Compassion and Strength

Compassion is underrated. Sure, people may talk about being nice to people, and being good to others, and understanding, but if some jerk cuts you off on the freeway, all bets are off.

I think many people think there is a choice to be made between being "nice" and being "strong". I think this is totally, completely, utterly wrong.

Compassion

Compassion is tied to empathy and understanding. If you feel someone's pain, you are less likely to contribute to it. If you know why someone is acting strangely, you are less likely to take offense. If you get someone's motivations, you might be able to see what they are trying to do, instead of just their attempts (often misguided attempts) to do it.

Strength

Strength means many things. It means courage, potency (i.e. you can accomplish things), toughness (i.e. you don't get hurt easily) and many other things. Some people think it means being mean sometimes, and again, I just don't buy that.

Crackpot Theory Time!

You can have strength without compassion, and compassion without strength, but best is both! And by "best" here I mean they reinforce each other. One without the other is counter-productive. One without the other actually undermines itself. This sounds like a a lot of talk, the following is the substance.

Strength without compassion

This one is easy. The high school bully is one bad day away from getting ganged up on by people who just won't take it any more. That road leads to a jail cell. And unless the bully's goal in life is to be the best bully in cell block 3, their expressions of strength are going to be severely limited. Abuse of strength makes enemies, and if you make enough enemies, sooner or later they will get the better of you. It holds true for people, corporations, and nations. Germany was very strong at the start of WWII. But oh boy did they make enemies.

Compassion without strength

Some people are compassionate but not strong. They allow people to walk over them. They give and give until there's nothing left. They love easily and get their hearts broken. They give so generously of their time and money that they have nothing for themselves in an emergency. And there's always an emergency. They have never taken to heart one simple lesson: Sometimes, the most loving thing you can say is "no".

Adding compassion to strength

Imagine two strong young men in high school. One is the bully. He's skulking around sneaking cigarettes, beating up people for their lunch money, and generally being strong with no compassion. The other guy is right out of a movie from the 50's. He's captain of the football team, class president, and he helps little old ladies across the street. He does not fear the bully. The bully fears him. The bully is big and strong, but he's not looking for a fair fight. The football captain is not looking for any kind of fight, but he might well choose to fight if the alternative is worse than a fight. He won't provoke the bully, but he might well dash in if he sees the bully beating up someone. This would not go well for the bully, who would then be outnumbered. The strong and compassionate guy may well go on to accomplish great things, and be stronger for knowing when to help.

Adding strength to compassion

People will ask for all sorts of things. A little understanding may help a compassionate soul figure out what they actually need. Having the strength to say "no" is essential. A child may well ask for a sack full of candy for breakfast. Understanding would say that the most compassionate thing is to give them something wholesome to eat. The child then busts out the puppy dog eyes, and maybe even the tears, and says "please please please!" It takes strength to hold out. It takes compassion to hold out in such a way that the child is happy to get the good meal.

More than that though, if you have x number of dollars to use for charitable spending, giving them to the first charity that asks leaves you with nothing to give the cause that you feel is really important. Sure, you could just reach deeper and give more, but you have to be able to feed your own family. You have to be able to keep yourself strong enough that you have more to give. You have to be able to invest in your own growth so that you have more to use to help others. And again, understanding helps. If one charity has a high overhead and little of the money given is used to help, and another charity is out giving sacks of candy to little kids and not good meals, and another charity is doing something to teach out-of-work parents new job skills so they can find good jobs, each dollar you give just plain helps more in the right place.

One final thought about strength and compassion

Imagine two dogs. One is a very small dog. The dog barks at everything. The little dog is threatened by everything, and has to declare in a yipping voice that he's on guard. The other dog is a big dog. Not one who has been taught to be mean, but a mellow, friendly big dog. The little dog is threatened by the big dog and starts barking, and jumping up and down, and just throwing a fit. The big dog is not threatened by the little dog. The big dog knows he is in no real danger, and has absolutely nothing to prove. He does not need to bark back.

Which dog do you want to be?

Time, Space, and things immaterial

A lot of people believe there is a physical world, and a spiritual world, and that while these influence each other in mysterious ways, they are two distinct things. I will not make any attempt at this time to say that this is so or not so. This is more about the consequences of such a metaphysical view.

Because of the completely metaphysical nature of this discussion, I'll get this out of the way right off the bat:

Crackpot Theory Time!

Time and Space are only relevant in the physical world.

