The system is by nessesity a decentralized system. Each element within it operates autonomously. The elements themselves are individual units possessed by their holder. They have two modes of operation only one of which is chosen at the time of initialization. The modes are Element Mode, and Witness Mode. Element Mode is the main mode of operation. It is a combination of different functions. The core function is the same as the Witness Mode function. This has a database of transaction histories for trust verification and reporting, a communications protocol layer for the sending and receiving of Trust validation requests, and the the storing and forwarding of Value exchange packets for itself and other Elements and Witnesses in it's immediate environment and vicinity. These core functions operate independently of the operator's use, with the exception of the communications channel(s) open and close. Comm channels, when open, are automatically utilized to provide the functionality of the Witness Layer.
All Elements are Witnesses, but only Witnesses are dedicated to the task of Witnessing. Witnesses will be explained later, but they are important for long distance communication of Trust and Value, and exist as repositories of transaction history for the community they serve, and are the local sources of exchange rate and time information.
An Element is the same system with a communications interface for the User combined with a simple double entry accounting system, a plugin system of accounts, all on top of the Witness layer. The big difference between the accounting system of an Element and an accounting system such as is in general use is that the Element uses gold by weight to store value, and computes time and material goods value relative to the gold. The gold is not real gold, it is the Idea of gold. This is the same as the backing of fiat currency, in that the currency is backed, not by something real and tangible, but by the Idea of Debt. Normally, an accounting system would store and compute value in the native currency, but ITES assumes gold as a standard of value and will compute the value in the native currency based on current market price of gold in that currency. The assumption is that gold, as well as the user's assets and time are of a stable value over time, and that the currency is fluctuating.
Currencies issued by central banks are not stable, by design, and so make very bad standards of reference especially in the long term. Gold on the other hand varies only slightly with supply and demand, and the Price at any given time could be anything, not because of the gold and it's intrinsic value, but rather on the current value of the currency it is being compared to. The more inflated the currency, the higher the price in that currency for a given amount of gold. But the value that the gold represents does not change with anything but the gold's weight.
The most important layer is the Witness layer and the transaction protocol. An ITES transaction is simply a request for quote, goods, service, funds, validation, . A typical transaction might begin with a quote. A quote request is sent from the buyer to the seller. The packet is received by the seller's Element and the Seller responds with a value. If the Value is accepted, a request for goods or service is made by the buyer in the form of a Transaction Packet containing a value to be debited from the buyer's Element, as well as the quote ID so that the seller has a record to match the request to. The Seller then delivers the goods or service, and closes the transaction. Both Elements debit and credit the appropriate accounts and the values are transfered.
But where was the Trust? This is the function of the Witness Layer. The Witness is a database of the outcomes of transactions. The data stored is simply a 1 for the buyer and his Element name.number and the a 1 for the seller and his Element's name.number if the transaction completed without trouble. If there is a problem, one of the Elements denies the transaction while the other says it is good, or Both elements deny and the deal is off and unrecorded. Only 0:1 and 1:0 represent a bad transaction with unresolved outcome. 1:1 is a done deal and good, 0:0 is no deal and left un recorded.
The date and the transaction numbers used in the transacton are recorded by both Elements. The Error condition or Flag condition is a bad mark on Both Elements. It is best to resolve such conditions, and that can only be done voluntarily by both parties, otherwise, both parties carry the flag. Any request for verification for either party in the future, will report these flags.
Flags will happen, and ITES is not concerned with why they happen, only that they happened and weren't resolved. Resolution is possible any time after the fact. As long as both parties agree to the resolution, the state can be changed to 1:1 and all values are transfered in full. A flag state can be changed from good to bad after the fact as well. Shoddy work that falls apart some time in the future can cause a user to flag a transaction until the problem is resolved.
Flagging causes the flagger to accept the consequences of a bad mark, but he recovers automatically half the balance of the transaction until resolution or reversal by the other party. The other party reverses the transaction simply by flagging his portion as well. Now the rating is 0:0 and the the other half of the value is returned and the deal is off. The record is cleared of bad deals and both parties have good trust restored.
Some flags will be carried by all Elements as time goes by. Some people are just prone to flagging. They may be difficult buyers, shoddy sellers or both. They may just be foolish or dishonest. They may be just normal people with a couple of bad deals with people who are dishonest or shoddy or difficult. They may be the victims a bad circumstance. ITES doesn't care one way or the other. It simply reports the facts as they are presented to it.
But this rating is not the only thing recorded. The relative risk or investment in the transaction is also recorded for both parties. This is simply the ratio of the transaction value to the Elements total capital per annum. How large a value compared to the total value exchanged in the last 365 days. This ratio would be quite small for a bucket of paint and quite large for an automobile or a house for the average person. But the bucket of paint would be small for a paint company and somewhat small for a car company. But for either the paint company or the car company to carry an unresolved flag is not good. The more of these flags that they carry, the less trust they have to potential customers. Flags can alter a seller's value assessment. If a seller caries flags, the price negotiated will go down or may not happen at all. Those flags are a historical record, and the ratio of flagged transactions to good transactions over the lifetime of the Element is a measure of it's Trust.
Witnesses are Elements that carry a backup copy of a transaction, and as such are repositories of Trust history that can be queried by any Element looking for verification of the Trust values passed to it from another Element that it wants to transact with. Any time a transaction exceeds a value, predetermined by the user, validation is requested from a Witness or Witnesses that have known transactions from that Element in the past.
Trusted Witness Lists are exchanged by the Elements wishing to do business. The Witnesses are contacted and those Witnesses now know the Ratings and Witnesses of Both Parties. If the Witnesses are already on the lists then the Transaction can proceed with only one of the Witnesses in attendance. If the Witnesses don't know both Parties, then a local Witness for one Party will contact a Witness for the other Party and the transaction will be conducted through those two Witnesses. The Witnesses do the store and forward routing between them and both record the outcome of the transaction. They also record the address of the other Witness and the Element that that Witness knows. They coordinate the exchange rates between the two Parties and the time stamp information.
By building Trust relationships between Witnesses, local communities grow in size and scope. For instance, Fred may be an importer of goods in San Fransisco, and Joe is a seller of goods in Hong Kong. Fred found Joe on the Internet or through a trade publication and contacts Joe. Joe give Fred his Element name.number and Fred gives Joe his Element name.number. They may also give each other the name.number of their local Witnesses that they do most of their transactions through. A preferred Witness can be specified in any transaction and the default Witness is the one most used locally. The Witness layer of the Elements themselves will do for a simple transaction, but a trusted community Witness is better. The community Witness knows more about the trust of the Element than the Element itself. It knows how that Element compares to other Elements in the community, and it knows most if not all of the Elements carrying flags on that Element. It's Trust rating is much much higher than the Element itself.
So Fred gives Joe the Witness name.number of the Witness in the community in which Fred does business most of the time. Joe does the same. They enter this info into their Elements when they open an account for each other. Then Fred contacts Joe by requesting a quote for an order of widgets. Fred's Element contacts Fred's preferred Witness and sends the quote request packet. The SF based Witness contacts the Hong Kong based Witness and forwards the packet. The Hong Kong Witness forwards the packet to Joe. But the SF based Witness also sent the Hong Kong Witness a Hello packet of it's own. This packet contains a summary of Fred's trust in the form of Fred's transaction history and ratings, including flags and the flagged parties Element name.number(s). The Hong Kong Witness responds with similar information. Then the Witnesses exchange their Witness lists. These lists are lists of other Witnesses they know, and the Trust they hold.
Witnesses carry flags too. They are Witnesses. They must store a flag if a flag occurs. But a Witness that carries too many flags/transacton-year is a false Witness. It has Witnessed a community that does not conduct fair deals or resolve issues. Witnesses and Elements both carry Lists. These lists are lists of Elements and Lists of Witnesses that the Element has had dealings with. They are Ranked Lists, with the list sorted by Trust Rank first, and by Recent Date second.
When an Element carries too many flags, the other party must enter a PIN to override a transaction pause and to allow the transaction to continue. When a Witness carries too many flags, there is no such option. It is dead. It is of no use any more to the community and should be re-set and allowed to grow a new transaction database. It has just seen too much bad business.
So the SF Witness and the Hong Kong Witness now know each other and they know of other Witnesses they did not know of before. This information is valuable to the Witnesses in their function as store and forward Routers. They have now learned of new networks of Trust, and with time, can establish a higher level of Trust between the two communities. Anyone else in SF who uses the same Witness as Fred, can now do business easier with someone in Hong Kong who uses Joe's Witness.
All a Witness needs to find someone is their Element name.number and their local area or a Witness in their community. Mary has a name.number of someone in Hong Kong that a friend of hers met on a plane. She wants to find them and send them a quote for some items they said they were looking for. She just does up a Quote, and sends it to the Witness in her neighborhood, which just happens to be the same one Fred used to do business with Joe. The Witness sees the name.number and the Area information and forwards the packet to the Witness in Hong Kong that it met in the Fred-Joe Transaction. That Witness checks to see if it has a record of that name.number and if it does, it forwards the packet to that Element. If it doesn't, it passes it on to the first Witness in it's list of trusted Witnesses. This process continues, with each passing eliminating a Witness from the list of tried Witnesses, and adding new ones that were not on the list before. As the packet makes the rounds, Witnesses are learning of new Witnesses by extending their own lists with the list that is growing in the packet. Eventually a Witness is found that knows the name.number and it forwards to that Element, and then sends a Hello to the Witness in SF. The community in Hong Kong got larger by the linking of Witnesses that previously didn't know each other, and the Witness in SF got a better list of Witnesses in Hong Kong back from the new Witness there that just said Hello.
