Bothe Blysse and Blunder

A billion years from now...

2011-06-23T15:37:00.000-07:00

A billion years from now will anything I might do today matter in the slightest? A lot depends on how we answer this question. It's not all that different than Paul Johnson's query in hisQuest For God. (A book I heartily recommend) "If God does exist, and if in consequence we are called to another life when this one ends, a momentous set of consquences follows, which should affect every day, every moment almost, of our earthly existence." That's largely what I am saying when I suggest that what we believe shapes our societies in many ways, sometimes predictably, sometimes surprisingly. But what does it mean in the scale of the life of the universe?

In Chapter Nine of his City of God, entitled Concerning the Foreknowledge of God and the Free Will of Man, in Opposition to the Definition of Cicero, St. Augustine went to some pains to deal with the problem of free will. He quotes Cicero:

"...for the knowledge of future things being granted, there follows a chain of consequences which ends in this, that there can be nothing depending on our own free wills. And further, if there is anything depending on our wills, we must go backwards by the same steps of reasoning till we arrive at the conclusion that there is no foreknowledge of future things.

Like Augustine, Cicero believed the world was the creation of an all-powerful, all knowing God. But if he is all powerful and all knowing, doesn't that mean that every event is foreordained? And if that's true, then human beings cannot really be evil- or good, for that matter. We are merely automatons carrying out the will of God. Either we have free will or God has foreknowledge. It's one or the other, and Cicero chose the first scenario. Such a conclusion was unacceptable to Augustine. Both had to be true. God must be omniscient, and man must have free will. Without free will the entire moral structure of Christianity collapses. But neither can Christian belief stand without the omniscience of God. How did Augustine get out of this impasse? He proposed that free will was among the attributes God gave Man at the Creation. Men were free to control their own actions, and could therefore choose to do good or evil. At the same time God, being all-knowing, knows what actions men will choose. Thus men have free will and God has foreknowledge, too. This is a little too tricky for me. It also seems a little unfair- if we are good it is only due to God's influence, but if we are bad it's our fault. Scientific materialists also have a stake in the game. If you think that everything is determined according to physical components, then free will has to be a myth. On the other hand, without a belief in an orderly, logical cosmos, there can be no science. A scientist may not be able to believe in a personal deity of the sort Augustine espoused, but he has to believe that there is an ultimate truth, and that at least some of that truth may be discernible by the human mind.

But I don't think either Cicero or Augustine noticed a deeper problem in their conception of God. In Chapter 25 Augustine made a statement he must have thought was entirely uncontroversial. This statement must be as true for a scientific atheist as for Augustine, although the scientist might frame it differently.

"If they wish to know what the Almighty cannot do, I shall tell them. He cannot lie."

Why is this a problem? Because it implies that there is a power that precedes God, that there is such a thing as truth, and such a thing as falseness, and not even God can overturn this pre-primordial order. He cannot make a lie into the truth, and he cannot make a truth into a lie. I'm not well versed in theological questions, but isn't this issue at the root of the famous Regensburg Lecture Pope Benedict gave a few years ago?

Intended as a defence of reason in the face of postmodern relativism and the Koranic literalism of Islam, a long ago conversation between a Byzantine emperor and an educated Persian was used by the pope as an illustration. In his article on the lecture in First Things, Father Francis Schall summed up the gist of this ancient argument.

We should understand the significance of this issue. Can God change his "reason," that is, can he make what was evil to be good or reasonable? Is what is good or evil dependent on a kind of whim of God so that worship of God means following whatever God is said to say even if it is contradictory to what He said previously. Does the Koran negate the Old and New Testaments? Does it negate reason? In other words, is God's revelation stable? Can we rely on its truth to be true everywhere and always?

The Islamic clerics were very quick to spot an insult to their doctrines. To prove how reasonable Islam was they called for violent riots to take place all over the Islamic world against the Pope. This is probably the passage from the lecture that aroused so much indignation. Say what you will about the imams, they at least understood the meaning of the Pope's words. It completely escaped the popular media.