The world of physical things includes time and space. These are inextricably linked. There simply is no time without space and matter. These are all aspects of the physical universe, and anything outside that universe, like, say, God, is not subject to them. It's important to note that I include time in this. Yes, time. A psychic who insists you have had past lives may or may not be on to something, but why only past lives? Time is an aspect of the physical universe, and theoretically at least, your soul is not. So why not future lives too? Why not simultaneous lives? Or, take it a step further, why not every life that has ever, or will be lived, all at the same time?

We are all one and the same

Quite a lot of people believe that we are all tiny bits of God's being. Just one soul. Ours. All of ours. Not just people you like, either. Every crazy mass murderer, every genocidal dictator, every corrupt politician, every good intentioned but annoying busybody, yup, all one soul. Sorta makes you squirm, eh? Admittedly, this is a bit more conjectural than my usual crackpot ideas, but it's a fun thing to consider, and it ties in with the next bit.

Speaking of God...

It's really easy for people to ascribe human emotions and motivations to some fatherly Zeus-like creator of the universe. But something omniscient and omnipotent probably would not experience things like jealousy, rage, anxiety, or really much of anything that a fire-and-brimstone sermon might contain. Going a bit further, the mind of an omniscient and omnipotent entity contains in a very real sense the physical universe. There's really no difference. Nor is there any distinction between our minds and bits of this larger one that, by definition, includes everything. Once again, we are all parts of one thing.

The cool part about these ideas

Now, I'm not much on religious dogma. Even if I made it up. So my crackpot ideas about souls and the universe are really just fun ideas... but... I kinda like the idea of a world in which empathy and compassion just make sense.

Emergent Behavior

Emergent Behavior is some weird stuff.

For instance, if you learn everything there is to know about the structure and behavior of atoms and their particles, you can derive all of Molecular Chemistry.

But it's -way- easier to treat Chemistry as a separate discipline, with it's own rules and language.

So chemistry is an emergent behavior of particle physics. Something outrageously complex on a quantum level can be simplified into something comprehensible if taken as it's own behavior.

This is fairly well known and accepted by the scientific community.

But I am thinking we just don't go far enough in applying this concept.

Sure, we can take psychology as an emergent behavior of biochemistry, and from there go bigger to sociology and economics and politics. But the bigger we get, the less well understood it is. Much like Asimov's "Psychohistory", in theory we just need a big enough sample for the rules to make any sense, but these things are evolving at a much faster rate the bigger we get.

For instance, imagine dropping a top tier economist/financier from our current age into the middle of the industrial era. Even if he were to have some odd form of specific amnesia about what technologies and ventures would prove to be winners, the -techniques- he would use would blow everyone else out of the water.

So too our social interactions and political structures evolve with frightening speed. Some changes are in response to technology. I'll forgo the usual Information Age examples and point out that The Pill has made gender equality something we can dream of achieving one day.

Politics changes even faster as people learn from the mistakes and triumphs of other societies. Some repeat the mistakes of the past, others are fine with the status quo, but still more societies struggle for positive change. Rome was not built in a day, and it lasted centuries. Japan went from obscurity to world power in a figurative blink of an eye, and after the war took them down a peg or two, re-emerged as an economic power in a generation. Since China's embrace of the market economy, they are rising at a rate that truly boggles the mind, dragging a billion people with them.

CRACKPOT THEORY TIME

Considering the speed and of change of these emergent behaviors, it begs more questions than I have theories for. But here's a few:

Global Economy and Politics

Regions with relative stability will expand economically until they are at parity with the western world and the fully developed Asian nations, such as Japan, where the per-capita income resembles that in the US. At that time, the US as an economic superpower will be more like Brittan as a strong military power, but no longer an Empire. Likewise our military might and station in world politics will be as one of many, rather than the biggest bully on the block.

To do: invest in plurality and coalition building while we can, or the new big kids (China and India) will kick sand in our faces.

Note: This only applies to regions with relative stability. Places where someone getting killed is a tragedy and investigated by an efficient police force are stable. Places where someone getting killed is a statistic are not.

Maturation of information/communications technology

We're still figuring out what we can do with this crazy internet thing, and building new and more powerful computers and new and crazier things to do with that power. Many of these uses involve porn and gaming, but as soon as someone figures out how to make money doing something, the rest of the world follows.

I am not so sure this trend is infinite. Moore's Law breaks down as the physical implementation of computing reaches the realm where it's impossible to make things smaller or faster as you reach the limits of the size of molecules and the speed of light.

