don’t perceive any beings that are in control. This presupposes there must be an intelligence of some type, at least some sort of intelligent volitional control behind things which we don’t understand, or else why would thing happen, why would apples choose to fall from trees, why wouldn’t they just float away, or explode – is there a directing being?

Ever since Newton we can understand with considerable precision why many things like gravity behave as they do. As the accumulated knowledge of testable science progresses more things come to be understood. What has been found in all of these cases is that there isn’t any volitional control, only the interaction of forces, each of which has an understandable and deterministic quality about them. It is only when these forces become too complex to follow that there seems to be some unknowable volitional quality making things happen. However, this feeling that there is intelligence and volition about these previously non-understood events has always been shown to be a projection of our own human need to have absolute answers – even if the answers are obviously made up just-so stories.

I was watching snowflakes fall after writing those paragraphs and occasionally when the air was calm they would fall vertically at their terminal velocity. But even in the calms between the turbulent winds there was a considerable amount of variability with each flake’s fall over a short period of time. The variations were caused by the irregular shapes of the flakes, as their tumbling would create highly variable drag forces on the edges of the snowflakes. Thus an individual flake when flat would fall slower but soon a tiny force would tip the flake and its downward friction-profile would become much smaller and the flake would appear to suddenly speed up, then something would change its drag-profile again and it would suddenly dart briefly in some other direction. It was all too complex to follow very well but if one could see each of the forces acting on the flake in very high resolution and in very slow motion its dance could probably be understood and even predicted for very brief periods of time. But these things in real time would be far too rapid for a human to predict.

Then of course there were gusts of wind caused by the general wind interacting with the swaying trees and creating invisible eddies of air which also affected the snowflakes and made their dance even more random seeming or controlled by some invisible god intentionally playing with these flakes. These invisible gusts made visible by the movements of the flakes themselves appeared to be random, but then of course if a super computer could follow each atom of the air in the gust all of the behavior would be seen to be mechanistic. But even if all the major and potentially measurable factors were known to high precision, the predictions for a given snowflake would only be for a few seconds of specific behavior.

The exact actions of a snowflake are mechanistic but they can only be predicted a short way into the future. Gross actions are different and they can be predicted, but in a different way. Say you chose an exact square foot of horizontal area 100 feet above the ground and were able to note snowflakes going through that exact place and then plot the time and location where each of those flakes landed on the surface below. After a large number of flakes had been observed landing they would form a circular target pattern in a smooth Gaussian-like distribution and you could say with some accuracy where a new flake falling through the hole would land, although you couldn’t be certain exactly where this particular flake would land. It would probably land near the center of the distribution but it might land at one side or the opposite side. You just can’t predict and even if you had a super-super computer you still couldn’t predict any better because there are so many tiny variables that affect the final result.

The world is made up of vast numbers of these kinds of variable actions and we can’t know how they will work out in specific, but we can know how they will work out in general. Our lives are made livable because of the smoothing out of vast numbers of these kinds of tiny events each modifying the others in a probabilistic way. The sum of these actions become understandable macro events. These types events are the ones we can learn to control and use to live our daily lives.

Because we as individuals learn to control these kinds of natural things we can be led to believe that other intelligences can control other events which are beyond our control and even beyond our understanding. We can be told, by authority figures, there is an intelligence so powerful it can control every atom in the entire universe, and that may be true but only in the second sense of prediction, that of macro control. If you took a voluntary deep breath you could claim to have controlled every atom in that breath to do as you willed but it would be true only in the vaguest of general macro senses. If you were to map even a single molecule of oxygen for the time it was within your body it would take all your consciousness for an hour to make a map of a single second’s three dimensional travel of that single atom.

It is unlikely that a conscious intelligence created the Universe, but even if that did happen that intelligence stepped away from further control, because the processes since that moment of creation are probably all knowable processes even if we don’t know them all in detail at the moment. And we may never know the finest details, not because they are unknowable, but because the research tools for finding them are too expensive to build. It won’t help humanity one iota to know prime physical factors to 20 decimal points of accuracy, but spending the amount of money to get that last decimal point would leave billions of people to starve for lack of resources.

Gods exist only in our imagination to explain the incomprehensible.

The various meandering of the Little Deschutes River as it flows just north of Gilchrest, Oregon, looks like a musical theme and variations on that theme. There are, without doubt, thousands of miles of meandering streams, but I wanted to stay close to home, so I captured this one from Google Earth.

It is the rhythmic quality of these pictures which reminds me of music, but this is only one type of music. I can think of many other representations but I will put that off for a while.