we will not be updating this blog in the near future.

thank you.

“I see a new triangle of global governance emerging that we need to strengthen. A ‘triangle of coherence’. On one side of the triangle lies the G20, providing political leadership and policy direction. On another side lie member-driven international organisations providing expertise and specialized inputs whether rules, policies or programmes. The third side of the triangle is the G-192, the United Nations, providing a forum for accountability.”

Translated to normal parlance this means that one can look at this new triangle of coherence as being comprised of three groups: the rich nations, the rich and up and coming nations and everybody else who likes to travel to Geneva or New York. I am still wondering if this new coherence has much of an effect on the price of coffee in China, or whether the Chinese even care to drink coffee on occasions.

“In the last sixty years the multilateral trade rules have played a vital role in increasing predictability, reducing uncertainty, underwriting the rule of law and fostering a sense of legitimacy in trading relationships.”

Now, what is the man saying really? Mind you, Pascal Lamy is no dummy, and you may or may not like how he expresses himself, or you may find it offensive that the man has a high opinion of himself, but then I do not think that this world would be safer if anybody in his position was a meek or naive bureaucrat easily swayed by the latest ideological fashion. I am thinking of all the anti-WEF demonstrators that can not distinguish WEF from WTO and put it all in one big pot, and do wonder what it is that they teach people in schools these days. However the quoted phrase above is a clear statement of what it is that global regulation, in this case of trade, has done for us all: it has produced more predictability and reduced uncertainty by making all efforts to create a level playing field when it comes to trade. Not that I do not think that people throughout the globe do not have good reasons to be both dissatisfied and satsfied with governance at all sorts of levels, however we ought to look at what it is that has been achieved and how it is that the circumstances have changed.

“The crisis is likely to have accentuated a sense of insecurity about the future, as have the pre-crisis food and natural resource price situation and the swine flu pandemic. The impulse to turn inwards poses real challenges to those governments that understand the benefits of international openness. One response to negative public attitudes is to do more by way of providing social safety nets, but governments also have a responsibility to convince the public of why a retreat inwards is no answer to the challenges of engagement.”

I do wonder if he is thinking of one country in particular, or a few? Those observing the international political stage will notice that public speak at these fora and national speak are not necessarily coherent in meaning. At this point, it may be appropriate to ask if a particular country who goes and pledges international doctrine, and then makes big “buy national” fireworks is really addressing the fundamental challenges of international engagement and speaking with one voice, be it abroad or on national territory.

It is not like a man like Pascal Lamy could not find a better paying job than that of being the Director-General of the WTO – a group of occasionally quarreling well-intentioned and greedy nations run by a plethora of individuals and ideologies – and when he argues for the value of the multilateral trading system, there is more at play than his own individual fortune, a whole lot more.

“As we contemplate the different ways that the world economy may be affected by the crisis, it becomes clear why we need the multilateral trading system more than ever. Even if we believed that all crisis phenomena were cyclical and that we would soon be able to resume ‘business as usual’, we would still need a strong regime of international cooperation to exit the crisis. But when we add the strong likelihood of secular change — that policies and behaviour in the financial sector will be modified to avoid a replay of the forces that generated the crisis, that ways of doing business may change, that new economic structures and patterns of exchange are evolving, and that public attitudes are likely to exert new influences on governments, this gives us a second reason for reinforced and more effective international cooperation.

There is also a third reason. The imperatives of changing economic, social and environmental circumstances, along with the shared global challenges of addressing development and poverty, mean that the nature and substance of cooperation is always changing too. We know we face new challenges for the trading system such as:

i) managing the relationship between trade and climate change;
ii) improving cooperation in a world where fundamental changes in supply and demand relationships are emerging in international food and natural resource markets;

iii) forging better coherence between regional trading arrangements and the multilateral trading system; and
iv) addressing some of the more opaque and intractable non-tariff barriers to trade.”

The whole of this speech makes for interesting reading, it may however be a bit hard to digest for those unfamiliar with WTO lingo. The concluding remarks deserve a few comments from my side, if noting else as a way of making some notes for further thought.

“First, the current crisis will end but it will have changed the world, against the background of a world already in an important phase of change, and these new realities will challenge the ingenuity and commitment of policy-makers across the globe.”

