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Here's a posting to let you know what I'm up to lately. Like I said in the post on What exactly is SMN and how does it connect with other technologies? I've been focussing on concrete implementations lately, rather than on discussions. One project was an artistic collaboration with Glistening Deepwater, called Mystic Visions. I've explored quite deeply into semantic and web 2.0 technologies. I've implemented the core algorithm for SMN in Java and the system simulation engine now has full functionality and the models can be imported or exported as XML files (this is still in further development but will be available for download soon).

But the current project on my mind is the idea of a System Oriented Modelling Paradigm. To give you some idea of what I mean, below are some excerpts from recent design documents – they are just a brainstorm at present. If these ideas make sense to you and you want to get involved then contact me – it will soon be released as an open source project.

The project involves an analysis of general computational processes and general systems, which re-orients system modelling practices upon a coherent metaphysical foundation rather than on a commonsense naïve realist foundation. Traditional modelling practices are seen in a new light and minor optimisations are proposed that can considerably extend the potential and overall functionality of designed systems. A detailed example is given in the context of software engineering.

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There are technologies that could replace our dependence on oil, coal, gas and nuclear but for financial and geo-political reasons they have been suppressed. However the motivation is growing amongst various power structures to release these technologies.

This is where AERO comes in.

From the website: http://www.aero2012.com/en/about.mhtml

This is the latest initiative by Steven Greer, the founder of The Disclosure Project. Quoted from its website: "The Disclosure Project is a nonprofit research project working to fully disclose the facts about UFOs, extraterrestrial intelligence, and classified advanced energy and propulsion systems. We have over 400 government, military, and intelligence community witnesses testifying to their direct, personal, first hand experience with UFOs, ETs, ET technology, and the cover-up that keeps this information secret.

See this video of a recent (2007-08-20) presentation by Steven Greer about AERO and the imminent disclosure and large scale development of energy technologies and the social impact of this, it is well worth watching:

For other related videos see the sidebar at google videos.

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This is a very simple and very brief distillation of some very profound ideas. If you think about it the profundity will grow exponentially :)

Check it out... Three Metaphysical Perspectives.

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Some Intriguing Mathematical Properties of the Mayan Calendar

This is a brief mathematical analysis of the cycles of the "Tun" or the transcendent Mayan 'calendar'. The analysis reveals some very interesting numerical properties, which show that it is certainly not a random concoction but in fact describes a complex and finely tuned process.

The general process relies on a system of cycles where each cycle is 20 times shorter than the previous cycle. Hence it tends asymptotically toward some point in time (year 2012). The cycle periods become shorter and shorter so that as the cycle number tends to infinity the cycle period tends to zero, i.e. the cycles become infinitely fast.

The so called 'calendar' is not a description of linear time like contemporary calendars, it is a model of cycles of creative activity. Hence it describes an evolutionary model where each creative cycle unfolds and produces the basis for the next cycle of creation. In such a process each cycle becomes faster than the previous one, as is seen throughout biological and human history. Initially there were long stretches of time between innovations but as the reservoir of innovations builds up the process of innovation accelerates. This process has been accelerating very noticeably especially in the last few decades.  More >

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I have recently begun to take a new approach, not focusing on explanations but instead on concrete demonstrations, instead of producing essays about ideas I'll focus on producing concrete products such as ontologies, software, etc.

I have also been looking into ways to get the message across. I have decided to look into developing SMN and thereby giving the mass consciousness what it wants - this will help to get its attention.

Understanding New Technology

First a quote from an article about XML, B2B and The XML/edi Group...

/quote
Gerry Galewski, a philosopher on information technologies, gave a provocative explanation on why it often takes years to truly appreciate the full potential of new technology:

"... when a breakthrough in technology is achieved, it takes us a while as a culture to figure out what we really have. New developments are culturally assimilated often based on what has come before. We can't help but place the new developments within an historical context.

"Here's an example: In 1844 Samuel Morse invented the ability to transmit information coded into electromagnetic pulses. He sent the first message of dot dash dot dot dash from Baltimore to Washington DC, and therefore people called this telegraphy.

