MOPECCA – a question of maximum entanglement

I don’t know why I didn’t recognise the depth of this question before. It is: is there an upper limit to the number of PA that can be entangled in the one Qnot? It is not quite the same as the question of how many PA can all be in direct contact with each other at the one location but for practical purposes it is very closely related. There seem to be several key points:

• There may be no natural tendency for some PA to remain in contact with others. This will be due to their differing intrinsic characteristics – the difference/s of their *beings*. (A key part of the MOPECCA is that each PA is a separate manifestation of being, or somethingness, which is truly connected only with itself, although it may be interlaced amongst others to a seemingly infinite extent.) For the MOPECCA it may be that the single most important of such differences is the speed of causality within each PA. The is no a priori reason for them to be the same.
• Qnots are will constrain some PA to abut others but otherwise they would not except by accident.
• A Qnot requires a twist of at least two PA twined around each other to provide the basic minimum feature that can entagle itself in a single running loop. There is no a priori reason why more than two must or must not be in such an original twist.
• There is no a priori reason why other PA or PA twines cannot be threaded through the running loop without being entangled as part of the loop.

On the face of it the MOPECCA

seems to have no a priori upper limit to the number of PA which can be entangled as a Qnot so what actually happens in our universe will always be a question of fact – ie synthetic knowledge.

Plato’s cave, UMSITW, and apples: food for thought!

Insight from a decade ago

“I bit my own fingers; it wasn’t painful but I felt kind of dumb about it. But why did I bite on them?  I was standing in the kitchen gazing out the window and eating a small apple while waiting for my oats to cook. I was thinking at the time about how small birds’ brains must work because I had just seen a New Holland honeyeater fly full-tilt through the complicated air-space amongst the branches of our fig tree. As it is winter here there are no leaves on the tree but many small twigs and branches for a bird to avoid, yet the honeyeater did that with apparent ease. 

“The apple was small, tasty, firm and sweet so I was ravenously but absentmindedly turning it to get at the flesh of it when it slipped in my hand and I bit on my fingers. This got me thinking about how thinking and daydreaming require energy and brain space just as much as doing things with one’s hands and feet. 

“Clearly my eating of the apple had been only partially conscious, because eating apples is something I have done many times before. The rest of my awareness had been taken up with working out how the bird had gotten through the tree without hitting a branch – although it did cause one loose twig to wobble. 

“Obviously there was a minor novelty in the apple eating department: it was small enough that it’s surface was very curved, and my slobber made it too slippery for my blunt teeth to dig into that last bit of it. But the bigger cause was me starting to gloat just a little bit because I worked out the main bit of the bird’s trick. [It folded its wings and followed a ballistic flight path.] 

“That started me thinking of Plato’s cave …”.

And that is where this rumination from a decade ago ended. Now, after many years review of my ideas, I prefer to talk of the fundamental paradox of our experience as human beings who are aware of being aware of being here….now. Plato had no means of accessing the inner workings of our brains, except as the subjective inhabitant of his own brain of course. IMO this caused his to conflate the metaphysical underpinnings of the universe with the processes whereby we are conscious. Nowadays I am putting forward my ontological conjectures about the former as MOPECA – “the MOst Powerful Existential Conjecture Available”, and my strongly held views of the latter as UMSITW – [the] Updating Model of Self In The World.

Noongar Boodja – where is it? What is it? And can we ask: who is it?

Boodja is the word for country of the Noongar people, who are the original occupiers, owners, and guardians of the South West region of Western Australia. I am not knowledgeable about Noongar society or culture, nor do I know Noongar language, but I am now determined to learn.

Why now? I have lived in Western Australia most of my life, since my family migrated here some 55 years ago when I was just 15 years old. In all that time I was never told, nor did I read, the true story of what happened as this part of Australia was colonised by, predominantly, British people. A couple of months ago however I heard about a book by Bill Gammage: _The Biggest Estate on Earth – How Aborigines Made Australia_. I haven’t finished reading the book yet but I already got the message: up until 1788 the plants and animals of Australia were being carefully and systematically looked after by the native peoples – *everywhere*! Everywhere that is was feasible for people to visit and hunt and collect, was being managed according to principles and ecological practices based on local knowledge gained over the course of thousands of years! The evidence that Bill Gammage has collected, based on the journals, drawings, and paintings of early colonists and ‘explorers’ shows this convincingly. The layout of the distributions of forest boundaries, woodlands, grasslands, free standing shade trees, etc, could only have been achieved by following plans of sequential procedures over very long periods of time, hundreds of years in some cases.

