Clearly there is a "soft" determinism.
We are complex. Few people take the time to get any sort of feel feel for the physical complexity of being human.
There are 7 billion people on the planet. If they were to run past single file at 3 people passing per second, it would take about 70 years for them all to pass by. Our bodies have roughly 10,000 times as many cells as there are people. That would take a million years at 3 per second just to see them all once. Each cell has roughly as many atoms as there are cells in our bodies. There are between 30,000 and 50,000 different sorts of molecules in each cell at any instant in time - all interacting with each other in complex ways on a time scale of trillions of times per second. That we understand anything of the broad principles involved in such complexity is little short of miraculous. To think we will ever understand all of the subtleties involved is pure hubris. We will always be surprising ourselves, should we live for the rest of eternity.

Heisenberg demonstrated that we can know the position or the momentum of any particle with accuracy, but not both at the same time. Thus there is fundamental uncertainty in our knowledge of physical reality.

Goedel demonstrated that even in purely logical systems, when we know all the boundary conditions and all the rules, there are things that are true about the system that cannot be derived from those starting conditions alone - so even logic is, in this sense, fundamentally incomplete.

Anyone who has worked with computers knows that we can design systems that respond to inputs and behave in complex ways. Human brains are the most complex computational entities we know of. We compute vast amounts of information at many different levels, and we are only ever conscious of the tiny tip of the vast subconscious computational iceberg that is us.

Of course we are influenced by our history.
Of course we are influenced by our beliefs.
To the degree that we can use awareness of those influences to free ourselves of them we can reduce the constraints that limit the possibilities we perceive as possible.

Yes Stephen Wolfram's work is fascinating, and so is every single human being - if we just relax our judgements enough to see something of the infinite potential that they are.

The distinctions and concepts we use are at once liberating and constraining. To the degree that we can become aware of the constraints, we can gain some freedom from them.

It seems to me that it is most often the unexamined constraints that most limit us.
It seems to me that the concept of money (market values) is the greatest of those constraints on humanity at this time (late 2014).

It seems clear that it is the value sets that we adopt that set the highest level constraints on our behaviour.

It seems that it is most powerful (in our individual and communal self interest) for all of us to choose a set of values that acknowledge the value of each and every self aware entity, and their individual need for freedom and self determination.

We have the technical ability to meet all the level 1 & 2 Maslow needs of every human being, yet we are prevented from doing so by the incentives inherent in using market values.

It is possible to characterise all major advances in evolution as the emergence of new levels of cooperation that are stabilised (made immune to destruction by cheating) by sets of attendant strategies.

It seems a perfect time for the emergence of a new level of global cooperation that transcends our current fixation on markets and money and delivers freedom and prosperity to everyone - as a starting point for further exploration of the infinite possibilities inherent in being human.

Delighted, aligned.
Great video.

My recent post Assorted short posts

All true enough in a sense.

The most powerful thing we can do is to choose the higher level context of mind.
Mind will deliver the thoughts that it does. We have no direct control over those thoughts, they are the outcome of an amazingly complex (holographic) interplay of all our experiences and abstractions. What we can do is provide a strong influence on that outcome, by the choice of high level context.
A small change in context can completely change the meaning derived from a lifetime of experience.
The experiences remain the same, what changes is the context in which relationships are formed, and that context is king.
The higher (broader) the context, the greater the influence we have.
My latest blog post - http://tedhowardnz.wordpress.com/2011/03/21/truth... might provide a context of money and capitalism that few may have considered previously.

My recent post Truth and capitalism

Hi Gerald

For me the view of the fractal is very different.
For me it seems that the old concepts are attempts to come to terms with some aspects of the reality of spiritual experience with a very limited concept set.

Many of the observations and practices of the old traditions are valid, they are accurate and work in a sense; yet in another sense the whole framework of understanding is based on a premise which no longer seems to be the simplest of the premises available.

It seems to be a reality that many of us get to experience a level of being beyond the usual egoic awareness that we all experience as children. The questions is, what in the full light of all information available today, is the most powerful and useful interpretation of those experiences?

Which sort of interpretation is most likely to lead to a global age of peace, happiness, personal growth and prosperity?

Is it likely to be a tradition that says something like "There is one TRUE way and this is it and all the rest of you are going to burn"?

Or it more probably going to be an interpretation that says something like "There appear to be an infinite number of possible paths from any place to any place (and a greater infinity of paths to other places), and there also appears to be an infinite variety of possible interpretations of any experience of reality. Chose one that works for you, and gives all others the freedom to make their own choices. All actions appear to have an infinite chain of consequences as they mingle with the actions of others, and no-one has the power to predict such infinite interactions ahead of time, thus we must all be willing and able to dance with the consequences of the choices of others with our own choices; in an ongoing dance of choice and consequence."

It seems to me that the latter is more likely to give an outcome that works for everyone, and there are no guarantees.

It seems to me that an interpetation that includes all the observations of modern science, as well as all the observations of the older spiritual explorers, encompassed in a single explanatory framework, is far preferable to clinging to ancient explanatory frameworks and denying any aspect of the observations and abstractions made available by "science".

My recent post Posts 24 Feb to 3 March 2011

Connectedness is real enough, at many levels we have some ideas about, and I suspect many more that we are currently profoundly ignorant of.