"That first message Morse sent was 'What hath God wrought.' Telegraphy became ingrained into the cultural consciousness. It was easy to understand and deploy.

"Fifty years later, Marconi made a technological breakthrough. He broadcast electromagnetic waves through the air. But what did he send? The ability to modulate a signal was well understood. But Marconi sent dot dash dot dot dash. That is what was ingrained into the cultural consciousness of the time. So people called this wonderful new tool, simply "Wireless Telegraphy." Within their frame of reference, they didn't know what they really had. It took another twenty years for Lee Deforest to apply practical knowledge that had been around for decades. Deforest had the Eureka event, and gave us radio.  More >

Did you know we all have blind spots! See for yourself. Just cover one eye and stare at the central smiley, but observe all three, then slowly move your face closer to the screen.

                                  :)                                                                      :)                                                                     :)

At a certain distance (about 15cm) the left eye cannot see the left smiley and the right eye cannot see the right smiley.

These are localised points of blindness and their dimensions are apparent if you rotate your head.

These blind spots occur because at the point where the optic nerve attaches to the retina there are no retinal receptors.

This means that there are holes in our visual perception. But these holes don't show up in our experience! This is an important fact. Think about it!  More >

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Ontologies

My discussions over the years have left me totally frustrated at how twisted and confused the language is - most of the important words are literally back-to-front and people are thinking about the world in an inside-out manner. It's no wonder that the world is a mess... And it's very difficult to use a twisted language to disentangle a twisted language.

I've decided to try a different approach - I'm giving up sentences and essays entirely for a little while and building ontologies. I'm always trying to find ways to more effectively express simple but uncommon truths and the technology of ontologies has advanced considerably in recent years.

By simply writing essays or ebooks it only gets through to those who are already open to the ideas and meanwhile the mass delusion continues to grow rapidly and drive the entire civilisation toward annihilation. Most of the communications within mass culture are the psycho-babble of the collective ego and any words of wisdom are just a vague gnawing conscience way back in the collective mind that is mostly just ignored. That conscience needs to find some way of making its wisdom heard even in the midst of mass collective insanity.

I'm exploring one likely method - it involves a recent synthesis of computer science, the internet and philosophy. It's related to the "semantic web" and its essence is the construction of ontologies - philosophical structures that define "that which exists" and the relations between the things that are believed to exist. Very advanced computerised methods are being developed to determine implied ontologies and to use ontologies to structure information.

Every belief that is held or every utterance that is made relies upon an implicit ontology that gives it meaning. The ontology is just the lowest level of beliefs that structure every other belief that is built upon them. Beliefs are only recognisable as true or false in relation to their ontological foundation so if the foundation is false all later beliefs are false but they will seem to be true. The materialist ontology relies on a series of assertions of belief that are actually proven to be false - and only so long as people don't notice this fact and continue to operate upon that foundation they will continue to believe in fantasies that seem to be true. Meanwhile there are other ontologies that don't rely on spurious assertions but on well verified facts from information theory, system theory, quantum physics and direct personal experience - but most people are too attached to their false beliefs to be able to seriously consider these more rational alternatives.

As an example of how ontologies and beliefs interact, take the phrase by the Buddha "with our thoughts we make the world" most materialists cannot comprehend this because they believe that "the world" is an "external material context" and that we are just material objects within it so our thoughts cannot "make the world". But if one uses a more accurate ontology where "the world" is just a subjective impression formed by our minds and which by naive realism we assume to be an "external material context" then it is obvious that with our thoughts we make the world. It is also obvious that to think of ourselves as objective material objects in and objective material universe is not a rational position - it may or may not be true but on the current evidence it is purely an irrational belief. What we know for a fact is our mind made worlds - beyond that we should avoid irrational belief systems and approach the situation rationally.  More >

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I've been busy building a system theoretic ontology in OWL - I doubt if that'll make sense to many people - I'll explain another time - but below is a very uplifting story I came upon on the net here - it's also a great metaphor for many things.

Hope in the midst of loss

[This is the story of] the river Arvari - which till the early Nineties had dried up. Today, it flows quietly in the scorching heat, despite scanty rainfall during the past three years.

