Home page and Us

The home page introduces my examination of us in terms of our successful use of information, describes how things are organised here, and includes a bit about me.

What's here

1. Introduction - it's all actions and things :as 09May26 15-45
2. Physical and Social ideas - things & their veracity
3. Ideas - their place in evolution and The Great Data Experiment
4. Other observations on Ideas
5. Why do intelligent educated people have widely different ideas?
6. ChatGPT and Us
7. Society and flimsy thinking
8. Some of our greatest ideas:
9. Experimental debate
10. Example problems - God(s) and Brexit
11. Evolution - why are you able to read this?
12. The very long paths to us ✤
13. We may be the brightest thing on the planet, but? - what makes us special
14. What's the point in all this?
15. Who's in charge - can we do better
16. The right to believe
17. Peacetime propaganda
18. Approach to the problems
19. Overview and organisation of the information here
20. My background and modelling (not catwalk of course)

Introduction - it's all actions and things

Welcome to the Great Data Experiment where everything is reduced to actions and things, everything that is except - did the Big Bang produce the particles or did the particles cause the bang? After that it becomes easy, everything is the result of actions on things, or things suffering actions – from the waves on the beach, to thoughts on the planet.

Actions may be geological processes acting on the planet, or biological process acting within fauna and flora, but whatever it is the process actions are ultimately governed by the laws of physics and chemistry. For example, gravity acts consistently on everything: apples, water, cannon balls and feathers, and so does wind resistance that affects feathers more than cannon balls, so in a vacuum they fall at the same speed. In the case of biology, the cell is a hot-bed of activity and production; it also forms the building block for all living things, one of which is of course us, and the brain that we use to think about things, however with a lot less regulation.

The Great Data Experiment has been running for a very long time, ultimatly since the big bang, but here the period is limited to the data and its processing that formed the initial life on this planet to present. The first cells had their RNA data to process, but before then embryonic life had processes that operated on data in the form of certain chemicals. Non-biological systems also work via actions on things, as Isaac Newton discovered and the weather has been doing its thing (action on thing) long before Isaac and even apple trees. The non-biological processes have been leisurely jogging along working under the laws of physics ever since the beginning, but once established the biological world has sprinted along and we represent the latest, and possibly the final stage, in that evolutionary process (assuming of course you believe in evolution But like climate change, you can accept something but debate the cause, is it by human or natural cycle, likewise evolution, caused by the creator or natural cycle.) - a process that in our way of thinking, selects the creatures fit for purpose relative to the current environment for continued existence – select action on creature things.

But the experiment has reached a critical point where the thoughts, ideas and actions of its latest biological creation are influencing the physical environment to such an extent that the creation itself may no longer be "fit for purpose within the current environment" and will become extint like the other 99% of species, or at least not for the numbers of it that exist. Will we survive our very own created climate based mass extinction event, assuming that nuclear annihilation doesn’t happen first, or perhaps a self-initiated pandemic – we’ll probably not change, let's just wait and see?

In the meantime the key action-on-thing here is our thinking-on-information that forms our ideas, which we continue to shuffle in our brains (the thinking process) to form more ideas (the data). There's a key feature or attribute of ideas, namely their veracity or extent of their truth, which is in itself is an idea that has been debated for millennia e.g. Wikipedia. But here I make a distinction between our ideas related to the physical world and those related to our social world – {which of the Wiki 5 Major theories is this?}. If ideas are about the physical world they are testable against the laws of nature, be they about the moon and how to get there, or the production of anything else that is to work, or not and found to be built on false ideas as in A false idea that didn't work ✤, and even physical world predations such as future weather can have numbers applied to their level of veracity. However, our ideas about our social world may be true: possibly by definition e.g. Paris is the capital of France; or by consensus e.g. supported by evidence such as a guilty verdict; or not necessarily true e.g. a “load of rubbish” believed by some but rejected by others - but in all these social world cases there’s no external natural examiner - for example:

Physical and Social ideas - things & their veracity

Here are some examples of the two types of idea:

Based on my distinction above, solutions to the two physical world events are testable against the laws of nature, or rather our ideas about their details are testable and this means that we can created relatively effective and safe vaccines and determine actions that will mitigate climate change. There are of course related social ideas here too, such as lock-downs and their various impacts, the veracity of these ideas are not physically testable and very difficult to assess, especially if politics are involved. Likewise the two social events and our related ideas have no “laws of nature third party adjudicator” available to mark our homework - although we have developed logic and methods of reasoning, but they are optional. Some of the Brexit debate included economic predictions but were labelled “project fear” by the wider emotional based arguments – only time could tell, there was no independent test of outcomes and no time machine. Again there're many social ideas about physical Covid Pandemic and Climate Change, including some with supporting evidence but never-the-less denied by many people’s personal reasoning, and ideas based on personal reasoning but with little supporting evidence, and some ideas associated with Donald Trump that are “alternative truths”.

