Re-building History?

Adam Curtis stitches together an array of extraordinary archive film footage in Can't Get You Out of My Head

Re-Building the Real History &

Organisation of a Required Class Consciousness

There is a current on-going series of films on the BBC (Can't Get You Out of My Head), which far from being politically radical, is actually in concert with that station's News Programmes, and much of its General Content across the whole range of genres, from Drama to all other types of entertainment, are purposely working increasingly hard to either instil-into, cajole, bully or merely influence its listeners and viewers, into a hopeless and increasingly cowed state of accepting that all of the mounting calamities besetting them, at present, are entirely of their own selfish making, and actually natural built-in weaknesses within themselves.

But this isn't True!

Even the total dishonesty and complete incompetence of the Tory Government, led by Boris Johnson, is NEVER revealed by the media for what it is, and what they are trying to impose both physically-and-blame-wise by allowing to pile up, all the agonies of their OWN mishandling, into a slowly-but-surely drift into putting most of the blame upon the people themselves.

Even, any "good policies", are never carried through to a satisfactory conclusion, because they were really always only gestures, included in order to con ordinary Working People into thinking that the Government has their best interests at heart, while, in fact, always-and-ever getting things back to having the money once again rolling into the pockets of the Wealthy - their pockets: with every one back at work - preferably on lower wages, and inferior working conditions, and, if possible, well-separated from each other, rather than working together, where their natural Class Consciousness would be mutually generated once again!

Though the powers-that-be may seem to be failing, we have to clearly acknowledge just how the seemingly tumultuous mess, is, in fact, dramatically changing the forms, conditions and remuneration of employment or benefits for most workers, to significantly minimise the possibility of collective action by Workers to defend and even extend their circumstances.

And with the demise of the Unions and genuine Working Class Political Parties, the once possible means are no longer available. JUST when they are needed most!

So, they have to be replaced in a wholly new way, by using any still-extent Democracy, but now legitimately extended, well beyond the rare occasions when Ballot boxes are involved - to Public Meetings, initially addressing local issues, in the current Crisis, with decisions by Culminating Votes, along with actual organisational arrangements, to effectively carry them out! And, selected enforcers - subject to Instant-Recall-and-Replacement, if they are not carrying out the democratically-arrived-at will of the majority in such meetings.

Much earlier in this health crisis (in 2020) I published a series of papers urging that the organised response needed to be in the hands of such local democratic structures, for doing the basic jobs nest, and putting any National organisation into the empowered hands of the NHS, bypassing the Tories biased structures, and installed "leaderships"!

And all that would have been incomparably better than what actually ensued.

I will now re-issue these papers again herewith, to allow The People to make THEIR Judgments as to what should happen NOW!

Brexit: Manufacturing Consent?

While there are certainly some convincing left-wing arguments for leaving the European Union, none of these featured in most Leavers' reasoning in 2016, in the original push for a referendum or in the current Tory party's attempts to manufacture consent for a no-deal Brexit.

As the UK sits at the precipice of another general election, we must try and understand why and how the Conservative Party, and large parts of the economic elite, are doing this. The media (most major newspapers and television news including the BBC) are certainly pushing for this outcome and are engaged in a substantial propaganda war against Jeremy Corbyn and Labour.

It's worth re-visiting this great documentary, Manufacturing Consent (1992), featuring the ideas and work of Noam Chomsky. In this film Chomsky asserts that the media always works this way, in the interests of vested interests and big money. Brexit and this current election are no different.

Play

Play and its role in learning

I have been watching a BBC TV documentary about the role of Play on animal learning (especially in the young). The general conclusion was that Play was more important than it is usually given credit for.

But, any analysis of such things must start from a sound basis - one which must necessarily address a great deal more than the accumulation of just everyday knowledge and skills.

Indeed, to really get at the processes involved, it cannot be purely an aggregating mechanism, but also, in some way, informatively address unavoidable crises, and even the Emergences of the Wholly New.

Now, useful contributions can be made without such a stance, but it will never address the significant Qualitative Changes that are the essential ingredients in real Development - or The Evolution of Undertsanding, rather then the aggregation of Knowledge only.

So, though many of the points made were of some value, they could not address the more important questions.

Let us look once again at the Play of young animals in their early years, but let us consider it in terms of the diverse capabilities endowed to the animal in question by its Quantitaive Evolution!

For embedded in the baby animal, from birth, is a complex system of bones and muscles capable of a significant number of movements and abilities passed on to it by it Evolution over, perhaps, millions of years. The potential for what that animal could do, is already built into its form, and certainly NOT due to its actions and experience.

So, what is the primary role of Play?

It is to reveal to the individual the built-in potential of its inherited form, but as a form of pleasure and fun, rather than mere functional exercise - to encourage them to do it all the time. Part of that inheritance will be the endorphins and pleasurable emanations also released by such new movements.

