zenpundit.com

[ by Charles Cameron — Ashby, the Law of Requisite Variety, Bateson, the arts and sciences ]

Mapping from complexity to complexity. Access to a set of relationships … that we are not usually conscious of in ourselves.  The depth and riches of imagination, of the arts and sciences, of the listening heart / mind, of the world around us, of the models we need to make to navigate that world successfully… of the wisdom our steersmen need, and all too often lack.

Zen‘s post Ruminating on Strategic thinking had me thinking a bit, and I guess I felt some of his bullet points,

• Assessment of the relationships among the variables
• Assessment of the relationship between the variables and their strategic environment
• Assessment of current “trajectory” or trend lines of variables
• Assessment of costs to effect a change in the position or nature of each variable
• Assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the variables as a functioning system

and particularly

• Recognition of systemic “choke points”, “tipping points” and feedback loops.

are separable as components one might learn, but need to fuse into a single intuition if the result is to be fully system-responsive.

And I think the two comments above by Ashby and Bateson are in their own ways both “about” that — about the need for a gestalt understanding rather than a list of separate and disparate parts…

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And of course, those two quotes can also be used to pitch for cybernetics, or for poetry, or both… much to my delight!

[ by Charles Cameron — recursion as form — this one’s for analysts: poets should know it already ]

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We spend far too much time on content, and not enough time on form.

We spend far too much time on the data, and not enough time on relationships. It is pattern that connects the dots with accuracy, not more dots – quality of insight, not quantity of information.

And pattern is underlying form.

Haiku is a form. The sonnet is a form, the sonata is a form. And just to juxtapose sonnet and sonata is to recognize the formal relationship between them.

1.

Recursion is the form that Doug Hofstadter explores in his book, Godel Escher Bach, and you’ll find it every time one mirror reflects another mirror (what color does a chameleon turn when placed on a mirror?), every time there’s a doll inside a doll inside a Matrioshka doll, often in the form of a paradox (“this sentence is meaningless”) – and when people take photos of themselves holding photos of themselves…

as in the pic of Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle and (in case your politics doesn’t agree so much with Chomsky) the one below them of Jacob Appelbaum and Donald Knuth in my “specs” image at the top of this post.

2.

Content can be powerful, but form really doubles up on the power. Here’s one way of thinking about it: form is what tightens information into meaning.

A couple of news reports in the last couple of days have caught my attention because of their form:

Charter of Open Source Org is Classified, CIA Says

Open Source Works, which is the CIA’s in-house open source analysis component, is devoted to intelligence analysis of unclassified, open source information. Oddly, however, the directive that established Open Source Works is classified, as is the charter of the organization. In fact, CIA says the very existence of any such records is a classified fact.

“The CIA can neither confirm nor deny the existence or nonexistence of records responsive to your request,” wrote Susan Viscuso, CIA Information and Privacy Coordinator, in a November 29 response to a Freedom of Information Act request from Jeffrey Richelson of the National Security Archive for the Open Source Works directive and charter.

“The fact of the existence or nonexistence of requested records is currently and properly classified and is intelligence sources and methods information that is protected from disclosure,” Dr. Viscuso wrote.

This is a surprising development since Open Source Works — by definition — does not engage in clandestine collection of intelligence. Rather, it performs analysis based on unclassified, open source materials.

That’s hilarious, it’s so misguided: I don’t know whether to laugh or barf (not a word I ever expected to use in my writings, but there you go).

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That’s sad, this one’s just plain tragic:

Protesters calling for religious tolerance attacked with stones, threatened with death

Police are investigating a violent attack on a ‘silent protest’ calling for religious tolerance, held at the Artificial Beach to mark Human Rights Day.

Witnesses said a group of men threw rocks at the 15-30 demonstrators, calling out threats and vowing to kill them.

One witness who took photos of the attacked said he was “threatened with death if these pictures were leaked. He said we should never been seen in the streets or we will be sorry.”