What this indicates is an intimate knowledge in each local area, of the land, of the climate, and of the properties and requirements of all the species which could be detected by the naked senses. Furthermore this accumulated knowledge was being passed down from each generation to the next within a rather stable social system that had learned how to avoid problems of in-breeding of localised populations and to avoid or fairly solve the problems which always arise as the outcomes of injustice! Furthermore, as Australia is a continent subject to intermittent extremes of variation of both heat and rainfall amongst the otherwise more predictable patterns , the First Nations societies were clearly knowledgeable and adaptable enough to cope with such extremes.

There is much to be said about this but one thing worth thinking about IMO is that Australian First Nation societies were not class societies in the way that colonial societies were and still are. In fact as far as I can see it is only the native peoples around the world who were living on *and as part of* their country who are, or were, truly classless peoples. I think this is important because as far as I can see there is no class society on Earth which has successfully worked out how to prevent persons without empathy from getting into positions of power.

IMO the *vast* majority of social problems, wars, and other instances of social disintegration around the world, and throughout ‘history’, can be linked to the lack of empathy of powerful people. In particular to those who are/were able to avoid taking responsibility for the dysfunction of their actions and the disasters which resulted and/or the unfair and cruelly dysfunctional actions they encouraged or induced other people to do. IMO this is no small issue in this Modern Era

Thus, my question is what can I learn from Noongar Boodja?

Why Facebook wouldn’t do.

I have created web pages in the past and found that the host services ceased to be or I had to leave the provider because the national Internet system was scheduled for marvelous improvement [NBN] and then a subsequent government mangleated that plan [conservative NBN]. I foolishly thought that Facebook, which had a provision for adding “Notes” to one’s own profile could be a substitute because it seemed so easy to provide references to those notes in comments on various discussion groups.

But no, F/b had to do and ‘improve’ itself, ie change everything into a would-be commercial beacon. In a classic race to the lowest common denominator, the ability to create and reference notes was taken away. Presumably because deeply considered rational thought cannot be so easily ‘monetised’ as chat and distracting trivia.

So, WordPress it must be and hopefully it will be around for a while. Ramen!

Optimistic lay philosophy

We have many reasons to be optimistic in this wonderful world. One reason is that we can communicate with people of like minds just about wherever they live on this planet.

Another reason is that around the world today there already exists just about all the technical knowledge necessary for us humans, as a species, to eliminate all the terrible curses which have afflicted us in the past. What we need to do now is to all work together and help each other!

Two Big Projects which will improve our world

I have many ideas about how we can improve our world.
Two of these are bees which buzz loudly in my “bonnet”.

#1  The conversion of all bureaucracies into sustainable and robust democratic entities.

#2  Double or Triple the Biological Productivity of the Oceans. 

Changing bureaucracies to democracies

In my opinion if we take seriously Karl Popper’s explanation of the relative success of democracy then we need to put its underlying implications clearly, then start working on how to change the world! 

The starkest way to say this is: Any organisation or social structure which is not overtly a democracy is, or will become, entrenched authoritarian and, either overtly or covertly, a dictatorship of some sort. Authoritarian social entities, be they boy scout groups, private or public companies, established churches, organised crime syndicates, armies, or government agencies, all achieve their authoritarian control by disempowering the maximum number of people that have anything to do with them. This means that people – particularly the disempowered – are treated as things rather than equal others and this is the very essence of evil.

I have come to the conclusion that authoritarianism is possibly the single most evil legacy from the pre scientific universe.

The thing is, it implies that bureaucracy per se is evil. Many people will smile and say “Of course! Just look what happens; just look at the way bureaucracies stuff things up all the time!” I would certainly never deny this. Other people will weep however because they have experienced more of the deep frustration and powerlessness that corporate entities can inflict. Many more will neither smile nor weep, they just shrug and say: “Don’t bother, there is no way anybody is going to listen to you; don’t waste your breath, don’t waste your time trying to change things in this place because you can’t beat the system.”

Why is this so?

Karl Popper’s reasoning about forms of government led him to see the fundamental  problem with non democratic social structures is that they cannot deal fairly and effectively with the unforeseen negative consequences of laws or policies. Furthermore, the underlying reason for this is that nobody knows the future. 

I have seen a honcho shake her head at this idea – that nobody knows the future, but I’m sure that being female had nothing to do with it. I think many of our leaders and corporate superstars will want to assert that ‘we *can* make reasonable predictions!’ and this is true, after all that is what they are highly paid for. Popper’s insight though is that, no matter how good the policy, there will always be unforeseen consequences because in any particular situation there will always be more things that can happen then we want to occur, and very often there will be more things that can happen, sooner or later, than we can possibly know about before the event. And as KP pointed out there is as much chance of an unforeseen outcome being negative in effect for some one or more people as there is  of being positive. 