It is a process of already available discoveries of the young animal's built-on potential, BUT, it is not how they discover the wholly New.

And it is not how Evolution takes place!

In the most advanced animals, like us, it is NOT how they qualitatively change their understanding of things! That is a very different process which has been termed Emergence, and must never be confused with the incremental accumulation of Knowledge, which ultimately just recreates what is already knowable.

Indeed a valid alternative word for what an Emergence reveals is that it delivers a Revolution: and such can be both in their Living Processes and in their Thinking. But in the latter it is NOT merely New Knowledge!

And, it is never merely an addition in either sphere: it is always cataclysmic and destructive. For it to occur, elements of what went before, first get challenged, in a series of usually overcome Crises, but ultimately do deliver the Emergence, where these have to finally cause an overall Collapse of the Old System, in what seems to be a debilitating Dissociation, but in so-doing it also dismantles the self-maintaining features of the past stability, and thereby enables a natural construction of a wholly New System.

This is always totally unpredictable from the prior seemingly permanent Stability.

And, if you dont believe it.....What was the Origin of Life, and the much latter Appearence of Consciousness? What was the Neolithic Revolution, when Mankind, after hundreds of thousands of years, switched from being Hunter/Gatherers to Farmers and Domesticators of Food Animals?

Also what were the English, American, French and Russian Social Revolutoons?

And why is all of this not a part of the Thinking of Mankind?

It is due to one of these Revolutions that took place 2,500 years ago in Ancient Greece - The First Intellectual Revolution, where the breakthrough was to assume the fixety of all fundamental categories, Names and even Concepts, by the universal adoption of The Principle of Plurality. For this excluded Qualitative Changes from Mathematics, Reasoning and even Science, where it still rules to this day!

The interesting thing about Play is that it limits what has to be passed in via genetic Materials, for in many animals and all plants literally everything that is needed is passed on in genetic material, but when Play is passed on, it both reveals the potentiality of bodily capabilities and also teaches the young animal how to use them in different ways - its more flexible.

There is NO training in flying insects how to fly, it is genetically transmitted: but in Humans Beings and many higher animals the transmission of playing, and parental care is far more efficient, if longer to acquire. Needless to sat Humans have an exceedingly long Childhood, while certain seabirds, for example, "fly" and swim straight from the nest, and are effectively "on their own" within weeks!

Evolution has equipped the higher animals in very different ways via actual Emergences, though they have never been clearly evident until Darwin and Wallace's revelation of Natural Selection, though even they didn't fully understand exactly how these radical developments occurred - they just discovered that they had happened.

The philosophical Revolution that began to tackle Qualitative Change did in fact begin seriously in the early 19th century, via the criticisms of Formal Logic by the German Idealist Philosopher Hegel, but he only applied his Dialectics to Human Thinking, and the task of applying it effectively across the board, and particularly in Science has only begun to make inroads there in the 21st century, with the recent successful attack upon the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Theory.

Now, there is still an enormous amount yet to be addressed, but Qualitative Change occurs in literally Everything so the current domination of Plurality in most Intellectual Disciplines, has still got a long way to go. Apart from the recent application to Sub Atomic Physics, the only extensive and indeed, at the time comprehensive prior definition and application to concrete Reality was undertaken in the Study of Capitalist Economics by Karl Marx in the 19th century, but both denounced and suppressed by an academia dominated by the pro Capitalist Ruling Class across the World, clearly because Marx's conclusion was the necessity for a Socialist Revolution...

Who delivers the News?

Graphic from Another Angry Voice

Without the facts, how can the People understand whats going on?

Can we really have a Democracy, without also having the necessary information to make informed decisions at the ballot box?

Who actually owns the Press and other Media? Who now organises the Social Media Platforms, and prioriotises their content?

It is always the Tories of this world, and their penumbra of "privileged-service providers"!

And it is clear what cause they serve - PROFIT!

Did the Working Class cause the Slump of 2008?

NO, it was them - the Profiteers and Bankers, extending the profit-making reach ever deeper into the poor, and then blaming them for their inability to be sucked any drier, and even shutting down the social services that are there to aid them: the completely disingenuous project known as Austerity.

And where in the Media is this truth exposed?

Absolutely nowhere.

Can the informing of the People be left in the hands of those whose sole purpose is to exploit those they are supposed to be informing?

NO! 

Of course it can't.

We have a National Health Service - so why not a National News Service? It could be independent of government - as an extension of a Real Library Service perhaps, financed through taxation, and NOT advertising. Local Papers would be produced by Local Libray News Servvices, which would also include a major presence on the Internet. And National Newspapers would come out of regional hubs in major centres throughout the country.

And why stop there? The publishing of books currently only survives if it makes a profit for the owners. A Public Publishing Service under the democratic control of its employees, would be very different, and it would also transform publishing on the Web. Indeed, the publishing of Music and Recordings, and the organisation of Concerts and Gigs, without the money making parasites, would benefit everybody involved. And, clearly, such would also be the home for Film Making - for writers, performers and artists would all be involved.

