Independence of Mind without Resources

I come from a position of disadvantage. I had no family fortune (or hardly any help at all, for that matter) to get me going in life. I am doing trades that have nothing to do with my education (an education that, as the promised end result was a ('successful') 'being like everyone else') I did not understand or even see the point of at the time), so became entirely dependant on 'networking' for finding work (as there are few 'traditional' companies who would take my five-page-long multi-trade CV seriously). In fact, in all my 47 years, I have held two full-time salary jobs: the first convinced me to get the hell out of that 'jumping through hoops for rewards' rut and do something for myself, and the second... well, was so 'easy' that it temporarily corrupted my results-based work-ethic (and I doubt that I'll ever see an opportunity like that again).

So when one is without resources, they have only their willingness to work to count on, and intelligence (education, experience, imagination) comes into play, too. But when confronted with real-world situations, we run into a problem: (comfortable) humans with resources are, paradoxically, often those with the least will to work and imagination. So when I, seeking resources, show up with my ideas and willingness to work, the resource-provider has the option of just taking the former... and, if my situation of precarity (foreigner without resources) becomes too evident, they have the additional option of making me do all the work, then reneging on their side of the deal. It was often like this until I became less trusting of 'the better angels of our nature' (but I still fail there from time to time).

But my road to this understanding was a long one. I began from a place of utter naiveté (my childhood was fairly devoid of 'normal' human interaction), a (childhood) lack-of-affection-generated too-eagerness-to-please, and a total disability when it came to dealing with dishonesty (I tended to wax credulous in reaction to even outrageously dishonest claims or blame-responsibility displacing (on me)). All of this tended to lend value to the existence of others around me, and none to my own. And a childhood-instilled lack of confidence in myself added to the mix: I had a hard time demanding a decent wage for my work (because I (somehow) felt that I didn't 'deserve so much') until recently. Also figuring prominently was my (also childhood-instilled) credulty - and fear - of authority: only through direct work with such supposed 'adults' was I able to distill that misconception, because many 'authority figures', most all of them in places of comfort, are actually lesser beings (utility-and-survival-wise) than the average worker, with less imagination, too.

Am I laying blame for all that? It's hard to, because everyone involved was most likely convinced that they were doing the 'right thing' (at the time they were doing it). And humans with no value-judgement abilities (or desire or will to learn to or accept the responsibility for making the same) will repeat the same patterns as long as it 'works' for them (meaning: as long as it doesn't put their survival (comfort) in jeopardy). Some concerned actors probably still don't understand the error of their ways even today. When considering such things ('fault') it's hugely important to consider their motivation, and whether they were knowingly doing damage/taking advantage... and that's often hard to determine, as feigned indigation is a common 'defence' in situations of idea-reality discord/dishonesty, too.

The curse is triple when one considers that, with that understanding, not only will a resource(-or-safety-net)-free person be sure to be exploited, they will often be obliged to accept that exploitation with a full understanding of the imbalance of it all... or retire from society completely. But how can one do that without any resources of one's own and survive?

Revising Copyright: Quality Control + the Attribution System.

Already I'm dismayed at seeing those who have done no work benefit from the invention/work of others. Only the morally bankrupt (voir: a socio/psycho-path) could ever do this. Damn Edison creating the 'model' of the investor (they who have already profited from/exploited from the work of others) getting the credit and profit from an inventor's innovation and work, and not the inventor. Who actually invented the lightbulb? You probably still have no idea.

But with that little rant out of the way, how do we treat copyrighted material in this internet age?

The powers-that(-would)-be seem to be clinging 'all or nothing' desperately to an old-world copyright system, and it is failing them, as it is impossible to locate and control all points of data exchange. Not only do their vain attempts to locate remove, paywall or monetise copyrighted material fail, but their efforts can become an incentive to piracy.

It goes beyond there: especially annoying is the 'copyright paranoia' reigning on one of the world's principle sources of information, Wikipedia: magazine and album cover-image use is restricted to an article about that magazine or album, making it impossible to use such art for articles on a band member or book author. As a demonstration of this last point, I am at present working on the article about Camera magazine editor Allan Porter, and I cannot use any images of the books he is the author of or worked on. Even the portraits of himself (given to me by himself) are under strict control, and cannot be above a certain pixel dimension. I do understand the reasoning behind this, but this tongue-tied practice is only katowing to (thus enforcing) the existing 'system' without doing anything at all to change it.

It's about the quality, stupid.

I thought this even back in Napster days, when the music industry moguls were doing their all to track down and remove/paywall any instances of 'their' product. The irony is that the solution to their dilemma existed already in the quality standards of online music: 128kb/s, a quality comparable to a radio transmission, is palpably better in quality than the 96kb/s some 'sharers' used to save a still-slow-internet bandwidth. Yet who would want to listen to the latter in their hi-fi stereo system? It might be interesting to consider a system where only the free distribution of music above a certain bitrate is considered as piracy.

The same goes for images: even from my photographer point of view, I consider any image I 'put out there' as 'lost' (that it will be freely exchanged and used), and it is for that that I am very careful to only publish images below a certain pixel dimension online.

Automatic Attribution

It would even seem that a free distribution of low-quality media would benefit its authors from an advertising standpoint, but... it is still rare to see an attribution on any web-published media even today. So how can we easily attribute a work to its author?

I think the solution lies in something similar to the EXIF data attached to most modern digital images: were this sort of 'source' info be attached to all file-format data that circulated on the web, we would have no more need to add/reference (often ignored, and still-rudimentary) license data, and our website applications could read it and attribute a maybe link-accreditation (overlay for images, a notification for music, for example), automatically.... and this would demonstrably be a boon-benefit to media authors.

And it doesn't end there: this ties into the RDF 'claim attribution' system I am developing, as this add-on would allow the media itself to be perfectly integrated into the 'data-cloud' that would be any event at any given point in time... but, once again, I digress.

ANN (Artificial Neural Network) OCR: A likely dead-end method. Considering a new approach.

