`` As if - the explanation of Emergence

Blog 2025


A mind not to be changed by place or time. Can make a heav'n of hell, a hell of heav'n - John Milton - Paradise Lost


Index


I thought that I'd add a blog page, largely because I haven't yet finished coming up with ideas, although I do frequently go over old ground. Some of these thoughts don't immediately, if ever, make it onto a suitable page, and if someone has already read the earlier version, they may miss the addition in any case. So here it is - newest entry first. Lots of things will be incomplete, just because time is not always on my side. Lots of things will be just copied out here because they will show how my understanding has evolved over time, and so will give a clearer picture of anything else I publish.


8 September 2025 - Free Will


Schopenhauer had a rather strange [to modern minds] way of thinking about the 'will', in that he believed it was some kind of universal spirit that, if I understand correctly, is the same for all of us, i.e. is a kind of moral standard for us all to aspire to, by being good Christians.


This, I think, has no resonance with any concept of Free Will, which I take to be the ability of the individual to do as they want, not as society, some ruler, or even their family and friends want. In addition, not how their bank manager, body, nor brain want. That doesn't leave much to be one's will, nor is it possible for what remains included to be entirely free from the demands of the foregoing list. Ipso facto, the self, the individual, can never be free - entirely.


But the self can, and does, have some wriggle room, despite so much of life being pre-determined. Faced with any true choice, a more or less even balance of options, which undeniably occurs at times, the individual is at the mercy, not of any external influences, but only internal influences.


Those internal influences include the knowledge possessed by the individual; although lack of knowledge and incorrect knowledge constitute limitations on freedom that arise from the self.


Just like knowledge, opinions constitute limitations on freedom that arise from the self; and such opinions include such personal qualities as taste, and even plain old likings.


However, there is one aspect to the self that borders on Schopenhauer's concept of the Will, and that is the spirit of the individual. But here we have to be very careful about our definition of the spirit, because it is such an amorphous thing that it is not clear on first considerations what it is, nor what it does, nor how it does it.


The spirit is, in my definition, the collection of all the true facts about the individual. These facts come from everything that the individual has ever been conscious of, and to a lesser extent simply involved with. That includes things done deliberately, hence consciously, of their own free will; things done to them that they were equally conscious of; also things that they were just bystanders to, as witnesses; and perhaps most contentiously, things that occurred in their vicinity, but which they were ignorant of, but not innocent of - the things that were, but which they were not personally are things that they share a collective responsibility for, to the extent that there was any possibility of their involvement.


The facts of the spirit form that which may be remembered, but I also believe they form that which can influence the conscious choices of the individual; and the manner in which spirit influences the conscious self is via a downward causation of the facts of the whole self; one that operates because one's facts contribute to each and every wave function that collapses in the vicinity of the brain. This is how, in the normal course of events, consciousness influences brain function - consciousness being the facts of the self that are supported by the brain attempting to be like something.


By supported, I mean amplified by the physical activity of the brain, as it makes connections, responds to stimuli, and responds to the facts of memories.


But much that the previous definition of spirit includes cannot be included in recall; either because it was never known, or because it is just a vague and distant memory - and here I would include possible past lives as the vaguest and most distant of memories. Although it must be recognised that whatever facts constitute the spirit, they all constitute spirit, they are all eternal facts, and they all have some bearing on the choices we make, hence they constitute our will - as the decision making apparatus that drives the unalterable realities of our present condition.


From all the preceding, it must be obvious that there is a clear and conscious will, formed by that part of the spirit that is within the grasp of conscious recall. But, in addition, there has to be another side to the will - one that probably equates to the unconscious self - and that this side of the spirit, while not available to recollection on a day-to-day basis, still has a role in all the wave functions that are constrained by the facts of the self.


That is your free will. It is there from birth, even though your brain at birth is not developed enough to respond to it coherently. Each baby has a spirit, perhaps some more so than others. It is there in the abstraction of the birth chart, and can be examined in the lives of some individuals - usually those who experience something exceptional.