But, it would certainly NOT be as a top-down hierarchy, a bureaucracy as was established in "Soviet" Russia! It would be built out of grassroots Worker Co-operatives - today's real "Soviets", so that Democracy would dominate at every level.

Clearly, this would never be allowed under a Capitalist System, but would be ideal in a truly Socialist State. For, the fight for Socialism is never merely the switching of the Ruling Party of Government: it has to be far more fundamental than that!

Here is the key question:

If Corbyn's Labour Party win a General Election, what will the rich do to undermine it? 

And will we let them do it?

Time

“Time is invention and nothing else.” Henri Bergson

Time is not a ticking clock. It is the measure of qualitative change. 

The Time Machine (1960)

A recent BBC Horizon programme, which purports to be a serious, if popularising regular Science event, took an odd and askance view of Time, even including Time Machines and the possibility of building one. But, in the part of the programme I was able to catch, only one scientist, Lee Smolin, addressed Real Time.

For, Time is what separates incremental, quantitative science, from developing, indeed, evolutionary science: The Science of Qualitative and Revolutionary-Creative Changes. The rest talked at length about "Time" as it occurs in Formal Equations, in other words, NOT time in the Real Concrete World, but "Time" as it exists in Ideality, (along with the "Dimensions of Space", which in Ideality can be as many as you like) within the world of Pure Forms alone- the realm of Mathematics, a totally pluralist world, which can only be made to approximate to Reality in very carefully filtered-and-constrained Stabilities. For, Reality-as-is is most definitely holistic and NOT pluralistic.

Now, one of the features of the Pluralist Stance, apart from its tenet of a World composed only of eternal Natural Laws, and hence wholly excluding any possibility of Qualitative Change, or any means of explaining real development, has therefore, to be the surprising inclusion of Time at all (apart, that is, as relegated to a purely quanitative variable - as with everything else in that realm). Indeed, even when Time is included in Equations, it is only as just such a variable: "Time simply passes, proceeds incrementally, as do all other variables along with it!".

Hence, such time doesn't change qualitatively, into something else: it is more like an alternative "ruler" of merely quantitative changes in something else! Like the dimensions of Space, that of Time is similar, merely an overall context - an independant stage upon which everything happens.

Yet, Qualitative Changes do indeed happen to other variables, and the precise times when they occur are important. Indeed, using a particular quantitative variable to signal exactly when a qualitative change is due to happen (from prior experience), became a regular totally non-causal pragmatic frig within all scientific reasoning.

Absolutely NO explanation would be involved, just a pragmatic if-then insertion to a wholly new situation where the change was already ready and waiting to be involved. Indeed, sometimes a whole set of techniques can be recorded exclusively using such flips and no explanations whatsoever, in producing a required result: it is termed Technology! And, as one of my disciplines is Computing, (particularly Computers-in-Control), I am well aware of its value in Computer Programming too.

But, Time has, in all of these situations, been totally dredged of all its qualities, which are necessarily-intrinsic to literally all Qualitative Changes, but never revealed. We see Time as merely an accumulating number - an abstraction - much more easily handled, than its necessary role in many qualitative changes.

Let us take a crucial one - Birth!

In every single second, literally millions of new living entities are born.

The time since their conception is, for each type of entity relatively fixed, but it cannot be wholly embodied in a ticking clock. Indeed, what must be going on, has to be a complex, multi-interacting set of processes of development that can only deliver its result, when all of those finally deliver-together a viable entity, which is then born!

What results is an integrated and persisting, self-maintaining system, in which vast numbers of contributing components, are now integrated and co-operating parts.

With human beings, we may give the period of pregnancy a quantitative-length of 9 months, with the Birth happening at the end of such a period, but what has had to actually occur, in turning a single fertilised egg into a new human being, is the caused development of an amazing system: that 9 months is only an overall measure in time of that miraculous, time-involved, real process!

Time is not just a significant quantitative measure of time-elapsed, but what is involved in every contributing process, and affecting inter-relationship in allowing all of that system to deliver appropriately. And, the final Time will be intimately determined by the conditions involved: the overall time will vary dependant upon different conditions. And sometimes those conditions are not fulfilled, and the whole process is aborted automatically.

The arguments involved here may seem somewhat laboured, but the intention is to bury the myth that Time is a mere incremental measure, and consider it as intrinsic in all holistic systems of processes delivering qualitative change.

The above ideas can only mean something significantly new within a Holist stance, rather than the usual pluralist stance, and the clearest example of the differences are delivered in the events involved in major significant qualitative changes - that is within Emergent Episodes, when systems of interacting processes actively and causally precipitate the final flip into a new mode.

