You should do your own research on that if you are skeptical, and why not be sceptical?:)

But my understanding, which is not totally naieve, is that there are many mechanisms of disruption.

I am not going to use any research to answer your question here, and I am not one for details, but here goes, my attempt to pursued you, via answering it.

The first thing that you need to understand is that of all the millions or billions of variables that constitute our bodies: Oxygen, Water, salts, amino-acids… there is only one that is totally biologically ubiquitous. This is electricity: Within, and between, every living are electrochemical processes that operate on tiny, tiny voltages.

The second thing that you need to understand is that wirelessly connected devices gain their connection via electromagnetic energy.

The third thing you need to understand is that connected devices operate at energy levels thousands and thousands of times higher than, both the natural background EMF energy (As the earth was 200 years ago, or so) and the biological levels found in every living cell in our bodies.

You need to understand and accept these three things before proceeding really Alexs. They are just science fact, which you should be able to easily disprove or accept.

Once you agree with the three understandings above then you can start to extrapolate from those premises.

Does it seem plausible that connected devices could cause biological change?

I think it does, why would it not. There is nothing special about the electrical energies involved here, over and above say, an electrical motor.

Would such changes be unnatural?

I think clearly yes. Three hundred years ago no human had expected anything like the levels of even measly Bluetooth4. (This is one point I am not convinced about without further researching. #cosmicblasts etc).

Would such changes be disruptive?

I would imagine that if you were to be able to take a person with a magic wand just randomly change the nano-voltages in the electrical systems in their bodies then those changes would have a point at which they would become noticeably negative. This seems totally reasonable to me as an assumption. And it is a case analogous to EMF, except with EMF it is more point of  source dependent.

So where we are now, I think, without any science evidence, just thinking,  is an understanding that, because of the nature of connected devices and biological systems, it is plausible that there could be negative effects from connected devices.

I accept that, it seems very sensible to me as a conclusion. There is no WooWoo in what I have said and I challenge anyone to refute any of the above:)

The next stage in my answering your question is to look at evidence. Is there evidence that supports the above plausible hypothesis?

I think there is lots.

The newest (2016?), most-compelling, evidence is to do with their system which decides on whether or not to allow calcium into our cells. Every cell needs calcium. Any cell can be damaged by too much calcium. This system that governs the calcium flow is called a “Voltage Gated Calcium Channel” and it is shown to be heavily susceptible to disruption from non-natural EMF. The effects of this are emerging to be many, but one that seems accepted is that this calcium imbalance, caused by your phone etc, causes sever oxidative stress. This is the cell ageing…rusting… corroding that is the cause of most modern diseases (It’s the thing that antioxidants are touted to reduce.)

So there we go…

I hope that answers your question!

I am a committed Vegan, but I am totally missing oysters.

Every day this mini-battle goes on in my head.

I am a Vegan for two prime reasons.

Reason One

I think, for reasons of woo woo, that the following is a supreme teaching:

“Do Not Eat Animals”.

Reason Two

Like most people, I do not want to be an increaser of negativity in the world. That is, I don’t want to choose to cultivate and propagate or in any sense be responsible for or supportive or endorsing negativity production in any way.

The “choice” aspect is important here, I think:

When I eat a salad, beings may have died to get that salad before me. A shrew in a field. Two badgers in a pile up on the M4. All is possible, even with kale.

But when I eat meat, I am necessarily choosing that an animal was imprisoned, tortured, exploited and slaughtered for me.

Vegans choose not to cause suffering in their choices, this does not mean that their choices will never cause suffering. #quornpocalypse

Once I accept this principle (Ahimsa and Sukka) it is just a no-brainer to me that if I eat cheese or chicken, then I am causing suffering. Often in massive ways that, as the end consumer, I see myself as ultimately responsible for. I pay the assassin via the teller or waiter or jolly vendor at the farmer’s market.

I have philosophised these kinds of points so much over the last few years, more than most, I would wager. Still my conclusions remain: it is water-tight, a no-brainer, a comestible cogito: We should not eat animals.

Of course I would eat meat in a survival situation.

Of course honey is not the same as ham.

Of course milk is worse than flesh, because it is flesh, plus more suffering. If B contains X and C contains B then C contains X.

I belive that if you want to be one of those people, like most people, one of the… “I-dont-wanna-be-cruels”, then, in no sense, can your meat eating be justified. You are being irrational, alongside your cruelty. (Please, please prove me wrong on this, for I would so love it not to be so true.)

The Mammalian end of the spectrum, and even the birds and the fish, those little fellas, I am close to done with them in my philosophical enumerations and ruminations, but Oysters, they are still in the mirky penumbra, somewhere between figs and accidental cod roe.

Of oysters I cannot say, “I should not eat that.”

I don’t currently eat them, and haven’t for many many months, but by gosh, they are almost on the tip of my tongue.

I cannot yet justify their exclusion for reasons a bit like, but not limited to, the following:

I cannot really make sense of an oyster experincing suffering, in much the same way that I cannot imagine yeast suffering. I could torture a goose, but an oyster? That does not yet make sense to me.

