They just moved the search box on wikipedia

It’s now on the top right, bringing it in line with the accepted internet norm of where to find a search box. It will probably make first-time viewers of the site more familiar with the interface, so more likely to stay. It’s therefore logical where they’ve put it, up on the right where everyone knows they always find a search bar.

But I don’t like it. I can see the logic behind the move, but I prefer it where it was. It wasn’t because it was a better place to put it, or it made searching easier, but because I liked it there. It was aesthetically right.

But we’re also talking about a big shift of something important from the left to the right of the visual field. Any kind of left/right change has a major effect on the human brain. The left side of the brain controls the right side of the body and vice versa. The left side is (simplistically speaking) more logical, and contains the language centres. The right side is more emotional, artistic, creative.

Perhaps the right side of my brain did like the search bar on the left-hand side. Because it felt good? Or just because it was on the left-hand side, so my emotional side could control what went in?

Whereas the left side prefers the upper right because it satisfies it’s own logical reasoning. That’s the best place for it. Liking it where it is isn’t an issue that the left side engages in.

Which all makes me realise that each half of the brain is indeed like a separate individual, with wants and drives and a certain way of thinking. You would first think that sounds plausible, since we know that the opposite sides behave differently, and in a very human way (although one side can’t talk, nor can it write). However they appear to be more like ordinary human brains with a few bits missing. And of course like humans they are very good at cheating and lying to get there own way.

The thing is, when wikipedia (probably) asked their beta testers whether the search bar was better on the right, they would have been replied to by the logical left side individual (the one who can speak and write) and they would have got a predominantly logical response. If they’d simply asked “Shall we move it to the top right, yes or no?” they might have got a different response. We’re in a weird situation here, where whichever side of the brain answers a particular question, it may give a radically difference response to the question...if it could answer it! The right side can therefore never answer the question, even though it may feel strongly about it. This may be the root of situations where an individual moves to another part of the country, for sound economic reasons, but then finds themselves quite simply not liking where they are, wanting to go back, but being unable to (for sound, logical reasons).

Sounds like the war between Right and Left brain isn’t a war at all, it’s a situation of Dominance of Left over Right, Mind over Heart, and perhaps it’s why we are often miserable. Right Brain can’t tell you why it feels so unhappy, so it does the next best thing, it lets you feel it for yourself. It’s like the soldiers of the right bunging a smoke or stun grenade over to the left side of the brain and incapacitating all of it, and allowing the right side to take over for a while. A wash of emotion like that is obviously a threat to the left side. Well logically a threat, which is why the left side often decides in favour of the emotion.

People use the phrase “Body Politic” and that description fits with the way the two sides of the brain deal with each other. The left side will continue to convey (through language and communication) it’s own viewpoint of any situation to the outside world. The right side can’t communicate that way. It doesn’t say or do, it feels, it knows, and it is. So basically the left side can control and dominate the right side’s ability to convey it’s own hopes and wishes to the outside.

So no, I don’t like the Search Bar up there. I don’t have the same sense of enjoyment I used to get when I was following a Search trail for hours. I’m reading away, and it’s all very interesting, and then I want to search for something related, something still interesting, and I’m stumped by that need to move my mouse, my arm, my focus, up on the right. It just doesn’t feel as much fun anymore.

Why Democracy Doesn't Work

Standing on the train station as a train pulled in, I watched everyone clustered round the door, everyone jostling for position, not even leaving enough room for anyone to get off. And I suddenly thought “that’s why the world’s in such a financial mess.” It’s every man for himself!

A human’s natural state is to be led, to be controlled. We need to follow a leader, to be told what to do. But we also have an inbuilt need to strive for freedom, a desire to be the leader ourselves. But that doesn’t mean we need freedom. That way lies anarchy, and anarchy doesn’t work, because as individuals we also have a drive for self-preservation, and a self-serving attitude gets in the way when you’re trying to do what’s best for your social group.

You can have too much freedom.