The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God's nature.[5] The editor, Theodore Khoury, observes: For the emperor, as a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is self-evident. But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality.[6] Here Khoury quotes a work of the noted French Islamist R. Arnaldez, who points out that Ibn Hazm went so far as to state that God is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us. Were it God's will, we would even have to practise idolatry.[7]

Clearly, Ibn Hazm's concept of God was in direct opposition to Augustine's. For Ibn Hazm, God is all-powerful, full stop, unfettered by concepts of good and evil. The essence of God is power. Good and evil have nothing to do with it. So therefore the mission of all good little Muslims is to spread God's power over all the earth. Since good and evil are irrelevant any means of accomplishing that purpose can be justified. In the last decade Westerners have become familiar again with Islam. Thought to be moribund, it now seems to be on the upswing again, and often with the collaboration of elements of Western thought that would seem inimical to its own beliefs. Some of those elements of modern thought are concerned with "liberation" themes, mostly anti-capitalist, black, gay, and feminist, all of which portray traditional Western mores as oppressive, and so apply that mythology to Muslims. The truth is that history is replete with examples of terribly repressive and murderous regimes. but it is only Islam that condones them. If they think Western society has been oppressive, they are in for a rude shock if they find themselves in the clutches of Shariah law. To any rational observer modern progressives and ardent jihadists would appear to have nothing in common, but this very theme of the universe as a capricious force is at the root of both ideologies. In both ideologies it morphs into fatalism. For a Muslim, since God's moods and actions are entirely arbitrary, it does no good whatsoever to seek laws and principles that would help men to make the world a better place. Whatever Allah wills will be. The best a man can do is get what he can out of his mortal condition, and the best way to do that is to seek power over others, or to attach oneself to whatever power has the means to improve his material welfare, thereby carving out his own sphere of influence. Since Allah is capricious and unbound by any laws, neither is the Muslim.

This end result, which has played itself out in the Islamic world over and over for 1400 years, turns out to be remarkably similar to the social ideologies that have evolved in the West since the advent of scientific materialism. They aren't entirely the same. Scientific materialists have had a historic allegiance to the idea that they are working towards the welfare of mankind, but in recent years things have changed. The notion that mankind is a sort of cancer destroying the pristine beauty of nature has become uncontroversial on the campus. The whole thing is remarkably confused. Man is nothing but a minuscule and inconsequential part of the universe, but he is consequential enough to be a menace. Scientists, it seems, are no more immune to confusion than the rest of us. Politically, nihilism is the logical conclusion if you believe human beings are nothing but transient sparks of nothingness. Thus we have seen political movements like Bolshevism and Fascism which are little more than thinly veiled justifications for murder. Power is all that matters. No tomorrow, no yesterday, now is all that matters. Socially, it only seems obvious that if morality and free will are naive fictions, then what duty do we have except to our own pleasure? And where does that lead? Straight back to nihilism... in the personhood of goths, grunges and rappers.

Problems like this also intrude on scientific theory, especially its language- mathematics. An ongoing debate questions whether mathematics is "real." Another question is if other universes exist with laws entirely different from our own, and another is when the laws came into being. Are they an artifact of creation- the so-called Big Bang- or were they the same as now, and will they always be so? After all, why should the universe obey laws at all? How does a galaxy at one end of the cosmos 'know' how to behave? Why should the elements in that distant galaxy be the same as ours? How do they 'know'? And in that context how can there be such a thing as free will. What is there that we could possibly do or think that would have the least effect on the vastness of creation? Not only is there a vastness of space, there is a vastness of time. The lifetime of the earth is measured in billions of years, compared to which our four score and ten amount to nothing. The earth was formed about six billion years ago, and the sun is halfway through its career. What does the ten thousand year history of man since the retreat of the glaciers amount to in comparison?

The theme of this blog as originally conceived was that the history of human thought is like a great conversation across time carried out through literature, religion, science, and art. This conversation, implicit in the arts, has become overt in the Western philosophical tradition. Religious movements reify the thoughts of philosophers and the insights of poets by choosing among them, codifying them and putting those choices into prescriptions for social behaviour. Societies become defined by the belief sets they adopt, and the subsequent evolution of the society is to a large extent determined by what it believes. In recent Western history this has amounted to a dialog between scientific atheism and Christian idealism, and this was my focus, but here I am a few years later holding the end of the thread in my hand with no clear idea of what thread to pick up next.

Maybe the difficulty comes from thinking in terms of either/or. Going back to my thoughts on the everyday implications of the Heisenberg Principle, perhaps one's perception of truth does depend on what one chooses to examine... Augustine's predicament, for instance. If you choose to conceptualize a Being capable of creating everything we know or can know, from our very thoughts and desires to the structure of the universe, then it must follow that He is all-knowing and all-powerful, that time and space is not his reality but his invention. Then how can anything that happens within that spatial/temporal structure be unknowable by him? And yet, how does that square with the concept of sin, which is meaningless without assigning responsibility to the sinner who must needs have a will of his own by which it follows that the willful actions of an individual human can affect the course of events in the universe? Like Cicero, logic compels me to say it's one or the other.