The ideas presented here may not be particularly novel, but I hope the method of presentation adds a new perspective.

Ideas - their place in evolution and The Great Data Experiment

There's a lots of analysis and deconstruction of ideas here, which many may feel un-necessary or excessive, but it's my attempt to de-mystify what we regard as our special gift. Here our ideas, their creation, transfer and subsequent re-generation in another brain are no more than an interesting stage in the evolution of life on this planet, or part of ⮝The Great Data Experiment -1 (for explanation of reference style to see "Overview and organisation of the information here" below). Inevitably the style and proliferation of ideas is based on the architecture of the machine that is processing them, and in our case an architecture that evolved to match an environment that no longer exists. We have done our best with the mismatch, with good and not so good results, but we are stuck with the architecture resulting in "a cave-dwelling brain now in a world changed climate", although we have invented “electronic brains” and now Artificial Intelligence to help us.

Other observations on Ideas

This objective view of ideas also raises the conundrum as to which is the dog and which is the tail - are we the dog wagging the tail of ideas, or is it our idea tail wagging us. Obviously we are implicated as it’s our idea tail, we have the ideas and control what they do, but I suggest the financial market as a good example of the contrary - we even speak of The Market as some sort of separate entity, we wait and see what The Market dictates, leading to the price of oil and gass and whether people can afford corn, or if they are to starve. This may lead to a familiar idea coined by Richard Dawkins of the meme that I revisit here, as I believe too much credibility has been lost due to too much emphasis on the idea that the religious are infected by mental viruses. Our relationship to ideas is discussed further below in "Who's in charge - can we do better" below, and also "We may be the brightest thing on the planet, but?"

Additionally ⮝General Introduction & Review of Not by Genes Alone -2, which is primarily a review of the book ᚜Not by genes alone - How culture transformed human evolution 15 ᚛ click , but also serves to give a good introduction to my ideas here.

And ⮝A Turing Hominin > Idea -3 includes a table titled "Comparison of Central Concepts of Epistemology to my model view" that compares a summary of items from a Wikipedia article on Epistemology with my model view, which I believe gives a more robust approach, although possibly misses nuances and could be appropriately updated.

Finally as a result of my obsession to reduce everything to processes and data there are a large number of diagrams or models of data and processes shown here; for an explanation of the symbols and conventions used please see ⮝Modelling Explained -5.

Why do intelligent educated people have widely different ideas?

Around 2010 when I first became interested in nature's long running experiment with data, which possibly ends with us, I wondered why intelligent and educated people have such different views about things – ask ChatGPT a question and multiple responses are primarily the same, although expressed differently. Of course a simple reply is: wouldn’t be boring if we all had the same views - we’re all different and entitled to our opinions. Yes but the question is about intelligent and educated people (whatever that may be and another question) and should limit the difference. However, there’s still a big differences, possibly the intellects (brains) are similar, but the data or information involved is very different. My favourite example is Allister McGrath and Richard Dawkins, both are what you might call intelligent and educated and from the same culture, but with totally different views about God and humanity's longstanding intersubjective♦ idea There are many definitions based on the “intersection between people's cognitive perspectives”, but using it here in the sense of: objective = the sun is shining, we all see it; subjective = I have a headache, if you say so; intersubjective = £100 is worth having and worth $137 today, but only if we all agree. with religions. But then in 2016 came Brexit (British Exit from the European Union), Donald Trump, Greta Thunberg as the poster girl for climate change action and finally Covid 19 hit the world (see Covid 19 & coevolution).
and more recently Israel's barbaric retaliation since 7 Oct 2024 that some try to rationalise with the Jewis xx xx while many Jewish voices and the world decry
A busy few years with sudden and tempestuous examples of group-thinking where logic and reason are buried under a mass of other considerations, all of which brought a different and broader perspective to the question that gives a better starting point - why do any of us have the views that we hold? I’ve attempted to answer this starting at ⮝A Turing Hominin -#.