How the people of Rajasthan, which has no perennial river running through the State, brought back dead rivers - Rupa, Sarsa and Arvari in Alwar districts - to life for their own benefit is a story that needs to be told and retold, as a lesson to others in practising simple traditional wisdom.

It is a story of people who did not give up facing the environmental problems in their area - chronic drought, degraded land, distress migration and poverty. Neither did they get bogged down by the administration.

The ecosystem of the Aravalli range, which earlier sustained the region, has been ravaged since the Seventies. Monsoon run-off washed away the top soil, crops failed regularly, women trudged long distances to fetch a mere pot-ful of water, not a single blade of grass could be seen for grazing cattle, aquifers emptied. Through the Seventies and Eighties, Aravalli lost 40 per cent of its forest cover and each year, four per cent of the Aravallis was becoming a wasteland, according to reports.

The fate of the entire region was such that, recall old-timers, the richest and the poorest of the villages were the same as far as their economic condition was concerned. Ecological destruction had caused economic and social degradation. Yet nothing was more dramatic than the transformation of the villages along the banks of the dried up Arvari in the following years.

It was in October 1985, when five young men arrived from Jaipur to Kishori village in Thanagazi Block in Alwar district - declared a "dark zone" by the State then, owing to lack of water. They belonged to Tarun Bharat Sangh (TBS), and NGO. Though not quite realising it the men had actually come to the right place at the right time.  More >

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Commonsense, Fascist Regimes and the Ego

Whilst talking about commonsense realism and truly overcoming it, are two very different things it is still very useful to talk about something when there is extreme misunderstanding about it.

To give an example - talking about the dangers of smoking and actually quitting are two very different things however if a person believed that smoking was totally natural and normal and there was no reason to quit then first they need to overcome that illusion before they have any chance of actually quitting and becoming healthy. Talk can be a vital preliminary to actually doing.

So I'll clarify commonsense realism a little more by talking about commonsense in general. Commonsense is just a blanket term for whatever unquestioned belief system is dominant at the present time.

At various times it has been commonsense to keep slaves or to beat children or to oppress women or to carry a sword or to wear high heels or to smoke cigarettes. Commonsense is a collective trance that changes over time according to its own dynamic.

Furthermore, civilisation is a communal understanding and commonsense is the foundation of that understanding. It is a subtle dogma that maintains a regime. See The Gaian-Ego Hypothesis and Collective Meditation to Counter the Collective Ego.

Every regime has its dogma which is a set of beliefs that are protected from reason by a culture of denial. The nature of a regime is determined by the nature of its commonsense.  More >

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Psychological Manipulation

This is an excerpt from the e-book The Gaian-Ego Hypothesis. Throughout the 20'th century vast resources and great minds were employed in the research and development of psychological manipulation. For example, the CIA's program of research in behavioural modification called MKULTRA [FR, FR]; it was a top secret project and little is known of its real depth and scope but some indication of the nature of this project can be seen from this archive of almost 20,000 pages of declassified documents [FR], also see these other archives [FR] and here is some information on Russian efforts [FR]. Such projects were a major initiative throughout the 20'th century because the technology became available and the motivation was irresistible. When the minds of the masses are ideologically placed in the centre of power, research into the technology of mass manipulation became critical and enormous effort was expended in perfecting the science of manipulation. With trillions of dollars of vested interests and the power of vast nation states dependent on the minds of the population through their spending and voting choices, a means had to be found to control the minds of the population, this is simple pragmatism and market forces. The motivation is obvious, who would let their corporate empire and imperial aspirations be left to the whim of the masses? Especially when it is certain that competitors will be vying for control; every sensible power broker had to get involved or otherwise be left behind. It essentially became an arms race in psychological weapons that can be used against the population.