And, widening the study drastically over longer time periods, and significantly different Levels of Reality bring both the Origin of Life, and its subsequent Evolution, and even Social Revolutions into consideration too. At such scales Qualitative Changes are the only significant ones, and alone enable Real Explanations for what is going on.

Perhaps the most revealing and crucial System of such processes, is that revealed by this theorist, in his description of what he termed Truly Natural Selection, as it pertained to the evolution of non-living processes in the necessary precursor developments to the amazing Origin of Life itself.

Indeed, it was only in addressing this essential Phase that he, himself, finally realised the only way that usually separate-and-transitory chemical processes could finally become both continuing and integrating factors, and, without which, Life could never have emerged!

NOTE: Inspect any diagram of Metabolic Pathways to see just how amazing that chemical system had to become before Life could become possible.

All the metabolic pathways which happen inside every living cell

BBC on the Russian Revolution

Russia 1917: Countdown to Revolution

Last night on BBC 2 there was a programme on the Russian Revolution, which occurred exactly 100 years ago in 1917. But, if you thought it would be an unbiased and informative account, think again!

It was in fact an extremely hostile documentary, and had most presenters dismissing the revolution as a military coup d'état, which installed a dictatorship.

A lone sympathiser in the form of Tariq Ali did not at all effectively balance the tenor of the account, and most contributors used sources that were extremely hostile.

Neither Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution, nor Read's Ten Days that Shook the World were used, but, instead, an incredibly biased account having the main Bolshevik leader, Lenin, in disguise and manipulating away in smoke filled rooms, replacing the undoubted major turn within the People, who were making an objective Revolution, independently of any leaderships, but only resulting in success due to leaders who, alone, understood revolutionary situations, and knew how to lead a genuine revolutionary transformation, which was already happening objectively within the people.

When Kornilov was marching on Petrograd with an actual coup d'état in mind, it was the revolutionary masses that halted his drive towards the capital, and successively melted away his whole army!

No real account of the trajectory of the Revolution during 1917 was delivered here, nor how the new state could win both in a Civil War, and in several wars of intervention to defeat the Revolution, by the USA, Britain, France and Japan.

Shame on the BBC!

It was a travesty of an objective account. It was propaganda by an enemy of Social Revolution!

David Malone & Chaos Theory

Revisiting David Malone's High Anxieties documentary from 2008 (you can watch it below), he seems, at first, to blame the collapses in social situations to ordinary people's own-and-increasing lack of confidence - their damning negativity, but, he then moved on to explaining that negativity upon to the discovery and vocabulary of The Mathematics of Chaos. 

He also recognised a generally-adopted Prejudice-of-Safety, which he put down to the prior widespread belief in Stability, as the absolutely necessary norm for Reality - for it, alone, seemed to allow the delivery of both reliable Predictions, and effective human Control of natural phenomena, via a mechanistic Newtonian-Laplacian kind of causality (taken from Mathematics).

But, clearly, the main assumption in such a stance, was the idealist-belief that what happened in the Real World was wholly determined by wholly-separable and eternal Formal Laws.

Remarkably, in the documentary, dominated by images of the debris of crumbling, abandoned factories in what had once been flourishing, industrial cities like Detroit, Malone sticks to his "revelation" that absolutely nothing is exempt from the ultimate inherent Chaos latent in literally everything that exists.

It is easy to see why some people, including Malone, are so pessimistic.

The only possible conclusion seemed to be, "Give up now, you'll never do it!", for you can't do a thing about it!

Detroit

Malone, and seemingly his version of the rest of humanity, are all locked into a philosophical Dead End, totally ill-equipped to deal with such cataclysmic events. There is not the wherewithal, in their assumed stances, to suggest anything that could possibly be done about these unavoidable calamities: "they are inbuilt into all aspects of Reality!"

But, of course, he is wrong!

The universal stance, which he tried-and-failed to accurately describe (and blame?) is not the only possible position to take philosophically. If you study Philosophy, with a view to equipping yourself to actually get closer to understanding things, you can trace its development from the Pragmatism of early Homo Sapiens with, "If it works, it is right!", down through the Idealism of the Ancient Greeks, as shown in both Euclidian Geometry and Formal Logic, and then to the beginnings of Materialism with Aristotle.

All of which, surprisingly, then co-existed with prior stances for literally millennia, which were due to the universally-subscribed-to Principle of Plurality that crucially made all causative factors separable-from-each-other, so that they could (though only very occasionally) be extracted as eternal Laws.

But, even, at the very outset of this adopted amalgam, the Greek Zeno of Elea did discover-and-reveal (in his famous Paradoxes) important contradictions, due entirely to this messy-and-incorrect mix-of-stances, but, even he had no idea what to do about it. Indeed, it wasn't properly addressed for a further 2,300 years. And, long before that turning point was finally reached, Mankind had found a pragmatically-effective way of "making-it-all-work-out", by imposing a version of Plurality upon defined and controlled areas of Reality, which they had constructed deliberately to reveal, as clearly as possible, a single, targeted, causative factor.