The packet has a time to live. Once a Witness is found that knows the Element being sought, the clock stops and the Witness will store the packet until it sees that Element again, or learns of it's existence in another area through a different transaction by that Element.
Witnesses are the backbone of the Trust system. Their operation can get quite large and their power and maintenance needs must be compensated for. Every transaction that completes as good, exacts a fee. This is a nominal fee of .01% of the value of the transaction. It is payable by both parties and redeemable by the Witness operator 6 months after the transaction completes. The value is transferred by the Elements involved at the time of the transaction, but the accounting system within the Witness itself will not release the funds for 6 months. If a Witness dies from flagging, the funds are forfeit. A Dead Witness is no good to anybody, including the operator. A corrupt Witness is a drag on the community, and must be put down. This is done by either flagging, which takes a toll on the Elements themselves, or by simply Black Listing. Black Listing is the forcing of a Witness or Element in the List, to the Bottom of the List. The List itself is dynamic, but forcing an Element to the bottom is an act of denial of Trust in that Element or Witness. There may be no indication within the system of a failure for that Element or Witness, but news of the Corruption within that community may prompt the Owner of an Element or the Operator of a Witness to down-grade the trust in that Element or Community, so that it is not utilized in the future. This down-grade only affects the Element or Witness for which the owner/operator has control, but does not result in the reporting of the downgrade when the Element exchanges Lists. It simply excludes the downgraded Element from the List of known Elements in it's report, and will not do business through that Element/Witness in the future. In a sense, the downgrading is shunning. In a free and open society, forcing suspision is wrong, but shunning, or voluntarily not doing transactions is allowed.
The fees that a large Trusted Witness can generate are dependent on the trust given by the Elements that use it. If it is corrupt, then the Elements will find another Witness.
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Wednesday, October 06, 2010
Earth has a sister next door.
With the recent discovery of an earth-like planet the odds of life outside the Earth have gone up tremendously. Gliese 581 g in the constellation Libra is only 20 light years (ly) away. That's spitting distance in a galaxy 100,000ly across. It's 1.2-1.4 times the diameter of the Earth and so would be a comfortable place to stand. It's in the "Goldilocks Zone" where it's not to hot and not to cold for liquid water.
20ly is within our reach if we assume Einstein's guess about the speed of light being the fastest possible to be true. It's doable for humans even at half the speed of light.
There is still controversy surrounding that limit. Gravity is the only force that refuses to be included in the unified field theory. And there is evidence that it's speed could be higher than that of light by a factor 200,000. This may seem to be impossible, but simple experiments as well as logical testing imply that this may be so.
One of the experiments often cited in arguments for a faster gravity is the direction of pull versus direction of image paradox. When the sun is observed both visually and gravitationally, either by observing the tides or direct measurement of a mass, the direction of gravity leads the direction of visual observation by just shy of the time it takes light to get from the Sun to the Earth, about 8 minutes or a few degrees when looking up in the sky at the Sun.
The other is logic. Light travels as a wave of probability. In order for any probability to exist, there must first exist a possibility, a framework within which the probability can be computed. This is the space between the masses that represent the observed, the emitter of the wave, and the observer, the receiver of the wave. The logical argument is that gravity is a result of the existence of the two masses, and that this existence establishes the possibilities that are required to have a probability wave of interaction between the two masses. The propagation of the gravity wave must precede the propagation of any light wave that follows.
New observations of very deep space structures that spiral around centers that are trillions of light years across strongly imply the existence of forces that are faster than light. These structures are known to have formed in a shorter time period than the light could travel between their component parts and convey force that forms the regular structure. These structures are way to big to be influenced this way by something as slow as light. They are obviously formed by the same gravitational tides that formed the spiral arms of the galaxies that are the particles in these enormous structures. In short, Gravity must be faster than light to form these shapes at these scales.
So if gravity is faster than light, then faster than light travel is possible.
Given this possibility, there is a whole new frontier opening up before us with the discovery that we have another place nearby to go. At faster than light speed, 20ly is right next door.
The odds of there being more planets around sun-like stars, the most common types, have gone up not just by doubling, now that we know of two, but by several factors because the two we already know of are so nearby. It's not like we've been searching for centuries and finally found another Earth-like planet on the other side of the galaxy. We have two right next to each other. We're on one of them, and the other is right next door. It follows that if another can be found so close, that there must be others we haven't found yet around the billions of other suns like ours that we already know are there.
Since the first extra-solar planet was discovered a few years ago, the number of extra-solar planets known is now up over 400. Granted, most of these are Jupiter sized. But that only adds to the odds of finding similar smaller planets inside the orbits of these giants that are easier to detect at the distances they are being observed.
Put all of this together and you have a recipe for a galaxy teeming with life. What an amazing thought. To look up at the night sky and know that there is likely to be other worlds with life on it makes the heavens seem more inviting than just a collection of rocks, ice, gas, and stars.
With the possibilities of life comes the possibility of intelligent, and technologically advanced life, much like our own, or not. But if the assumption of the speed of gravity is taken for granted, then it is safe to assume that any intelligent life will reach this same conclusion and find a means to take advantage of it, just as we are trying to do with the things we know and understand. If so, then perhaps they already know we are here. I happen to be one of those people on Earth who knows this is so. I have seen the ships they use. One in particular was the one that removed all doubt in my mind.
NASA and others on our planet have recorded a great number of videos and audio proving the point. John Glen had such an experience on his historic flight in Gemini 7. This was before we had space junk to blame it on. He was followed on that flight by someone, we just don't know who, and nobody wanted to talk about it back then, in the middle of the cold war, and in the atmosphere of fear and dread surrounding nuclear détent.
But today, people in high places and low are telling their stories, showing their videos, and seriously considering the presence of our extraterrestrial neighbors. It's not a crazy thought any more. In fact, the evidence is now so strong, that to deny their existence seems less plausible than admitting it. This is a paradigm shift of galactic proportions.
I'm not going to even try to prove they are here. I'm not going to waste my time with that. Google it and any body can find ample evidence and still not be convinced. Too bad for them. Instead, I want to address the possibilities of their intentions. Because we have had such a closed mind socially for so long on the issue, we haven't really seriously considered the obvious, why are they here?
The fearful minded of us speculate that they are here to conquer us. But the evidence for this is sorely lacking. They have disarmed our nukes many times, not just in the U.S. but in all countries with ICBMS. The devices are not destroyed, but just temporarily disabled. Everyone who has experienced this has been able to re-arm the missiles. There is footage of a test of a particle beam weapon fired at a moving UFO target, as seen from higher up, that causes the UFO to stop dead in it's tracks and then accelerate away from the shot just before it reaches the point of impact. They do not shoot back.
We have crop circles. Granted, some of them, even some of the elaborate ones, are made by enterprising hoaxsters. But not all of them. There are records going back hundreds of years about crop circles all over the world. This is a benign form of saying "Hi, we're here".
Some have speculated that they intend to enslave us. What for? They have technology that makes it easier to do work than a bunch of Monkey-men could possible do. Or is it that they need our resources? What for? The solar system we are in is loaded with everything they could want. The moon, the asteroids, the rings of Saturn, contain more resources than Earth by several orders of magnitude. Jupiter's moon Europa has water and warmth, The rings of Saturn contain enough water to fill Earth's oceans several times and not even feel the loss. The asteroids contain all of the same metals and compounds that make up the Earth, with the likelihood of high concentrations of some of those elements being right there on the surfaces, undisturbed and free of oxygen, unlike the ones here on Earth that have already been in and out of the rocks and water many times.
It's also possible that their biology is not suited to an oxygen rich atmosphere either. We got that because our oceans formed photosynthetic life, and changed the chemistry of our air. Most of the atmospheres we can see are Carbon-dioxide, Nitrogen, and Methane.
Trade? Trade what? Food maybe, but again the problem here is that if they can do what they have already done, and traveled long distance, they didn't do it on an empty stomach! Gold? Why? There's probably loads of it in the asteroid belt, and probably even more of it on the planets and moons closer to their own home.
No, I don't think they are here to gain anything from us other than our friendship. If we assume a little more, and consider that all of the solar systems here in our neck of the galaxy are roughly the same age, then our neighbors are roughly the same age as us. If we are just now waking up to the facts of our galactic existence, then so to are they. All of us have evolved a different biology, a different culture, and a different understanding of the world and life in general. What may seem to be important to us, is not necessarily important to them. But one thing is certain, and that is there must be more of us around the corner, in the arm of the Milky Way next to the one that birthed us, and our nearest neighbors.
They could be interested in us just because we are here. They may also be interested in us because we have so many different languages, and yet still manage to communicate. They may be struggling to communicate with each other and understand each other. We may have an ability they don't understand, yet find they need, now that they are bumping in to each other out there.
If they developed in such a way as say ants or bees, where there is only direct communication between individuals, but a hive mind, then they may not have the knowledge or the skills to deal with non-hive oriented intelligence. Yet here on Earth, Humans talk to everything, including hives of bees, and dogs, and dolphins and whales. This may be a very unique trait.