A degree of social conditioning is vital and leads to social cohesion but when it ceases to serve society and starts to dominate and manipulate society it starts to destroy society and to erode the very foundations of our civilisation.  More >

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The First Cambrian Explosion
or
The Global Cellular Meta-System-Transition

This is an excerpt from the e-book The Gaian-Ego Hypothesis. A major implication of system theory is what it can say about the nature of organisms, it relates to an aspect of evolution that is little considered by many. An outcome of cells creating beyond themselves is a phenomenon called the Cambrian Explosion which is an example of a global Meta System Transition (MST) [FR]. It was a systemic event that occurred around 550 million years ago whereby the ecosystem of single cellular organism underwent a change, giving certain cells (eukaryotes) enhanced communication capacity. Their subsequent interactions and systems of dependencies self-organised into vast collectives of cells that we call multi-cellular organisms. All animals including ourselves are such organisms and we are self-organising civilisations of trillions of cells with emergent phenomena such as mind and ego. Understanding this is vital for understanding the true systemic nature of ourselves and ultimately of civilisation.  More >

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Gaia or the Man Machine?

This is an excerpt from the e-book The Gaian-Ego Hypothesis. Also see The Man Machine - Organisms to Organisation, Consciousness or Materialism and Survey of the Central Idea.

Some have countered the idea of the planet as a holistic organism with comments such as: "But the question for us as individuals is: do we want our descendants to become like the cells of organs, organs which in turn comprise some larger entity - that is, totally dependent on the functioning of our civilised system as a whole, mere cogs in wheels? Is it inevitably to this end that the human pattern, like the metazoan and the social insect patterns before it, had to evolve? Lastly, if we should not want to evolve this way, are we still able to halt the trend that is already in progress, and if so how?" [FR].

W. D. Hamilton [FR], the author of this comment was a leading evolutionary biologist who was a forerunner to sociobiology and the scientific study of society as a natural evolutionary phenomenon. But in subtle ways, like most of his contemporaries, he was caught in a mechanistic view of the world and didn't have enough systemic insight to comprehend what it means to form a collective organism out of ourselves. Through collective integration we cannot but help form a super-system of some kind, we implicitly recognise that fact through the word 'civilisation'. It is the nature of systems to integrate and create super-systems and we are not beyond the fundamental systemic 'laws' of the cosmos. The only way to avoid creating beyond ourselves would be to cease all communication and cooperation and become isolated individuals or small fragmented tribes living close to nature, but for that the population would need to be massively reduced, the ecosystem massively regenerated and strict prohibition of all cooperation must be enforced. But in our current situation it is the case that for a long time we have already been "totally dependent on the functioning of our civilised system as a whole". We have already become sub-systems inextricably integrated into a super-system. But the important question is what kind of a super-system do we create out of ourselves, will it nourish us or devour us?

That depends on what ideas flow through our minds, what ideas flow through the culture and the way that we structure ourselves and come together in order to interact and integrate. These factors determine whether we create a fascist machine that enslaves us as "mere cogs in wheels" or whether we create a vibrant healthy living organism that can thrive and glow with health, where its health is our collective health, its intelligence is our collective intelligence and its joy is our collective joy.  More >

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A Psychological Perspective on Civilisation

This is an excerpt from the e-book The Gaian-Ego Hypothesis. As background to this essay see the related essays on Psychological Manipulation and the The Man Machine - Organisms to Organisation.

The process of constructing energised thought forms is the creation of conditioned stimuli or symbols that arouse an inner response. It is a cultural memetic technology that is the core technology with which civilisation has been built. A system of coordinated symbols, in the old language, is called an egregore and in the new language, it may be called a paradigm. Once conditioning has been imprinted in a population it provides hooks in people's minds by which influence can be exerted, either by the people themselves or by external power structures. It unleashes and harnesses the power of the subconscious mind, thus it is a very powerful technology.

Once these hooks are in place they can be subtly manipulated and turned to different purposes. For example, the rhetoric of "freedom and liberty" may have been imprinted to encourage people toward personal freedom and liberty but once this becomes a conditioned stimulus and it becomes a strong egregore/paradigm it can be gradually distorted. This may take place within the context of an authoritarian discourse so that it implies collective freedom and liberty through greater strength, 'security' and authority for the governmental system, which in turn promises to provide personal freedom and liberty, but in order to do so it must impose measures that ultimately destroy people's freedom and liberty.  More >