Killing your enemies for reasons of religion is one thing: killing those who work for peace between you and your religious enemies is no worse of the face of it – it’s religious killing, no more and no less, in both cases — but it drives the point home with considerable, poignant force.

Keep your eye out for recursion, it’s an interesting business. And respect form – it empowers content.

4.

You’ll find recursion right at the heart of Shakespeare: his plays were performed in a round theater (the “wooden O” of Henry V) called the Globe, whose motto was “totus mundus agit histrionem” – roughly, “the whole world enacts a play” – a notion which Shakespeare put into the mouth of the melancholy Jaques in As You Like It:

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players.
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts…

A martial version of this idea, indeed, can be found in the philosopher Plotinus, who wrote in his Enneads (3.ii.15):

Men directing their weapons against each other — under doom of death yet neatly lined up to fight as in the pyrrhic sword-dances of their sport — this is enough to tell us that all human intentions are but play, that death is nothing terrible, that to die in a war or in a fight is but to taste a little beforehand what old age has in store, to go away earlier and come back the sooner. So for misfortunes that may accompany life, the loss of property, for instance; the loser will see that there was a time when it was not his, that its possession is but a mock boon to the robbers, who will in their turn lose it to others, and even that to retain property is a greater loss than to forfeit it.

Murders, death in all its guises, the reduction and sacking of cities, all must be to us just such a spectacle as the changing scenes of a play; all is but the varied incident of a plot, costume on and off, acted grief and lament. For on earth, in all the succession of life, it is not the Soul within but the Shadow outside of the authentic man, that grieves and complains and acts out the plot on this world stage which men have dotted with stages of their own constructing.

5.

I thought it would be interesting to see if recursion had power, too, in the field of religion, and this passage from Ephesians (4.8) sprang to mind…

When he ascended up on high, he led captivity captive, and gave gifts unto men…

That’s a lovely recursion, “leading captivity captive”. But I think we can go deeper. John Donne‘s sonnet Death be not proud reaches to the very heart of the Christian message, it seems to me –it parallels the passage from Ephesians closely, while focusing in on the hope of resurrection with its stunning conclusion:

Death, thou shalt die.

Here’s the whole thing: profound content in impeccable form:

Death be not proud

Death be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not so,
For, those, whom thou think’st, thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleepe, which but thy pictures bee,
Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee doe goe,
Rest of their bones, and soules deliverie.
Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poyson, warre, and sicknesse dwell,
And poppie, or charmes can make us sleepe as well,
And better then thy stroake; why swell’st thou then;
One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.

6.

What do you think?

[ by Charles Cameron — vendetta, vengeance, an eye for an eye, compensation, forgiveness, and the question of limits ]
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I didn’t want this pair of events to slip by entirely unnoticed.

The first image above shows part of the “wanted” poster with which Rabbi Menachem Liebman offered a $100,000 reward to whoever would kill Huliad and Nidar Ramadan, recently released by Israeli authorities as part of the prisoner-swap for Gilad Shalit, who had previously been convicted of killing his own son, Shlomo Liebman, a settlement security guard.

The second, lower image is taken from the reciprocating offer of a $100,000 reward made by Dr Awad al-Qarni on Facebook, to whoever who would capture an(other) Israeli soldier.

These things tend to escalate.  According to this AllGov report, Prince Khaled bin Talal of Saudi Arabia commented that “Dr Awad al-Qarni said he was offering $100,000 to only take a prisoner but they [unnamed in the original Reuters report, but presumably Israelis] responded by offering $1 million to kill Awad al-Qarni” – and himself pledged an additional $900,000 to the bounty on the capture of Israeli soldiers, bringing the total to $1 million.

Accompanying this story on the AllGov site, appositely enough, was this illustrated quote from Mohandas Gandhi:

For those who have trouble killing Ramadan brothers or capturing Israeli soldiers, lesser rewards are also available in the United States: this article reports that a “$4,000 reward has been offered for the identity of the police officer who may have been responsible for the injuries sustained by former Iraq war veteran Scott Olsen” during the Oakland Occupy protests recently.