Is it in the nature of the dynamics of global economy that it is cyclical in nature? That asked, if so, then is it also its nature that given the non-linear nature of the various couplings between the interacting systems, that the next crisis will also not be predictable? (Needless to say that there will be enough ex facto futurologists claiming that they saw it coming; however those are in constant supply regardless of circumstances.)

“Second, we need multilateral cooperation more than ever, including in trade, and in that connection we must attach priority to the completion of the Doha Round.“

Oh, yeah. If it was easy, it would have been done long ago. What is different about the Doha round?

“Third, we need a new architecture of global governance to provide a framework for effective cooperation. These are all ideas that cannot be fleshed out adequately in thirty minutes, but I offer them for consideration and debate.”

Yes, thank you!

Alternative link via the World Trade Institute: here

Disclaimer: I am involved with the WTI, and Philipp Aerni is a colleague.

Of antibiotics and globalisation

Physics – Shaking atoms to make them stop

Shaking atoms to make them stop

Personally, I am always for the Bose-Einstein statistics… consider this a political statement, if you may.

The so-called plot to assassinate Obama may or may not have really happened, and America, south of the Canadian border and north of Mexico, may or may not be ready to accept a president of African ethnic origin. I am not in the heart of all Americans, I can not know that. I find it totally contemptuous that a character named Palin has been nominated as vice president candidate. It is tantamount to a slap in the face to any intellectual or hard working woman to have somebody so poorly educated and with such limited capabilities and no proven track record just a heart beat away from the presidency. You see, I am not so sure that Obama will either live to be sworn in, or that he will be elected in the first place. I do not know much about Obama, and if appearances and public words are of any advice, then he is clearly the holder of lot of hopes for America, if not the world. What kind of president would he be? That we do not know.

From an economic point of view I welcome the spending, but from an educational and democratic point of view, it is a catastrophe because not much of substance is being transmitted to the voters, just propaganda. From that point of view, a limitation on spending might be wise, but then, I am a liberal and limitations of spending do not fare well with us either. In this campaign the best thing that has happened to Obama is the financial crisis and Palin’s poor judgement on how to dress and who’s money to spend. By the way, I think she looks good in Manolo Blanik shoes, but so would Joe the Plumber’s wife.

Dannie Jost

Philosopher, Physicist and Swiss (at least today)

The Atlantic

So, but what is happening with tensoriana?

Actually not much. The basic idea of its creation is very much alive, and perhaps if I was not so busy working on that very idea, then much more would be happening with the website and the blog. Perhaps then Wall Street would not be crashing, and perhaps then there wouldn’t be a pathetic woman running for VP in a country that by sheer size has more to to say on fundamental governance matters than either you or I care to think about or are comfortable with. Perhaps then… only if… but what do you expect from me?

Now, you know that I am not into gender issues. I know it is a man’s world. I do not argue about that one, however it does not prevent me from either thinking or writing. Is it a white man’s world? Good question! I am glad that you thought of it. But then I recently heard James Watson on the matter of genetic differences, and I could not agree with the man more. We are all created alike, and some of us are more alike than others. I know that some of his remarks have gotten some feathers ruffled, what in fact has happened is that a lot of good people do not understand much of what is the fundamental architecture of life, and this is sad, very sad. Our technological society can ill afford to have so much ignorance around. If society is failing somewhere, it is failing in its recognition that education is an imperative. Actually access to education is a basic human right as chartered in the Declaration of Human Rights. So where is the problem? Why do we get side tracked about a few milligrams of melanin one way or the other?

Why is it that we value some aspects of intelligence more than others? But what is intelligence? We all know that spies only exist in James Bond movies and that what really happens in real life is a tad more mundane than the fantastic fiction. Oh, really. There are real life events and narratives that make James Bond sound like a dull character. Reality has always been much more fantastic than fiction. Fiction is only plausible, while reality does not have to adhere to plausibility. Oh, there is another kind of intelligence? Individual intelligence? Oh!