There are only two ways in which to have a truly free will. The first of these is to be a brand new spirit, to be born for the first time, innocent of all prior influences, and even then one's earthly manifestation, and ignorance, must provide a restriction of freedom. The other is to become enlightened to the point where physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual, incapacities are in fact no limitation on the freedom of the self to choose how to be, think, feel and do. Such a person, which the Buddha and Jesus are imagined to have been, and which Morihei Ueshiba certainly was to some extent in his later years; such a person, while physically present in the world, has some freedom from being enslaved by all aspects of the world.


5 May 2025 - Childhood's End


Probable v Paradoxical

A paradoxical change, two immiscible things brought together, creates a new order of things.


A probable change is inherent in an order of things, and when it comes about, the outcome will be of the same order.


Paradox produces numbers, as a linear order of things. Possibility, a weaker form of emergence, allows new dimensions of numbers, roots and products to emerge as the same order of factual objects, i.e. we are still dealing with pure mathematics here - the element is still fire - all numbers are still numbers and behave like numbers. This fact ties together all the different kinds of numbers, they all interact in the same manner.


However, some paradoxes still come about, because the natures of squares, cubes, etc. maeans that although they are all numeric, they are also different in the manner in which they relate to one another, through having different quantities of dimensions.


Euclid discovered the beauty of Geometry - beauty bare, the naked truth - but failed to discover the dirt inherent in the paradox that gives non-Euclidean form.


From numbers stuck inside numbers, replicated in similar, but slightly different numbers, we get the emergence of Reality, and the creation of the Early Universe. What was it like, was there really a Bang? Where numbers so small that it couldn't actually be very hot? In fact what is heat between numbers? What is background radiation?


This last is easier to understand. CMBR is composed of photons from as early in the Universe as we can detect - so far, maybe ever. When we look at the CMBR we are peering into the deep past, and anything we may claim for any time before then is, for lack of scientific evidence, necessarily conjecture - still very educated guesses, but guesses nine the less.


One story we could tell about CMBR is that we are looking at a time when the whole universe was a single star, and everything was on the inside, still made of stardust, but not yet free enough of the whole, yet paradoxically within it, to form individual stars.


We talk about heat and pressure - thermodynamic terms - as if they were as applicable in the early universe as they are now, but do we know that? What does seem fairly sure is that differences coalesced, the immiscible mixed to form stars that shattered, hatched even, to release heavier matter, dense enough to form planets, and life.


Life evolved, and in doing so became capable of creating its own impressions of the reality around it - Life did not just reproduce itself, Life reproduced its world, in ever more detail. Eventually, we may reach Childhood's End, when our creation is true to Reality, and Life itself is true to Life. When we achieve that, perhaps we will have fulfilled our potential as conscious material beings, and in doing so will move beyond the limitations of Earthly reality.


It is a race, a human race, perhaps an alien race too, to achieve immortality before the heat death of the Universe. What does this even mean? Our lives - the facts of Life - being facts, are already immortal, so what is the question?


The question is whether we, as children of the Universe, are able to beat the clock, to win the race, and achieve not just partial conscious awareness, the dim half-awakeness of human consciousness, the spiritual poverty of enlightened buddha-mind, but achieve the full potential of Life - whatever that may turn out to be. Perhaps it is something akin to the god-like power to manifest our spirits in full glorious technicolor noisy reality, to exist as ourselves in the material world without being hidden by our biological machinery and amplification. Literally to become the Undead. Life, but not as we know it, Jim.


18 April 2025 - Fast Freddie and Relativity


The following is in the context of Alice, Bob, Charlie, and Dave. Introducing three new characters to our minimal explanatory universe; Steady Eddie, Fast Freddie, and Gigantic George.


Time dilation, Stephen Wolfram says, uses up computation, so time moves slower. However, I would say that the state of being a fast moving object is a state of high momentum, and that it equates to having your rest mass rotated into the imaginary 3D in a way that gives you lots of directional change, and consequently much less real 3D change, which is all a consequence of the path from Dave's heart being curved. Momentum is simply more curvature due to more imagination. It is not that computation is used up, but that real change is reduced when imaginary mass is increased.


Not only time dilates, but all surrounding object experience Fast Freddie as being more impressive. Their changes are affected by his passing by because of the same mechanism as when he is stationary, but everything is increased. I think this is something that I have previously not fully explained.