We may be human, but we’re not as unique as we would like to think we are. We’re still simians, and there are lots of other examples of simian society that give us a very good insight into our own natural drives. Look at Mountain Gorillas. Alpha male keeping a family group stable through a kind of benign dictatorship. Do gorillas have an individual drive for freedom? Of course they do. All the males are constantly working towards the time when they can challenge the silverback for leadership. Gorilla society works, as does Chimpanzee or Monkey society. But if you gave them the freedom that a lot of human social groups have, their society would very quickly fall apart.

Our problem is that we’ve mistaken a Desire for Freedom for a Right to Freedom, and that mistake has permeated the whole of Western Civilisation, to the extent that although we still appoint leaders, we no longer allow them to do anything we don’t want them to. Effectively we have removed the decision-making process from the Silverback and placed it in the hands of the rest of the troop. The power now resides with those lower down the pecking order, individuals who would not normally have such power, are unprepared for it, and ill-equipped to deal with it.

On a human level, why invest decision-making power in the hands of people who may have no understanding of the situation that requires the decision? Calling for a Referendum on some political issue for example, when the majority of people who will be voting in the referendum do not understand the issue they’re voting on. Look at the Iraq issue. Remember the Gulf War, when Iraq invaded Kuwait, and the Western military waded in? Iraq surrendered, and everyone pulled out. What did everyone in the West say? “They had him on the ropes, they should have finished him off!” Fast forward a decade to the fall of Saddam Hussain, and now everyone’s saying we should never have invaded. And Western leaders are now bowing to public pressure and (in the case of Barack Obama) using a pledge to pull out of Iraq as part of their election manifesto.

How many times in the past 40 years have strong political leaders in this country been forced out by a combination of public opinion and the machinations of their peers? We’ve got to a state now where our political leaders govern not through what they think is right, but by what public opinion dictates. Major political decisions are taken based on what the public thinks and wants, not on what may well be good for the public as a whole.

But of course, when our leaders are not elected because they are strong and have proved their ability to lead, but because we like the look and the sound of them, what criteria is that for running a country, or even a Civilisation?

No wonder we’re fucked.

The Empty Man

Think of yourself as a suit of armour. No I don’t mean your body, I mean your “Self”, you know, the person in your mind who looks out of your eyes. The person you think is You. No I’m not using this suit of armour analogy for the usual reasons. Yes, armour can mean protection, something to hide behind. But in this case there is another aspect of armour that makes it particularly apposite. Armour is made up of lots of different bits and pieces, all bolted together. And what do they make? What does a suit of armour look like?

It looks like a person. And that’s how You are constructed. Out of bits and pieces of bolt-on personality. Everything that makes a human a person has been carefully fitted, screwed on, slotted in, until the end result appears to be a normal person.

This is the Empty Man.

But hey, what exactly is this sham suit of armour actually mimicking? Why, all the other people around you of course. It’s built and constructed to fit in with the current social structure that its wearer wishes to live in. So you build it out of the same materials, using the same social bolt-ons that everyone else uses. So you fit in.

In a sense the Empty Man is a necessary part of our whole social interaction with our species, and probably evolved in tandem with our species’ own social evolution. But is the Empty Man simply a mirroring, a copy of our own inner personality, the essential Self-Awareness of every person, the “I”? Surely if our Mind already contains an “I”, why would we then see the need to model one? Why couldn’t we use the one that we already have?

Well…perhaps we don’t already have one. Let’s look at what our “Self” actually is. OK, it’s what makes You…You. It’s the person inside your head who does the thinking, who makes the decision, who talks to people, who actually sits there looking out of your eyes. But what do we actually need a “Self” for? We need to know when we’re happy, when we’re sad, when we’re angry, when we’re hungry, when we’re tired. Hang on though. When we’re hungry we eat. When we’re tired we sleep. We don’t need a concept of Self for that. A Flatworm can do all these things, and it doesn’t have a Self. Right, but what about being happy or sad, or angry? Well these are emotions, and as such are social aspects of your personality. There’s not much point in being happy or sad or angry, if there’s no-one around for you to share these emotions with.

Let’s face it, we only need a concept of Self in order to interact with other members of our species. That’s the point of the Suit of Armour that is the essence of the Empty Man. It’s a construct to enable us to live in the Human World.