In my recent dives into AI-dependant endeavours, I've been presented with the gargantuan task of extracting data from countless pages of printed, and often ancient, text, and in every, I've run up against the same obstacle: the limitations of Artificial Neural Network (henceforth 'ANN')-dependant OCR.

For starters, ANN is but an exercise in comparison: it contains none of the logic or other processes that the human brain uses to differentiate text from background, identify text as text, or identify character forms (why is an 'a' not a 'd', and what characteristics do each have?). Instead, it 'remembers' through on a library of labelled 'samples' (images of 'a's named 'a') and 'recognises' by detecting these patterns in any given input image... and in many OCR application, the analysis stops there. What's more, ANN is a 'black box': we know whats in the sample library, and we know what the output is, but we don't know at all what the computer 'sees' and retains as a 'positive' match. Of course it would be possible to capture this (save the output of every network step), but I do not think this would aid the shortcomings just mentioned.

The present logic-less method may also be subject to over-training: the larger the sample library, especially considering all the forms (serif, sans serif, italic, scripted, etc.) a letter may have, the more the chance that the computer may find 'false positives'; the only way to avoid this is to do further training, and/or do a training specific to each document, a procedure which would limit the required library (character styles) and thus reduce error. But this, and further adaptation, requires human intervention, and still we have no means of intervening or monitoring the 'recognition' process. Also absent from this system is a probability determination (it is present, but as an 'accepted' threshold programmed into the application itself), and this would prove useful in further character and word analysis.

And all the above is specific to plain text on an uncluttered background: what of text on maps, partly-tree-covered billboards, art, and multi-coloured (and overlapping) layouts? The human brain 'extracts' character data quite well in these conditions; therein are other deduction/induction processes absent from ANN as well.

Considering Human 'text recognition' as a model.

Like many other functions of the human brain, text recognition seems to function as an independent 'module' that contributes its output to the overall thought/analysis process of any given situation. It requires creation, then training, though: a dog, for example, might recognise text (or any other human-made entity) as 'not natural', but the analysis ends there, as it has not learned that certain forms have meaning (beyond 'function'), and may so ignore them completely; a human, when presented with text in a language they were not trained in, may recognise the characters as 'text' (and here there are other ANN-absent rules of logic at work here), but that's about it.

What constitutes a 'recognised character'? Every alphabet has a logic to it: a 'b', for example, in most every circumstance, is a round-ish shape to the lower right of a vertical-ish line; stray from this, and the human brain won't recognise it as a 'b' anymore. In using the exact same forms, we can create p, a, d, and q as well... the only thing differentiating them is position and size. In fact, in all, the Roman alphabet consists of less than a dozen 'logic shapes'.

Not only can the human brain detect and identify these forms: it can also 'fill in the blanks' in situations like, say, a tree branch covering a billboard: the overall identifaction process seems to be an initial 'text, not text' separation, the removal of 'not text' from the picture, then it seems to 'imagine' what the covered 'missing bits' would be, and this is submitted for further analysis.

But the same holds true in cases where a character is badly printed, super-stylised, missing bits, etc.: in fact, if a word is not instantly readable (and this is a highly-trained process in itself), the brain seems to 'dig down' a level to determine what the 'missing' character should be, and 'matches' against that, and this is a whole other level of analysis (absent from ANN). In fact, were we able to extract the probability of a character match of every given character of any given word and compare this to to a dictionary, we would not only create another probability (the 'refined' chances of 'x' character being 'y'), we would also have a means for the computer to... train itself.

Gravity and Light (energy) is Everything.

Everything is gravity. Everything is light. Everything is both, and they're indissociable. In fact, the two together are a constant in itself, a constant that represents the base, or the base function, if you will, of everything existing in our universe.

The Inverse Squared law is omnipresent in both gravitational equations and magnetism (note: in an earlier post, I hypothesise that both are a variation of the same thing): the closer one measures to a given particle, the higher its gravitational pull, in a proportionately constant way. Concerning gravitation, Newton states:

"I ſay that a corpuſcle placed without the ſphærical ſuperficies is attracted towards the centre of the ſphere with a force reciprocally proportional to the ſquare of its diſtance from that centre."

- Issac Newton,

"The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy",
volume I, proposition LXXI

Or, 'translated' into modern equation form:

$F = G \frac{m_1 m_2}{r^2}\ $

For much of modern physics, this 'law' holds true until we reach a hard-to-observe (-and-never-observed) sub-atomic level, but 'goes west' when immersed in the sea of mathematical hypotheticae beyond. I'd like to maintain that Newton's observation holds true all the way down, but to do so I must explain my ideas on the dynamics that lead to this.

Every Particle: a Point Divided.

For the purpose of this article, 'particle' designates any non-construct manifestation of energy, that is to say any single photon, quark, electron, etc., (without considering later dynamics that will be explained later).

Where there is a particle, there is gravity. Every particle, isolated, is in a 'stable' state, an energy maintaining a constant 'resistance' against that gravitational force, in an action that could almost be considered an orbit. Gravity is considered to be a 'weak' force (not to be confused with the actual 'weak force' physics concept), as the gravity emanating from a single particle is almost immeasurable, and only combined (into a mass) does it begin to gain discernibility, but we think that because we can only approach and observe said particle outside a certain distance.

And it's that concept of 'distance' that has to change: it's only recently that we've begun to understand that it is quite possible, and quite normal, to observe and manipulate physics phenomena below the level of human observation; in the present day, we seem to have paused at the sub-atomic level, but, as a camera zooming in from a view of the entire earth to a single electron, the plunge can go far, far, beyond the latter point.

We seem to apply the 'inverse square' observation without considering what may happen at that extreme depth (of observation). Already we know that if we take the idea of a hydrogen atom and 'blow up' its proton to the size of a pea, one would need a football stadium to contain the orbit of the electron around it. And already the 'binding strength' (that physics does not consider as gravity) is quite strong. So should we retain the distance-attraction-strength aspects of the above model (because the 'has mass' atom model itself is not what we're looking at, here), we see that, at that level, the electron (particle) is still quite 'far away' from the point attracting it. But what if we were to take this dynamic to an even deeper level, even closer to any given point of attraction, within a particle itself?