They may not understand internal and external conflict very well. They may not understand diplomacy, though their lack of aggression would suggest that they do at least understand careful approach and non-aggression, at least so far. But here on Earth, we humans have very complicated dances of aggression and peace and diplomacy that have brought us to the brink of our own destruction, and yet, we still manage, in spite of our differing languages, we still manage to keep ourselves from extinction. To them, this ability may be just what they are looking for in friends when it comes time to travel further, and meet new and strange beings from other parts.
Maybe they want us to help them communicate. I can't think of anything else we might have to offer. But if I'm right, then it might be "Star Trek" time for all of us, our neighbors included. It's not so far fetched an idea. As humans, we know how difficult is is for an artist to communicate with a scientist even when they have a common language! Maybe our neighbors have trouble grasping the social concepts needed to understand their other neighbors, and so they have come here to learn how to talk. They already know how to communicate, but maybe they need to learn how to talk. Humans are masters of talking. It's part of our primate heritage. A heritage that is unique to this planet.
The crop circles are the only example of communication that we can point to so far and say, "communication". But this is a highly sophisticated form of mathematical "talk", that is beautiful, but not artistic. Our own hoaxes rival theirs in artistry. We've made circles that are realistic representations of things, where they have spoken to us in numbers. We have art, they have math. No wonder they are here. Circles describing the Fibonacci sequence is not really saying anything except "hi, we're here and we know math!".
They show us their machines, but they don't really "dance" with them. They streak through our airspace or hover over a spot for a while, and then move on, but they don't, or haven't yet, given us an air show. They may be too "Vulcan" and logical for such displays. But displays are a natural to us Earthlings, especially Primates like us Humans.
Abductions have revealed a wide range of communications, but all stories seem to lack compassion, with the exception of the Greys, the little guys we all think of when we think of "Aliens" and Area 51. It was a ship like the one I saw that crashed and it was Greys that died there that day. They are vulnerable, just like us.
Some abductees are forever frightened by the experience. They generally report being experimented on. Like I said earlier, not all of our neighbors will understand things the way we do, even if they are intelligent. They may not know pain, as pain, only an indication of damage. We don't always know when we are "hurting" things either, even though we are very smart. We don't even know sometimes when we are hurting each other, even though we have enough understanding to know for certain.
Military personnel and former abductee reports have brought the total number of neighbor species to around 50. This is a number that seems to jive with the distances and probable number of Earth-like planets in our immediate neighborhood. If we take these reports at face value, then we have a lot of talking to do, as do they. We have an enormous task ahead of us in learning to understand each other.
We have to worry about conflicts of interest as well as conflicts of biology. Some of our neighbors will have developed under similar oxygen rich and sodium-cloride and water type circumstances, and so may have chemistries that are similar enough to co-exist, but not directly interact, such as touching. Just touching a lion fish can kill you. It's conceivable that just touching some alien species, even if they are nice, could harm us or them. Imagine the misunderstanding that would result.
The hive-mind is also a possible sticking point in communication. We have been working with and beside bees and ants for all of our days as Humans, yet we are only just now beginning to understand how they interact and communicate with each other within those hives. We know now that each bee acts individually, but in a way that is pre-programmed to understand the "language" of the hive. Some of our neighbors may be similar in their intelligence, and the development thereof, and may therefore find it difficult to understand their neighbors who are more individualistic, like ourselves. I expect that some of the abductees that were "harmed" when abducted, were not harmed by beings who wanted to do them harm, but rather by hive-mind type beings who did not understand the individuality of the minds they were studying.
It will be very important to us in the coming future for us to recognize the difference between modes of thought and moral and ethical action and behavior. Hive-minds will not find it easy to see us as anything but expendables, like themselves, yet their actions must not be interpreted as malicious. For all of their technological and mathematical advancement, it would be a mistake on our part to equate that with morality and ethics as we know them here on Human Earth.
Every one of these beings is going to be unique. Not just unique because of the unique circumstances of their home planet, but also unique in their own individual way, just as we are. Even the hive-mind species will have some individuals that will act and think differently within their hive-mind and cultures. It will be a major diplomatic challenge to learn how to communicate with them all. It will require of us the bringing together of all sorts of scientific disciplines and understanding to pull this rag-tag collection of beings together. Fortunately for us, we have such skills. They may be unique in our neck of the galaxy and that is why so many of our neighbors are here. They see something in our chaotic dance of culture and scientific achievement that is valuable. We know how to talk. We make friends of different species. We talk to everything.
20ly is within our reach if we assume Einstein's guess about the speed of light being the fastest possible to be true. It's doable for humans even at half the speed of light.
There is still controversy surrounding that limit. Gravity is the only force that refuses to be included in the unified field theory. And there is evidence that it's speed could be higher than that of light by a factor 200,000. This may seem to be impossible, but simple experiments as well as logical testing imply that this may be so.
One of the experiments often cited in arguments for a faster gravity is the direction of pull versus direction of image paradox. When the sun is observed both visually and gravitationally, either by observing the tides or direct measurement of a mass, the direction of gravity leads the direction of visual observation by just shy of the time it takes light to get from the Sun to the Earth, about 8 minutes or a few degrees when looking up in the sky at the Sun.
The other is logic. Light travels as a wave of probability. In order for any probability to exist, there must first exist a possibility, a framework within which the probability can be computed. This is the space between the masses that represent the observed, the emitter of the wave, and the observer, the receiver of the wave. The logical argument is that gravity is a result of the existence of the two masses, and that this existence establishes the possibilities that are required to have a probability wave of interaction between the two masses. The propagation of the gravity wave must precede the propagation of any light wave that follows.
New observations of very deep space structures that spiral around centers that are trillions of light years across strongly imply the existence of forces that are faster than light. These structures are known to have formed in a shorter time period than the light could travel between their component parts and convey force that forms the regular structure. These structures are way to big to be influenced this way by something as slow as light. They are obviously formed by the same gravitational tides that formed the spiral arms of the galaxies that are the particles in these enormous structures. In short, Gravity must be faster than light to form these shapes at these scales.
So if gravity is faster than light, then faster than light travel is possible.
Given this possibility, there is a whole new frontier opening up before us with the discovery that we have another place nearby to go. At faster than light speed, 20ly is right next door.
The odds of there being more planets around sun-like stars, the most common types, have gone up not just by doubling, now that we know of two, but by several factors because the two we already know of are so nearby. It's not like we've been searching for centuries and finally found another Earth-like planet on the other side of the galaxy. We have two right next to each other. We're on one of them, and the other is right next door. It follows that if another can be found so close, that there must be others we haven't found yet around the billions of other suns like ours that we already know are there.
Since the first extra-solar planet was discovered a few years ago, the number of extra-solar planets known is now up over 400. Granted, most of these are Jupiter sized. But that only adds to the odds of finding similar smaller planets inside the orbits of these giants that are easier to detect at the distances they are being observed.
Put all of this together and you have a recipe for a galaxy teeming with life. What an amazing thought. To look up at the night sky and know that there is likely to be other worlds with life on it makes the heavens seem more inviting than just a collection of rocks, ice, gas, and stars.
With the possibilities of life comes the possibility of intelligent, and technologically advanced life, much like our own, or not. But if the assumption of the speed of gravity is taken for granted, then it is safe to assume that any intelligent life will reach this same conclusion and find a means to take advantage of it, just as we are trying to do with the things we know and understand. If so, then perhaps they already know we are here. I happen to be one of those people on Earth who knows this is so. I have seen the ships they use. One in particular was the one that removed all doubt in my mind.
NASA and others on our planet have recorded a great number of videos and audio proving the point. John Glen had such an experience on his historic flight in Gemini 7. This was before we had space junk to blame it on. He was followed on that flight by someone, we just don't know who, and nobody wanted to talk about it back then, in the middle of the cold war, and in the atmosphere of fear and dread surrounding nuclear détent.
But today, people in high places and low are telling their stories, showing their videos, and seriously considering the presence of our extraterrestrial neighbors. It's not a crazy thought any more. In fact, the evidence is now so strong, that to deny their existence seems less plausible than admitting it. This is a paradigm shift of galactic proportions.
I'm not going to even try to prove they are here. I'm not going to waste my time with that. Google it and any body can find ample evidence and still not be convinced. Too bad for them. Instead, I want to address the possibilities of their intentions. Because we have had such a closed mind socially for so long on the issue, we haven't really seriously considered the obvious, why are they here?
The fearful minded of us speculate that they are here to conquer us. But the evidence for this is sorely lacking. They have disarmed our nukes many times, not just in the U.S. but in all countries with ICBMS. The devices are not destroyed, but just temporarily disabled. Everyone who has experienced this has been able to re-arm the missiles. There is footage of a test of a particle beam weapon fired at a moving UFO target, as seen from higher up, that causes the UFO to stop dead in it's tracks and then accelerate away from the shot just before it reaches the point of impact. They do not shoot back.
We have crop circles. Granted, some of them, even some of the elaborate ones, are made by enterprising hoaxsters. But not all of them. There are records going back hundreds of years about crop circles all over the world. This is a benign form of saying "Hi, we're here".
