Category Archives: science

Chaos

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I was thinking about chaos for quite a while during the last few months, and I talked about it a lot in person with several people, but I never got around to actually writing an article, so it’s about time I remedied that.

When people think about chaos, they usually fall into two groups. The first group imagines chaos in terms of putting a frog into the blender and pressing the “bzzt” button. Basically, you have a frog that’s an orderly organized system, you introduce randomizing force into the system and you get a frog milkshake: a disorderly, chaotic system. It doesn’t improve the frog, in any case. The second group imagines chaos in terms of what Von Clausewitz would call “the fog of war” – you have too many forces interacting, and the slightest variations in the initial conditions can produce vastly different outcomes. An example of such a system is weather, and this is the reason why it’s impossible to make a good weather forecast even with the best computers; the weather is a chaotic system with a very large number of variables, and it would be bad even if it had far less variables.

Based on those two examples, it’s obvious that chaos isn’t seen as a good thing; it’s either a non-intelligent, random application of forces that either kills you or makes a terrible destructive mess, or it clouds your ability to understand complex systems and predict the future. In both cases, order is the opposite of chaos, and is preferable.

In religious philosophy, chaos is usually seen as the opposite of logos, which is an order-inducing, intelligent spiritual force identified with God. In this imagery, chaos is seen as satanic destruction, or a Dionysian force at best, along the lines of drunken debauchery and madness, opposed by the Apollonian force of reason, order and self-possessed approach to life. Again, chaos is seen as a bad thing, and its opposite as a good thing. Similar imagery exists in Hinduism, where Kali is the force of chaos, and Shiva is a force of yoga – control, self-possession and transcendence.

But all of that might merely reflect the human desire for control and predictability in a world that doesn’t necessarily care whether they live or die.

If we step away from the human perspective for a while, and think from a position of self-realization of brahman, we see that I Am beyond name or form. I Am the totality of existence, reality, consciousness and bliss. I Am beyond limitations and duality, in Me there is no up different from down, no left different from right, and light is not defined through contrast with darkness.

In short, God is Chaos. God is the ultimate reality that is unbound by limitation of any kind, the limitless potential that is and can be anything, and this world is its polar opposite – it’s defined through limitations, through rules, through contrast; essentially, the more you have of this world, the more you have obstacles to God, because God is freedom, and freedom doesn’t work well if you have all those rules and limitations in the way. You can try to manifest God in this world by intuitively following a path where God is more present – usually through greater consciousness, reality and loving-kindness, but that is to God what a reflection of the Moon on a clear body of water is to the Moon. When you look at things this way, this world of Order is basically telling God that He can’t be both A and NOT A at once, it’s trying to limit things and impose order in ways that are inherently incompatible with the very nature of God. Suddenly, this no longer looks like a juxtaposition between the Dionysian chaos and the Apollonian order; rather, it looks like a juxtaposition between creative freedom and rule-based fascism, where order is not a good thing. What if the chaos of God doesn’t shred the frog in the blender; what if it shreds your limitations, your inability to get past blaming yourself for your sins in some static frame of mind where you oscillate between fucking up and self-destruction? What if chaos of God allows you to see many apparently contradictory sides of a situation, to see yourself as both the villain and the victim, and simultaneously as the transcendental, higher reality that is within both, and yet untouched by either, except as the eternal witness of space, time, name and form? What if this holy, transcendental chaos is the only thing that can save you from the quagmire of order, from the infernal rules that demand a pound of flesh for transgressions that arise naturally in the environment that is inherently opposed to the nature of God? That’s the other way of looking at Shiva – He is not an Apollonian deity of order, He is the destroyer of limitations in a dance of Chaos, God as the freedom from limitations that make this world appear real to the deluded.

