by Gary Griffin
Freedom of choice is an absolute necessity to create. This freedom only comes from liberty. When liberty is denied, our freedom of choice is curtailed, and thus our power to create is limited, if not downright denied. The ability to transform ideas into a concrete form requires the focused effort of more than one person when it is a complex object. That is why we have a division of labor.72 Each person has a role to play and a certain piece of the work to get accomplished. The more complex and abstract the object, the more important it is to clearly communicate to others the needed direction to get the work accomplished. Tools can help to facilitate this process of work, but all technology is a tool. No matter how sophisticated a tool is, it still requires someone who knows how to use it. No single person possesses all the knowledge or the tools to build a complex object like a skyscraper.
The ability to create is a force that must be controlled. It is a power, and power unchecked can be used for both good and evil. That means we must have restrictions in the form of the rule of law, due process, responsibility, and accountability. These must be absolute—no favors for the rich and powerful. But freedom in the form of complete liberty carries with it responsibility for choices that result in actions, especially when those actions harm others.
THE CONNECTION BETWEEN NUMBERS AND GOD
Man is three in one—body, soul, and spirit. God is three in one—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The union of the two is equivalent to the number six. The multiplicative of the two (three times three) is nine. Thus God is represented as three-zero-six-nine with two numerical properties. First, the whole can’t be more than the sum of its parts. Second, the maximum value of any number is it’s multiplicative.
Mathematics, or more specifically numbers, are also important to politics, but not for the same reasons that pollsters think. It takes an agreement of at least two to arrive at a consensus to move forward. This is also necessary for America to move forward. However, our political parties can’t agree on anything except the fact they don’t want a new political party to steal any of their power. As long as America only has two major political parties, we will never move forward as a nation. The reason for this is that the net sum gain of two equal but opposing forces is zero. That’s right; our political parties essentially cancel each other out. So, two divided is one. One party pushing against the other party to control the direction of America results in zero.
One is the loneliest number because one is powerless. Our society as a system is powerless to move forward because we lack the agreement of at least two that is needed to achieve a maximum of force that will drive our society forward. As I stated elsewhere the laws of physics apply to American society because it is also a system that is used to accomplish the work of our nation. Right now, the structures, including our political structure, don’t facilitate the motion required to move our nation forward in accomplishing the work of our society. In short, we are powerless. We lack the power to move forward.
Let’s do some math to illustrate the principles I’ve just described. From this exercise, we can see how the power of numbers when applied to the American society system has resulted in a net sum gain of zero. More importantly, we can see how this contributes to the Inert America condition.
Let’s assume the coordinates of three-zero-six-nine equals GOD. The whole is the sum of its parts, and it can never be more than that. Is God a number? Absolutely not; God is the Creator of the universe; he is not a number. I am simply stating that within our system, the number three-zero-six-nine represents God. To that end, God also created a numerical system to control it. Within that numbering system, he is represented by a numerical value.
Evidence of this system is all around us. If God exists, then we must conclude this system is deterministic and the events we see are not random but chaotic. It can be difficult to tell from data whether a physical or other observed process is random or chaotic because in practice no time series consists of pure signal. There will always be some form of corrupting noise, even if it is present as rounding off or truncation error. Thus any real time series, even if mostly deterministic, will contain some randomness.
All methods for distinguishing deterministic and stochastic processes rely on the fact that a deterministic system always evolves in the same way from a given starting point. Thus, given a time series to test for determinism, one can:
pick a test state;
search the time series for a similar or nearby state; and
compare their respective time evolutions.
Define the error as the difference between the time evolution of the test state and the time evolution of the nearby state. A deterministic system will have an error that either remains small (stable, regular solution) or increases exponentially with time (chaos). A stochastic system will have a randomly distributed error.
Essentially all measures of determinism taken from time series rely on finding the closest states to a given test state. To define the state of a system, one typically relies on phase space embedding methods. Typically one chooses an embedding dimension and investigates the propagation of the error between two nearby states. If the error looks random, one increases the dimension. If you can increase the dimension to obtain a deterministic-looking error, then you are done. Though it may sound simple, it is really not. One complication is that as the dimension increases the search for a nearby state requires a lot more computation time and a lot of data (the amount of data required increases exponentially with embedding dimension) to find a suitably close candidate. If the embedding dimension (number of measures per state) chosen is too small (less than the true value) deterministic data can appear to be random, but in theory, there is no problem choosing the dimension too large.