Some have speculated that they intend to enslave us. What for? They have technology that makes it easier to do work than a bunch of Monkey-men could possible do. Or is it that they need our resources? What for? The solar system we are in is loaded with everything they could want. The moon, the asteroids, the rings of Saturn, contain more resources than Earth by several orders of magnitude. Jupiter's moon Europa has water and warmth, The rings of Saturn contain enough water to fill Earth's oceans several times and not even feel the loss. The asteroids contain all of the same metals and compounds that make up the Earth, with the likelihood of high concentrations of some of those elements being right there on the surfaces, undisturbed and free of oxygen, unlike the ones here on Earth that have already been in and out of the rocks and water many times.
It's also possible that their biology is not suited to an oxygen rich atmosphere either. We got that because our oceans formed photosynthetic life, and changed the chemistry of our air. Most of the atmospheres we can see are Carbon-dioxide, Nitrogen, and Methane.
Trade? Trade what? Food maybe, but again the problem here is that if they can do what they have already done, and traveled long distance, they didn't do it on an empty stomach! Gold? Why? There's probably loads of it in the asteroid belt, and probably even more of it on the planets and moons closer to their own home.
No, I don't think they are here to gain anything from us other than our friendship. If we assume a little more, and consider that all of the solar systems here in our neck of the galaxy are roughly the same age, then our neighbors are roughly the same age as us. If we are just now waking up to the facts of our galactic existence, then so to are they. All of us have evolved a different biology, a different culture, and a different understanding of the world and life in general. What may seem to be important to us, is not necessarily important to them. But one thing is certain, and that is there must be more of us around the corner, in the arm of the Milky Way next to the one that birthed us, and our nearest neighbors.
They could be interested in us just because we are here. They may also be interested in us because we have so many different languages, and yet still manage to communicate. They may be struggling to communicate with each other and understand each other. We may have an ability they don't understand, yet find they need, now that they are bumping in to each other out there.
If they developed in such a way as say ants or bees, where there is only direct communication between individuals, but a hive mind, then they may not have the knowledge or the skills to deal with non-hive oriented intelligence. Yet here on Earth, Humans talk to everything, including hives of bees, and dogs, and dolphins and whales. This may be a very unique trait.
They may not understand internal and external conflict very well. They may not understand diplomacy, though their lack of aggression would suggest that they do at least understand careful approach and non-aggression, at least so far. But here on Earth, we humans have very complicated dances of aggression and peace and diplomacy that have brought us to the brink of our own destruction, and yet, we still manage, in spite of our differing languages, we still manage to keep ourselves from extinction. To them, this ability may be just what they are looking for in friends when it comes time to travel further, and meet new and strange beings from other parts.
Maybe they want us to help them communicate. I can't think of anything else we might have to offer. But if I'm right, then it might be "Star Trek" time for all of us, our neighbors included. It's not so far fetched an idea. As humans, we know how difficult is is for an artist to communicate with a scientist even when they have a common language! Maybe our neighbors have trouble grasping the social concepts needed to understand their other neighbors, and so they have come here to learn how to talk. They already know how to communicate, but maybe they need to learn how to talk. Humans are masters of talking. It's part of our primate heritage. A heritage that is unique to this planet.
The crop circles are the only example of communication that we can point to so far and say, "communication". But this is a highly sophisticated form of mathematical "talk", that is beautiful, but not artistic. Our own hoaxes rival theirs in artistry. We've made circles that are realistic representations of things, where they have spoken to us in numbers. We have art, they have math. No wonder they are here. Circles describing the Fibonacci sequence is not really saying anything except "hi, we're here and we know math!".
They show us their machines, but they don't really "dance" with them. They streak through our airspace or hover over a spot for a while, and then move on, but they don't, or haven't yet, given us an air show. They may be too "Vulcan" and logical for such displays. But displays are a natural to us Earthlings, especially Primates like us Humans.
Abductions have revealed a wide range of communications, but all stories seem to lack compassion, with the exception of the Greys, the little guys we all think of when we think of "Aliens" and Area 51. It was a ship like the one I saw that crashed and it was Greys that died there that day. They are vulnerable, just like us.
Some abductees are forever frightened by the experience. They generally report being experimented on. Like I said earlier, not all of our neighbors will understand things the way we do, even if they are intelligent. They may not know pain, as pain, only an indication of damage. We don't always know when we are "hurting" things either, even though we are very smart. We don't even know sometimes when we are hurting each other, even though we have enough understanding to know for certain.
Military personnel and former abductee reports have brought the total number of neighbor species to around 50. This is a number that seems to jive with the distances and probable number of Earth-like planets in our immediate neighborhood. If we take these reports at face value, then we have a lot of talking to do, as do they. We have an enormous task ahead of us in learning to understand each other.
We have to worry about conflicts of interest as well as conflicts of biology. Some of our neighbors will have developed under similar oxygen rich and sodium-cloride and water type circumstances, and so may have chemistries that are similar enough to co-exist, but not directly interact, such as touching. Just touching a lion fish can kill you. It's conceivable that just touching some alien species, even if they are nice, could harm us or them. Imagine the misunderstanding that would result.
The hive-mind is also a possible sticking point in communication. We have been working with and beside bees and ants for all of our days as Humans, yet we are only just now beginning to understand how they interact and communicate with each other within those hives. We know now that each bee acts individually, but in a way that is pre-programmed to understand the "language" of the hive. Some of our neighbors may be similar in their intelligence, and the development thereof, and may therefore find it difficult to understand their neighbors who are more individualistic, like ourselves. I expect that some of the abductees that were "harmed" when abducted, were not harmed by beings who wanted to do them harm, but rather by hive-mind type beings who did not understand the individuality of the minds they were studying.
It will be very important to us in the coming future for us to recognize the difference between modes of thought and moral and ethical action and behavior. Hive-minds will not find it easy to see us as anything but expendables, like themselves, yet their actions must not be interpreted as malicious. For all of their technological and mathematical advancement, it would be a mistake on our part to equate that with morality and ethics as we know them here on Human Earth.
Every one of these beings is going to be unique. Not just unique because of the unique circumstances of their home planet, but also unique in their own individual way, just as we are. Even the hive-mind species will have some individuals that will act and think differently within their hive-mind and cultures. It will be a major diplomatic challenge to learn how to communicate with them all. It will require of us the bringing together of all sorts of scientific disciplines and understanding to pull this rag-tag collection of beings together. Fortunately for us, we have such skills. They may be unique in our neck of the galaxy and that is why so many of our neighbors are here. They see something in our chaotic dance of culture and scientific achievement that is valuable. We know how to talk. We make friends of different species. We talk to everything.
Saturday, June 26, 2010
Thursday, November 23, 2000
Individual Trust Exchange System
I have been plagued with a thought. I suppose this is a good thing. But unless I write, draw and speak my mind, the thoughts plague me. This particular thought has been plaguing me for several weeks now. It is the culmination of my views of individual being, consciousness, free will, physics, metaphysics, freedom, money, banking and state.
That's a pretty big plague. Much of what I think of Freedom and individual rights come from Thomas Jefferson, the Constitution, and the writings of Ayn Rand. But last year I had an awakening. I read Thomas Campbell's "My Big TOE". Tom is a physicist, and a Big TOE is not a body part. It's a Big Theory of Everything. A Theory of Everything is a theory that attempts to explain Physical Reality. A Big Theory of Everything attempts to include Metaphysics, or Non-Physical Reality as well. It is in a way, a scientific view of what many people would refer to as God and Reality.
I'm not a religious man. I am a very spiritual man. I am a rational man. And Tom's work lead me to communicate with him directly via his web forum for the book. There I met his colleague and co-conspirator Ted Vollers. I had so many questions, and got loads of help in understanding what the Theory implies. And then I got more questions!
Basically, and I am paraphrasing, but basically, the Theory states that all of reality, both physical and non physical is consciousness. Ted came up with a model that uses a giant computer as a sort of analogy for the framework of consciousness and a method of operation. One of the key elements of this model is the concept of "rule sets" which define the conditions and interactions possible in any given physical reality and it's associated non-physical reality. A sort of machine to model Heaven and Earth.
I was bothered by this at first. And I questioned this model with both of them. I had problems with all sorts of things and to go into them all here would be to get away from the point I'm getting to. I'll post this material later. What is important to this post is the concept of the rule sets. It occurred to me, that if everything else that Ted and Tom had to say was true, that this big machine had these rules and that these rules defined the nature of the realities, one within another, and that this whole thing had been evolving since the very first conscious element came into being, then perhaps there is a single set of rules that underlie all other rule sets. I started looking for these rules, and I think I found them! Or at least some of them.
The One Rule Set search took me down some very interesting paths, both through physics, as well as metaphysics. What I discovered is that it is possible to "boil it all down" to two things, Time and Consciousness. All fundamentals have two aspects. In physics, this is seen as particle-wave duality. In the metaphysics of Being, it is the fundamental duality of Time and Consciousness.
Without going into the very long explanation of this here, I would urge you to read the books and view the lectures. I would urge you to read Heidegger's "Being and Time" and learn what the philosophical implications are concerning this duality. For now, for the purposes of this writing, I am going to state a few axioms and observations:
You are Being. You are processing Time. Your Future is not actual until you experience it. It can only be experienced by you. Once experienced, it becomes Actual, and is a part of the History of the world you exist in.