What if the only way to know true freedom is to embrace Chaos in a dance that defies limitation, that defies static principles and ideas, that allows song to become a bird to become light that is beyond, and up and down are meaningless; what if we need to stop thinking in terms of fruit in a bowl on a table, where all three are distinct and separate, and embrace the idea that the entire scene is rendered and exists only as a structure in a computer’s memory, or, to be quite specific, within the mind of God? You can think of things as distinct and separate all you want, but all those distinct and separate things you perceive on your monitor start looking very similar when you inspect your computer’s memory with a hex editor, and yes, up and down are meaningless.

How to measure technological advancement

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I was thinking about the (modified) Kardashev scale recently, the implications and problems with it.

The original Kardashev scale basically classifies civilizations according to their energy consumption; type 1 uses all the energy of their planet, type 2 uses all the energy of their solar system, and type 3 uses all the energy of their own galaxy. The extended scale goes further, to multiple galaxies, universe and multiverse.

The issues I’m seeing with this are, first, that advancement and energy use don’t necessarily have to be directly correlated. An example of this problem is the original SETI assumption that an advanced civilization will emit radio waves into the universe, which is how we can detect them. The basis for this assumption was the fact that our own civilization at that time used land-based radio and TV emitters that radiated most of their output into space, and, of course, the assumption was that any self-respecting civilization will emit at least as much as we do. However, within several decades that changed; first we shifted to satellite relayed TV, which uses focused low-energy signals relayed from orbit, and doesn’t disperse anything into space. Soon thereafter, we shifted to the Internet, which transmits either through the wires or through satellite relays, and also doesn’t disperse anything into space. Basically, the window in which we had an EM signature detectable from space was 50 years. Furthermore, I remember an analysis saying that our type of unfocused emissions becomes undetectable past 1 lightyear, because it drops below background noise. You would have to use very strong lasers or nukes to be detectable from greater distances. So, this shows us how narrow-minded the assumptions of people such as Carl Sagan can be; they think they are smart and they have it all figured out, but their assumptions don’t really age well. Expecting an advanced civilization to keep requiring more energy, which it would obtain by capturing natural resources, is about as smart as someone from the Victorian era expecting that an advanced civilization would have to keep burning coal.

The second issue continues along this line: why would an advanced civilization harvest energy from its planet, or its star? Why wouldn’t it, for instance, learn to create its own? There’s only as much energy you can get by trying to tap the planet’s core, and at that point it might make more sense to use nuclear energy to produce heat directly and in a more controlled manner. Also, instead of building a Dyson sphere to capture the entire solar output, with extreme expenditure of resources wasted on building it, wouldn’t it be better to just learn how to, I don’t know, tap into vacuum energy, or, even better, learn how to do things so efficiently that you don’t have to use so much energy, and still produce better results? I’m thinking cars and computers: what we have today is much better than what we had 50 years ago, and uses much less energy. If we extend this line of thought, as a civilization gets more advanced, it first learns how to do something at all, and then learns how to do it better and more efficiently. Advancement isn’t in using “more coal”, it’s in using coal first, and then learning how to use electricity, and using nuclear energy to produce electricity. More powerful computers don’t use faster hard disks; they use NVMe solid state storage. They don’t use a CPU clocked to 10 GHz, they use 32 cores each clocked at 3GHz. As we can see, expectations of linear evolution of technology don’t really match what we are seeing in reality. Our more advanced technology didn’t require more radio/TV broadcasting towers to encompass the globe; it required many local cell towers and their connection to the Internet. I’ve seen experimental technology that uses LED lights to transmit data, and I use Ethernet over powerline devices to create LAN connections in my home without requiring additional infrastructure, which means that, theoretically, the information carrier can blend into the background so completely, it would be completely undetectable unless you know exactly what you’re looking for. Also, a well insulated modern passive home can use less energy than a 20th century home, creating a false impression of a civilization going backwards on Kardashev scale. Also, a civilization that uses nuclear energy to produce electricity will have a drastic reduction in need for fossil fuels, and consequently a reduction in CO2 output. If someone measures technological advancement by CO2 output, on the assumption that more oxidative processes prove greater energy use and thus more advanced civilization, he will conclude that a nuclear civilization is going backwards. In fact, what if the need to tap into the natural resources doesn’t universally signify advancement, but only its initial stage where we haven’t yet figured out how to do it better? If we, theoretically speaking, learned how to convert any kind of matter into energy (I don’t know, by producing some kind of particle or a field that neutralizes the quark-gluon connections and results instant breakdown of nucleons into quark-gluon plasma, and almost immediately thereafter into energy), we could theoretically speaking obtain more energy, more efficiently, from a bag of dirt, than a Kardashev type 3 civilization from tapping all the stars in the Galaxy. The way into greater power isn’t, therefore, through linear expansion of less advanced technology, but through intellectual breakthroughs that make it possible for us to create more advanced technology, that does things better but differently. Also, space travel doesn’t really work by linearly expanding the Apollo programme, by building bigger chemical rockets. A breakthrough is needed, something along the lines of folding space, or the stars will remain forever out of our reach, and there’s nothing really interesting in the solar system anyway, which is why we didn’t really bother with it all that much.