ChatGPT and Us

- although not around in 2010 - ChatGPT will give a balanced answer based on the information available to it (and that's an awful lot), but how does it know which information is true and which not, a point discussed in a BBC Radio 4 programme October 2024 The Artificial Human - Can AI debunk conspiracy theories?. Interestingly it was suggested that true information can be identified as it is consistent, however, an AI Overview when asking about this says: “ChatGPT does not inherently check the consistency of information to verify its truth”. If you ask ChatGPT (not the best approach) how it assesses the truth of information it gives a long list long list of sensible things that everybody should use, but gives a short list that "I'm" designed to use:

• Knowledge from vetted training data (up to a specific cutoff)
• Trusted databases and academic sources when using web tools
• Stated consensus (e.g., scientific or legal consensus)
• I also avoid speculation and mark where data is missing, unverified, or contested.

Back to the original question as to why the differences between humans, if considering educated and intelligent people hopefully we assume they’re following the “long list of sensible things”, but other features are also involve. We have access to the whole Internet, for better or worse, and not a vetted subset of training information (I too suggest reviewing relevance our past cultural ides too in ⮝General Introduction & Review of Not by Genes Alone -2); however, we too are trained on information as soon as we enter the world, but in this case based on nothing more than local social environment and tradition; we also have emotional attachment to information that ChatGPT avoids. So whereas ChatGPT provides output based on referenced reliable sources (based on human assessed quality information - obviously a crucial matter) humans output their views based on their acquired worldview of information and emotional attachments to information, and often if we like the initial information we don’t bother going through that long check list.

The question may have broadened from a couple of academics and their differences, but possibly there’s an underlying cause to all examples. A probable contributing factor is our flimsy way of thinking about information, but as both McGrath and Dawkins are academics with scientific backgrounds flimsy thinking shouldn’t be a problem. But of course their life experiences have provided them with separate additional information that colour even their rigorous thinking – they are afterall still, what we lovingly call human.

Society and flimsy thinking

Such social turmoil and flimsy thinking (more kindly conditioned reasoning or rationalising) is the result of our ⮝ Nature of Brain - structure & thinking-3, which originated for real-time survival and not for extended off-line thought - or perhaps not much beyond planning tomorrows hunting. Evolution is generally considered in terms of real-time survival capabilities, but once our fledgling brain-power came into being and we started to plan and organise ourselves, information appropriated our future; and like any evolutionary adaptive advantage, those able to utilise it, were better able to replicate their genetic brain plan. So little-by-little we arrived at modern life, but only after our developing brain power peaked at the point where evolution's real-time survival criteria became out paced by our off-line demands, and left modern persons with a brain stuck in the past.

With such importance and responsibility information’s veracity is paramount, but all too often we are surprisingly ambivalent towards it. However, to address the known weakness of our flimsy thinking our culture has invented some thinking aids such as philosophy, critical thinking and scientific method. And in addition to thinking aids we’ve added frameworks to address social organisation such as political systems and regulation via legal systems, and to satisfy early needs for explanations we invented religious, which now have to coexist with modern scientific explanations. A review of some of our best ideas follows that highlights our challenged thinking.

{gone}

Some of our greatest ideas:

1. Capitalism and a free market, a gaint that grew from simple bartering, but ... concerns about the alternative system of capitalist. For example, in her book "The Value of Everything - Making and Taking in the Global Economy" Mariana Mazzucato describes how we have lost sight of what we regard as valuable. We started valuing farming and food production, then came Marxist value of labour, a few more proposals, but now we just value whatever the market determines as valuable (who / what is in charge of that). She, and many others, say that we must change this; possibly a good idea, but will it ever struggle to the podium.
2. Marxis ideology has a lot of merit, but its application in the creation of the Soviet Union in 1917 didn't work out too well - probably always doomed to failure due to human characteristics, as summarised well by George Orwell's Animal Farm and 1984. However, Cuba's version is possibly working better, and China is adapting and ploughing on.
   • The Great Leap Forward of the People's Republic of China in 1958 in theory was a good idea, but again implementation was a disaster.
3. Democracy another great political system, however it needs voters who are informed, who have adequate and accurate information; it also needs a fair and accurate system to form their representative bodies.
   • Brexit (British Exit from the European Union) and a simple in - out referendum: to Remain in the European Union, or to Leave it? - it was anything but simple, more below. A relativly minor self imposed problem compared with the above, but not for those in Britain.
4. Climate change - natural cold hot cycle, but over millions of years, we came ooa start of cold period {We suggest that Heinrich events, which occurred episodically throughout the last glacial cycle, led to abrupt changes in climate that may have rendered large parts of North, East, and West Africa unsuitable for hominin occupation, thus compelling early Homo sapiens to migrate out of Africa. - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19019409?} so should be warming, but not at current rate. not suite many personally or nationally, doomsters .... {from below} Climate change may be anothere topic subject to emotional bias, but probably to a lesser degree. There are those who deniy that it's aproblem but usually for national or personal (selfish) short-term ecconomic or life style reasons
5. The God (and other religious) debates that started long ago, which is summarised well by the Amazon DVD description of Philosophy, Science and the God Debate, "Science disproves the existence of God - and thanks to high profile scientists such as Prof. Richard Dawkins and Prof. Stephen Hawking many people unquestioningly believe it. But many scientists and other academics of the highest calibre are challenging this assault on faith. Among them 3 top Oxford professors: Alister McGrath, John Lennox and Keith Ward." Why do intelligent educated people have such different views?

Experimental debate

- most ideas above impact the whole of society, especially if you: have a vote, buy stuff, have a carbon foot print, or just suffer the consequences. However, the "the God(s) debate" idea is a lot more personal and constrained (notwithstanding the many violent and controlling impositions of the "debate"), especially if it's just academics slogging it out. I suggest that the "academics slogging it out" represents an experimental version of the wider "all society slogging out" of other idea debates. Here we have a comparatively controlled situation, intelligent well educated people who have access to as much information as they want, but still arrive at opposite opinions.

This "experiment" suggests that as hard as we may try to arrive at reasoned conclusions we can't, there is something personal involved beyond the facts, possibly our past experiences and the emotions involved. This can easily be dismissed by: "obviously, we're all different", but once any of us have an emotional commitment to an idea it is very difficult to overcome this with reason. We may learn about others past experiences that contradict ours, and this should put ours into perspective, but ours will weigh heavy especially if emotionally charged. Emotion is a useful survival adaptation, it helps us commit to quick decisions in a dangerous real-time world, but possibly not so helpful with our off-line slow deliberations?

Example problems - God(s) and Brexit

{Brexit need updateing} There are two ideas above with similar characteristics, the God(s) and Brexit debates - both are still being debated with polarized views (again "Why do intelligent educated people have such different views?") and neither ideas have been realised as such . . .

• However, possibly some ideas of the God(s) debate are realised very often, at the end of everyone's life and we just don't know it - there's a problem with cross-worlds-communication and as yet there's no definitive confirmation. Another key idea of the debate concerns the conclusion of this world, which again is yet to be realised.
  It could be said that other ideas of the debate have been realised in the form of scriptures and e.g. Christian organisations, and life influences via prayer, miracles etc., which have been with us for a long time. However, humans have written many social guides e.g. Confucianism, but to claim any divine inspired or dictated authorship, or land rights, the God(s) debate and their existance must first be won.
• After a very rock period between the desciion to leave the EU and the formal declaration to do so, Brexit has finally concluded its "scope and objectives" phase and has moved into phase 1 of implementation as of 1 February 2020. But there's at least 11 months of debate before any real implementation.

These examples of .. ideas are considered further in "experimental" mode in area Implications of human strangenessand currently in Implications of human strangeness1 and God(s) and Brexit

{orig not included - not sure where originated} The first problem was entirely of the UK’s making, we were senior members of the EU club, although not as active as we could have been, and we had reduced membership fees, however we thought we could do better if we left the club. Covid was more of a given and all we could do was to minimize its impact, although different types of problems they shared common features of social understanding and management of and by some less than adequate people.

Evolution - why are you able to read this?

Another question is how we creatures got to this ability of communication and organisation, some answers are addressed in ⮝General Introduction & Review of Not by Genes Alone -2 and ⮝Our Beginnings and Change Mechanisms -4. However, the basis of evolution is a totally alien notion to us, that of a mindless mechanism that enables an organism to self-assemble itself from an on-board plan - we are the watchmakers and the watches, a difficult concept to us so we still need to ask who created us? And even more alarming, the plan can change to meet an ever changing environment and competition with other organisms. To cap it all, this somehow or another arrived at us with the ability to understand this paragraph. Although occasionally things go wrong and some of us aren't built properly to the plan, but to me the big surprise is that any of us work so well and that there's not a higher failure rate on the very complex self-assembly production line. Although all this is a wondrous thing, it doesn't necessarily need an anthropomorphic independent performer of the wonders. Spirituality is another topic considered here {where? Primarily in ⮝Implications of human strangeness1 -2 ??}. {above text from GM 4 - check for updates in both directions, but modified here}.