When a nonlinear deterministic system is attended by external fluctuations, its trajectories present serious and permanent distortions. Furthermore, the noise is amplified due to the inherent lack of linearity and reveals totally new dynamical properties. Statistical tests attempting to separate noise from the deterministic skeleton or inversely isolate the deterministic part risk failure. Things become worse when the deterministic component is a nonlinear feedback system. In presence of interactions between nonlinear deterministic components and noise, the resulting nonlinear series can display dynamics that traditional tests for nonlinearity are sometimes not able to capture.
God created life, and life on planet Earth could not be sustained except by the combination of three things—the Earth, the Sun, and the Moon. There are nine planets in our solar system.
The maximum of any number is achieved by its multiplicative except for 0, 1, and 2. Relating this mathematics to our political parties in the United States, we can see why we have the Inert America condition. The parties are divided 2 ÷ 2 = 1. The maximum that can be achieved by the number of 1 is 1 or (1 x 1 = 1). The net sum gain of two equal but opposing forces is zero. You do the math (1–1 = 0). In order to move forward, we must have at least the power of two because that number represents agreement (2 x 2 = 4). Mathematically, our problems in America could be solved by the addition of a third political party. With a third political party, we could then achieve enough power to move forward. This third party could represent the middle class of America.73
WHAT IS KNOWLEDGE?
There are five different type of knowledge, but the one Aristotle attached to the world is when human beings understand truths that are self-evident. Realize that John Locke was an Aristotelian thinker, so when Thomas Jefferson wrote “we hold these truths to be self-evident,” it was not an accident. Aristotle recognized four other types of knowledge. 1.) The well-founded opinion (belief) of mathematical thought. 2.) The well-established generalization of scientific research (the scientific method). 3.) The philosophical opinions that are based on common experiences. 4.) The opinions about particular facts that historians support through historical research.74 These four types of knowledge are less weighty because they represent opinions or beliefs that can be true or false. That is, they ar
e not absolutes. Unfortunately, these other four types of knowledge have become the common standards for knowledge creation. I say unfortunately because it seems that people, including renowned scientists, are content with standards of knowledge that are not based on self-evident truth.
In philosophy, empiricism is a theory of knowledge that asserts that knowledge arises from experience. Empiricism is part of the epistemology or theory of knowledge. Empiricism emphasizes the role of experience and evidence, especially sensory perception, in the formation of ideas, while discounting the notion of innate ideas (except in so far as these might be inferred from empirical reasoning, as in the case of genetic predisposition).
In philosophy of science, empiricism emphasizes those aspects of scientific knowledge that are closely related to the evidence, especially as discovered in experiments. It is a fundamental part of the scientific method that states that all theories must be tested by constructing hypothesis against observations of the natural or physical world.
The term empiricism has a dual etymology. It comes from the Greek word , which translates to the Latin experientia, from which we derive the word experience. It also derives from a more specific classical Greek and Roman usage of empiric, referring to a physician whose skill derives from practical experience as opposed to instruction in theory.
The term empirical was originally used to refer to certain ancient Greek practitioners of medicine (empiric school) who rejected adherence to the dogmatic doctrines of the day (dogmatic school), preferring instead to rely on the observation of phenomena as perceived in experience. The notion of tabula rasa [clean slate or blank tablet] dates back to Aristotle and was developed into an elaborate theory by Avicenna and demonstrated as a thought experiment by Ibn Tufail. The doctrine of empiricism was later explicitly formulated by John Locke in the seventeenth century. He argued that the mind is a tabula rasa (Locke used the words white paper) on which experiences leave their marks. Such empiricism denies that humans have innate ideas or that anything is knowable without reference to experience.
According to the empiricist view, for any knowledge to be properly inferred or deduced, it is to be gained ultimately from one’s sense-based experience. As a historical matter, philosophical empiricism is commonly contrasted with the philosophical school of thought known as rationalism, which, in very broad terms, asserts that much knowledge is attributable to reason independently of the senses. However, this contrast is today considered to be an extreme oversimplification of the issues involved because the main continental rationalists were also advocates of the empirical scientific method of their day. Furthermore, John Locke held that some knowledge (e.g., knowledge of God’s existence) could be arrived at through intuition and reasoning alone.
Logical positivism is a school of philosophy that combines empiricism, the idea that observational evidence is indispensable for knowledge of the world, with a version of rationalism. Rationalism is any view appealing to reason as a source of knowledge or justification. It is a method or theory in which the creation of the truth is not sensory, but it is intellectual and deductive.