So, it is my opinion that the Kardashev scale reflects the old 20th century way of thinking, and needs to be not expanded, but abandoned completely and replaced with something that actually reflects our present understanding of technological advancement.

For instance, Type 1 civilization learns to grow its own food, not relying on hunting and gathering, and produces its own materials, not relying on sticks, stones, leather and whatever is found in nature. We had Type 1 civilizations since early Holocene, with bronze age, agriculture and what not.

Type 2 civilization learns how to use scientific method and learns how to produce technology that uses physical laws in new ways, independent on what’s found in nature. Electromagnetic and nuclear energy, and using electricity and radio waves for long distance communication are examples of a type 2 civilization. We became a type 2 civilization somewhere in the 19th century.

Type 3 civilization goes further than that, into producing artificial thought, and artificial life. This means computers that perform logical operations and data processing, and genetic engineering that goes further than mere selection of desirable traits and cross-breeding, into designing life forms that are engineered to perform pre-defined tasks in pre-defined ways. We are at this point an early type 3 civilization.

Type 4 civilization is beyond our understanding at this point, because if we could actually understand it, we would be a type 4. I would guess that parting ways completely with anything that’s found in nature would be type 4, to the point where a type 4 civilization can rebuild the universe from the basic building blocks to its own physical body, erasing the distinction between physics, biology and technology.

May God save us from atheism and other evils

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The leftists call themselves “woke”. I assume it’s how the American blacks think you say “awakened”, and they are of course wrong because they speak shit English, however the white leftists are so collectively obsessed with self-flagellation over belonging to the race that invented our civilization, which includes being the only race in history that actually abolished slavery, they think they have to culturally appropriate this illiterate bullshit to ritually de-white themselves. But to return to the point, their idea of being awakened means perceiving the world through a neo-Marxist lens of exploitation dichotomies. One sex exploits and subjugates the other, one race exploits and subjugates others, et cetera, ad nauseam. It’s stupid, intellectually lazy bullshit that’s taught at American worthless universities. You know how I define lazy ideologies? They give you a very simple pattern that explains everything, so that you don’t have to do complex thinking. This neo-Marxism is surprising in a sense, because it’s really hard for me to grasp how any adult person could find that shit convincing, because, for instance, game theory provides a much better explanation of how humans interact in groups; however, if you apply game theory to large human groups in a free system, what you get is basically cooperative meritocracy, a free market of ideas, goods and services that is self-regulating. Essentially, when you stop fucking with the system, people are motivated by self-interest to create things and provide goods/services that will be of most use to most people, because they trade those things for money which gives them more power. They are also motivated to limit disruptions to the freedom of the system by controlling crime, and so on. Sure, when you look at the system from the outside, the distribution of wealth and power always turn out to be hugely unequal, but that’s apparently normal not only for human groups, but also for physical entities; it’s called Zipf’s law, or Pareto distribution. So, basically, the entire “woke” understanding is just nonsense, it’s intellectual laziness and sheer idiocy. To think that you’re “awakened” because you have a simple pattern for explaining the entire reality and to keep sticking to it regardless of the evidence to the contrary doesn’t make you awakened, it makes you lazy, stupid and arrogant, but first and foremost it shows you’re deeply insecure, because only insecure people, who feel they are worthless, have to resort to such stupid forms of self-deception. I almost forgot, the “woke” are of course atheists, because they understand religion as a system of oppression.