Fast Freddie's direction of momentum is 3D but imaginary, in addition to his real 3D properties, so is a vector and a scalar. The facts of this behave in the same way as the facts of every other object, and the virtual heart of Eddie and Freddie together is itself an object, and it is that superset that determines where Eddie and Freddie end up when change occurs in Dave [to Dave] - along with the movement of all other real objects. If Eddie is steady, and Freddie is fast, then George the giant, their virtual centre, behaves as the sum of Eddie and Freddie, and George moves more in the direction of Freddie's vector, in response to Dave - that much is velly much Machian. Bad jokes aside, George is equivalent to Eddie being a bit less steady, and Freddie a bit less fast, they experience a shove from Dave, all because something somewhere else changed.


Overall, all of Dave's dragging everything around largely cancels out, except for what Eddie and Freddie appear to do to each other, as centred on Gigantic George. That is, George is bigger than either Eddie or Freddie, although George is no more there than is Dave, so George adds nothing extra, though George is their whole, and without George, Eddie and Freddie in isolation would each make different moves. George is still boosted [rotated], and moves more than Eddie or Freddie would on their own, but crucially, George drags Eddie and Freddie with him, but only because George is just the manner in which emergent space bends near to Eddie and Freddie, not that the space is there, but it does alter the calculation for where Eddie and Freddie end up next time something changes somewhere, anywhere, with the consequence that after the dust settles they are closer and more rotated, i.e. both have a bit more momentum towards one another.


It is worth noting, there is no actual calculating going on, nor any exchange of gravitons. Calculating is something we do in order to understand things, and there are no gravitons. There is no big machine overseeing how things move, rather things move because the facts of what they are make it a logical necessity that when some other thing changes, they then appear to be somewhere else, but in truth they just exist with an altered virtual relationship to each other thing. The moving object emerges as being elsewhere, and simultaneously demerges from where it was. The demerging occurs because it would be paradoxical for the object to be in two places at once. It is not that there is any rule that governs the demergence, just that the numbers that form the object's reality remain unchanged, while the numbers that form its external relationships do change.


14 April 2025 - Phenomena and Recall


As previously stated, there is something like being a bat, or being a person, because being a bat or a person, as a mind, is like being the world. That is, the objects of consciousness are like the material objects of the world, with a few bells and whistles that emerge on top.


An interesting question, if it is all just, that is only, brain activity, is why is memory and imagination always a paler imitation of sensations of reality? At least until one gets so far into the reminiscence, or the fantasy, or the dream, that it seems as good as, as real as, reality.


The answer to this, I think, is that in a normal waking state the brain is perpetually dealing with reality, and this creates competition against any attempts at recall, or any creative thinking. To think best we either need to concentrate, to meditate, or to get into a repetitive state through some physical activity such as walking, or as Dan Dennett used to do, riding an exercise bike.


The repetition of the activity allows the brain to switch off monitoring reality with such awareness, much like when driving a familiar route - familiarity breeds not contempt, but a lack of intentionality, a lack of need to pay close attention.


The 'getting into it' of concentration, or daydreaming, or meditating, lets go of attention to reality, as does falling asleep. This is all about having a relaxed, stress-free self. Stress keeps us on edge, needing to pay attention to any danger that may be lurking out there.


When the amplified facts of normal awake consciousness of the world, the bright qualia, are dimmed by relaxing the brain and mind, then the shades of memory and imagination, those ghostly facts of the past and possibility [which may be the future] have the bandwidth through which to strut the stage of the mind. But shades do not have the overdriven input of exciting reality, although anticipation may be exciting in itself. Shades are low 'volume', subtle influences of the mind on the brain, and although this is a two-way street, there is much more traffic coming the other way, most of the time.


The causal chain of the self is environment-nervous system-brain-mind- memory. NB. Memory is static, I do not mean recall, recall being the cause of memory on mind. So, environment, which is material reality, is in direct opposition to memory, which I would call spirit. That is, they are terminus ends of that chain - the two sides of duality. We straddle both camps, and the bright active mind that is our aware conscious self emerges in the gap that is the difference between the two worlds. Both worlds are worlds of facts, but facts of different kinds.