The world you exist in exists because you exist and you interact with it. Interaction is the source of knowledge and the reason for your being. All of this is as a subset of a much larger system of being that you are not directly aware of, but it may be directly aware of you.
Why are we here? The answer is to interact, learn, and lower the entropy of the system. Sounds simple, but the devil is in the details! And so is God, the creator. Lower entropy is more efficient and orderly, and has more available energy. Higher entropy is chaotic and in-efficient, and has lower energy available. It's like the difference between a tempest and a calm day. The potential energy of the calm day, is higher than the spent energy in the storm, so to speak. Why is all of this important? It's the basis of your being, nothing could be more important.
You are a collection of conscious fundamental particles, and conscious fundamental non-physical particles as well. There is proof of this in a famous experiment that puzzled Einstein and everybody else for years. It's called the Two-Slit or Double-Slit experiment. Bear with me, because you need to understand something of your being in order to proceed. Here is another great link to illustrate it.
The experiment was a simple one. They were looking at the nature of electrons, and trying to determine if they were particles or waves. So they thought, if they are particles, and you were to shoot them at a panel that had a slit in it, and on the other side of the panel was a screen, you should see a line on the screen. You do. Now if you replace the single slit with two slits, you should see two lines on the screen. You don't, instead you see what you would expect if the electrons were waves, an interference pattern. Head scratching commences and then they said, "Ok, maybe there are too many electron particles and they are bouncing off the edges of the slits and then each other on the other side." So they reduced the number of electrons down to just one at a time, and after a while, they got the same interference pattern. More head scratching commenced, because for this to be so, the single electrons had to split and pass through both slits! They thought, "We'll put detectors along side each slit, and record which slit the electron passes through." So they did, and low and behold, the interference pattern disappeared, and was replaced with the two lines they originally expected if the electrons were particles. More head scratching and serious contemplation commenced. Then they decided to turn the detectors off. The interference pattern came back! Physicists were floored. Then they turned the detectors back on and the lines came back. Turn them off and the interference pattern comes back.
That should have been enough, but then they tried one more thing. They left the detectors on, but left the readout un-recorded. In other words, they left the detectors in place and operating but did not record the results. The interference pattern returned! Look, and you see particles, don't look, and you see waves!
What they discovered, was that the electron has duality. It is a particle when you look at it. It is a wave otherwise. They discovered that your concious observation of the electron causes the electron to become a particle. Consious observation Actualizes the electron, changing it from a wave to a particle, from a potential to an object. Your consciousness has this same effect on every fundamental particle you know.
You are a conscious being. You are a collection of fundamental particles, quarks and electrons, photons. ALL of you is conscious. You have fundamental duality. You literally create the world around you as you are Being and observing. You have the power of creation in you, and the Two-slit experiment is a simple proof of that fact.
You also have Free-will. You can look, or not look. You can breath, or not breath. You can create, or not create. You decide.
Now we arrive at the beginning. I want you to consider the statement "WE hold these truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness...". Do you think this thought is new? Not me. Jefferson and the other founding fathers knew something of their place in this reality.
This power of creation, this ability to define our environment and it's manifestations, is derived entirely from our connection with, our being a part of, our creator. It is inherent and implicit in our Being.
So, as individuals, you and I are on equal footing in our right to create. So long as we do not impose our will on others, so long as we do not deny others their right to create, Live, Pursue Happiness etc. we are fine. We are on equal footing in the ability to process Time. To Live is to process Time. We are on equal footing to love and to trust, or not. We decide for ourselves, what world we will create, in each and every moment we spend looking.
We interact with each other. Sometimes the interactions are harmonious, other times they are not. We learn, and move on. But sometimes we are fooled. Sometimes there is deception, and the ruse is so subtle that we don't see it, even though we could, if we looked, we could change the wave of confusion, into a particle of truth.
One of the things we need to interact on a daily basis is money. But what is that? The truth is this; Money is the combination of your ability to Evaluate and your ability to Trust. What the money is made of is dependent upon your agreements. But what that money represents, is your Value, and your Trust, and the Value and Trust of the other individual you are interacting with.
We've come a long way as Human Beings. We've gone from simple Barter to Online Banking. This is a significant change in the perception of what is real as it relates to money. We've gone from physical exchange to non-physical exchange. Money has gone from being a physical commodity, to being a conceptual commodity. Money has duality.
It has Physical manifestation as well as non-physical manifestation. There is another form of the dual nature of reality that came to light in the search for the One Rule Set. Reality itself exhibits duality. Actual reality is the things that happened, and are still happening. Actuality has Objects. Then there is the Potential or wave aspect of reality, the Conceptual Reality, the non-physical Reality. These two modes of reality interact. The two-slit experiment shows clearly that they do. But there are Objects within the non-physical as well as potentials. Potentials are within the area of time and the future. They are wavelike in nature and only become objects when they are experienced. Potentials are not objective in the sense that they are measurable only as a probability or an instantaneous measurment in time. Calculus was invented to deal with potentials. Statistical analisys was invented to deal with potentials. Until they are experienced, they remain a probability, a measure of their potential. A great example that most people can wrap their minds around is electricity. Voltage is also refered to as Potential. Current is what you get when the potential to move electrons is supplied with an actual path for the movement, such as a light bulb and wires. Power or Work is done when the resistance of the path restricts the movement that is driven by the potential. The higher the potential, the greater the amount of work for a given resistence. The formula for current, voltage, and power is Potential times Current equals power. Potential divided by Resistance equals Current.
(If you are about to be struck by lightning, your hair stands on end from the voltage, the charge, the potential building up on your head. Once the potential reaches a high enough value, BOOM! You're fried. That was the current doing the work of frying your hide. Oops.)
But there are Objects within the non-physical that are constant. These constants are the archetypes of thought. Things of definite form without physical form. Such as the numbers and mathematics. The ideas of Truth, Trust, Value, Love, etc. These thoughts have a definate form, but they appear to have changing values and forms when we observe them in reality. The reason this is so is that we measure the real experience against the archetypical thought, not the thought against the reality! But here is a sobering thought: All measurements are a comparison of the objects in question to the objects of the non-physical archetypes. All of them, ultimately rely on the ideas and objects within Conceptual Reality.
What? Think about it. You can't measure anything without comparing it to a non-physical Concept! Even the ordinal numbers on the ruler you use to measure a sheet of paper has a conceptual base. the Geometry of straight lines, equidistant points etc. The equal distances between the marks are a comparison of the time it takes to get from 1 to 2 to 3 to 4 and so on. The longer the time, which is non-physical, the longer the distance, which is physical. Measure distances far enough and the measurement itself is done against time and velocity. Light-years are a measurement of distance, which is physical, as expressed as a velocity over time, in this case 300,000,000 meters/sec for one year.
Money itself is a non-physical object. The creation of money is also non-physical, and today, even the transfer of money from one place to another is in the form of electrons and their representation by numbers. I'm not saying that the money is not real. It is real. It's just not necessarily physical. What defines them, what makes them change from a wave into a particle, from a potential to an object is the act of measurement, the looking.
Now for the secret the banks don't want you to know. They have no special powers of money creation. Their abilities are not unique to their particular priesthood. You create money. I create money. We do this all the time. If we didn't, we would not be able to pay our bills and buy gas. You and I creat money by doing work. They create paper, and call it money, by decree, by Fiat. In physics, that is like writing down a voltage on a piece of paper and calling it a measurement. Bull Pucky!
The secret is in the Trust. We Trust that the money they make is real. We trust that the money they make has value. We trust that we can measure value with it, and exchange it for value. And what do we exchange? Things we want in our pursuit of happiness, and our Time. The products of our creation. The results of our Life and Liberty. What do we exchange? Value. Not money. Value. And it is made real by our Trust in our measurement of the Value. Money is the medium of exchange, not the measurement of the value! That is the secret the banks don't want you to know. Because if this is so, then ANYTHING can be MONEY!
But think about this. If you were to ask me what value I place on my time, I would give you a measurement in Dollars per Hour. Once upon a time, in a past life maybe, I would have given you a value in Ounces of Gold per Hour. The measure of my value, the measure of the value of my time, has gone from a comparison to a physical object to comparison to a non-physical object. But wait! There's more. The ruler, the measuring device called the Dollar, is changing value constantly and has no consistent worth or value of its own! At least the physical gold had consistency.
It is this changing of the measure, the non-physical basis of the money and the reverse mentality of value measurement that has led us to economic ruin. We are measuring ourselves with an inconstant measure! This is the same problem that has faced all of the civilizations of the past that have de-based their currency. They removed the basis of the value from the money, and thus altered the ability to measure value consistently throughout society. The Bible has quite a bit to say about this, as does the Koran.
To qoute scripture: (I copied this from here: Sound Money Cafe)
What does the two-slit experiment have to do with money? The experiment is an illustration of truth. It is the best truth telling machine ever made. When the experimenter measures an electron, the device shows the truth that a real measurement was made. It shows two vertical lines. If no measurement is known, then it shows an interference pattern. Something very similar happens in the economy when the measurement is no longer reliable. The money no longer exists as an object. It becomes a wave and the economic equivalent of an interference pattern shows up instead of the lines. The values we measure are only good in the moment, because even though the objects we measure are static in their way, the measuing device is corrupted in it's output over time. It is like weighing your self with a faulty scale!
