now, i'm not exactly sure whether sitting around the corner from one another counts as 'sitting beside each other', i guess technically it does. I can't help feeling that someone somehow photoshopped this whole thing together. Paisley and Adams in the same room. Apparently they might even start talking if they have to actually run the country, woo hoo! And i though having Helen Clark and Winston Peters in the same cabinet was bad;)

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/northern_ireland/6494599.stm?ls

In the beginning there was process. Intentionality is not how the world works, it’s how our mind works. Switching off intentionality (the environment for the symbol and it’s reference) is the goal of spiritual enlightenment.

What are the causes of intentionality, Desire? Whatever that means. Are there perhaps good (or more accurately, useful) desires? Do we cease to be human without desires and passions, or are we closer to fulfilling our destiny?

Reality appears to me as a pact of biological convenience. The ultimate hypnosis, the unbreakable denial. The cave without entrance, nor exit.

For what would it benefit a man to gain a soul but lose the whole world. Ah, transform these crumbs of truth into loaves of bread for my dreams.

Try to relax your mind. Try to put away all thoughts. Don’t think about trying to relax your mind. Don’t think about the memory of the last time you tried to put away all thoughts. Think of nothing. Think of emptiness, space and light. This may take some time. If you feel irritated, strange or stupid, try not to giggle. You are reacting. Reacting to a situation like you would the next time and the last time. Try not to react. Remember you do not exist. Do not attempt to establish the validity of the assertion at this point, you may reflect on this later.

Ultimate freedom lies in the conscious recognition of destiny. The inner plan revealed to oneself acts as a guide fomenting all action. Without destiny, freedom is an illusion cast ever deeper through the repetition of inconsequential acts. Variations of inconsequential action reveal to the conscious mind a sensation of freedom; of opportunities taken, movements made, situations avoided. Without destiny, freedom is deterministic freefall, at best a probabilistic carnival. The raindrop on the window pane, cast down under its own weight.

Destiny is a flame of purpose for each life. Freedom lies therefore not in isolated acts of a disembodied self, but in the all-consuming course of right action, as revealed through a singular process of acceptance. True acceptance of destiny requires the re-emergence of primal considerations of the heart, and a temporary rollback of the acting mind.