David Chalmers

David Chalmers takes the view that he calls the Double Aspect Theory of Information, this is that information has two aspects, the material reality, and the experiential phenomena. The problem with this is that it is pan-psychism once removed - the pan-psychism of information.


It is not enough to say that information is experiential, is phenomenal. First off, what do you mean by information? Also, why should information be phenomenal? Even if we make the claim that information is facts, it still does not say why it should be phenomenal.


In Iconism, as a subset of Virtualism, you have the answer, inspired by Leibniz' Law, that to be the same as is to be one, united, the same. But it goes a bit further in both directions. In one way, reality is composed of a specific subset of facts, that have physical sub-facts, and from which emerges reality. In the other way, the facts of anything are identical with the whole, no matter the parts. The whole emerges from the parts, as does its place in Existence, as a part of Existence. Thus the fact of us contains the facts of our reality, together with the facts of our past, and these facts are terrifyingly eternal. Why terrifying? Because there is no escape from yourself. So you better try to get it right.


The bottom line, for consciousness, is that it is phenomenal, has qualia, because it is like reality, and it is like spirit, with knobs on. Emergent knobs.


Yeah! Don't be shy about naming things as they are. So I use 'spirit', because it has greater precision as a term than does phenomena, or experience, even though phenomena and experience can mean spirit, are at least the weaving of spirit, but they do not usually.


13 April 2025 - Causation and Consciousness


There are a few phenomena that muddy the water when it comes to understanding causation in the context of consciousness.


Firstly, Science [Physics] generally make sthe claim that because microscopic processes seem to be time reversible, except for thermodynamics, then it is not possible to say what causes what.


Secondly, because there is no common understanding of mind, aka consciousness, there is no conception of how we manage to do something as simple as lifting our arms. Neuroscientists have measured brain state readiness, and this seems to preempt movement and decision making, giving the impression that we ourselves are somehow not consciously involved in decision making.


I would argue that both of these positions are mistaken.


Firstly, time is never reversible. In fact, time is the waterfall of the past that flows away from the present Now, so it can never reverse. Causation in physical systems is always quantum events, and these occur because of instability in particles, that then transfer energy to other particles, largely in the form of photons. This rebalances the entire Universe, causing simultaneous gravity, and the production of more past time. That is, the gravity and time would not emerge if it were not for the quantum events.


Secondly, we have numerous distinct parts to our being; we have environment, body, nervous system, brain, and mind. The way that these interact is that:


The only difficulty that people have with this list is in that last step, because it sounds to be so dualistic. Since Princess Elizabeth questioned Descartes on the matter, it has been a reason for objection to Dualism.


The thing is; the interaction between brain and mind is not understood, and we have that misconception about the ordering of brain state readiness.


First of all, the brain state readiness can only be contrasted to other brain states, namely the realization of decision making. We have no means to measure mind directly, so it is a fallacy to conclude the causal order from the experiment.


It could be argued that for spur of the moment decisions, we do not know our own mind, just as the body has reflex reactions where it does not wait for the brain to tell it what to do - does not know its own brain [in the circumstance]. Equally, the brain has reflex reactions, where we will act quickly, say to avoid danger, without resorting to consideration of the problem, i.e. the brain has reflex reactions too.


From my perspective of Virtualism, the mind is composed of facts, and these facts impinge on all quantum processes going on in the brain, to a greater or lesser extent. After all, quantum processes are only a rearrangement of facts, which in that same moment cause a rearrangement of reality.


From this we can conclude that in an experiment where the brain is asked to move the body, and the mind has no strong opinion on the matter, then the choice is more brain than mind, in exactly the way that the brain may tell the body to do something, but with less influence than the state of the body or environment, and so our body is unable to do as the brain commands - that weight may just be too heavy for the body to comply with the brain.


The brain amplifies the state of mind, by connecting otherwise unconnected things, so while consciousness may exist as mind, but as a totality of systems, we may be unaware of things in our mind, and picking random moments may be just such an subconscious act of consciousness. On the other hand, if we were to be invested in the experiment, because it was highly meaningful, then the mind may be more engaged; less bored, maybe.