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Juvenal wrote Semper et infirmi est animi exiguique voluptas Ultio — “revenge is the weak pleasure of a narrow mind”.

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Let’s think about this for a moment.

Lex talionis is the law of limited retribution – one eye for one eye – found (following similar texts in the code of Hammurabi) in the Mosaic law, Exodus 21.23-25 requiring “life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise.”  The rabbis, however, commented that “inasmuch as the law seeks equity, its literal enforcement would frequently lead to gross inequity” [W Gunther Plaut, The Torah: A Modern Commentary, p 571. n. 6.] – and chose to interpret the text as mandating equivalent monetary compensation for value lost.

Tit for tat is a common expression of the same idea, and has also been used in a technical sense in strategies for the iterative playing of Prisoners Dilemma games referred to in my previous post.

Christ‘s injunction in Matthew 5.38-39 reads:

Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.

Similarly in the Qur’an, 41:34-35, Muslims are instructed:

Nor can goodness and Evil be equal. Repel (evil) with what is better: Then will he between whom and thee was hatred become as it were thy friend and intimate!

Joseph Smith, the first Mormon prophet, suggests in Journal of Discourses vol 2, pg 165-166 that such forbearance is appropriate the first time, but not thereafter:

Our enemies have prophesied that we would establish our religion by the sword; is it true? No, but if Missouri will not stay her cruel hand in her unhallowed persecutions against us, I restrain you not any longer: I say, in the name of Jesus Christ, by the authority of the Holy Priesthood, I this day turn the key that opens the heavens to restrain you no longer from this time forth. I will lead you to battle; and if you are not afraid to die, and feel disposed to spill your blood in your own defence, you will not offend me. Be not the aggressor—bear until they strike you on the one cheek; then offer the other and they will be sure to strike that then defend yourselves, and God will bear you off, and you shall stand forth clear before His tribunal.

The New Testament, however, suggests that this forbearance is not to be exercised only on the first occasion…  Thus in Matthew 18.21-22 we read:

Then came Peter to him, and said, Lord, how oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? till seven times? Jesus said to him, I say not to you, Until seven times: but, Until seventy times seven.

Also of interest is here the (possibly apocryphal) story of the Dalai Lama, who was asked how he would deal with a mosquito. “Brush it away,” he replied. “But what if it comes back?” “Brush it away again.” “But what if it comes back again?” “I crush it, and say ‘Come back as the Buddha!'”

For a detailed consideration of these issues in Islam, see Abdullah bin Hamid Ali‘s Islam and Turning the Other Cheek [.pdf], where this interesting discussion featuring the idea of forgiveness “seventy times” is also featured:

The Koran directs the Prophet — God’s mercy and peace be upon him — concerning the hypocrites, “Whether you ask for their forgiveness, or not, [their sin is unforgiveable]: if you ask seventy times for their forgiveness, Allah will not forgive them because they have rejected Allah and His messenger, and Allah guides not those who are perversely rebellious” (9: 80). After the death of the chief hypocrite, ‘Abd Allah ibn Ubayy, the Prophet — mercy and peace on him — saw no decisive prohibition in this verse against praying for hypocrites. This was, firstly, because outwardly the words give him a choice between asking forgiveness or not (Whether you ask for their forgiveness, or not…). Secondly, the verse mentions that God would not forgive even if he was to ask seventy times. His hope was that if he asked more than seventy times, it might be enough to secure forgiveness for Ibn Ubayy in spite of his open and insidious antagonism of the Prophet — mercy and peace on him. His companion, ‘Umar, contested this understanding of the Prophet’s — God’s mercy and peace be upon him. Later, the following verse was revealed confirming ‘Umar’s stance, “Nor do you ever pray for any of them that dies, nor stand at his grave; for they rejected Allah and His messenger, and died in a state of perverse rebellion” (9: 84)

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Perhaps Koholeth (Ecclesiastes 3.1) should have the last word:

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven

[ by Charles Cameron — Harvard controversy, free speech vs hate speech, Hindutva, moral high ground & sanctions for and against violence ]

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I am grateful to various members of the New Religious Movements list for pointing me to the recent events in Harvard, where a group of scholars led by the formidable Diana Eck (her book on Banaras is a masterpiece and greatly treasured) have persuaded the Faculty of Arts and Sciences to omit two courses in economics usually taught by Subramaniam Swamy from their Summer School offerings next year, on the ground that an op-ed he published in Daily News and Analysis titled “How to Wipe Out Islamic Terror” fell under the category of hate-speech (as opposed to free speech).

The article in question is no longer available on the DNA site, but can be found on Pamela Geller‘s Atlas Shrugged blog.  An account of the controversy can be found on Inside Higher Ed, and Harvard Faculty’s debate was reported in the Harvard Magazine.

Subramaniam Swamy is President of what remains of the once powerful Janata Party and former Union Cabinet Minister.

With that as background, I would like to address the issue of the varying principles and rule-sets invoked as offering a moral high ground – or a necessary safeguard – in various religious and other traditions.

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I have read Dr Subramaniam Swamy’s article, and while the various quotes in it recommending specific actions — such as “Remove the masjid in Kashi Vishwanath temple complex, and 300 others in other sites as a tit-for-tat” and “Enact a national law prohibiting conversion from Hindu religion to any other religion” – give western readers a sense of Swamy’s overall mindset and intentions, it was another quote that held my attention:

This is Kaliyug, and hence there is no room for sattvic responses to evil people. Hindu religion has a concept of apat dharma and we should invoke it. This is the moment of truth for us.

I suspect the reason this quote has not been featured in the reports I’ve read of the debate have to do with the number of words in it that are unfamiliar to the western reader.

I’m acquainted with Kaliyug (the Age of Darkness) and with the concept of the sattvic (“Sattva is a state of mind in which the mind is steady, calm and peaceful” to quote the sacred Wiki), but had to dig a bit to discover that apat dharma is essentially “righteousness in emergencies”:

There are special Dharmas during critical and dangerous circumstances. They are called Apat-Dharma.

Swami Sivananda

Apat Dharma: They are duties that come to one under extraordinary circumstances, in crisis or in emergencies (apatmulakah). In such circumstances, even that which under normal circumstance is deemed wrong becomes dharma (tatra adharmo’pi dharmah). Here the righteous motives guide our actions (bhava-suddhimattvat). Normally a doctor gives anaesthesia before operating the patient but an emergency operation performed on the battlefield to save the life or limb of a soldier on the battlefield may be done without anaesthesia and with the instruments available, be they sterilized or not. When emergency is declared in the country, the elected parliament can be dismissed, the Constitution suspended and the ruler assumes extra-ordinary powers to deal with the situation. When peace prevails, the youth of a country should get education and work, but during war, the country may call upon its youth to sacrifice their education and fight in defence of the country, sometimes with hardly any training.

Sanjeev Nayyar

So that quote – “This is Kaliyug, and hence there is no room for sattvic responses to evil people. Hindu religion has a concept of apat dharma and we should invoke it. This is the moment of truth for us” – is essentially the abstract principle on which Swamy’s various proposals are based, and thus corresponds to the principles articulated by PM Netanyahu in his recent opening of the Knesset as underlying his government’s policies with regard to national security:

Our policy is guided by two main principles: the first is “if someone comes to kill you, rise up and kill him first,” and the second is “if anyone harms us, his blood is on his own hands.”

If you want a sense of how important that quote about apat dharma is to a Hindu (and a fortiori, a Hindutva) reader, see the way it is singled out and quoted with an illustration of Krishna driving Arjuna‘s chariot into battle by “Sanchit” here (I’ve used the same illustration at the head of this post):

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What am I after here?

It seems to me that we could use a brief yet definitive scholarly account of what the guiding principles of the various religions and secular worldviews allow their adherents, in terms of justice, forgiveness, pre-emption, retribution and retaliation.