I will explain it this way. Suppose you had a ruler that shows 12 inches. But this is a baseless ruler. The creators of the ruler figure that if the ruler shrinks a little bit all of the time, that everything will appear to get bigger. Sounds silly, but this is the thinking behind fiat money. You know, and everyone around you knows, that the measure is shrinking, but you measure with it anyway because it is the accepted standard. I know, stupid, but that is what we do. Now suppose that every now and then, the rate of shrinkage increases so that instead of losing an inch a year, the ruler starts losing an inch a month. This is what inflation does in the real world of fiat money. So the ruler has gotten too short to measure in inches any more so we start measuring in feet. Ok, so in the money world, instead of a cup of coffee for $1 we get a cup for $5, right? No problem. But the rate of shrinkage continues to increase, our ruler begins to lose feet per month, and eventually miles. Soon enough, the measuring device is no longer useful as a measuring device because it's value is changing faster than we can adjust. This is hyperinflation. It seems like a misnomer, but you have to realize that it's not the measuring device that appears to be inflating, it's the values we assign to the things we have measured with it that is inflating! Why? Because the device we are measuring with is shrinking! The numbers on it are the same, but it's dimension has changed relative to the static things we are measuring. Eventually we lose our trust in the measurement. Once the trust is gone, the measure is no longer valid. Measurement is no longer possible and the value becomes entirely probabilistic. If you are measuring with a probability, you are measuring with a wave or potential, not an object.
What we need is a scientific measuring device for value. One that makes measurements consistently, over time. We need one made of metal. But in the real world of money, we had such a measure and we replaced it with the incredible shrinking "ruler" of the fiat paper money. We got so used to the shrinking, that we devised new ways of computing values so that we could keep up with the measuring device always changing. We learned to move values around in ways that were more convenient and efficient than the physical ruler itself could provide. Going back to the metal ruler would not be a very practical thing to do because we have gotten used to the conveniences that we built to deal with the shrinking problem! Same thing is true of our real money world. But there is hope. One of the things we learned was that we don't have to have a physical ruler to move value! Nor do we have to have a physical ruler to take an accurate measurement. We didn't lose our ability to measure, on the contrary, we've expanded on our ability to measure, by necessity. What we lost was our ability to Trust the ruler!
So what is the solution to the problem we face today? We are heading into a future where the entire human community is facing the real probability of hyperinflation. All of the banks are creating more and more fiat money every day expecting the extra number of rulers to fix the problem of the rapid shrinking. But in the world of money, it is the act of creation of fiat money that is the direct cause of the shrinkage in the first place! Every time a new "Dollar" is created, the total number of dollars increases, and so the relative value of those dollars decreases. Money is a representation of real value, the value of my time and your time and the things we want and need in our pursuit of happiness. Creating more dollars to represent those things does not make more things! It only makes more dollars. And so the measuring device shrinks.
But now we can measure with a metal ruler without having to actually have a metal ruler. We have the ability to transfer value from where we are to anyplace in the world without having to physically move metal to do it. Our ability to evaluate is all we need to create our own value. What we don't have, individually, that the banks provided, was a means of trust. I don't know Joe Wong in Hong Kong, so there is no way for me to trust him. But the bank Joe uses in Hong Kong knows him, and my bank knows me, and the the two banks know each other through the banking system. This is a system of trust that allows me to do business with Joe, even though we don't know each other. But when the banking system loses trust in the currency, then the business can't be done because the trust has to be not only between the parties exchanging, but also in the measurement of the value, the medium of exchange.
But we don't need the banks for the value. We only need them for the trust. Unless there is a way to trust each other that does not involve any private or state run system to do it. If we can trust on an individual basis, with a system that always tells the truth, like our two-slit experiment does, then I don't need to know Joe personally, if the trust measurement device, or trust system always tells the truth and says Joe is an OK guy to do business with.
As far as value goes, all we need is a metal ruler that everybody can copy, and remains relatively accurate for us to use to measure value. We can use gold, as the measure, without having to actually have gold to measure with. So I can evaluate my time, my worth in ounces of gold per hour with out having to have any gold and I can sell you my time in ounces of gold per hour without recieving any gold either. We learned to do this already with dollars! I have never physically touched all of the dollars I deal with. I have only physically touched some of the dollars I deal with when I wanted physical money. So the idea of value exchange by measure without the standard of measurment being in my possesion is not an unfamiliar concept. It is a very real part of my existence, and yours. The value exchanged electronically, is very real. This is one of the valuable lessons we have learned in dealing with the absurdity of fiat money.
What I have devised is a method of trust exchange that solves the other part of the problem. I call it Individual Trust Exchange System or ITES.
ITES is about telling the truth, but only as much as is needed to have a reasonable amount of trust in an exchange. ITES is very basic. It is based on some of the rules I found when examining fundamental interaction. One of the rules is that the interaction is always between just two Objects. Even when you are interacting with a group, there is only you, and everybody else. ITES sees only one interaction, and that interaction either results in a good or mutually fair exchange, or it doesn't. ITES only ever tells the truth. And if an element within the system becomes corrupt, the system will stop trusting it. ITES never forces an exchange. ITES follows the rules of free-will exchange. All exchanges are voluntary. ITES is a system of open, honest, voluntary exchange. It is a trust system for pure laise-faire Capitalism.
One of the things I discovered in my studies is that Capitalism is the only economic system that places it's trust in the people at large. All of the other systems of exchange require a central authority to "control" and "enforce" exchange. Capitalism is the only form of economics that is compatible with free-will voluntary commerce.
Another thing I discovered was the self regulating nature of chaos. Free-will systems have chaos within them. They have appearent chaos, where the pattern is unrecognisable, and they have degrees of order that can appear more and more chaotic as the complexity of the system increases. But interesting things happen when the ordered states meet disordered conditions.
I mention this now because one of the arguments against laise-faire is the lack of "regulation". But the regulation comes from the form of the system, and the allowance of chaos. A very simple example of this principle of self regulation based on chaotic reaction can be found in the clothes washing machine in most households.
The washing machine system has a tub that will be filled with varying weights of wet clothes. And in order to remove excess water from those clothes, the clothes are spun. But it is not known ahead of time where the weight will be in the tub. There is no way to build the tub so that it is always balanced with any weight of clothes and any distribution of clothes within. So underneath the tub there are two fly weights, each one on an arm of differing length and attached to the same shaft as the tub. When the tub begins to spin, the weights begin to spin as well, but the tub and the weights are not fixed to each other. Only the tub is fixed to the shaft, the weights are allowed to swing and pivot where they will around the same shaft. And they do. Each weight swings is reaction to the weight of the tub and the clothes it has in it and each of the weights rotates differently, creating a chaotic movement that counters the chaos of the unknown weight of clothes. If you defeat the interlock on the washhing machine, (the manufacturer would advise you not to do this for your own safety, should you be an idiot or something equally dangerous), you can observe the tub spinning in wide circles at first and then finding a near perfect balance as it speeds up. It starts to center itself and the shaking decreases. This is the chaos of the free weights at work.
Another example is a glass of water. The molecules in the water are doing whatever the heck they want, when they want. They are exchanging ions, and bouncing around interacting like crazy. But the water as a whole, appears still. It has order, even though if you were to look at the molecules up close, you would see only chaos, from the molecules point of view. Free exchange amoung people has the same kind of chaos at the individual scale, but also the same kind of order on the community or larger scale. It is not a correct assumption that chaos at one scale translates to chaos at any scale.
So the need for regulation of individual aspects of economic exchange is an illusion of scale. Free markets will find their own centers, create their own balance, and correct themselves as they go. They will not always be right, but they will also not be constrained to remain wrong by law.
That's a pretty big plague. Much of what I think of Freedom and individual rights come from Thomas Jefferson, the Constitution, and the writings of Ayn Rand. But last year I had an awakening. I read Thomas Campbell's "My Big TOE". Tom is a physicist, and a Big TOE is not a body part. It's a Big Theory of Everything. A Theory of Everything is a theory that attempts to explain Physical Reality. A Big Theory of Everything attempts to include Metaphysics, or Non-Physical Reality as well. It is in a way, a scientific view of what many people would refer to as God and Reality.
I'm not a religious man. I am a very spiritual man. I am a rational man. And Tom's work lead me to communicate with him directly via his web forum for the book. There I met his colleague and co-conspirator Ted Vollers. I had so many questions, and got loads of help in understanding what the Theory implies. And then I got more questions!
Basically, and I am paraphrasing, but basically, the Theory states that all of reality, both physical and non physical is consciousness. Ted came up with a model that uses a giant computer as a sort of analogy for the framework of consciousness and a method of operation. One of the key elements of this model is the concept of "rule sets" which define the conditions and interactions possible in any given physical reality and it's associated non-physical reality. A sort of machine to model Heaven and Earth.
I was bothered by this at first. And I questioned this model with both of them. I had problems with all sorts of things and to go into them all here would be to get away from the point I'm getting to. I'll post this material later. What is important to this post is the concept of the rule sets. It occurred to me, that if everything else that Ted and Tom had to say was true, that this big machine had these rules and that these rules defined the nature of the realities, one within another, and that this whole thing had been evolving since the very first conscious element came into being, then perhaps there is a single set of rules that underlie all other rule sets. I started looking for these rules, and I think I found them! Or at least some of them.