Even then, it is another possibility that we would not realise our own mind until after the event, even though we were highly aware of the situation, because the brain may be amplifying those thoughts post hoc. That is, the brain may respond to mind [due to quantum involvement], yet not recount the story loudly until afterwards. How many times do we have a 'My god! What have I just done?' moment, when we act without mindfulness.


12 April 2025 - Why are there correlates of consciousness?


We may as well ask why are there correlates of anything, such as planets to character, which many would deny, or change to time, or light to speed. In one way, these all have the same answer, i.e. that the world is like that, not that it helps much. We really need to see that evolution has taken sensory perception, evolved a nervous system to respond to it, and evolved a brain to make sense of senses. So of course there will be correlates. It still gets us nowhere with the Hard Problem. Except to say that qualia emerge from correlates, and qualia are like something. To explain why there are qualia, and what they are composed of, we need a paradigm shift, to see that to a large extent qualia share the same facts as reality, such as shape, and weight, and hardness, and we add a few more for good measure, such as colour and happiness.


So consciousness has the nature of facts, and it is important to distinguish facts from information. Information too has facts, but informational facts may be as inert as the numbers on a spreadsheet. The facts in your mind are connected, and that makes all the difference.


3 April 2025 - Nihilism, Emergence, and Truth


I watched a video that considered whether in the light of Nihilism it may be immoral to live, and thought to myself 'What tosh! I also watched a bit of an interview with Julian Barbour.


Julian Barbour is well known in some circles, largely due to his book The End Of Time, which describes his view of Time, which follows on from a long string of thinkers going back to Leibniz, and forward through Ernst Mach.


According to Barbour, Denis Schama interpreted Einstein interpreting Mach.


Also, Ludwig Lange defined inertial motion, perhaps as something like a tendency to move in a straight line. We need to ask why is there a tendency to move at all?


Inertial mass is something different.


Barbour reports that Mach said Newton's definition of mass was circular, so Mach gave his own definition based on Newton's Third Law, defining inertial mass in terms of the recoil of colliding bodies.


Mach's Principle, his view of physics, is holistic, taking into account each and every object in the Universe. So if anything moves anywhere, then everything else moves, which is exactly what I mean when I talk of Alice, Bob, Charlie and Dave.


However, to me, it seems there is no way distant stars can be said to be colliding, much less distant galaxies.


If Time emerges, my theory says paradox causes the emergence, so what is the paradox of time?


Answer: When Alice and Bob are distant, i.e. separated by some amount of difference between their internal and external states, then exchanges between them cause changes to both their internal and external states. Though there is no time passing for the exchange, the occurrence is instant, when energy/mass changes hands both parties change. What is paradoxical is that the distant always appear to be as they were, placing them in a past that paradoxically does not exist. This is a tricky point to understand, but to Bob in Berlin, Alice was in Amsterdam, but unknown to Bob, Alice has changed and is really in Paris.


Entangled changes, of properties such as spin, confer no energetic change, and so cause no change to Alice, she remains in Amsterdam, but is no longer high.


Some might say that this makes time an illusion, but that would be an incorrect view, because an illusion is not true. Emergent Time is always true, though not real, in as much as the past is not real - it cannot change - but it is eternally true.


Time emerges from change, because any change, anywhere, shifts the centre of everything, just by a tiny bit, but that tiny bit is enough to add another notch to the bedpost of the Universe.


It is, then, as if everything - Alice, Bob, Charlie, and all the rest - have taken another step away from Dave, though they remain very much in Dave. They are Dave. Dave has nothing else, except that heart that is not there.


The question of Time and Gravity is not are they quantum? No they are not, they are classical consequences of quantum processes, each quantum event causes some time to pass for all real objects, and the passage of time places that new notch in the past, making all prior events seem just a bit further away. What it is most like is as if the heart of the Universe were vibrating, not that it is, anymore than the rest is vibrating, but as Galileo said, 'it still moves'.


No, the interesting question, having answered the nature of Time, is to explain why apparently moving on one notch moves real objects in specific directions, and all other things being equal, i.e. when there is no countering momentum, those objects move towards one another, which we call Gravity.