Now, this turned out to be a major breakthrough, because it enabled the reliable use of what could then be extracted, as long as the situation-for-use exactly replicated the prior situation-of-extraction!

Indeed, without further developments, this important change enabled the whole Industrial Revolution via sequences of processes, each one delivering only a single causative factor, so that after sufficient of these stages, the required, "predictable outcome" was finally achieved.

And, it was this that enabled the mounting growth and dominance of factory-based Capitalist Economics!

Abandoned factories in Detroit

Now, Malone seems to be totally unaware of this trajectory, and instead, can only mistakenly-identify its definite undermining via "discoveries in Mathematics". But, all his conclusions are only true, if all the underlying conceptions and consequent resultant Laws are assumed as being absolutely true.

And, that they most certainly are not!

The amalgam of Idealism and Materialism, made "possible" by Plurality, and the flaws of this illegitimate amalgam, got around by the regular use of Pragmatism, was bound to generate multiple contradictions.

The resultant Dead End was true only if such a mixed stance really did reflect Reality.

And. the initial proofs that this certainly wasn't the case were delivered by Hegel around 200 years ago, when, on the basis of the very different Principle of Holism - "Everything affects everything else!", was able to show that Dichotomous Pairs of contradictory concepts were inevitable with the current mistaken pluralist stance, and even showed how such impasses could be transcended by the seeking-out, finding and correcting of the underlying premises that had led inevitably to these dead-stops in Reasoning.

It was, of course, his assumption of Holism that alone gave him a handle upon the real situation of Reality, and which led to the addressing of qualitative changes - impossible with the pluralistic fixed-and-separable Natural Laws.

A very different stance was established, which had complex mixes of causal factors, which didn't merely "sum-unchanged" in varying amounts, but, instead, actually modified one another, until some sort of balance was obtained, which invariably consisted of the dominance of one of them, within a balance of the rest!

Such a situation, which mostly only changed as a variability, around a single dominant relation, was defined as a Stability, which had the appearance of being both predictable and permanent.

BUT, in fact, the actually simultaneously-acting multiple factors could not be extracted as they really were.

And the one-factor-at-a-time method that had been developed, always gave different factors to the ones actually acting together in unfettered Reality-as-is.

So, the sequence of processes, one for each factor, though they produced an end product which could be predicted, NEVER delivered what unfettered Reality-as-is would deliver naturally.

And, most important of all, the times when the Stability in the Real world situation was finally undermined by small but crucial qualitative-changing of the contributory factors, for then, things changed in a major qualitative way, which could never be delivered by the pluralist methods described.

Hegel realised that a situation under study in the real world, without both the simplifications and idealisations into separate processes, would instead by a varying nexus of factors, emerge often with two exactly opposite possible dominances, and which of these predominated depended upon the changing mix of contributory factors.

His studies of such situations, which he termed Dialectics, could identify these opposites and consider what might occur due to the particular changes involved.

He termed his method the Interpenetration of Opposites.

But, of course, there was an important handicap! Hegel was an idealist, so he was speaking only of Thoughts, whereas these alternatives were much more generally true. Indeed, as I have slipped into describing them above, as of Physical processes too.

So, to do more than be a criticism of Formal Logic, Hegel's Dialectics had to be transferred wholesale to a Materialist stance - a task begun by Karl Marx.

Thus, the whole analysis of the situation which Malone was attempting to deliver, in High Anxieties, was like asking a non-scientist to explain Quantum Physics. Neither he nor his supposed audience would have ever been equipped with what is necessary to address such questions, and, of course, social positions with a whole array of political beliefs as well!

New Special Issue: The Secret Death of Chaos

Read the issue

This edition is a strange sort of double review. A review of a TV programme on mathematical Chaos from 2010, and a review of a "Marxist" review of it!

Having recently come across Daniel Morley’s review of the BBC TV documentary The Secret Life of Chaos, and finding that his critique (he is a avowed Marxist) was dramatically opposed to my own (also Marxist) series of review papers on the very same TV Programme, I considered criticising his contribution, but relised that a better service to those interested in such things, would be better served by simply re-issueing both together for readers to make their own decisions as to what was correct.

I commenced by simply writing a review of his review, but soon realised that readers would be better informed by seeing not only Daniel Morley’s contribution, but mine also. Access to the original programme would also be essential of course. Here it is:

The.Secret.Life.of.Chaos. by costello74


I was, to say the least annoyed at Morley’s review, but soon came to the conclusion that a Marxist versus Marxist head-to-head would be nowhere near as useful as a presentation of everything under discussion. So contained in this Special Issue of the SHAPE Journal there will be:-

This Introduction
Masters of Another World
Where is Their World?
Formal Chaos
What is The Secret Life of Chaos?
Notes on Daniel Morley’s Review

Review: Al-Khalili’s Sleight-of-Hand Analogies

Yet another proof of Quantum Entanglement?