This would need to include, compare and contrast such principles as:

• The Judaic notions of pre-emptive killing (Netanyahu’s first principle, found in the Talmud and commonly quoted as ‘ha’Ba Lehorgecha, Hashkem Lehorgo, If someone tries to kill you, rise up and kill him first) and the injunction, in fighting the Amalekites, “Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass” (1 Samuel 15:3).
• Christ’s “But I say unto you which hear, Love your enemies, do good to them which hate you.” (Luke 6.27)
• Christian “just war” theology.
• The western / UN “norm” that some actions are simply beyond the pale, unacceptable under any circumstances (essentially the basis for war crimes tribunals)
• Game theory’s “tit for tat” strategy in an iterated Prisoners’ Dilemma as proposed by Anatol Rapaport and articulated by Robert Axelrod in his book, The Evolution of Cooperation.
• The Islamic tradition’s notion of response in kind (Qur’an: 2.194, “and so for all things prohibited, — there is the Law of Equality. If then anyone transgresses the prohibition against you, transgress ye likewise against him but fear Allah, and know that Allah is with those who restrain themselves”) – which would appear to imply that actions that would not normally be acceptable may be appropriate in response to an enemy that has already “transgressed” in that specific manner
• Gandhi’s ahimsa, together with his corollaries, “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind” (attributed) and “It is better to be violent, if there is violence in our hearts, than to put on the cloak of nonviolence to cover impotence.”
• Swamy’s own “This is Kaliyug, and hence there is no room for sattvic responses to evil people” and “the nation must retaliate — not by measured and ‘sober’ responses but by massive retaliation.”
• Buddha’s “Victory breeds hatred. The defeated live in pain. Happily the peaceful live giving up victory and defeat” (Dhammapada15,5)…

… and so forth.

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I am grateful for further pointers and comments you may care to offer.

I hope to follow this post up with another, Lex Talionis II, which will address the use of private rewards for revenge killings in the Israeli / Palestinian matter.

[ by Charles Cameron — game and counter-game, FPS, Iranian nuclear attack ]

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Following up on two earlier posts [i & ii] on gaming a strike on Iran — from the FPS leagues…

The upper image shows “the designer of the first Iranian made Nuclear Energy computer game”, according to the tag-line in the Sydney Morning Herald game review, Iranian game promotes sacrifice and martyrdom — the image credit is AP.

According to the review:

In “Rescue the Nuke Scientist,” U.S. troops capture a husband-and-wife team of nuclear engineers during a pilgrimage to Karbala, a holy site for Shiite Muslims, in central Iraq.

Game players take on the role of Iranian security forces carrying out a mission code-named “The Special Operation,” which involves penetrating fortified locations to free the nuclear scientists, who are moved from Iraq to Israel.

To complete the game successfully, players have to enter Israel to rescue the nuclear scientists, kill U.S. and Israeli troops and seize their laptops containing secret information.

But there’s more: the game itself is a “tit for tat” move in an overarching game of games:

The “Rescue the Nuke Scientist” video game, designed by the Union of Students Islamic Association, was described by its creators as a response to a U.S.-based company’s “Assault on Iran” game, which depicts an American attack on an Iranian nuclear facility.

That would be the US designed Kuma\War game, Mission 58: Assault on Iran, described in the lower of my two frames.

As a Special Forces soldier in this playable mission, you will infiltrate Iran’s nuclear facility at Natanz, located 150 miles south of Iran’s capital of Teheran. But breaching the security cordon around the hardened target won’t be easy. Your team’s mission: Infiltrate the base, secure evidence of illegal uranium enrichment, rescue your man on the inside, and destroy the centrifuges that promise to take Iran into the nuclear age. Never before has so much hung in the balance… millions of lives, and the very future of democracy could be at stake.

Seems like it’s hanging in the balance still — the Kuma\War game was released in 2005, the Iranian response in 2007.