Before we go there, I'd like to return to the 'particle stability' dynamic. As it has already been observed, different particles have different energy levels: I'd like to propose that that energy level is directly proportional to the distance from the 'centre point' it is bound to, that is to say, the source of the gravitational force. The basic rule (here) is: to maintain particle stability, the closer an energy is to its source of gravity, the higher it has to be. In fact, if we can measure accurately the energy level of any given particle, using the inverse-square observation, we should be able to calculate that energy's distance from the centre of gravitational pull attracting it. So if we were to consider the gravity from the 'weak bind' hydrogen atom model, and increase that inverse-squared down to the level of a single particle, the gravitational pull there must be enormous indeed... thus so must be the energy levels required to maintain that state at that level, also.

Side-note: Light (EMR) is a particle; everything above (in energy level) is two halves of one. 

To avoid referring readers to earlier posts, I'd like to resume these briefly here: there I posit that any ElectroMagnetic Radiation (EMR) 'boosted' above a gamma-level energy level will split into two 'halves', and that their 'forward' light-speed-constant (in relation to their respective points of origin) will be no more. These two 'halves' will have what modern physics calls 'charge', and they will be opposite, that is to say, positive and negative. Consider a waveform with a line down the centre of its path: everything above will be 'positive', and everything below 'negative'. Yet, although separate, those two halves are still one unique entity. This should not be confused with Einstein's 'spooky action at a distance' because, although the effects of this phenomena would be the same, his hypothesis (rather, his reflections on someone else's work) about the creation of that condition is quite different.

I suppose that I should also outline what might happen after that split: here I posit that the halves of a 'split fermion', since they are halves of a unique 'thing', will not be attracted to each other, and cannot annihilate each other, but opposing halves of two different particles can, or at least they'll try. Since the respective particle energies are close enough to their respective gravitational centres to allow another opposing particle half to get close enough to be captured by the enormous gravitational draw at that proximity, the two will attempt to bind, in a dynamic modern physics calls 'the strong force'. I won't get into the dynamics of 'particle(-half) binding' here, but the only 'stable' particle-half combination seems to be a trio, or two positives and one negative, or vice versa, locked in an eternal inter-annihilation struggle, and, depending on the polarity, the result is an either proton or neutron hadron... and this brings us back up to the atomic-level physics we know.

Model conclusion

I've done my best to explain my ideas about an 'energy vs. gravity' dynamic of any given particle in the simplest way possible (and I hope I succeeded), but if any of this stands to testing, another reality becomes true: any single particle, that is to say: photons, quarks (all 'colours'), electrons (and positrons), neutrinos, etc., are but variations of the same thing.

Dealing with Depression

I try to make my public profile a 'progressive, positive' one, but sometimes my frustrations with, in maintaining as much integrity as I can, eking out a living in an increasingly shallow, between-(programmed)-classes-exploitative world: we should be helping each other overcome our weaknesses, not using them as leverage to gain control over each other and all (and all the ill-gotten 'reward' that that brings).

And in this 'survive by imitation (so jump through these hoops, or else!)' society (henceforth STI), I tend to be out of even the out-group; my seeking to understand in-group behaviour itself seems to be enough for any STI to put me into the out-group, and I have never learned to just 'fake it' (and since I can't read minds, that is probably an impossible task). And when I explain to my clients the solution for a relatively simple problem (so they won't have to call me next time), I get looked at like I'm from another planet, but my message through doing that is simple: 'Anyone can do this, so save your money for real problems'... but when things get tight, I've learned to do that less (but always feel bad about it).

My underlining integrity also saddles me with an inability to compete with others in the market: I still fondly remember the day where some 'gung-ho' new employee in one of my client companies would rather call someone else (less aware?) than face up to their fucking up a system I built for said client company... not only did I eventually have to witness that sort of manipulation, but I had to witness the lie-filled play-acting of 'the other guy'... and had to watch my clients falling for it (because, as they new nothing about 'how' it worked (only that it did, then didn't), how could they tell the difference). And from then on the gung-ho grudge-holder tried tapping every ensuing problem on me (but it was really a chain reaction based in their fuck-up)... I have no weapons against that sort of dishonesty, so I ended up just dropping them from my client list (which is what gung-ho wanted anyway).

But by doing that, I'm short-changing myself in another way: the brain needs 'reward' situations for motivation, and normally taking home a paycheck should be one of those, but through my added level of thought (understanding), I tend to cancel that, or 'sabotage' it, as some may say... but once one spreads their net of awareness about what effect they have on others around them in an even wider area, there's no going back. 

So, even though today my survival-experience has given me abilities far above that any education could provide, I find myself unable to be 'taken seriously' because of my 'not jumping through the same hoops, the same way, as everyone'... and I say that because I even thought to seek refuge in supposedly-high-minded, rational academia (where I initially felt very fearful and small), but that presupposition turned out to be illusion, too.

So, at present I'm in a very, very, very reward-less world. Not only that, but I'm also blocked from exiting that dilemma by... 'powers' beyond my control (a single person taking advantage of their legal status (and mine being dependant on theirs) to make me pay their work-less, ignorant (expensive!) space-filling ways). I was already in a depression before this new supposedly 'new start' apartment (and my ex-drug-pusher-more-than-anything-psychiatrist thought that I've always been depressed; I'm supposedly unable to even process 'reward' (meaning that I have no experience with it), meaning that the drugs they prescribed would never work, either (they didn't), yet they continued to prescribe them (€192 every two weeks, on average)... this makes no rational sense, but I digress).