I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a ... brain operation. Compassion is the antitoxin of the soul: where there is compassion even the most poisonous impulses remain relatively harmless. The problem with some people is that when they aren't drunk, they're sober. A woman knows the face of the man she loves as a sailor knows the open sea. Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. Autumn is the time when seasons merge because of bare necessity. When you're in love you never really know whether your elation comes from the qualities of the one you love, or if it attributes them to her; whether the light which surrounds her like a halo comes from you, from her, or from the meeting of your sparks. Not all chemicals are bad. Without chemicals such as hydrogen and oxygen, for example, there would be no way to make water, a vital ingredient in beer. Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. When we drink, we get drunk. When we get drunk, we fall asleep. When we fall asleep, we commit no sin. When we commit no sin, we go to heaven. So, let's all get drunk and go to heaven! Love is the beauty of the soul. Can miles truly separate you from friends... If you want to be with someone you love, aren't you already there? Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning. Without question, the greatest invention in the history of mankind is beer. Oh, I grant you that the wheel was also a fine invention, but the wheel does not go nearly as well with pizza. When solving problems, dig at the roots instead of just hacking at the leaves. Why is it drug addicts and computer afficionados are both called users? Nothing splendid has ever been achieved except by those who dared believe that something inside them was superior to circumstances. Begin doing what you want to do now. We are not living in eternity. We have only this moment, sparkling like a star in our hand and melting like a snowflake. When you're in love you never really know whether your elation comes from the qualities of the one you love, or if it attributes them to her; whether the light which surrounds her like a halo comes from you, from her, or from the meeting of your sparks. The best proof of love is trust. When love is not madness, it is not love. A kiss makes the heart young again and wipes out the years. Compassion alone stands apart from the continuous traffic between good and evil proceeding within us. Not all chemicals are bad. Without chemicals such as hydrogen and oxygen, for example, there would be no way to make water, a vital ingredient in beer. The only time you run out of chances is when you stop taking them. Life's challenges are not supposed to paralyze you, they're supposed to help you discover who you are. Touch is the most fundamental sense. A baby experiences it, all over, before he is born and long after he learns to use sight, hearing, or taste, and no human ever ceases to need it. Keep your children short on pocket money - but long on hugs. A kiss is a lovely trick designed by nature to stop speech when words become superfluous. Love is always bestowed as a gift - freely, willingly and without expectation. We don't love to be loved; we love to love. I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a ... brain operation. Reduce the complexity of life by eliminating the needless wants of life, and the labors of life reduce themselves. The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands in times of challenge and controversy. A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a shp, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. Too often we give our children answers to remember rather than problems to solve. The problem with some people is that when they aren't drunk, they're sober. Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. When you're in love you never really know whether your elation comes from the qualities of the one you love, or if it attributes them to her; whether the light which surrounds her like a halo comes from you, from her, or from the meeting of your sparks. A kiss is a lovely trick designed by nature to stop speech when words become superfluous. I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same. A positive attitude will not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort. Those who are willing to sacrifice essential liberties for a little order, will lose both and deserve neither. Love is always bestowed as a gift - freely, willingly and without expectation. We don't love to be loved; we love to love. When solving problems, dig at the roots instead of just hacking at the leaves. Iron rusts from disuse; stagnant water loses its purity and in cold weather becomes frozen; even so does inaction sap the vigor of the mind. Without question, the greatest invention in the history of mankind is beer. Oh, I grant you that the wheel was also a fine invention, but the wheel does not go nearly as well with pizza. Sometimes our light goes out but is blown into flame by another human being. Each of us owes deepest thanks to those who have rekindled this light. Take away love and our earth is a tomb. Yesterday is a dream, tomorrow but a vision. But today well lived makes every yesterday a dream of happiness, and every tomorrow a vision of hope. Look well, therefore to this day. Nothing splendid has ever been achieved except by those who dared believe that something inside them was superior to circumstances. Always remember that I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me. Nothing splendid has ever been achieved except by those who dared believe that something inside them was superior to circumstances. Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. Solitude, if rightly used, becomes not only a privilege but a necessity. Only a superficial soul fears to fraternize with itself. When solving problems, dig at the roots instead of just hacking at the leaves. Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up. Memory is a child walking along a seashore. You never can tell what small pebble it will pick up and store away among its treasured things. Friends are as companions on a journey, who ought to aid each other to persevere in the road to a happier life. You can widen your life by yourself, but to deepen it you need a friend. The game of life is not so much in holding a good hand as playing a poor hand well. Drinking provides a beautiful excuse to pursue the one activity that truly gives me pleasure -- hooking up with fat, hairy girls. A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a shp, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. Always listen to experts. They'll tell you what can't be done, and why. Then do it. You can widen your life by yourself, but to deepen it you need a friend. Each encounter that becomes a friendship turns into a lifeline. One can never have too many, only too many to properly take care of. I would like to believe when I die that I have given myself away like a tree that sows seed every spring and never counts the loss, because it is not loss, it is adding to future life. It is the tree's way of being. Strongly rooted perhaps, but spilling out its treasure on the wind. When solving problems, dig at the roots instead of just hacking at the leaves. If you ever reach total enlightenment while drinking beer, I bet it makes beer shoot out your nose. I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a ... brain operation. The Babylon project was our last, best hope for peace. .. It failed. . But in the year of the Shadow war it became something greater: our last, best hope .. for victory. The year is 2260, the place: Babylon 5.True friendship comes when the silence between two people is comfortable. Treat people as if they were what they ought to be, and you help them to become what they are capable of being. Nothing splendid has ever been achieved except by those who dared believe that something inside them was superior to circumstances. Reduce the complexity of life by eliminating the needless wants of life, and the labors of life reduce themselves. Who so loves believes the impossible. Your living is determined not so much by what life brings to you as by the attitude you bring to life; not so much by what happens to you as by the way your mind looks at what happens. Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut. Not all chemicals are bad. Without chemicals such as hydrogen and oxygen, for example, there would be no way to make water, a vital ingredient in beer. Love is the immortal flow of energy that nourishes, extends and preserves. Its eternal goal is life. I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a ... brain operation. The only time you run out of chances is when you stop taking them. Not all chemicals are bad. Without chemicals such as hydrogen and oxygen, for example, there would be no way to make water, a vital ingredient in beer. Who so loves believes the impossible.

I was thinking about that and surely at the end, ultimately, there would be one person with one eye and everyone else would be blind so they would like, win. Unless, by some chance, the last two people poked each other's eyes out at the same time, which would be most unfortunate. Also, there's the chance that people might get sick of poking each other's eyes out and just decide to leave each other alone and maybe start hacking legs off instead.

