I LIE, OH COMPUTER

Digital ‘truth detection’ technology is on the way to tell if you are lying on text, email and, presumably, blog. Cornell University have analysed thousands of electronic messages and identified ‘linguistic anxiety’ that gives the game away.

Tell tale signs are very very very lengthy messages than are required. Another sign is that the liar tries harder to prove he’s not faking – yes, he really does. Then, of course, they blame others for problems – I’m so late today; the kids wouldn’t get up, God was not on my side.

 Emotionally negative words are also used – this is so stressful, you know. And then, of course, the liar is deliberately, you know, how can I put it, vague, so to speak. And soon the software will be here to catch you out.

 Except it won’t work. You see, personally I think that we all lie or exaggerate, or evade, either to others or ourselves, so the test would become pointless. Although I once met someone who didn’t lie. Or so he said.

© Anthony North, Feb 2007

Have you tried NewsFlash, my general news blog?

INTERNET ADDICTS

Many Chinese teenagers have become so addicted to the internet that the authorities are beginning to use drugs, confinement and electric shock treatment to break them of the habit.

This is shocking news indeed. Online games and chatrooms seem to be the worse areas. There has been a spate of internet related suicides and even a murder caused by an argument over an online game.

With 123 million users, many under eighteen, they’ve decided to do something about it.

Could we have a similar problem in the west?

I said: Could we have a similar problem in the west?

 Are you listening to me? Stop chatting. Turn that game off and pay attention.

I said … Oh, I give up.

© Anthony North, Feb 2007

See Paranormal UFO Occult if you have an interest in the mysterious. This new blog will build into a full archive of the unexplained.

UNDER-MIND

If an extraterrestrial tapped into the blogosphere what would he think? After all, he’d want to know how Earth thought, so the internet would be the obvious thing to look at.

That’s a strange way to put it, isn’t it? How the Earth thought. But maybe it isn’t a ridiculous idea. James Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis argued that planet Earth could co-ordinate itself.

Does the blogosphere fit into this realm? When we blog we lay bare our individual unconscious ideas. That’s what writing is all about – allowing the unconscious a foothold in other people’s reality. At the point of writing it is psychology, but in the act of reading, people turn psychology into sociology, a more communal enterprise.

So the blogosphere becomes more than our individual rantings and frustrations and becomes a more communal thing; a statement; maybe, of the angst of mankind.

Quite a few decades ago Carl Jung argued that below the personal unconscious was a collective unconscious, a repository for shared thoughts and symbols, constantly bubbling up into the personal mind through dream, myth or folklore.

Many people ridiculed Jung’s idea as ridiculous. I don’t know whether the collective unconscious exists but I suspect it does. But even if it didn’t then, when I look at the blogosphere, I know it exists now.

© Anthony North, Feb 2007

Blogging Index

See Anthony North’s Paranormal UFO Occult, my new mysteries blog.

PARANORMAL UFO OCCULT

INTRODUCTION

Welcome. This sub-domain is supplementary to the ‘Mysteries’ page, above, which has dozens of mysteries from Lost Civilisations to the Loch Ness Monster. Here, I offer shorter posts dealing with anecdotal evidence of phenomena and theories to account for the unexplained.
Often these theories will appear slightly sceptical of supernatural powers. This is just my way of rationalising phenomena and I in no way attempt to degrade a person’s peacefully held beliefs.
Anthony North

THE DARK ZONE

Click Paranormal UFO Occult Page One for:

Borley Rectory - Raynham Hall - Angels of Mons - Edgar Cayce - Emanuel Swedenborg - Uri Geller - Aleister Crowley - Roswell - Bonnybridge - The First Saucer Crash

Plus:

Paranormal, What Is It? - We Are Afraid - Are You There, Mr Alien? - It Knocks You Senseless - Levels of Reality - Reborn In the Mind - Exorcism Rules, OK - Oh, Curse It