I used to depend on alcohol to 'boot' me out of a depressive state, or to make me numb enough to ignore those reward-killing 'details', but even that stopped working once I found a better understanding of what it does to the brain (and that I learned while doing research about why the antidepressants were fucking me up so much) and saw it for the 'fake reward' it is. And there, too, there's no going back (side note: so why do alcoholism 'support' programs never include the critical thought (lessons) required to overcome/re-program our 'default' reactions and instincts?). All the same, I would sometimes resort to my 'knock out remedy' when the depressive bout was particularily bad, but even that stopped working to the point where drinking itself seemed... a sad and pointless exercise. I can drink socially again, but I can't really say that I like it anymore... in any case, it's not what it was before. I feel about alcohol today as I always felt about weed before: one (rational) part of my brain being concerned about another part not functioning 'correctly'... not a positive experience, and it's like watching myself twice (in everything I think and say while 'influenced'), in a way.

So, today I have neither alcohol or antidepressants to 'help me though' depression, and my understanding of my state seems to be just another obstacle; ignorance could be bliss, but only in an ignorance-exploiting world (like today's). My only remedy is to make my own rewards, and that solution seems, for me, to cut myself off from the world entirely, and do some sort of humanities-service task that will remain in human memory. I would also like to develop my AI research (and I think I'm on to something there, but convincing someone to finance non-tech-educated me, good luck) and RDF development (my at-once utterly simple and horribly complex 'fact engine'), but I just can't support myself that way.

At this point I find solace in working with both my mind and my hands (and this apartment was that at one point - I did get a new kitchen-countertop technique invention out of it), but what I really need is to invest myself into something that I've evidently not yet had in my life: something for me.

Critical thought (or not): Autonomous-thought survival in a 'survive-through-imitation' world.

There's really something to say about the Dunning-Kruger effect: I'm constantly fighting to overcome it, and because of it, I'm not even sure how successful I am to that end. I keep going on about the importance of critical thought, but because of the above, I don't think I'm even very particularly good at it: those notions of self-doubt ground into me through my entire childhood plague still my every thought process (albeit, today, to a lesser degree), and that probably causes me to miss options and certainly to doubt outcomes (second-checking), and that lengthens what should be a 'normal' thought process enormously. Re-routing around early-life indoctrination ('programming') is a long process and takes sometimes decades of work.

And I got into it in the worst possible way: something happened to me in early life that 'flipped the switch' for autonomous thought... but I only can speak for my own mind, so perhaps this happens to everyone, and it eventually gets ground out of them. Anyhow, it seemed early on in life essential to my (subconscious idea of) survival that I understand everything happening around me; if something (I was told to do/imitate) didn't make any sense, I simply couldn't do it. What made things even more confusing was the obvious evidence (that no-one seemed able to see) that the 'ideal' goal of 'simply obeying' was a stressful, unsatisfactory, unhappy, and unfulfilled life. And the goals everyone was striving to 'fulfil' were almost never their own.

And when presented with an 'example' to follow, I soon found that the very act of questioning was enough to destroy, interrupt, 'poison' what was supposed to be a 'normal' social process. Yet not only did I not understand this, I had no answer for it (once one knows enough to question, how can one not question (especially things obviously questionable)?). That was a divide that I was never able to overcome, and one I only recently began to understand.

The root of that difference is in the 'survival' I mentioned earlier. It sounds strange and almost cliché said like that, but that is actually how our subconscious works: every decision we make is rooted in, and depends upon, that survival instinct.

And there is a 'switch'. How does one 'survive'? Whether we are familiar with our environment or not, we have the options of a) learning about everything that environment contains, and making our own decisions about what's good and bad in it, or, b), should we observe others already 'surviving' in that environment, imitating them (based on their overall healthiness and happiness).

But again, to one that has always taken the second option, the first option does not even exist... or, at least, it would most likely not come to their mind as a choice of action.

And therein lies the divide. To one that relies on imitating others for survival, any deviation from the (group) 'survival model' is 'different', and this can even mean 'danger'. So questioning the survival model is, in itself, already enough for a survive-through-imitation-er (have to think up a term for this) to 'out-group' anyone doing it... and once out-grouped, a person so deemed will probably always be mistrusted at a deepest level... unless of course they make some display of total submission. And this 'same or not' pattern-matching comparison (that the non-critical-thinker seems condemned to), too, is a 'switch'.

So how is one to negotiate with one who knows (or cares) not to reason, but only to imitate?

The thing with people able to make their own value judgments (think critically) is that they're persuaded that everyone else can think critically, too. Yet to find the answer to the above question, they have only to think back to the time (probably their childhood) when they couldn't think critically, or were still new it... and this is a hard thing for some to do.

Convincing someone who survives through imitation to deviate from their 'chosen' (often 'programmed' by others) behaviour pattern is almost an exercise in manipulation: either we have to convince them that an option 'outside' their comfort zone (programming) was a) their idea, or that b) everyone else in their 'in-group' has already opted for it (making it look like they are 'behind' or 'different', and this would make them even eager to adopt the new model (to conform)). And if one needs evidence of this and evidence that some, if not many, are already aware of it, one has only to look at almost any and all advertising.

Even more maddening, since the survive-through-imitator can/will not judge the value of anything for themselves, is the fact that they will continue to refuse to change their minds even when buried in evidence; when one knows not to judge the value of something, how can the value of that evidence be determined? In short, it can't (and all that is left/that 'registers' is the 'default' comparison (to an existing survival programming/model)).

Ridicule doesn't work, either, unless their 'in group' somehow joins in against the targeted... but, again, any critical thinker with any moral values would hesitate to resort to that sort of manipulation.

(side note: therein lies a point of irony in, the sheer disingenuousity of those who deem themselves 'masters (programmers) of morals': if one doesn't measure the value of anything, no moral judgements are even possible, making those 'moral lessons', to those who lack the will/ability to understand them for themselves, nothing but dictate to imitate (or else!), so it's hard to believe the gall of those who call that sort of dictate-serving carrot-and-stick (or else!) manipulation 'morals'?).