It's a nice quote though, but a better one is that in the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king. Or in a place like america, someone like george bush can become president.

And remember folks, time is just everything happening at once, slowly.

How come epitaphs are always funny, never serious. Is it because for most people, they don't know what they want, who they are, or where they are going? Is the joke the easy way out?

"I want to influence people. I dunno. I want people to remember me as a person who had something to say. You know. A good person. On my gravestone? That’s a tough one."

When was the last time you breathed deep and smiled? Where did it go?

You know that feeling you had when you were young, when you were immersed in whatever it was that gave you total joy.. who told you to stop doing it? Why did you stop?

Breath deep and smile whilst you remember.

Try to move closer to it every day.

“Man will become better when you show him what he is like.” Anton Checkov

‘Being who you really are’ is often attached as a goal or outcome of the ‘authentic transformation’ of the individual.

However, being true to oneself and reducing self-deception wherever possible can be seen as laudable even from a purely rational perspective outside of any spiritual or moral import the process might invoke in some people. Better decisions are likely to emerge from a clear-minded, confident and focussed individual.

Individuals who think and act ‘from the heart’ it could be suggested, are more likely to be believed and trusted, which is a good thing for that individual in terms of getting what they want, and for others wanting to associate themselves with warm and trustworthy people.

Authenticity therefore represents a conscious process of rigourous honesty with and a desire to follow one’s whole-hearted intent.

However, there is a mistaken assumption that being more authentic means being a nicer or better peron, whatever that entails. Certainly, the outcome of any worthwhile process of inward re-assessment can be a more contented, focussed, driven, dare we say it, happy individual; but only on the terms through which that individual experiences happiness.

We may not like a dictator’s strategy, but we surely can’t blame everything we don’t like about people on their parents, or look for that repressed period of child abuse that would cause individuals to become ‘dysfunctional’ or ‘deviant’. The point being, that if we can’t condone or explain someone’s actions in a moral context, our only option appears to be to condemn.

Arguments which state that something (e.g. authenticty) leads to good/bad behaviour because humans are essentially good/bad in nature are an example of reasoning which succumbs to the moralistic fallacy.

As Stephen Pinker says in The Blank Slate (1): “The moralistic fallacy is that what is good is found in nature or “What ought to be, is what is”. It lies behind the bad science in nature-documentary voiceovers: lions are mercy-killers of the weak and sick, mice feel no pain when cats eat them, dung beetles recycle dung to benefit the ecosystem. It also lies behind the romantic belief that humans cannot harbor desires to kill, rape, lie, or steal because that would be too depressing or reactionary.”

Indeed, could it be the case that at least some of the people we don’t like from a moral perspective are equally as authentic or inauthentic as us, but just believing in different things. Of course it is one’s duty to stand up and say “this is what I believe in, join me” if one truly believes in one’s beliefs and wants others too as well. What happens when the authentic actions or beliefs of two or more individuals clash? Wouldn’t things just get more, well, noisy?

So, it is dangerous thinking to assume that authentic action implies action which is for example socially and environmentally positive. This is not part of authenticity, but of a wider belief in what constitutes ‘right action’. To invest the term authenticity to this extend involves investing a moral import to the term which is surely not justified.

It can be suggested then that we would not necessarily be nicer towards one another in a world of ‘authentics’. Indeed, authentic behaviour could have overall negative consequences if more people acted authentically using violent or anti-social behaviour than using co-operative of non-violent strategies.

If we wanted to reduce levels of violent competition (2), what we would need to do then is to discover ways of developing more non-violent co-operative behaviour between people alongside helping them become more authentic. Authentic action as realised through a process of individual self-discovery by itself is not enough.

We must not ignore, underestimate or take for granted the complexity and beauty of the human animal and its nature, however uncomfortable that may be. This includes the part of us descended from the millions of violent, inauthentic thugs who enabled me to write this article.

(1) The Blank Slate, Stephen Pinker (2002)
(2) The Evolution of Co-operation, Robert Axelrod is an excellent place to start in this regard.

i've been thinking about how to change the world for a number of years. i think a lot as you might imagine. unfortunately, i haven't quite managed to come up with anything you might call clear cut as yet, however i thought i'd share some of general observations.

decision making and the vacuum of blame

I've realised that some problems are fundamentally about the difficulty of making decisions because those making decisions don't have all the information necessary in order to make a good decision, particularly about the decision-making of other people. The term 'the tragedy of the commons' was coined as means to describe scenarios like over-use of a natural resource which is utilised by everyone. A good example is a fishing area which fisherman fish until there is no fish left, not because they individually want to run out of fish, but because the benefits of fishing sustainability are so diffuse and the benefits of taking as many fish as possible each time they fish, so immediate, that they act in a rational manner and heavily discount the future in their decision-making.