In the first instalment of Jim Al-Khalili’s series on BBC 4 entitled “Let There be Light! The Secrets of Quantum Physics", he tackles the long-standing argument between the position of the Copenhagenists and that supported by Albert Einstein, on what is termed Quantum Entanglement.

As is usual in this area of Physics, analogies are used to attempt to “solve” (though really only describe) crucial anomalies in Reality.

So, here Al-Khalili uses playing cards to represent what is supposed to happen with Quantum Entanglement at the sub atomic level. And, by a series of modifications, ends up with an experiment, using two simultaneously caused quanta of light, which are, “therefore, entangled”, and he looks at their polarizations, to see if the idea of entanglement is “correct”. But, he defines the test as being a dispute between the two contradictory explanations of a certain case of the phenomenon – one by the Copenhagenists, and the other by Einstein.

So, Al-Khalili asserts one must be right, and the other must be wrong! But, I have to insist, “Why should they be the only considered possibilities?”

The way Al-Khalili puts it, one answer proves the that the Copenhagenists are right, and that the phenomenon is totally inexplicable physically, while the other (Einstein’s) proves that the two photons’ properties were fixed when they were created, and no inexplicable link between the two would be necessary.

Al-Khalili uses his described Laser Set Up with photons, but insists that we see it in terms of his analogy with the playing cards, so how might he be misleading us? Can the playing cards change, or are they fixed? Clearly, we are persuaded that they cannot change, all by themselves – that would be magic – especially if the change was due to a measurement made elsewhere, at the other case. But this is also misleading us even more!

Our quantum entities are not playing cards that are fixed forever - they were created (in the more usually used example of Pair Production) modelled here by the split light into two photons (and considered to act in exactly the same sort of ways with regard to quantum properties), and the assumption of that creative process being the production of two massive particles from pure energy alone, is made without any chance of it being mistaken.

NOTE: We cannot continue such a discussion without questioning Al-Khalili’s many, quite definitely questionable assumptions. He refers to a photon, which we are to accept as a disembodied quantum of pure energy. Then, also, in the alternative argument, two particles can be created out of just such a high-energy photon. No possible substrate is assumed to be involved in these phenomena, and finally, in conclusion, that separated entities can be still instantaneously linked, no matter how far apart they get. These are not to be questioned. They are assumed to be totally unassailable. What do you think?

But, this theorist (Jim Schofield) sees the area very differently. The phenomenon of Pair Production is due to the dissociating of a known-to-be-physically-existing unit (not pure energy) in a universal substrate, made up of large numbers of these, each consisting of two mutually orbiting particles, of one electron and one positron, which can also hold and transfer internal quanta of energy by the promotion of that orbit. It has been observed in colliders as the Positronium - in it's stable state we call it a Neutritron. (By the way, this assumption also solves electromagnetic propagation through space, and all the anomalies of the full set of Double Slit Experiments – a supposed cornerstone of Al-Khalili’s set of assumptions embodied in the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Theory). Finally, this alternative also stands upon very different holistic grounds, which means, “Everything affects everything else!” and also “Nothing is eternal!” 

Theoretical particle - the Neutritron

So, if our Pair were linked (synchronised) at their joint point of creation, and, thereafter, were in-step-evolving from there on, then both Einstein’s and the Copenhagenists’ assumptions (both of which are entirely pluralist) and requiring both eternal laws and eternal entities – must be wrong.

Al-Khalili’s presented alternatives are not intrinsically opposite, so that one or the other must be the truth!

It is, on the contrary, an example of a classical Dichotomous Pair of concepts, due entirely to common, yet wrong, premises, by both sides of the argument. The contradictory pair was entirely due to their mistaken common premises (embodied basically Plurality for both sides).

And, as the philosopher Hegel clearly demonstrated, a sound critique, and then a necessary replacement of those erroneous premises, would remove the seeming contradiction, and allow the impasse to be transcended, and a consistent and better theory to be possible, while opening the door to further developments too.

Effectively, both sides of the argument were determined by the same errors, and hence no resolution would be possible without those common and false premises being removed and replaced with something closer to the truth.

Now, such alternative reasoning may sound to be something of a circuitous route, but it is far superior to the thing it replaces. Let’s face it; the premises of the Copenhagenists mean that certain things just cannot be explained physically, and we must not even try! And, as long as we have an overall, formal means of getting what we want, in a given situation, then we must be satisfied with that.