And what to do in face of this sort of divide? There is a frustration to both sides of it: the survive-through-imitation-er feels frustration in not being able to get the critical thinker to simply conform (and, subconsciously, sees the same's behaviour as even a danger (to survival)), and the critical thinker feels frustration at the former's inability and unwillingness to reason, and apparent dishonesty.

And when communication doesn't work to overcome this divide, what remains? Yes: violence. Overcoming/squashing this (primal!) urge depends upon the duress of the situation and/or the education/programming of both parties, but the critical thinker has the distinct advantage of being able to rein in their emotional responses, whereas the non-critical-thinker has only their fear (strength comparison, strength in numbers, 'thou shalt not' (or else!) programming, etc.) to hold them back.

If that's not enough, even the concept of honesty seems lost on one with no value judgement abilities of their own: if the only means of determining value is comparison, then, in any given situation, only the options comparable (beneficial) to the survival model will be considered (and everything else, especially things countering or questioning the same, rejected). To the critical thinker, who quite often is used to assessing the maximum available elements in any situation before making a decision, this looks like 'cherrypicking' to the extreme, but they have to understand that, to the non-critical-thinker, the concept of 'cherrypicking' can't even exist.

So, to 'work' with a non-critical-thinker, only is it necessary for critical thinkers to mask their thought processes (which would (subconsciously, even) trigger an alarm in their interlocuteur), it is necessary to avoid all attempts at reason and ridicule. But since the critical thinker will almost certainly fail at one or all of these challenges, and will certainly become 'out-grouped', the only means remaining is a long, arduous, one-on-one building of trust (acceptance as a 'reliable survival model') before even lessons of (how to) reason can even begin to set in.

Oh, the genius of the immoral those who set up the world this way: once set into motion, the survive-through-imitation machine perpetuates, almost immutably, itself, and its masters (the shepherds) have only to program the in-group survival-model 'leaders' (sheep-dogs) to propagate change through the rest of the imitation-or-else society (sheep).

That has been the model almost since humanity began to gather in greater numbers; it has worked thus far because our inability to communicate over long distances has contained 'packages' of humans into managable, isolated 'in-groups'. Yet it is becomong increasingly hard to maintain these, and it will soon become necessary to cut a dictate-able (survive-through-imitation) group from any other (competing group) influence entirely... and it's hard to imagine that those who would opt for this could ever become a world majority (at least, in the near future).

So, how does a critical thinker survive in a non-critically-thinking world (if they are not already an immoral part of the sheep-dependant 'shepherd' clan)?

Find your own autonomous as-away-from-public-as-possible means of survival, keep your cool, and have patience.

RDF (the 'Semantic Web') and the Human Brain

I was introduced to the RDF (Resource Description Framework) data model by the chairpeople  (waving to Paul Rouet ; ) of the "Paris Time Machine" project; they were sorely in need of a 'tech guy' (and I was the only one on the 'team'), but it was the only computer-oriented thing on their 'cahier des charges' that I wasn't qualified for; not only had I no experience with RDF, but I was totally unaware of its existence until then. I'm wondering how I managed to miss it: it's been around since 1999, created almost in tandem with the XML format (that is only beginning to seem 'more value than noise' for me), but it never took off, and is still far from anything approaching a standard (use) today. Now that I've looked into it, its potential utility is, well, amazing, but it's going to require a lot of work to implement: either the whole of the web is going to have to be re-factored to accommodate it, or we're going to have to develop an AI that can reliably read and extract data from all forms of publication (print and web). I'm working towards, and vying for, the latter.

RDF at its base is not a complicated affair, and its syntax took only a couple days to master. Basically, each bit of data is a 'subject-predicate-object' "triplet", for example: "Bob=><-->last_name=>Smith', or "Bob=>address=>25 maple lane' or "Bob=>phone_number=>0 (145) 628-5400'. So if we were to do a search for (subject) 'Bob', we would get all the data 'attributed' to that subject: last_name, address, phone_number. Of course, in larger data collections, 'Bob' would be a bad 'central node/identifier' choice (because that what it becomes in this context), but I'm sure you get the picture: in this way, it would be possible to attribute any 'type' (dictated by the predicate) of information to that subject, without any limitation and possibility of conflict (Bob can have two phone numbers: both will have a 'Bob=>phone_number' subject-predicate, and a query for 'Bob=>phone_number' (or just 'Bob') will return both). Furthermore, one triplet's object (data) can be a subject with data of its own: for example: "0 (145) 628-5400=>phone_number_type=>land_line' would turn up as a 'second level' of data in an 'all about Bob' simple 'Bob' query. So with this method, data linked to data linked to data... the possibilities are endless.

But that's not what excited me about it: I've always been fascinated by neuroscience (basically: understanding my own (brain's) quirks), and as I learned more about RDF, my thoughts, with bells ringing, returned increasingly there: there are a lot of similarities between the workings of RDF and the human brain.

Granted, RDF is a step 'above' our 'fired-or-not' basically-binary synapses, but the organisation seems the same. If we were to think of 'Bob', our brain would return all the data it contained that could be attributed to that entity. Our brain 'identifies' "Bob" by a group of synapses ('identifier'), and that is where I thought the difference with RDF was, but if we were to examine a more complicated RDF dataset,  easily-conflict-prone subjects such as 'Bob' would have to become unique identifiers as well (and 'that particular Bob's' first name would become, say:10001010=>first_name=>Bob (and 10001010<-->=>address=>25 maple lane, etc.). In reality, to avoid conflicts, most likely every 'thing' in existence should have a unique identifier (save, for example, our most fundamental elements (atom-types, fermion-types, etc.)... so if we reductio ad absurdam our computer's 'unique id', it will be a collection of 'on or off' binary values... the same as our brain's.

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Just a footnote here to underline that this 'binary cocktail' outline most likely does not describe the entirety of the brain's thought-memory-recall process; probably other chemical 'filters' figure in there too (and this is how we give 'value' to retrieved memories (over others)). This is yet something else to explore (and perhaps even exploit, if it can be re-created technologically), but for the purposes of this what-is-supposed-to-be RDF perusal, going there would be but a distraction.