The One Rule Set search took me down some very interesting paths, both through physics, as well as metaphysics. What I discovered is that it is possible to "boil it all down" to two things, Time and Consciousness. All fundamentals have two aspects. In physics, this is seen as particle-wave duality. In the metaphysics of Being, it is the fundamental duality of Time and Consciousness.
Without going into the very long explanation of this here, I would urge you to read the books and view the lectures. I would urge you to read Heidegger's "Being and Time" and learn what the philosophical implications are concerning this duality. For now, for the purposes of this writing, I am going to state a few axioms and observations:
You are Being. You are processing Time. Your Future is not actual until you experience it. It can only be experienced by you. Once experienced, it becomes Actual, and is a part of the History of the world you exist in.
The world you exist in exists because you exist and you interact with it. Interaction is the source of knowledge and the reason for your being. All of this is as a subset of a much larger system of being that you are not directly aware of, but it may be directly aware of you.
Why are we here? The answer is to interact, learn, and lower the entropy of the system. Sounds simple, but the devil is in the details! And so is God, the creator. Lower entropy is more efficient and orderly, and has more available energy. Higher entropy is chaotic and in-efficient, and has lower energy available. It's like the difference between a tempest and a calm day. The potential energy of the calm day, is higher than the spent energy in the storm, so to speak. Why is all of this important? It's the basis of your being, nothing could be more important.
You are a collection of conscious fundamental particles, and conscious fundamental non-physical particles as well. There is proof of this in a famous experiment that puzzled Einstein and everybody else for years. It's called the Two-Slit or Double-Slit experiment. Bear with me, because you need to understand something of your being in order to proceed. Here is another great link to illustrate it.
The experiment was a simple one. They were looking at the nature of electrons, and trying to determine if they were particles or waves. So they thought, if they are particles, and you were to shoot them at a panel that had a slit in it, and on the other side of the panel was a screen, you should see a line on the screen. You do. Now if you replace the single slit with two slits, you should see two lines on the screen. You don't, instead you see what you would expect if the electrons were waves, an interference pattern. Head scratching commences and then they said, "Ok, maybe there are too many electron particles and they are bouncing off the edges of the slits and then each other on the other side." So they reduced the number of electrons down to just one at a time, and after a while, they got the same interference pattern. More head scratching commenced, because for this to be so, the single electrons had to split and pass through both slits! They thought, "We'll put detectors along side each slit, and record which slit the electron passes through." So they did, and low and behold, the interference pattern disappeared, and was replaced with the two lines they originally expected if the electrons were particles. More head scratching and serious contemplation commenced. Then they decided to turn the detectors off. The interference pattern came back! Physicists were floored. Then they turned the detectors back on and the lines came back. Turn them off and the interference pattern comes back.
That should have been enough, but then they tried one more thing. They left the detectors on, but left the readout un-recorded. In other words, they left the detectors in place and operating but did not record the results. The interference pattern returned! Look, and you see particles, don't look, and you see waves!
What they discovered, was that the electron has duality. It is a particle when you look at it. It is a wave otherwise. They discovered that your concious observation of the electron causes the electron to become a particle. Consious observation Actualizes the electron, changing it from a wave to a particle, from a potential to an object. Your consciousness has this same effect on every fundamental particle you know.
You are a conscious being. You are a collection of fundamental particles, quarks and electrons, photons. ALL of you is conscious. You have fundamental duality. You literally create the world around you as you are Being and observing. You have the power of creation in you, and the Two-slit experiment is a simple proof of that fact.
You also have Free-will. You can look, or not look. You can breath, or not breath. You can create, or not create. You decide.
Now we arrive at the beginning. I want you to consider the statement "WE hold these truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness...". Do you think this thought is new? Not me. Jefferson and the other founding fathers knew something of their place in this reality.
This power of creation, this ability to define our environment and it's manifestations, is derived entirely from our connection with, our being a part of, our creator. It is inherent and implicit in our Being.
So, as individuals, you and I are on equal footing in our right to create. So long as we do not impose our will on others, so long as we do not deny others their right to create, Live, Pursue Happiness etc. we are fine. We are on equal footing in the ability to process Time. To Live is to process Time. We are on equal footing to love and to trust, or not. We decide for ourselves, what world we will create, in each and every moment we spend looking.
We interact with each other. Sometimes the interactions are harmonious, other times they are not. We learn, and move on. But sometimes we are fooled. Sometimes there is deception, and the ruse is so subtle that we don't see it, even though we could, if we looked, we could change the wave of confusion, into a particle of truth.
One of the things we need to interact on a daily basis is money. But what is that? The truth is this; Money is the combination of your ability to Evaluate and your ability to Trust. What the money is made of is dependent upon your agreements. But what that money represents, is your Value, and your Trust, and the Value and Trust of the other individual you are interacting with.
We've come a long way as Human Beings. We've gone from simple Barter to Online Banking. This is a significant change in the perception of what is real as it relates to money. We've gone from physical exchange to non-physical exchange. Money has gone from being a physical commodity, to being a conceptual commodity. Money has duality.
It has Physical manifestation as well as non-physical manifestation. There is another form of the dual nature of reality that came to light in the search for the One Rule Set. Reality itself exhibits duality. Actual reality is the things that happened, and are still happening. Actuality has Objects. Then there is the Potential or wave aspect of reality, the Conceptual Reality, the non-physical Reality. These two modes of reality interact. The two-slit experiment shows clearly that they do. But there are Objects within the non-physical as well as potentials. Potentials are within the area of time and the future. They are wavelike in nature and only become objects when they are experienced. Potentials are not objective in the sense that they are measurable only as a probability or an instantaneous measurment in time. Calculus was invented to deal with potentials. Statistical analisys was invented to deal with potentials. Until they are experienced, they remain a probability, a measure of their potential. A great example that most people can wrap their minds around is electricity. Voltage is also refered to as Potential. Current is what you get when the potential to move electrons is supplied with an actual path for the movement, such as a light bulb and wires. Power or Work is done when the resistance of the path restricts the movement that is driven by the potential. The higher the potential, the greater the amount of work for a given resistence. The formula for current, voltage, and power is Potential times Current equals power. Potential divided by Resistance equals Current.
(If you are about to be struck by lightning, your hair stands on end from the voltage, the charge, the potential building up on your head. Once the potential reaches a high enough value, BOOM! You're fried. That was the current doing the work of frying your hide. Oops.)
But there are Objects within the non-physical that are constant. These constants are the archetypes of thought. Things of definite form without physical form. Such as the numbers and mathematics. The ideas of Truth, Trust, Value, Love, etc. These thoughts have a definate form, but they appear to have changing values and forms when we observe them in reality. The reason this is so is that we measure the real experience against the archetypical thought, not the thought against the reality! But here is a sobering thought: All measurements are a comparison of the objects in question to the objects of the non-physical archetypes. All of them, ultimately rely on the ideas and objects within Conceptual Reality.
What? Think about it. You can't measure anything without comparing it to a non-physical Concept! Even the ordinal numbers on the ruler you use to measure a sheet of paper has a conceptual base. the Geometry of straight lines, equidistant points etc. The equal distances between the marks are a comparison of the time it takes to get from 1 to 2 to 3 to 4 and so on. The longer the time, which is non-physical, the longer the distance, which is physical. Measure distances far enough and the measurement itself is done against time and velocity. Light-years are a measurement of distance, which is physical, as expressed as a velocity over time, in this case 300,000,000 meters/sec for one year.
Money itself is a non-physical object. The creation of money is also non-physical, and today, even the transfer of money from one place to another is in the form of electrons and their representation by numbers. I'm not saying that the money is not real. It is real. It's just not necessarily physical. What defines them, what makes them change from a wave into a particle, from a potential to an object is the act of measurement, the looking.
Now for the secret the banks don't want you to know. They have no special powers of money creation. Their abilities are not unique to their particular priesthood. You create money. I create money. We do this all the time. If we didn't, we would not be able to pay our bills and buy gas. You and I creat money by doing work. They create paper, and call it money, by decree, by Fiat. In physics, that is like writing down a voltage on a piece of paper and calling it a measurement. Bull Pucky!
The secret is in the Trust. We Trust that the money they make is real. We trust that the money they make has value. We trust that we can measure value with it, and exchange it for value. And what do we exchange? Things we want in our pursuit of happiness, and our Time. The products of our creation. The results of our Life and Liberty. What do we exchange? Value. Not money. Value. And it is made real by our Trust in our measurement of the Value. Money is the medium of exchange, not the measurement of the value! That is the secret the banks don't want you to know. Because if this is so, then ANYTHING can be MONEY!
But think about this. If you were to ask me what value I place on my time, I would give you a measurement in Dollars per Hour. Once upon a time, in a past life maybe, I would have given you a value in Ounces of Gold per Hour. The measure of my value, the measure of the value of my time, has gone from a comparison to a physical object to comparison to a non-physical object. But wait! There's more. The ruler, the measuring device called the Dollar, is changing value constantly and has no consistent worth or value of its own! At least the physical gold had consistency.
It is this changing of the measure, the non-physical basis of the money and the reverse mentality of value measurement that has led us to economic ruin. We are measuring ourselves with an inconstant measure! This is the same problem that has faced all of the civilizations of the past that have de-based their currency. They removed the basis of the value from the money, and thus altered the ability to measure value consistently throughout society. The Bible has quite a bit to say about this, as does the Koran.