NOTE: The final part in the experiment to test Bell’s “thought to be final proof”, was that if there was NO built-in relation between them, then the overall results, in his analysis, would be “more than 2”, whereas if there was an in-built relation (as Einstein insisted) the overall results would be “less than 2”. But, this is really only testing between the two options proposed by the Copenhagenists and Einstein, and consistent with Formal Logic. Yet, with a non-pluralist, changing situation, that test would not be appropriate. The tenets of Formal Logic would NOT apply! The thinking is entirely pluralist, hence it must have the supposed, totally underlying laws – independent of context – the same happening in all circumstances – in fact they must be FIXED! Whereas, that will certainly not be the case at all – and the holist stance is bound to be be much closer to the truth than the pluralist.

As with all pluralist experiments, they are set up specifically to reveal a given pluralist law, and one, which, to the holist, is anything but that. It is, in fact, totally determined by the context of the experimental set up. It isn’t a fixed Natural Law at all.

Finally, the whole World of Formal Logic, of the Principle of Plurality, and Form as Cause is certainly mistaken. In the end, its laws are those of the World of Pure Form alone – Ideality, and NOT of the real subject of Physics – Reality.

And, to cap it all, the assumptions used were, at the time of their establishment, historically unavoidable.

Mankind didn’t come into the World already ideally equipped for such problems. They have has to develop them from scratch over millennia, and the posing of the problem in that way was the only thing they could do at the time.

Closer to God?

Marcus du Sautoy - The Code

It just had to happen!

Picture mathematics professor Marcus du Sautoy staring up in wonder at the soaring structures of Chartres Cathedral, while extolling the ethereal wonders of Number in its design and construction.

He does it, of course, to reveal the essence of The Code (his version of the determining World of Pure Form alone, usually called Mathematics). For, his standpoint has the World bowing to such majestic Form as the Cause of All Things. And, clearly, such a position makes him an idealist, and most certainly no kind of scientist, and hence is related, at least philosophically, to The Designer and Cause of All Things” as also celebrated in that towering edifice at Chartres.

His theme in this episode of his series - The Code, was Number, and he delivered a veritable aria on the wealth of content hidden in this deceptively simple category.

Except that many of his examples were not in that category at all. For he dallied (with positive delight) over the wonders of i ,“the square root of –1”, and showed its many uses. But i certainly is not a number at all, but an Operator.

In its most basic form it is the spatial operator “Turn anticlockwise through 90 degrees”. Yet, he blithely defines i followed by i as i squared , which means “Turn anticlockwise through 180 degrees”, (or alternatively “Turn into its opposite” – the operator –1 ). His lyric to the virtues of Number is full if such ambiguous poetry, and yet he wants us too to worship this man-made set of abstractions which deals only in Pure Form and absolutely nothing else!

No Thanks!

Quotes and Inferences from The Wonders of Life

What is Life?

Let us consider some of the direct quotes, or occasionally the recast statements that infer certain positions uttered by Professor Brian Cox in the What is Life first installment of his Wonders of Life series for BBC TV, which commenced on Sunday 27^th January 2013.

Elsewhere, this writer has written a review of this programme, but the exact meanings of part’s of Cox’s narration really do need to be revealed as exactly as possible as he delivered them, because they do reveal exactly where he is coming from, and what he actually believes, not only about Life, but about the true nature of Reality in general, which he is certain resides primarily in his own specialist subject – Physics.

For Brian Cox is most certainly a fully paid up member of the current consensus in Sub Atomic Physics, He agrees completely with the so-called Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Theory, originally put forward by Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, and this puts him, and all his colleagues, into a particular and surprising philosophical position.

For the whole group are what are usually termed “shamefaced materialists”, who have steadfastly embraced a purely idealist philosophical position, beloved of such people, which has physical Reality being wholly determined by abstract, disembodied and purely formal laws. These are so pure that they can be most perfectly represented by mathematical equations.

Now, let us be quite clear exactly what is involved in such a position. These laws have to be eternal – in existence throughout the duration of our Universe, and act as driving essences, actually making the concrete material World behave as it does. Now, you may find it hard to believe that there is anyone at all who subscribes to such a position, and especially professional scientists, but I assure you, it is entirely true. They do have reasons, of course, for such a profound retreat from the once steadfastly maintained materialist standpoint, but that will become clearer as this exercise proceeds, along with just a little history of 20^th century Physics.

For, this position has been around for some considerable time, and is usually termed as Positivism when applied within Science. But, a much more descriptive label is the philosophical term Agnosticism (“I do not know”), for though the position purports to be materialist, it also says that there are many things not only that we do not yet know, BUT that we can never know: things that are “Unknowable Things in Themselves”.

Clearly, this was the stance made famous by the philosopher Kant, though it has resurfaced several times – a fairly recent interlude being at the end of the 19^th century, with what were sometimes called the Empirio-Criticists. This group included both of the scientists Max Ernst and Henri Poincaré.

When, a little later, something like this position was considered necessary to paper over the ever widening cracks in 20^th century Sub Atomic Physics, there was already in existence (and fairly “modern”) a body of philosophical suggestions that these physicists could subscribe to, and indeed tailor to their particular needs in their very esoteric area.