One of the reasons rational choice theory is inept at explaining human behavior is because its proponents assume that people make choices based on knowledge. For any choice or choices to be rational, it must be based on knowledge of the truth. Unfortunately, people so often make choices based on what they believe and not on what they know. Beliefs can be both false and true. However, if choices were based on knowledge of the truth, they would always be rational and predictable. Truth is truth; it is absolute, and any choice made as a basis of action that is based on knowledge would logically be the same. However, because beliefs differ, choices made based on beliefs seem irrational because they are not based on truth. They are false. False beliefs lead to irrational behavior. Because choices are not necessarily based on rationalized knowledge where truth is the standard of measurement, there is a certain uncertainty that can only be understood through the use of mathematics by the use of probability theories to explain behavior. Probability theory can only give you the most likely outcome most of the time. It is not an absolute measure because choices are not absolute. If truth were to be used as the standard of measurement, probability theory would no longer be necessary, as choices would be rational all the time. There are not multiple truths, as some would have you believe. There is but one truth. It is absolute and unalterable. To know something is to make it true, which again makes it absolute. There is no mystery here and no need for probability to predict the most likely outcome.
All mathematics exemplifies rationalized knowledge. For example, 2 + 2 = 4 is a simple mathematical problem. We know that 2 + 2 = 4, therefore it must be true. However, we can’t know it based on our experience. We can’t know that 2 + 2 = 4 through the use of sight, sound, taste, touch, or smell. It’s something that we can only know, therefore it must be true. Even though we can’t know that this simple equation is true through experience, we can know it is true through reason and rational thought. Interestingly, all things created by the human beings from ideas such as buildings, and which we define as real, are only possible through the use of mathematics in one form or another. Oddly, rationalized knowledge or mathematics makes possible the reality of our everyday experience by transforming ideas into physical entities that we can define as real because we can see, taste, touch, hear, or smell it.
If these assertions are true concerning everything in existence today that we define as real, then it must also be true that we can know that God is real and that he created all that there is on planet Earth through the use of science called mathematics. We can know this by the reality of all things that exist on planet Earth that are natural, and therefore not manmade. If we can know that math is real, then we can know that God is real and that the truth of his existence lies in the fact that he used mathematics to create everything on the planet. If not, then we can say that the Empire State Building came into being through a sheer act of random events.
It’s absolutely necessary for us to arrive at the knowledge of the truth of God through the use of a rationalized process if we hope to move forward as a nation. We must create an information society and a knowledge-based economy, and align our social, political, economic, and philosophical systems to the three macro-level trends identified in chapter 1 if we wish to return to a state of prosperity that is drive by growth and innovation. How can we do this if we can’t even arrive at the truth of God as the Creator of the universe? An information society with a knowledge-based economy is a rational society. It exists out there in an abstract form; it’s not something we can experience through touch, taste, sight, hearing, or smell.
Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
THE HISTORY OF THE SOCIAL CONTRACT
When men gathered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on June 7, 1776 and declared their independence from the tyranny of England because of the unjust taxation levied on the people of the colonies, it was a significant event in human history. At no other time in the history of the planet and among any civilization had a group of men undertaken such bold actions. When we examine the men involved in these actions that were viewed as treasonous by England, we have to also consider the language used in drafting the Declaration of Independence, as well as the ideas the document represents and where these ideas originated. It is especially significant to remember that Thomas Jefferson was the original drafter of the Declaration of Independence. The language used may have been his exclusively but the ideas used were not his alone. They were based on ideas of other men, some of whom can be traced all the way back to Aristotle and the early Greek philosophers. Some of those influential ideas came from thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and especially John Locke. You see, unlike the politicians of today, our Founding Fathers were veracious readers.75 They didn’t have TVs, the Internet, and an army of staffers to do the reading and thinking for them. They relied on the written word
as the transmitter of ideas. A close examination of the first two paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence as drafted by Thomas Jefferson illustrates this point. Many of these ideas come directly from John Locke.
When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,—That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.76
After the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson wrote to Richard H. Lee some three years later “that it had not been his task at the time to find new principles and arguments, but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject.”77 Just as there are always disagreements among men as to the proper course of things, the wording that charts such a course and its actual execution of the course never finds agreement among more than one person without compromise. The same was true for the Declaration of Independence. For example, the wording crafted by Thomas Jefferson of inalienable rights of Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness was influenced by John Locke’s writings on political theory in which he said that all men are born in a natural state where all people are equal. In this natural state, each individual has the natural right to defend his life, health, liberty, or possessions.78 Although it lacks common agreement as to the change in wording, some believe that it was changed in order to downplay the ownership of property as a role of government. It is further conjectured that this idea was put into place to appease the many landowners among the signers of the Declaration.