Last month I attended a fantastic conference in Geneva with what to me is a rather misleading name: Access to Knowledge. The fundamental issue is actually access to information, or as one of the speakers pointed out, access to justice. Access to knowledge boils down to the fundamental right of access to education, and that is a rough one on a global scale. When the most powerful country in the world – of which I am a citizen – has some of its influential figures – note that I am not using the word leader – all confused about one very basic biological function that we call reproductive biology, then I in my not so modest opinion see that there is a problem in education. When that same big numbers country can not manage to educate its influential figures in what are the basics of reproductive biology, how is sub-Saharan Africa going to manage to curb AIDS? There is the consoling idea that perhaps the former is not a prerequisite for the latter, and let’s hope so.

But I am biased, very biased. I was educated within the tradition of the scientific method, and was born loving the arts.

Shift your thinking, go ahead, do it! Technology, like life, is transient.

the videos are here

Kamaran and I have explored a bit of the idea space between quantum mechanics and the non-reductionist philosophy of modal aspects and have had an interesting time in bridging what seems to be two different universes. I for my part have immensely enjoyed the opportunity to flirt with Hilbert space and cobordisms. I did my best however at trying to write the paper in plain English without calling on mathematical formalism to camouflage my inability to formulate complete sentences.

In conclusion what I could write is that a first interaction with what seems to be the welding of two ends of a long strip of theories representing the evolution of human thought where on one end the ideas encapsulated within the formalism of higher-dimension algebra, topological quantum field theories and loop quantum gravity that incorporate both the fundamentals of quantum mechanics and general relativity reside, and on the other end a narrative non reductionist philosophy of modal aspects stands awaiting critique, is a risky proposition as these two ends seem at first glance to have no common language in spite of their common goal. Both aim at making sense of our Universe. Is then sense something like a Möbius strip?

Below you will find the abstract of the paper submitted to the conference.

While physicist pursue the search for the Grand Unified Theory (GUT) and the expedition to find the Higgs that ought to solidify the Standard Model, philosophers keep inquiring as to what the nature of Matter and mind might be and propose various theories. At first sight the high energy physicist or the philosopher, both human, and the elementary particle seem to have nothing in common, however we contend and argue in this paper that we are looking at different scales of what constitutes universal behaviour and use Herman Dooyeweerd’s theory of Modal Aspects to bridge the particle to the mind. To other than a physicist the dual nature of the atom or the so-called elementary particles may be difficult to comprehend and certainly appears unfathomable to intuit. This is due to the fact that the dual nature of Matter finds its anchoring within the theoretical and mathematical frameworks provided by quantum mechanics, the latter tends to not be easily accessible to most individual’s intuition. What would the consequences be if human nature itself had a dual character?

We all know that human nature is both egoistic and altruistic, however it is not often that one considers the fact that egoism is an individual behaviour, while altruism is a collective behaviour. Likewise a particle is an individual manifestation of what we call Matter, while wave nature can be considered characteristic of collective behaviour of the same Matter. Recent advances in experimental physics – the queen of reductionist science – aimed at solving the mysteries of the quantum world has led to a deepening of the mystery rather than easing it dispelling the EPR paradox and pointing out to a conceptional error in this now famous gedanken experiment, while lending some authority and validation to quantum mechanics. The strange features of the quantum world are founded on what Bohr dubbed complementarity or the way a sub particle entity can be observed to behave either as a wave or as a particle; and on Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which says that a quantum entity such as an electron do not avail themselves to a deterministic exact measurement of both position and momentum simultaneously. Such postulates seem to contradict deeply held assumptions by the deterministic and materialistically oriented world of experimental physics where everything, including the atom, can be reduced to a single aspect.

There are mounting calls for newer ways of understanding reality that are capable of handling these apparently strange incomprehensible phenomena revealed through the classical observation of the microscopic quantum world. There is also fundamental progress made in bouncing cosmology theories that bridge general relativity to quantum mechanics and provide some insight into the nature of the Universe and its transition and pre-history through the big bang. The thrust of this paper evolves around two pillars. One is that that the apparent logical fissure emergent in reductionist thought coming from orthodox science and the application of the scientific method is manifest in what we know and do not understand in quantum mechanics can be liaised to our intellectual understanding through the perspective offered by Herman Dooyeweerd’s theory of Modal Aspects. The other is the central and special role humans have in relation to the Universe. Through this approach we will argue that the dual nature of the atom or elementary particles rather than being a strange phenomena is in fact an essential characteristic of what constitutes its nature.

Authors: Kamaran Fathulla and Dannie Jost