THE WHITE ZONE

13 Sep 07 - Strange Memoirs - Grandad Calling
25 Jul 07 - Climate Change and Phenomena
17 Jun 07 - What Is a Real UFO?
3 Jun 07 - Flying Saucerer’s Apprentice
27 May 07 - Psychodrama
20 May 07 - Future Now
13 May 07 - Paranormal Mind
29 Apr 07 - Paranormal - Where Is It?
22 Apr 07 - Reality - Objective or Subjective?
15 Apr 07 - Hallucination
31 Mar 07 - Salem
31 Mar 07 - Strange Memoirs - When A Plane Fell
31 Mar 07 - Enfield Poltergeist

HORROR FICTION

2 Apr 07 - The Hand of God
13 Mar 07 - The Sunday School
1 Feb 07 - The Exorcism
1 Feb 07 - New Love
1 Feb 07 - The House

THE PROBLEM WITH DEMOCRACY

I like nothing better than trawling through dictionaries of quotations. You can learn a lot about a person by doing so. But more than this, you can learn about the person’s times. And never was this more true than in the case of Winston Churchill.

My favourite Churchill quote was a reply to the lady who said: Winston, you’re drunk.’ His reply came swift and sure: ‘Yes, madam. You’re ugly. But in the morning I will be sober.’

Churchill once said: ‘Democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.’ Never was a truer word spoken. The great statesman instinctively knew that democracy was a mess.

Why is it that politics is always a problem, with even democracy a mess? If we take democracy in its purest form, we have direct democracy. The electronic age could allow it. For any decision, we are all to press a button and vote. This would be a total nightmare.

The philosopher Mill perfected democracy with his insistence that the majority has no rights over a minority, other than self-protection. If we all pressed the proverbial button, minority rights would disappear entirely.

 I think, though, I understand why democracy is so often a mess. It’s like a jury in a court. It involves the human, and the human is always fallible. And it is so for an important reason.

As far as I’m aware, there are no politics in an ant colony. Every ant has a role and carries it out in an orderly way. Again, as far as I’m aware, an individual ant does not understand the concept of individuality.

And here lies the problem. We do. The success of a society is to balance social regulation with the individual. But it can never be perfect because we ARE individuals.

It is that ability to be who we are as individuals that stops politics and democracy from being perfect, for we refuse to be consumed by society.

 We will have to live under the truth of Churchill’s quote, for to place the concept of the perfectly regulated ant colony in humanity would be to place us in a totalitarian state. Let’s hope politics remains a problem.

© Anthony North, Feb 2007

See my new site P-ology For Beginners and look for a new system of thought.

P-OLOGY FOR BEGINNERS

This is a MY SITES Search Post. The following subjects appear on this site.

P-ology Patternology Psychology Sociology Philosophy Religion New Age Science History Politics

You can comment on this site here

INFORMATION IS IN A MASS

Many sites on the internet overwhelm me. Even blogs can suffer the same problem. I log on and all I see is a mass of information. If someone is compiling a site on a particular subject, he feels the need to put ALL possible information on it.

The result of this is that all you see is a blur. Making sense of the sheer amount of information can be impossible. Indeed, there are other kinds of sites and blogs I prefer. I hope my alternative network is one such example. Best, I think, to clearly categorise, and then to be selective on the information you use.

Yes, the outcome of this may well be that the information may be biased, but then the surfer has the opportunity of visiting other sites with different viewpoints and then forming a balance.

This is how research used to be done – by going to various books on various viewpoints. The degree of information contained was such that the mind could rationalize it and place it in an order.

This order was what was once called ‘wisdom.’ Indeed, wisdom is a process whereby you take information and glean an understanding from it. I’m worried that the internet is over-loading people with so much information that wisdom is giving way to pure data-processing.

This could be the end of thought as we know it.

© Anthony North, Feb 2007

Blogging Index

SEARCH ENGINES & THE HUMAN

Search engines. Now there’s a tool for you. I use them a lot for my research. But I’ve noticed a thing or two about them. Maybe it’s because they are created by humans, but have you noticed they ape human society?