Einstein has pretty much answered this one, although his interpretation is that space and mass are equivalently causal - 'matter tells space how to bend, and space tells matter how to move.'


The thing Albert got a bit wrong, if you ask me, is that the Space is not there at all, it emerges in the fashion of Time. What is there, for every real object is some rest mass, some internal mass that is more properly describable as numerical values of position and imaginary rotation. The rotation into the mass dimension is exactly equivalent to curving the straight line to Dave's heart, i.e. causing the emergence of curved space, and any two proximate such real objects will add to one another's curved line to the heart of Dave, such that following the 'straight line' of the geodesic in consequence of that added notch in the line, brings both objects closer. Thus it is that Gravity is just as emergent as Space and Time.


We could then go on to discuss gravitational lensing, and explain how it is that non-existent photons travel in curved trajectories through space that is not there?


The answer to the question 'why does light not travel a straight path?' is exactly the same as the gravity explanation, it is as if there were space there, because all objects enter into the wave function calculation, so the presence of a star in the straightline path of the photon just allows it to jump around the star, or through it, or wherever you care to imagine it going, the photon does not actually follow the path of the wave function, the photon is simply outta here, and in there - no inbetweens.


In this way change causes time, and then in the same moment causes both gravity and redshift, together with all the other changes that are consequences of what we take to be forces, together with equivalents in consciousness that are partly driven by the aforementioned real changes, taking place in the brain, but also partly constrained by the meanings of relevant past consciousnesses.


So, if all objects enter into the wave function, what about ideal objects? What about objects of consciousness? What then about planetary objects, gods, and chakras?


The facts of conscious thoughts are complex holistic objects, composed of layers of associated meanings, but certainly always lacking the complete reality of real objects. The objects of mind are generally pale imitations of reality, but contain the bright colours and other qualia of the imagination - i.e. properties that do not exist in reality, but do exist in our minds.


The point is this, those objects of mind, that have no physical counterpart, that emerge from the activity of our brains, and can be recalled, and weave our spirit too; these objects contribute to the landscape of our minds, and so affect the many wave functions that occur within the activity of our brains, altering the outcomes of all that guesswork.


In this way, there are mind objects that affect the physical correlates of consciousness, and so affect the behaviours of the body, and so change the world.


This bring me back to the subject matter I was attempting to consider before I got distracted, namely, how does the self respond to nihilistic feelings, when the weight of the World starts crushing the hollow man?


The thing is, the individual, male or female, or animal, suffers loss and consequent discomfiture.


The loss may be trivial, or profound, and ultimately all that lives is born to die. Our hollowness is certainly a weakness, but is it also, paradoxically our strength?


The idea I am groping toward is that one's personal fantasy may be easily crushed, it usually being somewhat insubstantial, but where we imagine truth, then there is potential for an inner strength that could perhaps move mountains. The truth that I am thinking of is a truth that has the precision of a Swiss watch, a truth that is exactly it, whatever the 'it' is that you can hold.


By holding on to truth - not so easy in these days of Trumpian post-truth - the suffering individual can withstand the crushing, and maintain an invincible defence against Nihilism.


So, the kind of truth I mean is not the coherence of religion or science, it is something more like the conviction and certainty of deep personal lived experience, or even died experience in these days of resuscitation that give so many the gift of an NDE. Paranormal experience may be hard to understand, but there is little doubt that it can be life changing for those who have it.


For me, I've had a number of para experiences, but too few, or too fleeting to comprehend in isolation. So I look to Astrology as a touchstone, together with my personal philosophies of Virtualism and Iconism. These give me an understanding that is both coherent truth - has explanatory power - and is, through the astrological precision, true in a precise abstract manner. Truth and precision; these are Blake's Jerusalem, and they vanquish doubt.


It remains to be seen if they will vanquish Trumpery.


The word 'trumpery' originates from the Middle English 'trompery', ultimately derived from the Middle French 'tromperie', meaning 'deceit' or 'fraud'.