So if we already have a constructed personality, in the Empty Man, and we only really need a Self in order to interact with other people, is it reasonable to assume that the Empty Man actually is the Self?

Yup, that’s probably it. The reality behind our Self-Awareness is this: Our model of the Human World around us contains a detailed construct of Ourselves, a model so detailed that it thinks it is alive. However, it isn’t a model of anything that exists. It isn’t a copy of our Self...it is our Self.

And that’s the secret of the Empty Man. Like a suit of armour, he is truly empty. He walks around the stage of life, strutting his stuff, forever refining his image by adding new personality traits here and removing obsolete attitudes there. A false smile for this occasion, some sincere honesty for that, and a squirming bag of unhealthy desire to flavour the mix. Far from creating a model that we can drive around inside our heads, we have created a personality that extends into the Human World and drives around inside us.

Not only that , but in order for us to function correctly, we have to integrate hidden, sometimes unsightly, personality traits into the Empty Man as well. We all have parts of our persona that no-one knows about. Guilty shameful secrets that only we are aware of. Naughty things that range from a hopeless infatuation for someone we can never have, right down to an unhealthy obsession with someone we should never go near. Without these hidden desires, the Empty Man wouldn’t be a true representative of all that we are, and all that we want to be. Of course these hidden aspects are just that…hidden. So why incorporate them at all? Well, because they are all parts of your human personality, and as such they all need a voice. These secretive parts of our nature may not be part of our visible armour, but they still colour our interactions with other people, the way we might talk to someone we secretly find attractive, for example. Although we might never allow that person to know our true feelings, those feelings still have a strong influence on how we interact with them.

If you doubt this premise, there is plenty of evidence to back it up. Look at the development of a child. At birth a child is armourless, but almost within weeks that begins to change as the child looks to the adults around it (and its parents in particular) for behavioural clues to mimic and incorporate into its own social makeup. You can almost see their personalities forming in front of your eyes. Somewhere between the ages of three and four a child learns to lie. This coincides with their sudden ability to generalise about the world around them, and for the first time to put themselves into “another person’s shoes”. This is the first beginnings of the Empty Man, and if this is true, then we are all Empty.

Thoughts from the Anarchy of my Mind

Why can’t I stop smoking? There isn’t a day goes by that I don’t think maybe I’ll quit this evening, scrunch the packet and throw it away. But I never do, and yesterday I really looked into my reasons for this.

OK so it’s the addiction that prevents me from stopping, but how exactly does that work? Well it changes my thought processes, making the decision to keep on smoking more attractive than the decision to quit. So far so good.

But what is actually happening in my brain? Examining my feelings, I find that I’m actually not looking forward to my own reactions afterwards. I know from experience that the next few days will find me annoyed and stressed, angry at my own decision to quit. I am fully aware that my mind is a fragmented affair, consisting of several separate units of emotion and thought, so I have put this down to me not wanting to experience the angriness and frustration of the part of my personality that is actually addicted.

I’m scared of discomfort.

Now any normal human being is scared of discomfort and pain, and I suspect this is controlled by an inate "self-preservation module”. Mind would appear to be very highly developed. Certainly there is evidence for this in my past behaviour. I dislike and avoid confrontation with other people. I don’t like trying something new, especially if there is a real risk it will hurt me, or I won’t like it. I have to really force myself to undertake tasks where the outcome is uncertain. I don’t like to stray outside my comfort zone, I don’t like to take risks, and I’ve seen this behaviour in my (currently 10 year old) son. The only times I can seem to override these feelings are with respect to other people whom I have a vested emotional interest in (e.g. members of my family), or in situations where the "self-preservation module" weighs up the pros and cons and realises that taking the risk may result in a Big Reward…or not taking the risk may result in more discomfort than the risk itself.

For example:

Taking nasty-tasting medicine to get better.
Running for a bus.
Suppressing my natural dislike of fairground rides for the sake of my kids.

In all these cases the outcome is clear and substantial – you get better (and hence feel better), you avoid the grief of being late for the bus (even though physical exertion makes you uncomfortable), and you avoid the profound parental disappointment when your kids can’t go on a ride because you don’t want to.