Software maturation will take longer, but eventually we'll be inventing software that can write and optimize software, and teach that machine to understand plain English. The day will come when you can ask your computer, in plain speech, any question and it will figure out what it needs to do to answer that question.

Don't doubt some of the first uses of this will include "What does (some celebrity) look like naked?"

To do: Implement Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics ASAP. (refine them just a bit to make sure they'll work)

Even More Emergent Behavior

This is all good and well, but it's only scratching the surface. Just like if you only consider biology, the Human Being looks like the pinnacle of Emergence, we too are limited in what we can understand. What behaviors will occur that will emerge from thought, memes, sociology, politics, economics, etc? Will we even be able to comprehend what happens as these evolve at absurd rates? Will Human Thought be as cells to some larger, incomprehensible phenomenon that will think it's so neat that these cute humans keep doing what they do? Would we even understand if such a thing existed even if it were capable of desiring that we know?

That's right! Throw your preconceived notions and antrhopomorphisms to the wind, because we will have less frame of reference to understand these than we do the quantum physics that many have tried and failed to really wrap their heads around.

My Crazy Theory about the Hubble Constant

OK, I'm not a physicist.

Fact is, while I devour physics type news and science popularizations, I'm still just a math geek and home business owner and former software developer who likes to think and invent crackpot theories.

But here's something that struck me one day.

Yes, about physics.

Specifically, Astrophysics.

More specifically, the Hubble Constant, and how it leads to the Big Bang theory.

The Hubble constant is a measure of the ratio of observed red-shift in the light reaching observers on Earth to the distance from earth of the objects (usually galaxies) emitting said light.

The further away something is, the more red shift. Red shift is assumed to be caused by objects moving away from us, so that the wavelengths of light are "stretched", and thus more red.

Since everything in the universe is apparently moving away from us, and the further away something is, the faster it's moving away, it's an easy guess that this is because the whole universe is stretching. The mental image often used is a huge balloon, with the galaxies painted on the surface. As the balloon is blown up, the galaxies move further from each other. The further away the galaxies are on the balloon, the faster the stretching moves the apart.

So far so good.

But, they thought, since the balloon (henceforth called "the Universe" is expanding, then at some point in the past, it must have been very, very small.

So small, in fact, that all the stuff in the universe would have been packed into an infantessimal area.

Then the balloon, excuse me, universe started expanding, and everything got further apart.

Some guy who thought this concept was stupid called it a "Big Bang". The name stuck.

There has been some success to this theory. It accurately predicts the cosmic microwave background radiation that was found around the same time by people who had no idea what they were finding.

But it also has some failures. It seems the expansion of the universe is speeding up. This is attributed to "Dark Energy", which is every bit as stupid as it sounds. It's an attempt to patch a big, glaring hole in the theory.

CRACKPOT THEORY TIME!

What if, just, what if: Instead of the red-shift being caused by the expansion of the universe, it were caused by the speed of light changing?

Yeah, crackpot, eh?

But, there's no change in the size of the universe, just how long it takes photons to get from one place to another.

Scientists attempting to measure the "curvature of the universe" i.e. the shape of the balloon, figure it's most likely completely flat. That is to say, it's not a balloon at all, but a Euclidean plane (or space, as the case may be), stretching off infinitely in all directions, filled with galaxies forever and ever.

This is -juuuust- a bit different than a balloon being blown up.

And no dark energy, just a change in the speed of light.

Remember that bit about E=mc^2? Change the speed of light, and E changes. The second law of thermodynamics says E always goes down. Always (the always bit is actually the third law). If c is getting smaller, then so is E. And red-shift happens.

Strangely enough, there's still a catastrophic energy density in the past as the speed of light was vastly different. Thus: the cosmic microwave background.

But no universal expansion, just a change in the speed of light. Nothing is being "pushed", there's no force being exerted, so no need for "dark energy". (don't confuse this with "dark matter", but with no actual expansion of the universe, we may need to re-think the model of how much gravity should be attracting other galaxies, etc. But I'm not a physicist, and have not attempted to do the math on this. We may yet be stuck with dark matter until we figure out more about how gravity works.

So, there's no Big Bang here.

Therefore, no Big Bang Theory.

All there is is the Brakes Theory of the Hubble Constant.

But maybe I should rearrange that a bit.

I want to call it the Brakes Theory of the Constant, Hubble.

That's right, BiTCH.