1 April 2025 - Political Power


It is a comforting fantasy to dream of having the power to dispose of Trump, Putin, the GOP, and all the evils in the World - but such power, the power of the One Ring, is exactly what Galadriel declined, because such power would indeed create a monster every bit as bad as the evil it seeks to eradicate. In this there is a great lesson, a great truth, that not only separation of powers is necessary, but no person, or group should have too much power, so the only possible political solution - for one that works - is, counter-intuitively, polyarchy. That is, the polyarchy of PR that creates governments of coalitions. The last thing society needs is kings with absolute power, or anything like it.


The problem seems to be how does society deal with the wannabes? The answer is people power, such as the campaign to dent Walmart's profit margin as a response to their ditching of DEI. For such to work you do need an educated population. One that can see that the Right are the embodiment of corruption, and cannot avoid being so.


15 January 2025 - Intentionality and Dualism


David Bentley Hart is far too religious for my liking, and seems confused about God and Evil. Simply answered, there is no God in the sense of an all powerful being who controls everything. So our lack of controls, except by physical limitations, allows for Evils to exist, especially those perpetrated by us. The ultimate evil is destruction, death, but there are worse things, which essentially are the negation of life during life.


Talking about Intentionality : Intention, literally inner holding, the ability to hold an image of an external thing within our minds. The thing about this is that we do not just hold an image, if we define image as what we see. We have multiple senses, and that tells us that there is a reality to the World that is beyond ideas. At least, the ideas of what we see are supported by the ideas of what we touch, and so on. It is all photons in the final analysis, but multiple arguments for the reality of real things. What we hold in mind is emergent from the brain activity consequential to sensing, and remembering, and imagining, which is a form of creative remembering. Intentionality is just another word for consciousness.


The Buddhist counter is non-attachment, the acceptance of destruction, which is one tactic for navigating life. However, an alternative is to understand everything and to then attempt to persuade people that there is a better way, which is to live in a non-destructive manner. Although death may be inevitable, we can understand that too, and avoid the destruction of life while we are living it. How do we understand? By using our imagination to think things through successfully. There is no limit to our ability to answer life's problems.


Understanding has to be based on both science and philosophy, because science tells us about reality and philosophy tells us about truth. There is a seeming paradox that Existence has this duality, but really science and truth are both manifestations of the same thing, it is our understanding of both that is incomplete, and so fails to see that Dualism is just one way to view Existence in its entirety.


The fundamental misunderstanding comes from our tendency to see parts rather than wholes, whereas Existence starts with wholes and from the whole(s) emerges the parts that form new wholes. Wholes are always virtual, that is they only exist as true facts about things, and the mind is formed from the creation/emergence [same thing] of subjective facts - inner holdings - and at the same time we inhabit a real world where wholes also emerge, but as objective facts.


The facts of the mind have parts that are composed of brain activity, while the facts of the world have parts composed of particles, atoms, protons, quarks, etc. But the facts of both, while appearing as a kind of dualism, have the same nature - that of being wholes, of being facts. The subjective and the objective are ultimately composed of the same thing, truth. Even your mistakes are true, they are your facts. The important thing to grasp is that facts are both eternal and vary in significance.


The significance thing ought to be self-evident. Some facts have greater impact than do others. But, the thing about significance is that it is the same thing as objectivity. The more objective a fact, the more significant it is. Again this should be self-evident. For example, feeling rich won't buy any shopping, while being rich will. What we need to understand is that by sharing our subjective facts we make them more significant, and so more objective. But there is more to this - because facts are eternal, they don't go away, they just fade into the distance, but more significant facts fade less. The main reason for this is that sharing facts takes nothing away from the original fact, whereas sharing reality, which is just rearranging deckchairs, always takes something away, because energy is conserved, which results from the nature of objective reality [matter].


Understanding the full gamut of Existence shows us that while our material bodies must die, the facts of our life cannot die, they can only fade as we create new facts for ourselves. In this lies the truth of spirit, the afterlife, and even resurrection as rebirth. In this manner we can overcome Evil, at least in principle. To do so, however, we have to make progress during our many lifetimes, and collectively learn to live in a non-destructive manner.


14 January 2025 - Cheating and the nature of truth


Prompted by Esther Perel reading an essay by Karen Jones about being the other woman.


Cheating, is it lying, and what does it tell us about the nature of truth?