There are no Gluons, Bosons, Gravitons, Weak or Strong Force... or 'magnetism', while we're at it.

...Not as individual 'things', anyway. All of these are the effects of the energy-gravity battle between particles at different energy levels... the varying degree and state of every particle (super-gamma split, sub-gamma photon, polarised-bound (quark) or unpolarised (lepton) make for the different 'effects'.

Magnetism is simply 'synchronised gravity'... of atoms whose outermost electrons are in that 'sweet spot' that is just to the inside of the overall atom 'event horizon': while being retained by the atom itself, that outermost electron(s) can 'broadcast' its gravitational signature while being affected by other similar atoms; the gravitational effects of electrons deeper within an atom's sphere of influence tend to be 'stifled' (negated) by the atom itself.

The centre of both gravity and magnetism (and this is no coincidence), 'negative squared' rules everything. Weak and strong forces are simply the 'proximity factor' of two particles, or the difference between two (bound) particles and another.

Of Sheep Dogs, Shepherds and Sheep

I've expressed in past posts my persuasion that it is critical thought abilities that divide humanity, but since then I've tried to refine and revise that somewhat, and attempt to apply it to the social workings of modern society. Definition of terms: by 'modern', I mean 'now'.

Through that I came up with the title's three behaviour patterns: critical thinking (or absence of the same) does indeed create two distinct behaviour-thought patterns, but attempting to achieve 'survival success' with these in modern society creates behaviour subdivisions.

One who thinks critically can seek 'autonomous success' (perhaps in mutual exchanges with other like-minded humans), or they can choose to use their critical-thought abilities as an advantage over non-critical thinkers (without any attempt to educate them): it is this latter type, the one I call 'the shepherd', that I'd like to talk about here.

Then we have the non-critical-thinkers ('survive-through-imitation-ers'): I used to (rather pejoratively) refer to them as 'the sheep', but that would mean that anyone in a 'management' position would be a critical thinker; this is hardly the case. It would also require that every indoctrinating religious leader be aware that what they are spreading is bunk, but this is hardly true, as many are genuine 'believers'.

This latter case puzzled me until realising that there is a fine line, almost a behaviour 'switch', between those who seek to imitate a survival model and those who enforce it. All that changes there is a reference to, and exercise, of authority, but the 'survive through imitation' behaviour remains the same. Thus the 'sheep dog' ('survival-model authority') and 'sheep' ('survival-model-imitator') classifications.

So, if the sheep depend on the sheep dogs (and 'in-group' comparison) for their survival model, where do the sheep-dogs get theirs from? The shepherds, of course.

The genius of this system is that, to 'enact' a behaviour change, all the (often behind-the-scenes) shepherds have to do is give orders to their sheep-dogs (with a healthy share of scraps as 'reward'), and they will introduce that to whatever in-group behaviour pattern of whatever in-group they lead... not only will the sheep dogs 'police' that behaviour, but the sheep will police themselves; in the surive-by-imitation thought-behaviour mindset, imitation is the only known survival method, and everything outside of it is a 'threat' (to be 'defended against' through various levels of denial/dismissal/ostracisation/violence), and simple observation shows that this is how many people behave today.

The religious example led me to that realisation, but the pattern extends well beyond it: in your local supermarket, for example, consumers may think they have the 'freedom' to choose whatever product they like, but few think to why those products are there (and not others) and to who decides this 'for' them: the store manager stocks the shelves, but they take the choice of products from (often central) management, and when it comes to chain stores, this is pretty high up in the hierarchy.

In this pattern I've observed that the shepherds will often put forward a 'believer' sheep-dog as a 'patsy-authority' while they themselves remain anonymous: we see this both in politics (many of the presidents of the United States since Eisenhower have been this (and the present one is an uncontrollable, failed attempt at this)) and religion (it's the cardinals that pull the strings, not the Pope). But yet other shepherds don't 'require' this as an accountability-deflecting distraction, and content themselves with controlling what products appear on the shelves: the Koch brothers and Exxon mobil (we've had the technology for electric highways and electric most everything since the 1970s, for goodness' sake) are good examples of this.

And this behaviour pattern is echoed in modern class-divisions and our economy: the top 1% are people we rarely see in public, and the more-visible shepherd-connected 'rewarded sheep-dog' levels fill the tiers below that; as this system saps the lower levels, there is a sharp drop-off (at the former 'middle class') when we get to the 'sheep'.

And in this system, autonomous thinkers who don't seek to exploit their advantage have difficulty fitting in: we have seen rare examples of honest, autonomous success (such as Tesla and Elon Musk), but many, to survive, must rely on shepherds (grants, research financing) for their existence, making them almost... well rewarded slaves (anything they produce will earn their 'benefactors' much more than they will ever see), condemned to all the social ills that being an 'out-group' entails, because, in a survive-by-imitation society, even though those 'not-sheep or sheep-dogs' do the demonstrable, overly-obvious 'right' of producing all the comforts sheep enjoy, since they don't 'behave the same way', the sheep will always (instinctively) think them 'wrong' in some way... that they themselves can't even describe.

A facebook suite to my last post (energy + gravity = 'light' (thus mass))

First off, quantum physics isn't as hard as most make out: there's a few base movements and interactions and the 'complicated part' is the math (expressing and predicting that interaction)... and that's partly due to the inefficiency of our 'traditional' base-ten number system.

Anyhow, a lot of present 'knowledge' (a lot of which has never been demonstrated) is based on hypothesis dating back to the early 19th century: the most cited of these is Maxwell's equations, themselves based on earlier observations of 'electromagnetic activity'.

Then and since then, they've taken the observed atomic (electron) behaviour and used it as a description of the actual content of an electromagnetic particle. I question this.