I don’t think it experiences anything. It has no brain, as such. It has a strewn out clumps of proto-neurons. It will respond to stimulus, but feel pain or in any sense be, in any point in anything that can be considered a mental space?

Is it a being?

When I think “Do Not Eat Animals” that last term expands out into something like “sentient beings”. “Sentience” means able to experience. “Being” means able to be. I don’t know really what either of those terms really mean. Nobody really does. Especially not the oysters. But I am sure a dog is sentient, as I know I am. Oysters, profoundly lack this sureness, to me, right now.

We think fish can feel pain, they respond as such, they can be anaesthetised, they have similar pain biologies to mammals. But these arguments and understands do not apply to oysters. Oysters may move away from toxic environments but that does not mean they experience the environment. Singled celled organisms can do the same, and vegans eat those. #youpeople!

There is another point, I will make this my last, which is that oysters are jam-packed with nutrients that vegans find very hard to get without chemical supplementation (Which is what I do).

Is that wise? The vegan definition on the society website centres around the term “practicable”. I like that definition, it gives room for reasonableness. I am forced, by reason, to ask, is it not practicable to eat oysters given that, being human, I need B12?

Is it really better that I get it from some industrial process in pill form?

I do not know the answers to these questions and so I just trundle along, not eating oysters, yada yada, “have another bit of cress, Mat”.

Thanks for reading!

First  one realises, just by thought, that they are a cause, enabler, endorser, supporter, antecedent (temporal or not) and well… a fan of the causing of  unacceptable suffering.

Then one realises that, ultimately, the reason that they cause this suffering is to satisfy their  own momentary mouth pleasure.

When these two simple realisations are acknowledged I belive it would be ignoble of me not to then ask myself,  “What should I do?”

If I consume meat, then am I an accomplice in the murder of a baby animal, just for fun?

What should I do?

It took me a while to get to answer this question. There were lapses and cognitive dissonances and a guilty goat curry that was “going to waste”.

But the answer came, a nobrainer it seems to me now, “I do not eat animals.”

And that is almost that, except that  it get’s worse than the worseness of meat and the obvious butchery/epiphany of that equation:

If I eat dairy, then I cause greater and wider suffering than the suffering I cause from just eating meat.

This is startling, when you let it settle.

The dairy industry is the meat industry.

But it is the meat industry with extra layers of humiliation and exploitation.

It has enforced breeding, unnatural confinement, torture, antibiotic recklessness and on and on…

Is it not is even more repugnant and brutal than the meat farming?

Cheese is literally addictive.

I miss it so much.

One of the key advantages of practicing CHE is the ability to quickly sift through life’s mundane choices, enjoying them and knowing that, by and large, you have made what for you were the right choices when it comes to Home Economical issues. How should one clean their clothes, house, self and mind. Is Amazon Prime is justified? Which vitamins should I supplement? How much is optimum salt?

Consider the CHE equation: Should I wear my seatbelt?

It is simple to see on a three-space Risk/Cost/Benefit vector graph that, yes, of course you should wear your seatbelt. It is irrational not to, if you value self preservation. What is interesting is that such indubitable Cartesian conclusions map into the same kind of epistemic grid as things that on the whole seem woo, irrational or nonsensical.

Consider the CHE equation:  Should I salute magpies?

This one, when you flesh it out, has a few more nexi than the seatbelt one, but the structure is almost the same; where the two equations differ is in the two driving assumptions.

1. Wearing Seatbelts: It is possible that wearing a seatbelt could save the wearer’s life.
2. Saluting Magpies: It possible that saluting a magpie could increase the saluter’s  Luck.

In the case of 2, once we accept the possibility of Luck then it is no difference of kind to move on and reason something like:

1. There is something special called Luck.
2. It is possible this Luck can be increased by agency.
   1. I’m assuming that if there is a supernatural (“nonprobabalistic”?) reality to luck then it can be something that can be in some sense accumulated or bestowed on.
      1. If this assumption is not accepted then you seem forced to accept that there is Luck but it is distributed stochastically/probabilistically.
         1. Luck would be real but its distribution chanced, which seems absurd.
3. It is possible saluting magpies could entail 2 (Luck increase).
4. Saluting magpies is an extremely low risk activity.
5. Saluting magpies is an extremely low cost activity.
6. It is rational to solute magpies.

I have long been a collector of the various ways we humans have found to express that abstract goodness to life, and the singular, hopeful, response to that goodness; Seize the day. Play The Game. Don’t Worry, Be Happy.

My Uncle Andy died a few years ago, he was a great man; all thought. My older cousin, and Andy’s first male nephew, Yeof , he came to stay, from LA. Just the other day. He told me how Andy had been such a fertile influence on his life; as Andy was to many. He told me of the wise and pristine advise that his uncle had given him, without claim, many long, long years ago… .

“Chase The Butterflies”

Uncle Andy ’47’10

This thought experiment is exactly the same as with the Glove Universe, except that it will have less parts. We will simply stipulate a new Universe for the game and then look at the Truth Lists for this Universe

Imagine a universe that is just a circle. No different on the inside or out, but a circle, perfect in its simplicity.