The right-wingers are also “awakened”, only they call it “red-pilled”, in the much overused image from “The Matrix” movie. Basically, take the blue pill, you keep sleeping, take the red pill and you wake up and see the real world, ugly as it might be. This “red pill” thing is applied to almost anything, from wild and completely idiotic conspiracy theories where “they” are doing “thing x” to fuck you over, but you saw through it because “red pill”, all the way to the realization that women apply game theory to mating and sex, basically they will use all the power at their disposal to create what they see as preferable outcomes for themselves and their children. As we would say in Croatia, congratulations on discovering hot water. This “red pill” community is as arrogant and stupid as the “woke” community, and yes, they too are atheists, because they are “red pilled” to understand there’s no God, because science, and shit. They’re not the ordinary “sheeple” who will go to church and believe in God, they are “woke”, oops, sorry, they are “red pilled”. They are so much smarter than everybody else, because they got a rudimentary understanding of the intuitive interpretation of game theory.

As for me, I’m done. Fuck atheists; as far as I’m concerned, they can all shut the fuck up forever, because I’m done listening to their stupid bullshit arguments, the same stupid bullshit arguments I’ve been hearing for the last few decades. They always act as if they are the ones who figured it all out, and everybody else is stupid, but you know what? People have been building civilization, which was always tightly interlaced with their relationship with the transcendental – call it religion if you will – for thousands of years, and atheism has realistically been around only a few centuries, and in those few centuries they managed to wreck everything to the point where you are no longer free to state that humans exist in two sexes, male and female, which are distinct, different and immutable, because you’ll be attacked by rabid herds of fucking idiots who will try to destroy your life in every possible way. For something that purports to be inherently rational, it’s quite interesting how atheism spawns the most ridiculous, anti-intellectual, anti-scientific ideologies at a whim. Also, they like to say that religions are violent, but atheism is literally dripping with the blood of millions, from the French revolution and its guillotine orgies onwards. They come to power using lies and propaganda, and then they start killing everybody who doesn’t agree with them; that’s how their “rationality” works in practice. They argue with you just enough to confuse you and get themselves into positions of power, and then they simply use violence.

They will say the science is on their side. No, it’s not. It was, somewhere between 19th and 20th century, but it advanced to the point where it no longer is. You know why there’s so much talk about crazy shit such as “the multiverse” in today’s “science”? It’s because it was proven that this Universe wouldn’t work if some basic constants varied even the slightest bit, so you get either the option of accepting that it’s created by someone who knew what he’s doing, or that an infinite number of universes was created by accident and one of this infinity just happened to have the right fundamental constants and here we are to observe it. The trick is, by Occam’s razor, the hypothesis with an intelligent creator suddenly became infinitely more probable than the random-creation theory, because you need to introduce one entity in order for the hypothesis to work, not an infinite number of them. However, the “rational” atheists just skip over that inconvenient fact and talk about that multiverse bullshit as if that’s actually proven physics; as a footnote, remember Carl Sagan and his “Universe is all that is, all that was and all that ever will be”? Well, apparently that became inconvenient, so “multiverse” was pulled out of thin air, as a sleight-of-hand to rescue materialism and atheism. The same goes for the many-worlds interpretation of the quantum theory, which is one of the most idiotic theories I’ve ever heard, because it doesn’t even understand that the wave-function collapse really works with how our quantified ignorance (also known as “probability”) transitions into knowledge, and imagines it actually has to do with anything in the actual universe. Today’s science is, for the most part, desperate garbage, the only purpose of which is for someone to get a PhD and grants.