A society is made up of individuals in a sea of faceless, mass humanity. A search engine – especially a big one – is pretty much the same. It can access all these sites and blogs, each one created by an individual or organization. But in their totality, they disappear into a mass of uncoordinated information.

This mass begins to be organized when we place individuals or organizations in specific specializations. For instance, that man is a plumber, whilst that one is a doctor. The search engine carries out this categorization. You just type in the specialization and there they are, all lined up for inspection. The only thing is some search engines are so big that, even in their specializations, we have just a mass of faceless specialists.

But the search engine can help you here, too. You can rise above the faceless mass and be a front runner. The usual means of doing this is to buy your place. If you do so, you can come near the top. And hey presto, just like a capitalist society, money buys you more influence and power.

Human society, it seems, will out in any form – even the electronic. Of course, we could decide privilege and money shouldn’t work on a search engine, and everyone should be equal. But wouldn’t that just be communism?

© Anthony North, Feb 2007

Blogging Index

See News page, above, for latest posts on my other blogs

WHAT IS CYBERSPACE?

It’s Techie Without a Clue getting all philosophical again. Today’s subject is Cyberspace. Basically, what is it? How can we possibly understand it? We can look at the subject in many ways. Rationally, it is nothing more than millions of electronic files stored in millions of computers.

In this form, Cyberspace doesn’t actually exist. It is just a word used to explain the interchange of information from those files on the web. Yet, if we accept this reductionist explanation alone, then the ‘interchange’ has no reality.

This is plainly preposterous. The interchange is real. It does happen. So for it to happen, it must have reality, but a reality that cannot be grasped in any rational or, indeed, scientific, understanding.

The processes behind ecology may be helpful. Ecology is about eco-systems – the interplay of lifeforms within an environment. Science would study the individual lifeforms or the environment itself. Ecology searches for the relationship within the interplay.

Again, we are talking of something that doesn’t really exist, but obviously does. It is simply not registered in any form of understanding to science. It’s similar to, say, love, which clearly exists, but cannot be measured.

 Maybe fictional representations of Cyberspace can help. Increasingly Cyberspace is being represented as some parallel world ‘out there.’ Within it, superheroes react with forces of good and bad.

This has echoes of the mysticism behind the religious impulse. Religion is thought to have begun with animism, the idea that a spiritual world lies parallel to the physical, populated by spirits of the physical forms.

This idea eventually led to the Classical mythologies and the existence of an ‘other-world’ that guides us, defines our morality, and shows us the information which allows us to make sense of the world.

Guess what. That is increasingly an explanation of the internet and this mythological Cyberspace. Are we birthing a new, electronic God-force? Or is cyberspace just millions of individual files in millions of different places?

 If you opt for the latter, then this debate doesn’t exist.

© Anthony North, Feb 2007

Blogging Index

TECH v LITERATURE

I’ve only been using a computer for a short time, but I’ve noticed something about my writing. In one way, I feel it has got worse. In another, I guess it has just changed. How can this be?

It reminds me of an argument I heard many years ago – can’t remember where, but it was a good one. Basically, the argument goes, the quicker the means of writing, the less eloquent your words become.

The most obvious reason why is that the faster you can write, the less time you have for thinking about what you’re writing. In the past, they had plenty of time, and had the space to think up beautiful words. Now, we can write faster than we can think, so words become more basic.

This is borne out by history. In Shakespeare we have pure poetry. By the 19th century, prose is beautiful, but at long last it IS prose. With the introduction of the typewriter, we see prose becoming more compact, with less descriptiveness. And with the computer, much description has disappeared completely.

Today’s prose tends to be functional, whereas in the past it was a true craft. Mindst you, I can’t say this is a bad thing – all too often prose was overwritten in the past. But I still ask, was my writing better before the computer? Or maybe you’ll decide it’s academic – I’m rubbish, anyway.

Writing Index

© Anthony North, Feb 2007