Your Glove Universe and my Glove Universe would have been distinct, it’s very unlikely we could imagine identical gloves, especially not if we started getting really trivial with our Truth List. Perhaps yours had stubbier fingers than mine or yours had thick external seams whereas mine were concealed.

With the Circle universes our Imaginings, and thus stipulations, will be identical. To see this, try to imagine a statement that could be true of your perfect Circle Universe but not True of mine. If you can imagine one in your Universe then you have cheated and not imagined a perfect circle.

Now let’s play the Truth game with this new perfectly circular board.

I will write my Lists using Bullets from now on. I am no mathematician but perhaps I may start my Lists like this:

• • True:
    • The proportion of the area of the circle is Pi times the radius squared.

• • False:
    • The circle has exactlly four axis of symmetry.

• • Meaningless:
    • The King is dead.

It is a lot harder with Circles than Gloves to fill the Three Lists because the very act of stipulation/imagination/creation limits what’s possible to say about the Circle Universe. Also, and importantly, the fact that all circles in the Game are perfect means they must also be identical. Two things are identical if the totality of their Truth Lists contain all of the same statements on each List, as would be the case with Perfect Circles but nor red gloves. We can imagine the difference in gloves, but not in perfect circles. And therefore, if follows that we can have no differences between our Circle Universes, to show me wrong here you just need to come up with a statement that would be true of your universe but not mine (without changing the rules of the game.)

We are going to move to the even more simple “Board” for our next variant of the Game, in the next part of this Thought Experiment.

Imagine a Single Point universe.

I don’t know what that means in any deep or metaphysical sense. I can’t imagine a Single Point Universe like I think I can a Glove Universe or a cosmic Universe and I certainly can’t imagine it like I can imagine yesterday’s lunch. But, just like with gloves and circles and anything else, I can fill out the Truth List for the Single Point Universe.

So… let’s play, fill out the Truth Lists for a universe that is just a point. No space or time, without change and structure.

When you try to do this, you will soon see that the Meaningless List can be added to easily, but the other two, Truth and False, are much more challenging.

There are only two true statements I can think off about the Single Point universe, and even these I am not sure what they mean. Here is my Truth List for the Single Point Universe:

• • True:
    • The Point Exists.

• • The Point is Identical with Itself.

How can I even be sure that I can have these two True Statement’s on my list? I am not sure that I can, but it strikes me that whatever “existence” is if it is True of the Glove Existing then why would it not be True of the single point existing.

We have stipulated that the universe contains no change. It follows from this stipulation that the point must be identical with itself. If it was not, there would be a change, either in sequence or structure (We shall see what these terms mean in future experiments).

Let’s look to the False List:

• • False:
    • There is no existence.
    • The Point is Identical with Itself.

The Single point universe has two False statements on its List, these are, as you can see, simply the opposite of the Truth List.

If this was the case, if the two lists contained items that couldn’t exist within the same game’s Truth lists, then we would have a problem, the most fundamental of problems, the Contradiction.

Underlying all of these Games we can play is a rule set that contains as its most fundamental rule:

There Can be No Contradictions

It doesn’t matter what Universe we try to imagine, if we are reasonable then the underlying truths of Logic dictate that things will be consistent. There can be no contradictions. Soon we will see how emergence is a dependency relationship and we will be able to test this with any statement against any possible universe and see that this NonContradiction flows thought reality, possible and actual.In other words, if you are not prepared to accept this most fundamental rule then these Thought Experiments just cannot be for you:)

Conclusion: The Single Point Philosopher

The Single point universe is logically the most Simple Universe anything could consistently imagine or represent. All we can say are four nontrivial statements, is “that it exists” and “that it is identical with its self” and the negation of these two statements. That’s all we can say, but as we shall see in the next experiments comes, from this most minimal of atoms we can create some amazing things. Before this, I think it would be good to ask the questions we cannot really answer about the Single Point Universe.

So far we haven’t been anywhere near what is traditionally and culturally considered the deeper side of philosophy. In fact, we haven’t really been doing any “philosophizing” at all in these two thought experiments. We have been reporting “the facts” about imaginary universes rather than asking the big Why/What/How? questions common to Philosophy.

As a final exercise, which is ideally suited to the bath, bed or pub, I want you to think about the Single Point Universe in as many ways as you can (or can’t). Try to contemplate the Single Point universe, as we have been; asking questions and suggesting answers. Try to meditate on the single pointed universe, focussing on it with as little distraction as you can (I find this very hard!). Try to visualise the Single Point Universe, even if you never can. Try to doubt it. Try to disprove its possibility.

And when you have tried the above, try, however you can to answer these kind of questions:

1. 1. Could it exist?
   2. Can I make sense of it not existing?
   3. What is the difference between it existing and not existing?
   4. Does it contain Pi?
   5. Does it the anything like time or space?
   6. Is it true that 4+6=10 in the Single Point Universe?
   7. If it exists can it then not exist?
   8. Are the Truth Lists of the Single Point Universe contained within the reality we are now in This Universe. Are all things identical with themselves in this universe? Do all things in this universe exist in some sense in this universe?
   9. What happens if we add another point exactly like the first?

If you are like me you won’t be able to clearly answer most of the above, but that really doesn’t matter.