Unfortunately packing in smoking doesn’t give you such an immediately identifiable win. In order to persuade your mind to allow you to quit, you’ve got to give it an incentive. It's got to be something good to offset the very obvious bad (craving, irritation, nerves), and it’s got to be something simple and obvious that the relatively simple components of your mind can understand. Nothing esoteric and intellectual.

Unfortunately it's very difficult to find one. You’re not going to feel better immediately afterwards. You won’t look more attractive to the opposite sex, instantly lose weight (in most cases the opposite), or generally feel much happier and healthier. Although some of these things actually will happen eventually, in the short term, you will feel worse.

Faced with such odds, it’s no wonder your self-preservation instincts almost always persuade you that packing in smoking is a bad idea.

Now about personal confrontation...

Life is like a Zip file

OK, so you've got this Buddhist mate, right...and you ask him “What’s the secret of life?”, and he replies “All life is an illusion, dude.” So you think WTF does that mean? Life is an illusion? That like doesn’t mean anything! You might as well say life is a banana, or life is a train track, or a seagull, or a molecule. It doesn’t make any sense!

So you go away and you learn about Psychology, and you find out how the world looks to Psychotics and Neurotics, and they like see the world differently, and then you learn about Neuropsychology and you find out about Pattern Recognition and Modelling and Perception and Memory and stuff, and about how the brain actually works.

And then you get into Quantum Physics and you find out how the universe works at the sub-atomic level of particles and stuff, and you learn how everything is like really dependent on probability; and you find out about the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, like how you can’t really tell where anything in the world is at a certain time, and how everything is really just energy.

And after all that you finally realise that the universe is just illusion, and so you get back to your Buddhist mate and you say “You were right, dude!”, and he sort of nods sagely and says Yeah, because like he’s known this all along.

But you see the problem is that he’s condensed all of that down into…into one short phrase – “Life Is An Illusion” but he’s left all the like baggage out, so without all that background you don’t know what the phrase means. You have to go through all the like science and shit to find it out.

It’s like he’s compressed it all into this one phrase, but he’s used lossy compression, like an mp3 or a jpeg of the whole thing, and he’s used such high compression that most of the stuff has been removed, so you can’t get it all back from the end result, like. Other stuff you can, like E=MC2 which is like a zip file, it’s lossless, and all the stuff is still there. If you put the numbers back in, it like still works. But “Life Is An Illusion”...well it just doesn’t work!

A Glimpse of the Nongod

Big Bang, right? Instant of creation. The entire Universe's complement of fundamental particles (aka "matter") created there and then, from an area of space that less than a pico-second ago had zero volume, infinite energy density...and no Time.

Yup that's the thing. No time. No Prior To, and no Just Before. And with infinite energy density (not infinite energy, mind), there's no room for data either. So no Information.

If you want to comprehend exactly what the situation before the Big Bang was like, think Black Hole in reverse, a Singularity. Only instead of matter compressing into Zero Space, it expands from it.

So putting aside the question of "how" or "when" the Universe decided to be born (there's no time, so you can't use "hows" and "whens" anyway. Re-phrase your question.), what about the fundamental laws of physics? Were they created at the same time? Well, if there's no way that any information can exist during the infinite density period "before" the Big Bang, then surely Laws of Physics count as Information? For the first proton to be constructed according to such Laws, information about these laws must exist prior to the Big Bang, otherwise how the blazes does the Universe know how to build a proton.

Doesn't this mean the only logical choice is that this information was somehow placed into the Zero Space before Creation started? An event that probably caused the Big Bang to "start" anyway? This of course requires the existance of some meta-space and meta-time for this information to come from.

And of course since this meta-Universe must also have started in the same fashion...where did it get its initial jump-start from?

Well it may not be God, but it would appear that there is still "something" out there.

From Carpenter Bees to Life On Earth

That’s when it all happened you know, back then with the advent of the social insect. One version of the bee went down the Hive mind route, whereas other versions went down the socially “independent” route – carpenter bees for example. At that point I think the carpenter bee evolved to effectively sidestep what must have been the logical conclusion of the entire evolution of the bee species, right back to the beginnings of life itself. 

