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.

These gods perform supernatural actions and not just natural ones that are associated with testable physical reality. But, it is claimed, they somehow do interact with our physical reality, because if they didn’t there would be no way to perceived, they would be absolutely invisible, and they could be totally ignored. Sometimes even nature can seem capricious, but for a nontheist or atheist or perhaps a natural scientist these unknowable behaviors are tallied up to the specific details of random sloshings about of real things bigger than us and our perceptions or even our potential understandings. These atheists would accept being struck by a meteor as just exceptionally bad luck and not as an act of a wrathful god intentionally disciplining them for being uniquely bad persons or for some ungodly act.

An act which one would think would annoy a god and make him wrathful would be to use his name in vain, or to say he doesn’t exist or perhaps worst of all simply ignore him altogether. Wasn’t it Oscar Wilde who said, “The only thing worse than being spoken ill of is not being mentioned at all”? No – I just looked it up and he said, “The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about..” It would seem the gods would be vengeful toward atheists, but even more so against those who totally ignored their existence. The atheists at least acknowledge the possibility of the gods’ existence, but then go on to doubt them because of lack of personally convincing proofs. The gods might rationalize their letting atheists out of punishments, because they, the gods, just didn’t want to bother with illustrating their power by performing some supernatural deeds for these atheists. The gods might also just ignore those people who ignore them. Why bother with someone who isn’t interested in you; it’s a waste of time and energy.

Those thoughts postulate the possible existence of gods, but what if that idea was just a string of words without any meaning — what if gods didn’t exist no matter how broadly you stretched the definition? If that were the case then an atheist would be against nothing whatsoever. It’s like saying I am opposed to nothing. This isn’t in the open-minded sense of being open to everything, but instead it’s the opposing of an utter vacuum in an absolute void. It doesn’t make much sense to be an atheist ( a — theist ) because it is against nothing.

There is one supernatural thing which nonbelievers could believe in if it were thought of in the right way, and that is the void itself. Everyone who thinks at all can wonder where their consciousness and being came from, why it is here and where it will go. What were they before they were born and what will become of them after their body is totally dissolved back into the universe and vanishes back into the void? This void is the supernatural entity of which we and everything we can conceive of has been created, is part of, and will vanish back into. It is the supernatural entity to which we should address ourselves when we ask for help, it is the supernatural entity we must cooperate with or be destroyed sooner rather than later. When we accept the void as our supernatural god we can get on with our lives as we see fit.

We came from the void, exist in the void and shall return to the void.

This amazing picture was by Stuart L. Gordon. It illustrates why it is necessary to know the exact time as well as the location for making this picture, because every minute of every day the view will be different. This exact spot would be a fine place to have a webcam taking a picture every few minutes year around, as that would make a fascinating three-minute movie; or one shot a day, which would make a thirteen-second one.

A precise time stamp is needed sometimes or the picture, at least as seen, will be impossible to replicate. The picture below was taken at 1/14/2012 – 3:14 PM at 44.0606 -121.2831 All photos should have a clear time and location stamp.

The shadow was moving surprisingly fast and the time frame for this picture was about a minute. If it were taken a minute after this picture, to get the head positioned as it is, there wouldn’t be any legs, as they would be shadowed out by the steps. And standing on the edge of the steps a minute later the head would disappear over the ledge.

Many pictures are very dependent upon timing. Obviously sports shots require exact instantaneous timing, but what I am referring to, at least for nature photography, is the timing of natural events. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a database of exact times and locations of spectacular visual events! Google Earth – click photo boxes – shows many pictures of interesting natural locations, but what we need is an ongoing list of these places so we can plan to be at those exact places at the right time. It would look like this previous post I made except there would be dates linked to the locations.

UNESCO World Heritage Sites in the United States

Today the snow accumulation was about six inches but it rained in the afternoon, which turned the snow to two inches of slush. Right now it is freezing so tomorrow morning will probably be very dangerous to drive unless you have studded tires. A lot of people installed their studded tires months ago but unless they headed up into the mountains they weren’t needed, at least here in town, until yesterday.