‘So what?’ you ask, and the answer is simple: any unexpected positive outcome is a bonus proudly adopted by the authors of the policy if ever they hear about it, but negative outcomes are not so easily acknowledged by those in charge. This is true not just for those at the top of a command structure but usually applies right down the ladder also because nobody likes to give their boss bad news. Even in the most benign of organisations something not going right with the system means extra work for whoever ‘touched it last’.

Is anyone to blame for this?

It will always be possible to point the finger in particular situations and of course the practise of hanging scapegoats ‘out to dry’ is a time honoured way of shifting the wrathful gaze of the god-like ones onto a sacrificial offering. Popper’s great contribution to our understanding of this though is to point out that unforeseen negative consequences of policies are inevitable. Modern science has the concept of entropy which states that within any closed system the amount of energy not available to do useful work always increases. Not many systems are totally enclosed though. The wider implication is that within any system we have to do with, good order and useful energy can only be maintained or increased if the overall disorder of the environment [ie the rest of the world] is increased.

Luckily for us the universe is a very big place and is expanding  all the time. Even more lucky for us is that we live on a planet near a star we call the Sun which provides a continuous flow of light and heat towards us which is more than enough energy to provide for our needs for the next billion years or so. What this means is that if we act in a reasonably intelligent manner we should pretty much always be able to deal effectively and fairly with the unforeseen negative consequences of our actions and policies.

What this requires though is that we always work together and help each other wherever and whenever this is feasible. Cynics may smirk and call this idealistic but I maintain that it is the fundamental basis of human success. Indeed the very genius of our species, is precisely our ability to work together and help each other. I would give it the status of a natural law!

to be continued …

Radically increasing the biological productivity of the oceans

This can be achieved through the creation of artificial upwellings of deep water at or near whatever locations the increase is required to occur. The reason artificial upwellings can cause the increase of biological productivity in the ocean is because surface water of the deep oceans becomes depleted of nutrients as micro algae, AKA phytoplankton, absorb whatever they can out of the water. Phytoplankton are found mainly in the surface layers of ocean water because, of course, they need sunlight for the photosynthesis which powers their growth. Sunlight however is absorbed by sea water such that 90% of it is removed for each 75 metres it penetrates. This means only 1% of sunlight entering vertically in the tropics can reach 150 metres depth.

A fundamental difference between the deep ocean and dry land, apart from the wetness of the water, is what happens when animals expel wastes from their bodies. In summary: in the ocean shit sinks! So also do any uneaten body parts that don’t float. This is altogether different from dry land where faeces falls to the surface where it can be washed into the soil by rain or rolled into balls by dung beetles, etc.

Of course rivers and creeks carry nutrients from islands and continents into the oceans and also there are submarine volcanoes and mid ocean spreading centres where hot rocks are exposed and water brings out dissolved minerals. But most of the ocean is hundreds or thousands of kilometres away from dry land, and the photic zone – where sufficient light penetrates to support photosynthesis is on average about 4 kilometres above the sea floor.

The natural processes which take nutrient laden deep, cold, water up to the photic zone are upwellings caused by cyclonic wind systems, and by winds interacting with shorelines, and by deep currents impinging on islands and continental shelf. Human beings can fairly easily induce artificial upwellings by making use of natural wave motions and/or the power of the wind. Small and localised upwellings can be produced using a pipe, with a one-way foot valve, hanging down from a buoy on the surface. Wave motion alone will raise and lower the pipe causing a pumping action which brings deep water to the surface. This has been demonstrated to work causing an increase of phytoplankton where the deep water mixes with the warmer surface water.

A much bigger upwelling could be created using wind driven barges, pontoons, or other mechanisms that are driven in convoy around an endless circle. The circulating convoy will create a gyre at the surface resulting in the circulating water moving away from the circle due to its tangential inertia. Water from below will be drawn up to replace the outward flowing surface water and this arrangement could be increased in size to create upwellings of enormous extent. On the other hand many smaller upwellings using this method could be made to create a current of cooler, nutrient rich water such as, for example, could perhaps protect coral reefs from bleaching.

It is also quite feasible that large scale artificial upwellings in the areas of the tropics where tropical cyclones, taiphoons, and hurricanes are born could could reduce the numbers of such storm systems which, otherwise, are increasing around the world both in strength and frequency. IMO there is potential here to save many thousands of lives and reduce the amount of damage which is set to increase greatly this century as a direct consequence of global warming.