Because all that is based on observations of the behaviour of a -few- atom-types whose electrons occupy a 'sweet spot' that nears the 'event horizon' of its host atom's repelling force with other atoms (a sum of its parts' total 'mass' and charge), meaning that two 'sweet spot' atoms can in fact come 'closer' than other atoms whose outer electrons are further away from any neigbouring electron, meaning that they cannot affect each other's inner workings (but more about that later).

All of these 'sweet spot' atoms, because of their 'almost touching' outer electrons, easily transfer energy (heat) between them, and in some cases their outer electrons are held so weakly that a neighbouring unbalanced-charge atom will 'leech' them away... this is the base behaviour of electricity.

But those 'sweet spot' atoms whose electrons are near enough to their 'event horizon' to be affected by neighbouring atoms, but not close enough to it to be 'leeched', can be -synchronised- by a field of constant polarity... and this (imho) is the base behaviour of 'magnetism'.

Because if we add gravity (instead of 'magnetism') to the 'base elementary particle', what we have in the latter case is -synchronised gravity- (fulfilling 'magnetic behaviour').

Because if we observe gravity, we see that it becomes exponentially stronger towards its point of origin; in the above atoms whose atoms are 'almost touching', even though the actual 'size' of the electron may be small, the gravity must be great at that proximity (as would the energy it is retaining).

And gravity seems to extend to 'infinity' from that point of origin, but already at a short distance away it is next to 'nil'... but acumulate points of origin, and the combined 'pull' will add up, and if that 'pull' is synchronised (all electrons 'pointing in the same direction at the same time'), even more so, perhaps even exponentially (combined 'wavelengths'... observable even in ocean waves).

So if we have a point of origin, an energy, and an exponentially-stronger-towards-point-of-origin force that is that energy trying to get 'back' to it (gravity), in order to resist this force, the energy would have to be exponentially stronger/weaker with distance too: yet even stable, that energy is -there- orbiting the point of origin, and it's that constant gravity-energy 'difference' that is the origin of the constant 'c'.

The rest is 'consequential behaviour'... 'light' is a low-energy 'complete' particle that is 'chasing' its energy excess, with an oscillating 'polarity', in the direction it was thrown in: super-gamma-energy particle energy has (somehow) 'split' between polarities (as described in fermion pair (creation/annihilation)) that pull at -each other- with a force beyond gravity, stopping their forward motion.

That would make mass (in the classical sense) 'mismatched particle pairs', and I've already written about that extensively elsewhere.

In any case, the 'gravity vs. energy' model ties everything together, or 'clicks'.




But please, shoot me down.

Electromagnetic radiation is probably neither electric nor magnetic at all... and the Pandora's box that idea opens.

I'm about to commit physics blasphemy, but it's only me here, and I don't mind at all being wrong. These are just my conclusions after years of trying to fit the 'demonstrated' pieces of evidence together, and my ignorance in the subject may have even helped me try thought-experiment methods that may not have been considered before. My research tends to be pretty linear (following one hypothesis rabbit-hole down to its demonstrable fact-bottom), so I tend to hear about existing similar hypothesises only after I've reached a conclusion of my own. Anyway, with this I have yet to find any hypothesis similar to this one, but I'm sure that there's one out there, somewhere.

What set me off towards this blog-entry's title conclusion was my research into the demonstrable aspects of electromagnetic radiation theory: I was wondering if the mechanics of light had ever been observed. Even before going there I was quite aware that observing electromagnetic radiation (henceforth 'EMR') is well-neigh impossible, due to the conditions that Schrodinger outlined so succinctly, but I was wondering if some 'non-classical' testing methods had ever been devised, especially since CERN entered operation.

But all I got in response to my questions (even to some professors of prestigious universities) were (often condescending) references to Maxwell's theorems, themselves based on Farraday's findings before him. I parsed these from every angle for some insight into the inner workings of EMR, but these, in spite of them being presented as 'accepted fact', are but theory, as, to date, the inner workings and mechanics of EMR has not been observed. And there is obviously something wrong with these observations, as phenomena such as those observed in the double-slit experiment still have no answer, although many are doing their damnedest to make those observations 'fit' Maxwell's theorems mathematically.

And there I noticed that most all experiments 'demonstrating' EMR's inner workings were using at least one of the 'conductor' elements, that is to say an atom that has a 'sweet spot' created by a rather weak 'charge surplus' that would be the sum of the nucleus and inner electrons; any electron attracted to this would have an orbit towards the outer 'reaches' of the atom's overall charge-reach, meaning that the electrons of two neighbouring same-element 'conductor' atoms would be 'closer' than it would be possible in any other atom; this is why and how they transfer energy (e.g., heat) and electrons (electricity) so readily.

This behaviour is more than obvious in experiments leading to inventions such as the electric motor, and it has been demonstrated that any intense-enough form of EMR will generate electricity (and resulting 'magnetic' waves) in a conductor element, but again, this behaviour is only that of those conductor elements. Yet here we have taken this behaviour and projected it into the workings of the EMR itself, and there's something fallaciously wrong with this: it's like shining a flashlight on someone in a dark room and, should they react, declaring that the the mechanics directing the behaviour of the person reacting must be the 'same' as the light from the flashlight because 'they reacted'. Hm, I have to come up with a better analogy than that.

Anyhow, underlying all this were the questions about 'matter' I have mulled over in earlier entries, and the one non-answer prevailing from all these is gravity; it's in applying my thoughts to the gravitational constant (simply put, that the gravitational 'draw' between two mass-elements grows exponentially with proximity) and the proximity of the electrons in the above 'conductor' atoms when things began to 'click'.

'Magnetism' is Gravity.

In short, I'd like to propose that what we call 'magnetism' or 'magnetic fields' is in fact 'synchronised gravity', or in other words, instead of a 'separate' force, just a different behaviour of an 'existing' one.