The very long paths to us ✤

But before looking at what we are, we've got to understand how we got here. One view may be a religious creation story, but the scientific story is just as fascinating. Here the starting point is the origin of life on this planet addressed by a number of theories around self-replicating molecules - see Mechanisums of life ⮝Mechanisums of life -5, that one way or another (yes a cop out but it doesn’t immediately necessitate religion) led to simple prokaryotic cells, then the combination of prokaryotic cells to form a more complex eukaryotic cells and off we go to end, so far, with us, but over a very long time scale as adjacent diagram - refs Symbiogenesis IoT

That long journey has involved the DNA molecule that leads to the construction of proteins, then to cells, which form into organisms. They live for a while, possibly reproduce and pass on their baton of DNA in the lifelong relay race, and then disappear into the soil making room for the generations to come. The mechanisms around DNA, protein production, and cells etc. is fascinating to me and epitomises process and data representation – DNA is the data that is processed by enzymes to produce proteins, more in ⮝The Great Data Experiment -1

We may be the brightest thing on the planet, but? - what makes us special

Our species has come a long way, especially over the last few thousand years, which is normally an insignificantly short time in evolutionary terms. This fast-track change was (and still is) driven by our, once newly acquired, ability to process information and exchange it. Not only did we exchange information, we remembered it and past it forward to our children's memories, who in turn past it to theirs and so on into the future. At one time the information baton could only be passed by word of mouth, but once writing was invented it was set in stone, clay or papyrus – the baton could now be dropped and picked up minutes, or thousands of years, later by anyone.

What makes us special ✤ - the adjacent image occurs often here and is a summary of what makes us special i.e. our use on information. One of us is represented by the geeky white man (other humans are available) who has a brain of a particular nature and thinks in a peculiar way (has particular hardware and software), who lives in a physical environment and a cultural one that provides mases of information, some of which sticks and collects as a worldview, which in turn influences subsequent collection and contribution back into cultural environment.

Pretty impressive, but our ability to process the information, which is so liberally being exchanged, didn't change much during the fast track period - here we now are in a global society with our faithful ZX80 home computer of 1980 and the 1st in the UK processing capability. Perhaps a little harsh as our processing power is considerable, but a brain hardware update would be good - unfortunately it's taken millions of years to arrive at this brain, evolution doesn't do instant updates. The next best thing would be a software update (education), we know our limitations and we could use rigorous checks and balances to minimise the limitations, but unfortunately there are many in society who prefer to exploit our limitations for their own benefit. Ultimately the problem is that our basic brain architecture and processing features are not up to the complexity of social life that we have created.

Although the architecture of our hardware (the processing modules and methods modules cover various brain regions and interconnection arrangements (why have we theses regions and not others?); methods include various decision making short cuts that we may now call fallacies, biases or deferments (eg ) ) hasn't changed over these thousands of years, we have developed many applications to run on our processing platform (brain). These applications include sophisticated language, which help accurate data transfer, and systems of rules leading to: mathematics, science, law, philosophy and logic, financial systems, etc. But as hard as we try to constrain our short-cut processing methods, the underlying processor is 'fit for a purpose' rooted in a time long ago and is now far from fit. The architecture needed for 'fast real time survival decisions' is not the same as one needed for balancing complex interrelated options that do not require an immediate best solution - a simple fight or flight, verses a well-considered complex decision. Our add-on applications are often let down by our inappropriate underlying architecture.

What's the point in all this?

COPY FROM IDEA, INCLUDE? Initially the following may appear unnecessarily complicated, but considering the devastating effects that our ideas have on the lives of our fellow humans and the future of the planet, and given that they are generated by a very fallible idea machine, I think they deserve all the attention they can get

There’s nothing particularly new here and you might say it’s a lot just to re-state the obvious. But an important takeaway is that rearing children with an open mind and to think critically for themselves is an essential. However, it doesn’t take much thought to realise that’s a big ask in the world we have created and when considering our innate way of thinking – nevertheless it’s a good objective.