To qoute scripture: (I copied this from here: Sound Money Cafe)
Leviticus 19:35 ‘You shall do no wrong in judgment, in measurement of weight, or capacity. NASB95
Deuteronomy 25:13-16 “You shall not have in your bag differing weights, a large and a small. “You shall not have in your house differing measures, a large and a small. “You shall have a full and just weight; you shall have a full and just measure, that your days may be prolonged in the land which the Lord your God gives you. “For everyone who does these things, everyone who acts unjustly is an abomination to the Lord your God. NASB95
Proverbs 11:1 A false balance is an abomination to the Lord, But a just weight is His delight. NASB95
Proverbs 20:10 Differing weights and differing measures, Both of them are abominable to the Lord. NASB95
Proverbs 20:23 Differing weights are an abomination to the Lord, And a false scale is not good. NASB95
Micah 6:11 “Can I justify wicked scales And a bag of deceptive weights? NASB95
What does the two-slit experiment have to do with money? The experiment is an illustration of truth. It is the best truth telling machine ever made. When the experimenter measures an electron, the device shows the truth that a real measurement was made. It shows two vertical lines. If no measurement is known, then it shows an interference pattern. Something very similar happens in the economy when the measurement is no longer reliable. The money no longer exists as an object. It becomes a wave and the economic equivalent of an interference pattern shows up instead of the lines. The values we measure are only good in the moment, because even though the objects we measure are static in their way, the measuing device is corrupted in it's output over time. It is like weighing your self with a faulty scale!
I will explain it this way. Suppose you had a ruler that shows 12 inches. But this is a baseless ruler. The creators of the ruler figure that if the ruler shrinks a little bit all of the time, that everything will appear to get bigger. Sounds silly, but this is the thinking behind fiat money. You know, and everyone around you knows, that the measure is shrinking, but you measure with it anyway because it is the accepted standard. I know, stupid, but that is what we do. Now suppose that every now and then, the rate of shrinkage increases so that instead of losing an inch a year, the ruler starts losing an inch a month. This is what inflation does in the real world of fiat money. So the ruler has gotten too short to measure in inches any more so we start measuring in feet. Ok, so in the money world, instead of a cup of coffee for $1 we get a cup for $5, right? No problem. But the rate of shrinkage continues to increase, our ruler begins to lose feet per month, and eventually miles. Soon enough, the measuring device is no longer useful as a measuring device because it's value is changing faster than we can adjust. This is hyperinflation. It seems like a misnomer, but you have to realize that it's not the measuring device that appears to be inflating, it's the values we assign to the things we have measured with it that is inflating! Why? Because the device we are measuring with is shrinking! The numbers on it are the same, but it's dimension has changed relative to the static things we are measuring. Eventually we lose our trust in the measurement. Once the trust is gone, the measure is no longer valid. Measurement is no longer possible and the value becomes entirely probabilistic. If you are measuring with a probability, you are measuring with a wave or potential, not an object.
What we need is a scientific measuring device for value. One that makes measurements consistently, over time. We need one made of metal. But in the real world of money, we had such a measure and we replaced it with the incredible shrinking "ruler" of the fiat paper money. We got so used to the shrinking, that we devised new ways of computing values so that we could keep up with the measuring device always changing. We learned to move values around in ways that were more convenient and efficient than the physical ruler itself could provide. Going back to the metal ruler would not be a very practical thing to do because we have gotten used to the conveniences that we built to deal with the shrinking problem! Same thing is true of our real money world. But there is hope. One of the things we learned was that we don't have to have a physical ruler to move value! Nor do we have to have a physical ruler to take an accurate measurement. We didn't lose our ability to measure, on the contrary, we've expanded on our ability to measure, by necessity. What we lost was our ability to Trust the ruler!
So what is the solution to the problem we face today? We are heading into a future where the entire human community is facing the real probability of hyperinflation. All of the banks are creating more and more fiat money every day expecting the extra number of rulers to fix the problem of the rapid shrinking. But in the world of money, it is the act of creation of fiat money that is the direct cause of the shrinkage in the first place! Every time a new "Dollar" is created, the total number of dollars increases, and so the relative value of those dollars decreases. Money is a representation of real value, the value of my time and your time and the things we want and need in our pursuit of happiness. Creating more dollars to represent those things does not make more things! It only makes more dollars. And so the measuring device shrinks.
But now we can measure with a metal ruler without having to actually have a metal ruler. We have the ability to transfer value from where we are to anyplace in the world without having to physically move metal to do it. Our ability to evaluate is all we need to create our own value. What we don't have, individually, that the banks provided, was a means of trust. I don't know Joe Wong in Hong Kong, so there is no way for me to trust him. But the bank Joe uses in Hong Kong knows him, and my bank knows me, and the the two banks know each other through the banking system. This is a system of trust that allows me to do business with Joe, even though we don't know each other. But when the banking system loses trust in the currency, then the business can't be done because the trust has to be not only between the parties exchanging, but also in the measurement of the value, the medium of exchange.
But we don't need the banks for the value. We only need them for the trust. Unless there is a way to trust each other that does not involve any private or state run system to do it. If we can trust on an individual basis, with a system that always tells the truth, like our two-slit experiment does, then I don't need to know Joe personally, if the trust measurement device, or trust system always tells the truth and says Joe is an OK guy to do business with.
As far as value goes, all we need is a metal ruler that everybody can copy, and remains relatively accurate for us to use to measure value. We can use gold, as the measure, without having to actually have gold to measure with. So I can evaluate my time, my worth in ounces of gold per hour with out having to have any gold and I can sell you my time in ounces of gold per hour without recieving any gold either. We learned to do this already with dollars! I have never physically touched all of the dollars I deal with. I have only physically touched some of the dollars I deal with when I wanted physical money. So the idea of value exchange by measure without the standard of measurment being in my possesion is not an unfamiliar concept. It is a very real part of my existence, and yours. The value exchanged electronically, is very real. This is one of the valuable lessons we have learned in dealing with the absurdity of fiat money.
What I have devised is a method of trust exchange that solves the other part of the problem. I call it Individual Trust Exchange System or ITES.
ITES is about telling the truth, but only as much as is needed to have a reasonable amount of trust in an exchange. ITES is very basic. It is based on some of the rules I found when examining fundamental interaction. One of the rules is that the interaction is always between just two Objects. Even when you are interacting with a group, there is only you, and everybody else. ITES sees only one interaction, and that interaction either results in a good or mutually fair exchange, or it doesn't. ITES only ever tells the truth. And if an element within the system becomes corrupt, the system will stop trusting it. ITES never forces an exchange. ITES follows the rules of free-will exchange. All exchanges are voluntary. ITES is a system of open, honest, voluntary exchange. It is a trust system for pure laise-faire Capitalism.
One of the things I discovered in my studies is that Capitalism is the only economic system that places it's trust in the people at large. All of the other systems of exchange require a central authority to "control" and "enforce" exchange. Capitalism is the only form of economics that is compatible with free-will voluntary commerce.
Another thing I discovered was the self regulating nature of chaos. Free-will systems have chaos within them. They have appearent chaos, where the pattern is unrecognisable, and they have degrees of order that can appear more and more chaotic as the complexity of the system increases. But interesting things happen when the ordered states meet disordered conditions.
I mention this now because one of the arguments against laise-faire is the lack of "regulation". But the regulation comes from the form of the system, and the allowance of chaos. A very simple example of this principle of self regulation based on chaotic reaction can be found in the clothes washing machine in most households.
The washing machine system has a tub that will be filled with varying weights of wet clothes. And in order to remove excess water from those clothes, the clothes are spun. But it is not known ahead of time where the weight will be in the tub. There is no way to build the tub so that it is always balanced with any weight of clothes and any distribution of clothes within. So underneath the tub there are two fly weights, each one on an arm of differing length and attached to the same shaft as the tub. When the tub begins to spin, the weights begin to spin as well, but the tub and the weights are not fixed to each other. Only the tub is fixed to the shaft, the weights are allowed to swing and pivot where they will around the same shaft. And they do. Each weight swings is reaction to the weight of the tub and the clothes it has in it and each of the weights rotates differently, creating a chaotic movement that counters the chaos of the unknown weight of clothes. If you defeat the interlock on the washhing machine, (the manufacturer would advise you not to do this for your own safety, should you be an idiot or something equally dangerous), you can observe the tub spinning in wide circles at first and then finding a near perfect balance as it speeds up. It starts to center itself and the shaking decreases. This is the chaos of the free weights at work.
Another example is a glass of water. The molecules in the water are doing whatever the heck they want, when they want. They are exchanging ions, and bouncing around interacting like crazy. But the water as a whole, appears still. It has order, even though if you were to look at the molecules up close, you would see only chaos, from the molecules point of view. Free exchange amoung people has the same kind of chaos at the individual scale, but also the same kind of order on the community or larger scale. It is not a correct assumption that chaos at one scale translates to chaos at any scale.
So the need for regulation of individual aspects of economic exchange is an illusion of scale. Free markets will find their own centers, create their own balance, and correct themselves as they go. They will not always be right, but they will also not be constrained to remain wrong by law.
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