I have come to believe that such fisherman are not necessarily to be scolded as bad examples of human beings, as greedy or as lacking virtue. Indeed, i believe there to be a certain inevitability about these scenarios, unless information can be provided, and crucially 'trusted', amongst all participants.

I've become very interested in the applicability of game theory in explaining what look like irrational and immoral outcomes for collective groups, but what instead turn out to be simply the outcome of individuals or small groups acting in a way with reduced knowledge and/or trust in the behaviour of others.

i tend now to look at decision-making failures and don't immediately assume there is someone or something blame. For example, the capitalist system, corporate greed, bad government, lack of confidence etc. If some of our problems are fundamental to our ability to process information and make decisions for the group as individuals or smaller groups, we should acknowledge that, and attempt to address without necessary recourse to a moral reckoning for the participants.

Of course, sometimes there are culprits! It's just useful to note in my book that sometimes it's not useful or helpful to think in terms of blame.

Prisoners Dilemma and Theory of the Bomb

incentivising co-operation

one of the most important things we can do then is to incentivise co-operation between individuals where the value to the group exceeds that of the individual. note that i say incentivise rather than enforce. Depending on your view of human nature and your political persuasion, you are likely to either favour enforcement, gentle incentive or a complete lack of any attempt to control or incentivise other individuals. This is my problem with political persuasion, you have to stick to your guns, when in fact each major social or environmental problem benefits from a different analysis being in a different context.

Sometimes a gentle incentive might work best, sometimes we need to punish cheaters and show them who's boss. Maybe we should be voting for policies and not parties? www.simpol.org.

Note that i don't really care about co-operation because it's nicer, but because it's better for more people to be better off than less. Survival of the fittest implies not the strongest or the greediest, but the fittest, those most adaptable to change. Often, and increasingly in human history, co-operative behaviour works best for survival of individual organisms.

Axelrod in Evolution of Cooperation mentioned ways to improve co-operation, including making the future more valuable (get rid of short termism) through people interacting together more often so that they will have to deal with the consequences of their actions with the people that are affected by their decisions. The example of the behaviour of soldiers from Britain and Germany in Great War is testamount to that fact. They organised signals to each other for dinner and recreation time and resumed fighting using dummy shells to make their captains/generals think they were fighting. What we're after here is encouraging reciprocity of behaviour which helps the individual in ways which help the group.

evolution and politics

I've heard it say that Marxism is a great theory, but simply that it was suggested for the wrong species. For those of a left-leaning disposition, the notion that there are aspects of our human nature which unalterably lead to certain outcomes or pre-dispositions within individual behaviour is anathema. We idealists would prefer there to be a blank canvas on which to inscribe the future of humanity. I think one of the most important things the left needs to do intellectually, is to acknowledge the fundamentals of evolutionary biology and seek to address the limitations (and therefore the true potential) of what it means to be human.

Darwinian Left and The Blank Slate, both great books in highlighting the challenges we face in uncovering and dealing with fundamental issues of human nature and how this affects social policy formation.

so what?

Well, i guess i'm thinking right now of some specific solutions using the above insights. They are business solutions, or at least commercially driven and socially motivated which is why i think of myself as a social entrpeneur. I hope to meet people here in NZ who i can discuss these things with. I should say that i believe in specifics. We're only here for 70 odd years if we're lucky and i'm not interested in just positing another interesting theory about why we are the way we are. I'm interested in making something that demonstrates possibilities and ideally, that make peoples' lives better whilst allowing me to live.

nice nice nice

i must apologise to Ben, for whom my blog is 'too nice'. As i am no longer in Britain, i have obvously lost all trace of cynicism and bitterness behind in old Blighty. Not so, i'm simply experimenting with having a Positive Mental Attitude ™. Look, i know i'm going to die, you know you're going to die, there's no point getting too upset about it. Perhaps that's the only reason we laugh (no-one's ever really worked that one out either). Who was it that said 'every laugh is the sound of an emotion dying'.

Till next time.