There's much discussion in ⮝General Introduction & Review of Not by Genes Alone -# as to whether culture has developed in a Darwinian fashion or not, which may appear to be just an unnecessary intellectual debate, does it matter? Possibly it does, the Darwinian principle of natural selection, or survival of the fittest (most appropriate) in the prevailing situation, has maintained a massive stable and consistent set of lifeforms on this planet. One of the most successful forms is us with our peculiar ability to think and do, all thanks to Darwinian evolution - with the guiding hand of God? However, just as it can be argued that we have paused physical evolution with our medical interventions, it can also be argued that our culture has also lost its ruthless guiding hand of Darwinian selection. Ideas are key to our culture, but what determines which ones get proliferated, once it was the ones that worked for us (hand axes and developing social behaviours) but now alternative facts can be proliferated across the world at the whim and benefit of an individual.

And another point, hopefully it provides a model or framework of how we initiate, process and spread information in what we call ideas. This framework is undoubtedly incomplete and possibly wrong in some places, but nevertheless may be a useful for others to consider. And it hopefully highlights why child rearing and their information priming is such an important topic, as discussed in ⮝Worldview - each Turing Hominin's view of the world -3. Other topics are introduced below.

And possibly this may also help answere similar questions to Jack's on James O'Brian's Mystery Hour:

Who's in charge - can we do better

If you know how something works you are better able to look after it, which is obvious from a medical and health perspective, both the world "Life" and "Healthy Life" expectancies are increasing, and considerable more so in affluent areas of developed countries. But we're not so good at looking after worldwide social lives and perhaps we can't considering our nastier human habits. Our history is littered with injustices of: slavery, torture, land-grabs, subjugation and 'petty' squabbles. Of course our history is also filled with attempts to do better, and with some success: political systems, religions, justice and welfare systems, and grand committees such as the United Nations. But we are a combination of genetically evolved features and accumulated culture, whose relationship is summaries by the adjacent cartoon and E. O. Wilson’s quote “The genes hold culture on a leash. The leash is very long, but  but inevitably values will be constrained in accordance with their effects on the human gene pool. The brain is a product of evolution. Human behaviour - like the deepest capacities for emotional response which drive and guide it - is the circuitous technique by which human genetic material has been and will be kept intact. - it’s also important to remember that genes are potential and not destiny, which makes everything very complicated and difficult to overcome our underlying nastiness.

But for all our good intentions and some progress, it’s very much 10 steps forward and 6? backwards. The world is still full of wars, famine and inequality, and while Climate Change adds a new worldwide social problem it takes second place to wars. So is this just a symptom of our inbuilt attitudes that gave us adaptive advantage and enable us to conquer the evolutionary world. All our actions relate to our ideas and some ideas are more appealing to us than others, and some people are better at forming alliances (a natural social animal feature) to propagate and manipulate ideas to their own ends (protect the family is another natural feature). We have created many power bases were such people flourish (politics, media, finance etc.) but there’s one with many appealing ideas, supernatural powers and often dispensations from scrutiny, namely religions. The need for God(s) again appears to be an in-built human necessity and this notion appears in many sections here, and of course some would say God is a fact of life while others not. So if we better understand and address our biases and origins of our nastier habits, could we do better and make sure we are all wagging the idea tail.

The right to believe

- in an interview for the New Humanist (Autumn 2022) Francis Fukuyama, who among many things is a council member of the International Forum for Democratic Studies, gave his definition of liberalism that included:
"no matter what country you live in, as a human being you still are entitled to a society respecting your rights. Namely: the right to believe, to talk, to action and to speech."
Not many would disagree with this, but the right to believe is a bit tricky. We all believe many different things and ideally we're free to believe: that the world is flat, which political party is best, that Climate Change is man-made or not, that God(s) exists or not, that the UK is better outside the EU, that woke (as being aware of injustice) is a pejorative, and we all believe that human life should be cherished, but with mitigation e.g. wartime enemies, punishment / retribution, honour takes precedence, end of life suffering and of course when does a life actually start.