Now, in taking what Brian Cox actually says about The Wonders of Life, you certainly must see clearly where he is coming from. He is “in one way” a materialist, stressing the development of Reality without recourse to any spiritual or supernatural input, while, at the same time, rejecting the longstanding purpose of Science to explain why it is as it is. And, to cap it all, he surrenders all impetus in development entirely to a set of eternal Natural Laws – abstract relations (or Forms), which he insists actually “cause” the World to behave as it does, and even develop as it has.

So, nice easy put-downs will not suffice in dealing with such post-modernist eclecticism. The positions taken do NOT form a single coherent standpoint, but a variously based one, with either omissions (not spoken about), or a papering over the cracks (spoken about at length). So, the reason for these extractions from the programme should be clear. If you think that this universally commended paragon has been misquoted by this critic, you can make up your own mind by studying these important quotes. You may find many of his throw away lines more than a little difficult to accept. This fairly extensive collection will reveal many questions, which Cox does not answer, and many arguments that are certainly invalid.

The Quotes:

1. “Are wonderful products of evolution like dragonflies simply complex machines, for when they die nothing remains of what would be called Life?”
2. “The idea of the Spirit is understandable, because otherwise we would have to accept that Life emerges from an inanimate bag of stuff”
3. “It is incumbent on Science to explain what animates Life”
4. “What is the difference between a lump of rock and me?”
5. “It is only recently that Science has begun to answer these deepest of questions”
6. “Life is the result of the same laws which govern everything else”
7. It is how Life uses energy!”
8. Energy is indestructible: it only ever changes from one form to another”
9. “What is true for the waterfall, is true for everything in nature. It is a fundamental law of nature. The First Law of Thermodynamics – the conservation of energy law!”
10. “Energy is eternal!”

11. “The story of the evolution of the Universe, is just the story of the transformation of eternal energy from one form to another”
12. “And at some point that transformation of energy led to the Origin of Life on earth!”
13. “Volcanoes transferring energy from the very depths to the surface can produce chemicals and their reactions, which are very similar to those that produced the Origin of Life”
14. “Hydrogen ions (H⁺) instead of balancing the Hydroxyl ions (OH^-) as in neutral water, can be increased in number by energy, hence storing that potential in the heightened number of Hydrogen ions.”
15. “And such a produced proton gradient can do work, and it is through that, somehow, that early Life was able to use that source to drive its necessary processes”
16. “Now there are alkaline sub-ocean volcanic vents, and it is thought that, at the time if the Origin of Life, the oceans themselves were mildly acidic. Hence there was the possibility of a ready source of energy for Life to exploit.”
17. “And the vents are also rich in the chemicals that Life needs”
18. “Now, the energy currency for Life even today is still in that same sort of proton gradient, and it occurs in Mitochondria in every cell of every living thing”.
19. “So, if you are looking for a universal Spark of Life this proton gradient is it”
20. “But, Life doesn’t use energy up. So what does it do?”
21. “The evolution of the Universe involves the changing of energy from one form to another. But, that energy becomes less and less useful. It becomes more and more disordered. It’s the quality of energy that is changed. Light can be absorbed, but it is then re-emitted as Heat. The energy of a lower quality: it can do less. It becomes Heat which is of a very low quality of energy indeed”
22. Life takes highly ordered, high quality energy from the Sun, and converts it to an equal amount of low quality, disordered energy”
23. “This descent into disorder is happening across the entire Universe”
24. “Everything is converted to Heat, and the Universe cools down to absolute zero, and with NO ordered energy left, and everything comes to a halt, and everything decays away”
25. “Yet, while the Universe is dying, everywhere you look, Life goes on”
26. “How can it be that Life continues to build increasingly complex structures, while the rest of the Universe is falling to bits – decaying away?
27. (It is) “according to the Second Law of Thermodynamics!”
28. “The key is to look at the energy Life takes in, and the energy that it gives out. Heat is a highly disordered form of energy, and that is what Life gives out, but Life can hang on to a tiny amount of order, just enough to resist the inevitable decay”
29. “Living things borrow order from the wider Universe and export it again as disorder, but they have to export more disorder than the amount of order that they import.”
30. “Living things, being physical structures, must obey the laws of Physics, so they must obey the Second Law.”
31. “Just by being alive, we are part of the energy transformation that drives the Universe.”
32. “All living things share the same fate. Each individual will die, but Life itself endures!”
33. “Something separates Life from every other process in the Universe”

Now, I originally thought of countering every single quote, but let’s face it, they do speak for themselves! I cannot imagine many reading them with a genuine realisation of their truth, and with real pleasure. I am sure that they don’t need me to explain which orifice he is talking out of.

NOTE: For those who might like to hear a more explicit alternative to Brian Cox’s conception of Life, this author has written another parallel paper attempting to do exactly that.