Many people who have affairs do not tell their established partners. Some do, but possibly that is rare; infidelity, whether with consent, or not, is a minefield of potential disaster for established relationships, because it always carries a possible threat to the relationship, and in any case presents a very real commentary on it.


As for truth, only complete openness is honest, truthful, the same as reality - or is it? Openness is all about what is presented, whether the spoken word [air], or the actions [earth], but it is more than that, it is the objective sameness of true knowing [fire], that comes when feelings [water] are shared in actuality, that is, not just presented, but felt as if being the other.


Most connection falls short of the coincident [sameness] level of absolute truth, we so frequently fail to communicate well enough for that, and so with good reason hope to protect the feeling self of the partner, if we go even that far. So mostly we run our lives on coherent truth, we present a consistent set of facts, and omit uncomfortable points that may rock the boat. Such coherent truth, while not being a lie as such, is only accurate by ommission, and so is not truly honest, and is certainly not the whole truth. At times, some [Russians being a case in point] indulge in vranyo, convenient truth, which is really a lie, but one that both sides can live with, even knowing it is not truth, at least it may be bearable.


Looking at truth with the example of a relationship illustrates the three philosophical versions of truth. The elephant in this room is the unacceptable falsehood, the lie, and the mistake or misunderstanding. Giving the wrong answer, the wrong facts, will, in most circumstances, constitute a big fail.


Knowledge is truth, or rather true knowledge is truth; it is an awareness of what is - the complete facts. Not necessarily all the detail, because facts apply to wholes, and less so to parts [unless they be considered wholes themselves]. All the things we deal with are at the level of emergent wholeness. When we achieve this we have discovered fire, and are on a firm footing. The creation of true knowledge is the creation of love, and hate is its opposite; hate is a denial of love; the two cannot co-exist, except as parallel connections to complex objects such as people, when we can love some proportion of the other, but hate another aspect of them.


If we want to connect to others, and our human condition makes it imperative that we do - our survival depends upon it, or rather the state of our survival does; if we want that, and we do, we have to connect honestly, that is, we need to make love. I don't mean sex, or not just sex, all connection is love, and hate is disconnection through negative love, that ironically also connects, but like a virus, the hated is a part of us, despite us not liking it. Hate is as much an awareness as is love, but it is uncomfortable as it connects and separates, which is as hard to live with as an unrequited love, or a failed love that lives on.


An adversary, or a rival, doesn't have to be hated; if we are to play the game we may turn out winners or losers, both are important parts of life, and growth, and without competition there is no game. This is why playing fairly is the essence of sport, and why we not only dislike a cheat, but withhold credit from the winner who cheats, unless we indulge the sin because they are our winner, but this makes us cheats also. When anyone cheats there can be no true knowledge. Yes, life is muddy water, but it is all we have, while we are here.


Why is laughter such a mark of a good relationship?


The answer is that laughter, which astrologically is Jupiter in action, laughter is honest. It absolutely cannot happen without truth.


Mark Laita - Soft White Underbelly - said in a video [Denny] that 'That subconscious belief that you have about yourself will dictate everything in your life.' The truth in this is that whatever our foundations are, they are all we have to build on, so everything is built on our beginnings. This is where the impact of the birthchart comes in, because we have new beginnings throughout life - new charts to build on - but all of them have to stand on the rubble of the first one, and it seems likely that the first one, being a reflection of our spirit at that point, is built on the rubble of our past lives, especially that of the most recent, or perhaps the most impactful, if it was extreme enough to cause a kind of PTSD that then colours everything, until such time as the issues get dealt with.


This brings us to the meaning of life. In a sense we all have the same meaning, which is to develop the ability to love, i.e. build relationships of genuine awareness of other. But that is kind of a fundamental, rather too general, in the same way that the physics of existence are fundamental, underpinning everything, but not really being pertinent to the issues in life, for the most part. The personal meaning of life, the reason any one of us is here in our own individual circumstances, is to manifest the meaning of our spirit, as mapped in the birthchart, in whatever way we can. Often that presents limited choices, but the issues we deal with can allow us to progress beyond our starting point, hopefully in a good way, and that means hopefully in a manner that allows some of the negatives we start out with to be lessened.


When we interact with others, especially when we help others, we do a lot to help ourselves.



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