Intuition is real enough. It is an emergent property of the complex system that is a human brain. It is the result of the way in which we store and retrieve information as interference patterns, rather than as sequential patterns (analogous to holograms). This gives us the ability to abstract and associate and to create new levels of relationship. It is a physical process with amazing "side effects" - it provides what Kant called "pure practical reason". All of this is "simply" explained by the process of evolution by natural selection working recursively at several levels in several domains.

It seems that all the observations of O'Donnell are true enough in so far as they refer to reality, but there is no need to invoke the concept of "God" to explain any of it.

We are each potentially infinitely creative, compassionate and loving beings.

It seems very probable that we got to be in existence through a process of evolution by natural selection operating on very simple systems with initially very simple variation.

We do seem to have the capacity to become aware of and responsible for our creative (and destructive) potential.

It takes some work to do this.

It takes being willing to question everything that history and culture seem to have taught us.

My recent post Posts 24 Feb to 3 March 2011

My best non fiction read of 2010 is a hard pick Jared Diamond's "Guns, germs and steel" - an amazing look at how we got to be who we are; and Mike Anderson's "The RAVE diet and lifestyle" - probably the reason I am still here and writing this and not dead from advanced stage 4 metastasized melanoma - after 55 years a carnivore, I am now a struct vegan, and without any detectable signs of cancer (8 months ago it was in my face, neck and liver - they got some with surgery, and the rest I got with diet - my medical records are on my blog - http://tedhowardnz.wordpress.com/about ).

Cute, really cute ;)

Hi Cameron

Apologies for taking so long to reply - 5 weeks ago I was diagnosed with metastasized melanoma, and 3 weeks ago had three tumors, and quite a bit of the left side of my cheek and neck removed in a 5 1/2 hour surgery. The following week I was informed that there are more tumors on my liver and there is nothing that medical science can do to significantly alter the survival probability curve. So I have been focusing on giving my body the best metabolic chance (mostly raw foods) and exploring what lies behind the placebo effect, and employing that to my best advantage.
A lot of time has gone into thinking about what is most important, and this topic is one of those very dear to me.

The Oxford dictionary defines social as "Capable of being associated or united to others.". In this respect I say social media can and does create new societies, and new social forms.

The asynchronous nature of the media is fascinating and powerful. It allows people to enter conversations at their own time of choosing. It can, and does, join people across space and time. A great example has been the contributions of people to us in response of the recent health issues and the medical response. Six people have visited us physically from the local community, with food and offers of help, and many people whom I have never physically met, but have befriended in online fora, have offered assistance, and one of then has sent me stuff. Of what I consider that of the three most valuable contributions thus far to my continued existence, two have come from people whom I have never physically met, but have become part of my cyber community.

I totally agree with you about the quality and value of social media in determined in large part by how we engage with it; and the same can be said of any aspect of life and reality. What we see and experience is only partly determined by physical reality, and is in large measure determined by the context of understanding and expectation that we bring to the situation. Those contexts and understandings are themselves the result of complex genetic and cultural evolutions, intermixed with our individual development, intuition and choices. It is a very complex infinitely dimensional matrix.

I do deny that most social media is static. It seems to me that most social media is very dynamic, and it is dynamic on different timescales. Even reading our own words, hours, days, months or years later, can be an interesting experience. And the ability of words written months or years previous to bring people together is not to be underestimated.

As to the aspect of money, the inherent incentive structures within money itself it is something that has intrigued me for some time.
The problem with money lies in the fact that it is not a measure of real value, but of scarcity value.
One can easily establish this by contemplating two of the most valuable things to any human being, oxygen and water. For most of us both are plentiful and cost little or nothing - oxygen certainly costs most of us nothing most of the time - one exception being under water, when SCUBA is required.
This non-equality between real value and scarcity value introduces a fundamental problem into monetary systems.
There are two basic classes of mechanisms by which one can increase money.
One is socially useful, and involves increasing the supply of something that is valued.
The other is socially devastating, and involves increasing scarcity to increase value.

This incentive to increase scarcity is clearly present in many aspects of society.
Monopolies are one simple expression. Laws which create barrier to entry, such as most "health and safety legislation" are another that is not so clear (because a lot of advertising and political speak has gone into convincing us that such laws are for the public benefit, rather than the reality, which is that they are for the monetary benefit of a select few). When one starts to look clearly, in depth, it is profound how far this "double speak" goes in all aspect of society - health industries which are in fact sickness industries. There are many others - deep in all levels of governance.

Awareness of this must spread.
We must change our governance structures to ones that see money as a useful tool, rather than an end in itself.

The plan at www.solnx.org is one possible path to a future of abundance for all - there are others possible; none seem particularly probable at present, and they remain possible.

The responsibility for Zaadz was something beyond short term cost, it was about seeds of long term prosperity, as measured in real, rather than monetary value.
It's a real shame that money became the sole driving force.

No doubt at all in my mind that our minds are far more powerful than most give them credit.

Posted about that on another site todayhttp://holessence.wordpress.com/2010/05/26/curing...

To me, it seems much of the power of the mind comes from the unconscious ability to intuit and abstract from the information available as a side effect of the way we holographically store and retrieve information 0 (see my paperwww.fishnet.co.nz/ted/papers/laserrsn.htm )