Happy Thanksgiving everyone, far from a universal holiday I realize (few
are, but this one is especially tied to a nationalistic narrative).
My friend and neighbor Patrick, a family guy who enjoys cooking, invited me
to his house as usual (we'll miss having my mom with us this year), and was
planning to deviate from the norm by featuring duck instead of turkey, but
that bird proved harder to find on short notice, so turkey it is.
Treating GPT as a mirror that averages human thought, by sticking to what
it computes as most predictable i.e. middle-of-the-road mediocre, I've
somewhat reluctantly concluded that Synergetics (Fuller's) is not a TOE or
GUT, although it has some TOE and GUT-like elements. [1]
TOEs and GUTs involve the Standard Model as studied at CERN and have to be
about bosons and fermions primarily, to qualify as such. That's what GPT
(as consulted by Christer) is telling me. [2]
Per my previous post, I see elementary physics as describing a grammar, a
rule-following matrix, that does not predict any particular unique future.
Any novel, any plot that's "grammatically correct" might "run" atop
(inside?) the matrix. The rules of the road do not dictate which road or
when to take bathroom breaks, or whether the road goes anywhere interesting.
A TOE is like a programming language focused on the tiniest detectable
phenomena. We have programming languages at all levels and they are not
connected vertically, i.e. a language about keeping humans adequately fed
and clothed at the planetary level (say GST or general systems theory) is
not implemented in a TOE language.
The old idea expressed by Laplace's demon (a thought experiment) was that
knowing every aspect of a state would allow one to predict its next state
and so on. That view is no longer in vogue, thanks especially to chaos math
(dynamical systems). [3]
The words "explain" and "predict" don't mean the same thing though, so I'm
sure a TOE has explanatory power even if it doesn't super accurately map
out the future for us (nothing can or will) except in broad outline. If we
finally detect any dark matter up close, that'll help explain what gravity
alone is currently failing to.
Speaking of my mom, and the state of the world, she was a big Gandhi fan
and knew a lot about his life and thinking. Along those lines she was also
a big fan of Abdul Gaffer Khan (1890 - 1988), in turn a follower of Gandhi.
He was a Pashtun freedom fighter but not a big believer in outward violence
(very Quaker in that sense). [4]
I don't think we're finished defining that game of nation-states and their
citizens and how borders should work. There's a tendency to think these
concepts are fully fleshed out, but with so many people failing to achieve
statehood, that can't be the case. That Gazans are forced to stay put in
Gaza and aren't allowed to even take a temporary vacation from their prison
is evidence that the nation-state system is severely broken, and therefore
hard to take seriously.
I've been huddling with other planners to think of ways we might implement
an underground railroad on a global basis for stateless people more
generally. My first real job when I moved back to Portland in the 1980s was
with a nonprofit (named Center for Urban Education, or CUE) that worked in
refugee resettlement.
However my role within the company was to teach computer generic skills,
and that bias still shows in how I think about problems. We always need a
database or registry of some kind. We can register Palestinians for
elective travel outside Palestine without waiting for the UN to recognize
a whole new state in Mesopotamia (why wait any longer?).
I've been brainstorming a pilot project that frees some Gazans to visit
Cuba, perhaps to return to Gaza but in the meantime to start populating a
global "diaspora nation" based on the model of a supranational corporation
i.e. more like Tibet. [5]
My attitude is: why rush to create a new Palestinian state in the usual
sense when I think the nation-state system is largely over, starting with
the bankruptcy of the USA in the 1980s (not acknowledged, but clear on
paper). [6]
I'm still thankful for and fighting for freedom and more democracy as among
my values. I just don't look to Washington DC for much meaningful
leadership on that score (a captured city-state). I stay more focused on
Cascadia, still part of an American federation.
Kirby
[1] https://mybizmo.blogspot.com/2023/11/gravity.html
[2]
https://www.freelists.org/post/math4wisdom/Sv-Re-Theory-Consciousness-and-evolution
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laplace%27s_demon
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdul_Ghaffar_Khan
[5] https://worldgame.blogspot.com/2023/11/virtual-nationhood.html
[6] https://grunch.net
