Reality is a Rorschach inkblot interpreted as a geometric theorem
and a geometric theorem interpreted as a Rorschach inkblot.
May-Tzu
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Guess I’ll identify as an advanced-AI quantum computer.
We’ll see how that goes.
May-Tzu
Academics consider the Pashtun to be an East Iranian people. Ironically for hundreds of years there have been claims with interesting evidence to support them that the Afghan Pashtun, a faction of today’s Taliban, are at least in part one of the ten lost tribes of Israel from more than 2700 years ago. Please see, for example: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/jan/17/israel-lost-tribes-pashtun After more than two decades of genealogical research I recently learned that I have 3.8% “Asia (South) – Pashtun-related” ancestry, according to the genealogical DNA-testing company LivingDNA. “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!” or descent from the Pashtun.
I deduce by the process of elimination that one of my maternal grandmother’s eight great grandparents may have been “South Asian.” The specific identity of any of Grandmother’s antecedents, an orphan born in 1882, are largely unknown to me. This ancestral DNA probably comes from an unknown great great great grandparent, about 1/(2 ^ 5) ≈ 3% of my genetic inheritance, probably on my mother’s mother’s side. Many of my mother’s relatives had unusually broad noses. The few surviving photographs of Grandmother reveal that she had what were to me slightly exotic facial features, including a broad nose. See, for example: https://www.flickr.com/photos/28384322@N05/29215996923/in/photostream/lightbox/ A Google-image search for Pashtun faces shows that the Pashtun do tend to have broad aboriginal noses.
Regardless of how many genetic markers on your chromosomes are tested by a company, if certain pieces of your DNA aren’t in one of their reference populations, their origin won’t be identified. E.g., if one of your recent ancestors were an extraterrestrial and if there is none of that particular species of extraterrestrial’s DNA in any of the company’s reference populations, your alien-hybrid nature will not be indicated in the test results. LivingDNA has 80 reference populations at present. Most other genealogical-DNA testing companies supposedly have about 40.
I think that the description “Pashtun-related” does not precisely equate to Pashtun ancestry per se. Living DNA also uses both the terms “Irish-related ancestry” and “Irish ancestry.” The former includes much of Scotland geographically. The latter does not. So the term “X-related” appears to include a wider geographic area than the term it refers to. The reference populations this company has for Asia (South) are Balochistan; Burusho; Indian subcontinent; Kalash; Pashtun; Sindh; and Southern Central Asia.
There are very many ethnicities within the Indian subcontinent. Many ethnically mixed marriages, some polygamous, occurred between Europeans, especially the British, and the people of India in the 18th and 19th centuries. At some point in the past the Chinese also intermarried with the people of India. This contrasts markedly with the traditional tribal endogamy of the people of Afghanistan, including the Pashtun.
One of the “South Asia – Pashtun-related” possible ancestral areas indicated on a LivingDNA map is the southern border of Pakistan along the northwest border of the India. The ancestry maps indicate up to 10 generations back. But, of course, Pakistan did not exist as a country before 1947. Therefore, this area was a part of India in the 19th. century. The people of northwest India are more genetically admixtured with Europeans than those of other areas of India.
It’s far more probable historically that a European male would have married a South Asian female in the early 19th century, than vice versa. It’s also more likely that she would have been a female from what was then northern India, than an Afghan female of the Pashtun tribe. I conclude that my South Asian ancestor was probably a woman from northern India who married a Brit in the early 19th century. Maybe …
May-Tzu
“The composition of vast books is a laborious and impoverishing extravagance.”
— Jorge Luis Borges
“A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.”
— Ludwig Wittgenstein
In the beginning was the Word – – and the Word was WTF!
— May-Tzu
Multiverse Is That It Is
Here is my personal intuition or wild guess regarding
the nature of reality, which will probably be
offensive to theists and atheists alike. There is
physical reality, the world of phenomena, mass-energy, space-time, the universe, perhaps a Multiverse. There also is a non-physical reality, referred to by such terms as mind, awareness, consciousness and even perhaps “spirit or spiritual.” These two realities are not unrelated to each other and perhaps are not two or are a unity. Maybe their relationship is similar to front and back of a Mobius strip or inside and outside of a Klein bottle. My intuition is that consciousness at some rudimentary
level is not an epiphenomenon of matter (brains), but
as fundamental as mass-energy and space-time.
What we call intelligence is, according to this insane view, an inherent part of the fundamental substrate of
reality, as order with awareness. The totality of what
is, perhaps, the Multiverse, has always existed, i.e.,
it is not infinitely old, but beyond or outside of space-time, as we pitifully understand it. If you want to call this consciousness-permeated Multiverse “God,” then that’s fine with me, as long as there is no further attribution of the personality of Zeus or Yahveh. But if you claim that this is only a new or a very ancient view of nature and the cosmos, panpsychism, and that no reference to “God” is necessary or desirable, then that too is fine with me. Truth may lie somewhere between “theism” and “atheism.” But everyone should develop his own intuition regarding the nature of reality.
May-Tzu
Understanding
Generally a man does not understand an utterance of his wife in the same room with him expressed in his native language, but fully understands a putative revelation from the “Creator of the Multiverse,” written thousands of years ago in an ancient language completely unknown to him.
May-Tzu
Why is there no sacred music?
If sacred music were the only ‘doctrine’ of the church, then I could believe. Why, Pythagoras, is there no sacred music of mathematics, logic, and reason?
May-Tzu