{James - 13aug24 - mental health problems, what they believe due to psychosis "I'm OK and don't need medication" as opposed to misinformation acceptance "Covid vacine to enable control by Bill Gates"}

We may reason and argue with people to encourage them to see the light (but whose light?), and what’s the point in having a mind if you never change it. But sometimes some personal beliefs appear to be immovable and firmly fixed in concrete - why? The answer is probably not here, but it's an attempt to answer the question. {30aug22}

Perhaps we need an academy of 'certified current knowledge' to distinguish between tried and tested, well understood facts and previous ideas that turned out to be incorrect. The history of human ideas is interesting as a subject, but we need to distinguish facts from fictions, just because an idea has been around for a long time doesn't mean it right, all ideas need constant review against latest knowledge. Maintaining Old Wives' Tails is another common human condition.

Peacetime propaganda

- the growing apparent acceptance that there are valid alternatives to what is otherwise undeniably true. In times of war blatant alternatives to truth are common, in the form of propaganda see ⮝Representation of ideas - wrappers -3, and as such required to maintain justification of the war. Although not at traditional war such propaganda appears to be creeping into everyday life. Unfortunately I think religion has a case to answer for here too, as many claims are made without any actual evidence, or counter to contrary evidence. So now Donald Trump can say that his lucky escape from death was by the Grace of God and his life was spared for a purpose, and effectively God’s choice for president. Why would his God believing followers think any differently, and why not conflate this with the myriad claims Trump makes with no further explanation.

Did Brexit and Cumming’s clever use of social media to propagate the Leave Campaign’s ideas to a targeted audience raise his masters desires to new heights, as above - “All our actions relate to our ideas and some ideas are more appealing to us than others, and some people are better at forming alliances to propagate and manipulate ideas to their own ends” - truth within the messages was irrelevant and probably the origins of alterntive facts. Possibly some of the alliance members, who should, or did, know better, propagated such ideas as: the £350 million a week that we could give to the NHS, or that BMW would give us good motor industry deals, and that we would get our country and sovereignty back, although the government’s White Paper on Brexit says “Whilst Parliament has remained sovereign throughout our membership of the EU, it has not always felt like that” because it involved a lot of administration.

Interestingly the cry to get our country back lives on and was used in the violent protests (or riots) of August 2024. Once we left the EU most of our European brothers and sisters who worked here also left and had to be replace from countries such as India, Nigeria, China and Pakistan. Ironically we “got our country back” from the EU, but have now filled it with very visible immigrants, who being from distant continents, do have different cultural backgrounds to us Europeans. So - we’ve left the frying pan to jump into the fire - and there is genuine disquiet about the abundance of different cultures, languages and often lack of integration – leading to cries of getting our country back from the new situation.

Approach to the problems

- we have a very detail understanding of how our bodies work anatomically and mentally, and I’m not pretending to add anything new here, but I am trying to give a different perspective to our understanding. Models provide the essentials of a situation and so allow sight of individual trees in context to the forest. My model of us here attempts to give a starting point, it's incomplete and possibly wrong, but I hope it's a useful way of viewing one of our major activities, that of assessing information and doing things about it - sometimes for good but many times for bad - next question, what’s good or bad? However, if we could swing the balance more towards “good” it would help the majority of us, but like all problems you need to understand what's happening first and models are a good way to do that - here is my straw man, or geeky white man, proposal.

Another aspect is to try and find ultimate causation rather than the proximate, the analysis at Proximate and ultimate causation of why the MS Herald of Free Enterprise capsized moments after leaving the Belgian port of Zeebrugge on the night of 6 March 1987, killing 193 passengers and crew, provides a good example.

Overview and organisation of the information here

There are 5 Areas shown on the Content Map of Areas and Pages, as adjacent. A description of each area follows and together they provide a broad overview of the site.

1. Home – introduction and summary article The Great Data Experiment
2. Implications and human strangeness – has several pages that describes the outcome of our particular way of thinking, producing and exchanging ideas. It also has a book review that gives a good introduction to the content here.
3. A model of our information processing – contains many pages that attempt to detail our particular way of thinking, producing and exchanging ideas.
4. Background and Mechanisms – has only 2 pages, one covers how we evolved to become us and the other provides some reference to the possible origins of life - note  to me the topic of genetics, DNA and cells fascinating from a data and processing point of view. I was planning to add my view, but as there's so much information available there seemed little advantage in adding my bit, so again references will suffice
   The area was to be much bigger as I found the biological mechanisms involved with genes and the production of proteins and cells, where this factory of data driven processes happened, and all overseen by a process of selection to meet current environmental opportunities fascinating. .
5. Reference - includes a single access point for all the models appearing throughout this site and with some matrixes showing the common items between models. There's also a Modelling explained page plus Glossary, References and Footnotes.