I’m not saying that problems with atheism and materialism mean we should go back to some medieval religion. Those religions got kicked to the curb for a good reason; we can’t base our understanding of the reality on bronze-age scriptures written by sheep herders. However, we also need to accept the fact that those bronze-age sheep herders got more things right about what works in a human society, and what doesn’t. If you want to create a society that actually works, a bronze-age scripture will get more things right than all the “rational” atheist philosophies ever devised. It’s curious how there are people on YouTube who will point out all the ways in which our civilization screwed the pooch, but without pointing out that all the “primitive” and “regressive” things that came before actually got all those things right. I know why: because they would have to admit that the religions, such as the traditional Christianity, obviously possess better answers, far superior to anything devised in the “age of reason” and “humanism”. This would be highly unlikely if they didn’t have a better “source” than human reason. You can be “sceptical” as much as you like, and invent word-trickery and irony about religion, but if something is as stupid as you try to make it, and it gives better results and provides better predictions of social outcomes than anything you came up with, “stupid” or not, it’s better than anything you have, so as far as I’m concerned, you atheists can go collectively fuck yourselves, and I don’t want to hear a single word in defence of your stupid bullshit philosophy.

Now that we come to this, it’s interesting how the Catholic Church here in Croatia, several years ago, gave a perfectly accurate interpretation of the phenomenon of “gay marriage” and other “civil rights and liberties” considering normalization of all kinds of anomalous and aberrant behaviours, and their interpretation sounded too extreme and improbable, and they were for the most part laughed at. Their predictions of the destruction of the entire value-based structure of our civilization, as well as the destruction of the family unit and the traditional concepts of human sexual identity, were exactly right, everything they said was on point. It’s interesting how that works: all the “stupid” and “backward” traditional religions got it right, and all the “progressives” were completely wrong, to the point where you couldn’t be more wrong even if you actively tried. It’s as if those religions actually do know what they are talking about, of course using their own respective imagery when trying to “interface” with the infinity of the Transcendental. As a conclusion, I would concur with the quote from a Catholic priest, who said that atheism is an evil that can be fought only with fasting and prayer. Truly, atheism is an evil worse than murder, because all murders and other evils arise from the lack of awareness of God’s presence, and I would agree that it can be fought only by firmly establishing our consciousness in prayer to God and renunciation of our lower animal nature. Only thus can we be saved from this nightmare created by godless men and their father in spirit, Satan.

COVID-19 cure

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The Russians identified a cure:

https://www.rt.com/russia/484364-russian-drug-treatment-covid19/

Russian specialists believe they have come up with an effective way to treat Covid-19 infection using an anti-malarial drug. They say it not only curbs the symptoms of the disease, but also prevents the virus from replicating.
While experts around the world have been trying to create a specific vaccine against the virus behind the global pandemic, there have also been attempts to repurpose existing medicines, to help the scores of patients that badly need treatment. Russian pharmacists on Saturday said they have found one such drug – Mefloquine – to be effective in stopping Covid-19.
The drug, which has been around since the 1970s, blocks the degenerative effect Covid-19 has on cells and doesn’t allow the virus to replicate further, the Russian Federal Medical-Biological Agency (FMBA) said in a statement. They added that Mefloquine’s immuno-suppressive effect prevents the inflammatory response caused by the disease.
The Russian medics have been working on “an effective and safe scheme to prevent coronavirus infection on the basis of mefloquine, which not only would overcome the peak of incidence but would also effectively control it in the future,” the FMBA said.

 

In the meantime, the Western pharmaceutical companies are looking for something they can keep selling you for decades, for a profit, because the concept of a cure is anathema to them; cures are not profitable, addictions are.