I won't get into the math here, but when one keeps the 'exponential draw with proximity' of gravity in mind, and considers the proximity of a 'conductor' electron to its neighbouring atom, the potential draw between the two must be great indeed. But some conditions have to be met for that 'enhanced' attraction to happen: if we take two 'synchronised' iron atoms, the draw between the two will be the greatest when the outermost electron of one is farthest away from that of the other (and vice versa), that is to say, when the electron of one is 'most drawn' by the overall charge of an atom whose electron is as far as possible away from another atom whose outermost electron is closest to it. Repeat this behaviour across thousands or more synchronised electrons, and we see have a 'wave' effect when all of the electrons are pointing to the same 'side' simultaneously. This would also explain polarisation. And although this would happen in 'waves', the rapidity of an electron orbit is so extreme that this attraction would seem, to us slow humans at least, constant.

That's all fine and well on its own, but of course, if I'm going to remap that part of the model, I'll have to remap the rest. Of course, I came to the 'EMR is neither electric nor magnetic' conclusion only after remapping the rest, but, well, it all fits together.

So what is gravity?

As I outlined in earlier entries, I think that gravity seems to be one half of a whole that has a 'zero state'; the 'level' of that zero state is not important for now, but it could be a perfectly intertwined (and indistinguishable) gravity and energy; this could even be the 'fabric' of our universe behind the 'dark energy' (and 'dark matter') hypothesis.

Anyhow, a fermion of any type seems to be a 'rip' in this fabric that caused the energy to separate from its binding force, and gravity is that 'zero state' trying to draw its energy back to it. The gravitational constant probably still holds true there, that is to say, the closer one gets to that 'zero point', the more energy it would take to resist its draw; I would like to (again) propose that both EMR and matter are that energy 'orbiting' around that zero point, an 'orbit' that becomes increasingly tighter as the energy 'resisting' it increases. I'm not sure what form this 'orbiting' takes (do the 'zero point' and the energy resist each other equally, orbiting each other (like a two equally-sized balls at the end of a string), or is the 'point of origin' zero point a fixed one?), but they are interlocked around one point in spacetime.

Just to avoid referencing earlier entries: I hypothesise that an EMW and a fermion pair are the same thing at two different energy levels; above a given energy level, the EMW wave 'splits' into positive and negative 'arcs' of the same waveform to become a quark and antiquark, or electron and positron depending on energy level, and that hadrons are formed by 'mismatched' halves of EMWs of different origins.

I would surmise that a rip in spacetime would release a gravity 'draw' that extends to infinity (becoming infinitely weak with distance) and would not be different in 'size' from any other (the energy resisting it being the variable here); if we imagine an electron, its infinitesimal size would create an extremely weak draw at any given distance, but its infinitesimal size also means that it is possible to approach the 'zero point' to such an extent that, towards it, the draw would be enormous.

So how does all this work together?

The 'towards newtonian' model remains essentially the same. Since both EMR and particle pairs are 'one thing', still-joined positive-and-negative EMR 'halves' would remain a 'neutral' whole that, outside of direct contact with another particle, would be affected only by gravity; particle 'pairs', or the positive and negative 'halves' of the same 'thing', would maintain their state, with their respective energies resisting the gravity of its own and all other particle 'gravity rip'... irrelevant of their polarity, or so my thoughts go so far, but I'm still mulling that one over for the time being.

Matter = bonded 'mismatched' halves of a same thing.

I'm going to have to revise a few diagrams I made earlier to illustrate this (I was misguided/wrong about a couple things in them), but the recent observation that anti-atoms emit light, too, was... encouraging.

I still see sense in my prediction that mass is mismatched particle pairs (which I will get to in a second), but I was most likely wrong about it being gravity that makes them bond to each other, as it would make more sense that it is their polarity that makes them try to annihilate each other... but mismatched quarks would have to (practically) touch for this to happen. Maybe.

To sum up my idea this far: a photon and a particle pair are essentially the same thing at different energy levels. Not 'electromagnetic' at all, I hypothesise that a 'light wave' (photon) is, in fact, a 'balance' of energy and a force that we would call gravity. Like a bucket swung on a string, the more energy one puts into the rotation (the faster the rotation), the higher the sensation of gravity; the two, in essence, are a tug-of-war balance against each other, and this is the source of the 'constant' that is 'light-speed' C.

It works this way for a forward c-travelling energy wave, with the 'gravity' being the force that causes the energy to oscillate across polarities; yet above a certain energy level, the oscillation will 'overcome' polarity axis and forward motion, and the wave will 'split' into its positive and negative polarities... we would call these 'quarks' (but henceforth 'particles', here). And, as they are perfectly matched (they are, essentially, halves of the same thing), they should annihilate each other perfectly.

But if, after particle creation, the particles are estranged from each other, they may meet another not-same-energy-level one, and, should they touch/near (again, the 'how' of this is still not clear to me), they will annihilate each other, 'creating' either a photon or smaller particle equalling the energy difference between the two.

But should three particles, one of one charge and the other two of opposing charge, meet each other instantaneously, they would try desperately to annihilate each other, but the two same-charge particles would prevent that from happening (while being 'bonded' across the opposite-charge particle): this is called a 'hadron'.

But, in particle physics, there are two forms of hadron: 'neutral charge' neutrons and positively-charged protons. I still have a lot of questions about how this comes to be (are neutrons really so 'neutral', or perhaps is this distribution an 'outcome' of further particle interaction), but going there would digress from what I'm trying to address here.

But the 'bonding' I describe above only involves one half of a particle (pair): what happens to the other 'estranged' half?

This model, if it is demonstrable, would explain both radioactive decay (nuclear half-life) and Einstein's "spooky action at a distance", as, since both particles of a pair are one half of a same thing, something affecting one of them would also affect the other. For example, were an electron annihilated by a positron, their 'opposing twins' would be affected, too, and one or both of them are 'bonded' in some way to other particles in a stable manner, their disparition would make the bonding unstable, causing it to be affected by surrounding particles, or, in other words, decay. And it would make sense that the 'distance' separating twin particle-pairs doesn't matter; any change to one would instantly affect the other.

Were this true, the implications and possibilities (instantanious communication, etc.) would be myriad: this is becoming almost exciting.