Figures lie and liars figure

Again, Brenda gave me the cue:
“It doesn't make any sense to evict something like 10,000 people? Why does the military -- yes, the military -- want this whole town vacant? Something's up. I can feel it. Maybe that's the headache, the anvil on my head. I keep feeling as if I'm watching a movie.”

She calls it “a feeling”.

I call it:
“instincts and emotions. Both are information detectors, based on key signals, with a success rate of about 80%”

Never underestimate instincts and emotions – or intuition. Because what those subsystems of brain give to us, is the result of high-sophisticated information processing.

First: the detectors of the physical signals, eyes, ears, skin, tongue, nose. What do they do? They detect, yes, but they also - choose.

Choice is part of each and every information process because of a simple fact: reality is too big for us, too huge for a single object, too large and multifarious for one single point to be caught.

So each and every information process has to choose from what reality offers us.

Therefore – each and every information processing system has to declare:

goals.

The simplest goal surely is: i want to survive, the next is, my race should survive, but then you can have “individual goals” like “i want to support Green September caring about people” or “i just want to be a winner caring about nothing else then myself”.

However, the fact which goal exactly you have, is not that important at the moment. Important is, that:

goals must exist for each and every information processing system.

They are the “bouy in the sea”, the navigation point, where the infinity of the flood of signals are parted to get a manageable load of work. But that’s only the first step, because then you have to “make a set” out of your load of work to be able to perfectly "Part the Sea".

He, he – i hear you say, my eyes don’t choose anything, they simply retrieve signals.

Yes, but only electromagnetical ones – try to hear something with your eyes or try to read with your ears! Convinced?

Back to Parting the Sea: i want to focus you on the next step of your eyes and ears and nose: They are not only choosing the kind of physical signals, they also choose the kind of behavior. Because only information is useful.

So they measure in time-steps. And if signals are not regular, they can’t fulfil the first precondition for information: to be a repeatable process you have to have repeating behavior.

Simple, isn’t it?

Therefore, all not regular events are viewed as “noise” and – ignored. That means, that even on the level of your eyes and ears most of the incoming signals were omitted.

And that sorting and selecting goes on and on and on.

Your brain works with a 3-level memory: ultrashort, short, long.

All controled by time steps, by the regularity of repeating signals. Btw: that's the general strategy of information processing systems to “create order in a random world” by just using the two axes “kind” and “time” to create unique space-time curves.

In simple words: what is able to reach your central brain has been controlled and checked and controlled and checked many times with the result to have a reasonable probability to be a repeatable, identifiable process – to be true information.

True information, according to 1) the current real situation around (at least just some milliseconds before, but the whole situation, don’t forget that) and 2) your own goals...

and 3)?

According to your own abilities, because if you’re blind, you can’t use electromagnetical signals, but that’s just an aside.

All the efforts to gather as much information as possible? Why?

Because of the basic insight of Joseph Bertrand (1822-1900), "Calcul des Probabilites", 1889, called Bertrands Paradox (better known as “Monty-Hall-Problem”), discussing a really “mathematical sounding” problem with an important aspect: the more you know about your problem, the better you can evaluate it – with the result, that your prognosis significantly betters, how this problem will develop.

The more you know about a system, the better you know, how that system will behave.

Which system?

The system you mapped in Part One – the “sensory side” - gathering information to create unique-space-time curves.

Bertrands Paradox simply explains you, why human brain grew so much in the last million years after inventing language, just to be able to gather (and process) more and more information to be able to do better prognosis.

To be able to better foresee the future.

That’s Part One of my answer to Brenda – regarding the sensory side of information processing, where information has to be gathered and structured.

Part Two is about the “motor side” (motor in the meaning of “motor nerve”), is about creating a decision, finding a solution – so Part Two is about the question, what shall we do, no, not with the drunken sailor, but with all the nice unique space-time curves, our brain now has created?

All those curves and paths and nodes, objects and relations, movings and actions – how does such an “ordered chaos” can help us?

Again, the definition of information gives us the right hint – because information is repeatable, it has to be action – in the physical sense, means that it has to follow the principle of least action.

And that is just one path in all our space-time curves – that is the solution, you look for.

Ok, that’s fine, you’ll say, great, but can you please tell me, how that fits with “figures lie and liars figure”?

And i’ll reply “wait a little”.

Our brain is perfectly optimized to analyzing the map of space-time-curves of the incoming events to detect the one single path according to the principle of least action. That is not the point.

The point is – and that’s why the human brain did grow so much – if you have gathered enough information to rightly evaluate the current situation. And Bertrands Paradox tells you, that if you lack some information, your evaluation of the situation therefore isn’t as good as it could be.

Now remember the first part of information processing – the goals.

They are information like any other part of the reality, so if you know goals, you can better decide, where a reality including information processing systems will go.

And here i am:

Back to liars.

A lie is nothing else than an information, which is not based on real events, but on signals sent by the liars to “pretend reality”.

Or in other words: the reality including liars looks different for someone who knows about the lie and someone who doesn’t. So the “curve of least action”, the evaluation of the situation and therefore the results of decisions of someone who doesn’t know about the lie also looks different to the conclusions of someone who knows.

That’s exactly the reason, why a liar lies – he simply tries to force others to decide wrong things. Wrong for the others, not for the liars.

Your defense? Try to detect the lies by understanding the liars. If you know their goals, you know as much as they do and you know what they want you to “evaluate”, to decide.

And here i am back to Brenda:

“I keep getting the message that New Orleans is going to be rebuilt with no room for the poor.”

Thanks to JMF we know that the vultures start circling over New Orleans:

Old-Line Families Escape Worst of Flood And Plot the Future:
“The new city must be something very different, Mr. Reiss says, with better services and fewer poor people. "Those who want to see this city rebuilt want to see it done in a completely different way: demographically, geographically and politically," he says.”

The Voice of the White House
“In that way, we were told (and I was not the only person in the dining room who heard all this), this served to “chase out the niggers” and permit Bush-supporting businessmen from buying up the soon-to-be condemned sodden houses for five cents on the dollar from friendly insurance companies (which one of them was a CEO of) and put up an enlarged and very profitable combination of industrial park and office building section. The money for this would, naturally, come from government grants which a terrified Congress (Mid Term elections are coming) had just voted for and the contracts to demolish the wrecked low-income slums would go, as a no-bid contract, to another stellar Bush supporter.”

Pumping Us Dry
“Katrina tragedy is an absolutely perfect storm for oil companies.”

The vultures circle...

Gimme Shelter
“Trying to force authorities to open an Air Force base as a shelter, Jesse Jackson and other black leaders picked up 150 evacuees at the squalid New Orleans Airport and headed into the night.”

(i stop now, just asking JMF for more links to gather at one single point to show the “big picture”)

That’s the reason, Brenda, why you feel, that “something's up”. It’s not the headache (btw: hope you'll soon be well again), it’s just the knowledge, that those poor guys have, you mentioned:

“Seeing people being handcuffed and arrested for refusing to leave their home” – these people know that the robber barons may take their homes - in one way or the other - and sell them for thirty peaces of silver and that they may never see their homes again.

Thank you, Brenda, for inspiring me – and thank you, Barnita, for inspiring Brenda.