I made this picture from our front room of Debbie retrieving our mail.

Our life has been pleasant here in Bend. We had worried about the weather being too cold after decades of living in the balmy San Francisco Bay Area. But the dryness of living at 3600 feet, as opposed to the humid sea level cities, makes it easier to regulate one’s bodily temperature. We had worried a bit about living in such a remote little city of 80,000 people but with cable internet and HDTV it isn’t a problem. Also, there are enough events and people sympathetic to our interests that we are enjoying ourselves. It is strange, after living in the big city, to go downtown and randomly meet people on the street we know.

Even mundane things can have their interest and value.

I am not particularly atheistic, but I have been attending The Central Oregon Atheists MeetUp here in Bend, Oregon, and find them to be a congenial group willing to calmly discuss most things. I have even converted everyone of them I spoke with to admit they liked what Jesus had to say, when I presented as nearly as I could what Jesus himself actually said. It boils down to specific things to do to help people live their lives and live them more abundantly. That should strike every reasonable person as a worthwhile goal for any religion.

Jesus’ message got completely changed when Christianity became the State Religion of the Roman Empire. The organizational aspect of that religion is what has persisted and Jesus’ message got whittled down to the almost meaningless generalized statements of the golden rule (intentionally lower case). Be nice to people and they will be nice to you. Or the silver rule – Don’t be mean to people and they won’t be mean to you. Either way you flip that concept it is isn’t close to what Jesus was teaching. Go read the Sermon on the Mount Matthew KJV 5 – 7:27 several times through — it’s not very long — and then read the rest of Matthew for context. He was presenting a path for spiritual advancement.

The primary function of a religion is to bind a group of people together as a reproducing entity. That is necessary if the group is to survive beyond the lives of the individual members. Another necessity for a group to survive indefinitely is that it needs realistic external threats. These threats should not be so powerful as to easily destroy the group, but they must be realistic enough and powerful enough appearing that the people must stay firmly together or they will be attacked and destroyed. Formalized contentions within a group keep the people active and vitally alive because too much comfort and the group falls into petty bickering and loses sight of vital issues. For example, the government of the United States is intentionally divided against itself to promote contention and this keeps the various portions of the group strong so when an external threat appears it becomes easy for these already mobilized parties to join together and fend off the external threats.

A serious problem for those people who refuse to believe in supernatural entities and usually calling themselves atheists or agnostics is that they automatically generate suspicion, even hatred from theistic groups. Atheists by their very name proclaim themselves to be enemies. That coupled with the fact that they don’t have any natural cohesiveness created by a supernatural belief is disastrous for the permanent survival of atheist organizations. All successful religions have absurd supernatural claims, but these function to give these groups of people an absolute cause for uniting and staying united. The supernatural claim binds them together and when together they can fend off other groups and survive indefinitely. The atheists have very weak binding powers and until they find an essence of their belief which unifies them they will be forever weak. Weakness in Darwinian terms of survival of the fittest means they will be persecuted unto death when all inclusive survival problems arise, problems such as the ultimate long-term but reoccurring event – famine. During such stressful times the groups that are most cohesive will be best able to maintain themselves and survive. Atheists without any potent social cohesion will be the first groups to collapse and die.

Although atheists may be intellectually more correct in their beliefs, demanding reasonable proofs for their beliefs, they are socially weak. Social cohesion is the power of religions in the face of adversity. If atheists are to ever become more than a moribund splinter group of intellectually correct dissenters they must find a cohering principle. When a critical time arrives a group of atheists may say, “The problems are so severe you must join our group or die,” which may be correct but it is a temporary joining based on temporary expediency. A similar preexisting religious group based on a untestable belief in a supernatural god who protects his own people will have more cohesion. An atheistic group can only exist for long when social stress is modest and liberal laws are strong and enforced.

Atheists may be right but when problems get serious they will be the first to die.