 

Look at how life has evolved, from simplicity to complexity, and on a cellular level from independence (and vulnerability) to coexistence (and security). Single-celled organisms joined to become multi-cellular organisms (compare, say, Influenza virus, with…a human body). The trend is towards integration, ultimate communism, in which each individual unit (cell/virus/packet of DNA) is bred for a specific purpose and is controlled and directed from life to death, but then is almost certain to live out that life and die a quiet expected death. 

 

However there does exist other “modes of living” than integration. Viruses are essentially small packets of DNA that are not integrated into a communal “body” in the way that a multi-cellular organism such as a human is. And this decision is repeated again and again at increasingly macroscopic levels. A bee (itself a multi-cellular conglomerate) decides to take a more “individual-oriented” direction in life. Animals decide to live in herds, then improve their chances by evolving selfish behavioural strategies. Even up to humans deciding to live in tribes…and then attacking other tribes. Isn’t that a strive towards diversity and individualism as well? It is, if you look at life on Earth as a whole. But if you take one individual species and only view those changes in relation to the species itself, you get a different picture. 

 

Look at homo sapiens. At some point the DNA in all our cells existed inside various scattered uni-cellular organisms. Some time in this distant cellular past the mutation coin was tossed – shall we remain individuals, or become part of a collective? Actually you can probably trace this back to when a single cell replicated and something happened (a mutation in DNA) to change the way the cell behaved during replication. A tendency to “hold on” to the sibling cell that has just been created, rather than allow it to drift off into an individual (and probably short) life. In fact I bet that’s it. If a cell has stayed in a place long enough, that place is probably likely to be “safe”, so therefore any offspring (or clones really) might have a better chance of survival if they stayed in the same vicinity as their parent. Pure weight of statistical chance ensures that if you’ve lived long enough, you’re likely to be living in a place that your offspring would also live long in. 

 

If you look at it on that level, you can see that the simple evolutionary advantage of forming a close bond with the cell that just produced you is not questionable. It’s blindingly obvious by looking at simple statistics. So at that point in the development in the cell, if that kind of mutation occurs, it will ensure its propagation successfully each time, simply through the numbers. So the decision is won when you get to that level, by collectivism (ignore viruses, they just haven’t got to the decision yet). But then when you get further down the evolutionary line that leads to you or me, you get asked the question again, and this time on the “organism” level. That is to say mutation occurs in one of the organism’s cells that is then passed on completely to one or more offspring. We’re dealing with a collective of cells, cells who have lost the right to individualism billions of generations ago, but the decision is now being made at a higher level, and groups of higher cells are involved. The decision is being made by the organism itself (you or me). 

 

Let me straighten that out. The decision is still resulting from a mutation in the DNA of a single cell, but the mutation is not affecting the cell individually, rather the properties, or behaviour of the collective as a whole. In effect evolutionary change is affecting the structure of the entire organism, the cells themselves change relatively little. Though of course it’s only random mutations in sex cells that get passed on to the next generation. Although random mutations do occur in single cells, there’s no way the DNA from your recalcitrant liver cell is going to be transferred to your gametes...especially if you’re a girl, because your gametes are already formed before you are born. Anyway, as we can see the decision is a highly successful one for “collectivism” at whatever level you make it. It always works. 

 

Unless of course a cell or organism is in a situation which appears safe, but is only so due to a statistical glitch – the apparent decrease in mortality rate of the previous generational line. But ultimately whenever a cell…or an organism…or a herd of organisms…or a tribe of humans...is faced with this decision, it should almost always be the safest course of action. And of course viewed only along the generational line of one species, it is the safest. Multi-cellular organisms cover the planet, so multi-cellularism was a good choice of that particular cell back then. Every species also tends to group together, in a sort of meta-organism, be that a flock, a tribe, a city, or a country. There are exceptions of course at any level, but looked at introspectively, each one is simply the result of a decision that hasn’t been made, because the question has not yet been asked.