All pages have a navigation bar at the top such as "You are here: Content Map > Home page and Us". The bar always remains in sight, and gives an indication of where you are, and provides access to the Content Map that gives a visual overview of the site and provides links to the pages within the 5 areas. Reference within pages to other pages is made by, for example, see ⮝All What's here content -5. This is a cue to use the navigation bar and Content Map, rather than providing a direct link to the relevant page as this both reduces the number of links, but also helps understanding of where you are and where you are going. Also the "All What's here content" page provides a listing of all pages and their headers and provides a sit index. Some pages have an additional "Go to" in page link within the sticky navigation bar.

Each page also has a brief opening description and a “What’s here” that lists the headings of the page. A complete list of all page "brief opening descriptions and a “What’s here”s" (together with descriptions of the Areas) is provided in Area 5 - Content What's here, and provides site content overview. The Content Map provides and overview of content while “Content What's here” gives more detail and provides a bit of an index, and the “Search box” at the top of the Content Map should provide additional help.

All pages also show a sidebar with at least one entry offering a Content Map in a new browser window (sometimes useful), and possibly additional entries with a Title and highlighting content on the page; in which case a link is given to the relevant part of the page, and at this page point a back reference to the Title ✤ is given.

There are other references used and a complete list is given below:

My background and modelling (not catwalk of course)

Of course not catwalk modelling or even mathermatical like Boyde in NBGA but in computor graphical style

I’ve always been interested in how thing work, from watching the movements of early steam engines in the London Science Museum, to taking things apart, and usually getting them back together and even mending some, and also creating various strange contraptions. Then on to books about value amplifiers, transistor radios and building them, progressing to car maintenance and add-ons such as electronic ignition and inlet manifold steam injection, of sorts. All this led to a career starting with physical circuitry, then software systems and finally business systems, modelling and supporting tools.

I had a long career with BT, joining long ago when it was the British GPO (soon becoming the Post Office, then British Telecom. plc and currently BT Group plc) and starting in the Circuit Laboratory in London near St Paul’s Cathedral. And continuing for many more years that included the early days of microprocessors, computing and software, and finally ending working in their Global organisation modelling parts of their European partnerships in terms of processes and data. I took early retirement and continued working for a few years as a freelance consultant on business modelling, or otherwise, describing the operation of company in terms of departments, their interrelations and data they handle, how it's achieved at present, with a view to improvement and achieve a more successful company - also see ⮝Explanation of modelling and sysbols used etc. -5

After a lifetime of regular monthly income this freelance "real world" working was an interesting eye opener. The IT Industry uses a lot of freelancers, but it doesn't want to be responsible for their taxes, so contracts are awarded to limited companies, which are responsible for their tax affairs. Hence the need to setup and become an employee of your own limited company that pays its taxes, and so the need of an accountant to issue annual accounts, not to mention VAT, IR35 and HMRC tax office. On top of all that it requires obtaining work, doing the work was the easy bit; all very different from a regular monthly “pay cheque” - but on the up side I had a very good 6 months working in Amsterdam.

When I finally retired early I had the time to wonder how we humans work, not from an anatomical view, but from a mental one and how we’ve evolved to become the dominant species on the planet, together with our strange and often unpleasant habits. I was amazed by the chemistry and the very digital organisation of the things that came to be running within life's building blocks i.e. in billions of cell factories. Each cell forming itself into a Lego brick dependent on internal instructions, which then divide to create more brick factories that go on to self-organise, easily said, but how do identical cells personalise and joint up into working creatures, which in turn replicate and create more creatures that grow to contain many more cell factories. And then of course the mechanisms of evolution kick in to select and adapt those replicating creatures.

Here I've tried to capture my new found interest in us and to reverse engineering of us in data and process terms and obviously only scratched the surface, but to me, we are a lot less mysterious than some of us believe. Those of a mystic or religious following may be dismissive of such ideas that reduce us to a machine, which eliminates our uniqueness and spirituality; while others may wonder why all the analysis, we're all individuals and different, just get over yourself. But I believe that we are no less amazing for exposing our phenomenally complex mechanistic workings; and non the less for being able to achieve such detailed self-knowledge and that of the world that has brought us to this point in time.

{also somewhere - never mind our disabilities - surprised any of us work welll}