The essence of the Heisenberg Principle is that one can know with certainty either the wave nature of a quantum event or its particle nature. Following the logic indicates the reality of the event depends on the choice of the observer. Does this mean that the observer causes the event by the mere act of observing? That's a question that's still up for debate- or maybe deafening silence.

Science's problem is not unlike Augustine's quandary when you think about it. At the everyday level of our common experience we obviously have a lot of choices. If I go to the beach on a hot day and shed most of my clothes I will surely get a bad sunburn. Whether I do such a thing is entirely a matter of my will. Choose one course of action and I will have one outcome. If I choose the other I will have another outcome. Equally obviously, my range of choices are limited. I may want to levitate but I can't. I may not want to work but if I don't work I will go hungry. One of the characteristics of human existence is our constant quest to overcome our limitations. In fact you could say that about all living organisms. They actively seek conditions that will be to their benefit. They actively adapt whenever they can. The means may change from species to species. Regardless of what you may think of evolution, the entire kaleidoscopic range of living forms are achieved through variations on a few very complex carbon based molecules. In humans the most outstanding physical variation is a huge increase in the size of the cortex of the brain.

I can say on my own account that the drive to make sense of it all is never ending, and I can say from observation that it is the essence of being human- maybe of life itself- to probe the universe, not to dominate it, but in order to understand it. I recently saw a rather fatuous Imax. Publicized as a chronicle of the Tour de France bicycle race, I was hoping to see vistas of the Alps, Pyrenees, and other features of the French landscape. It turned out to be more like an animated junior high school film on how the human brain recovers from an injury than a travelogue. Nevertheless, it made the point that the neurons and axons rebuild themselves. But it requires an act of will on the part of the injured individual. He must actively strive to recover, and as he works, the network grows and reconnects.

So it seems that when you look at things at the human scale we obviously have will. Looked at from the cosmic scale, whether or not your cosmic scale includes God or not, it seems absurd. Certainly, the prevailing opinion among average men and women and among the shapers of opinion, is that man is utterly insignificant, that nothing we do matters in the slightest in the grand scheme of things. I may not be able to prove it with absolute certainty, but I think prevailing opinion is wrong.

Aquinas and cell phones

2010-11-02T11:27:00.000-07:00

A young Chinese girl sits down in a chair nearby, reaches into her purse and pulls out a small plastic object. It is a telephone. She flips it open, stabs at it with her finger and puts it to her ear. Yawn. Why mention such a commonplace scene? Well, for one thing, it wasn't that long ago that it wasn't so commonplace, in fact would be a scene in a science fiction novel. When I was a boy regular telephones were only common in cities and well-populated areas. The telephone on my uncle's farm was bigger than a shoebox and hung on the wall. Powered by a car battery, it was slightly in advance of some phones that had to be cranked, but quite behind the private line we had in the city. In the countryside telephone lines and exchanges were expensive and had to be shared, as in the Hank Williams song:

"The woman on the party line's a nosy thing

She picks up the receiver when she knows it's my ring,"

But it's not my intention to provide a history of telephony here, except to note how a new set of possibilities opens up whenever a paradigm shift takes place. Please don't confuse this idea with Marshall MacLuhan's Medium is the Message meme. MacLuhan was fully a child of his time and believed that we were all passive receivers of the environment, as if we were not much different than Pavlov's salivating dogs. As it turns out, dogs are much more complex than Pavlov suspected. In my model all living things are very much active participants. When a paradigm shifts the rules of the game change, just as in cards, and when the rules change not only human beings but life itself makes adjustments. We are as quick to explore and probe what we can do under the new dispensation as any puppy sniffing out a new home.

It may seem irrelevant to mention the sex and ethnicity of the person who prompted the opening paragraph, but consider. At the same time my uncle was picking up the receiver to listen in on his neighbours' conversations, this girl's grandparents were experiencing the opening phases of the most lethal regime that has ever set out to murder its own citizenry. One of the reasons it was possible to exercise control of the vast Chinese population was because of inventions like the telephone. Instant communication undermined the localism that had persisted in China for at least three thousand years regardless of who the overlords might be. But now that telephones have escaped the tyranny of centralized telephone exchanges, China is swarming with girls like her, girls who no longer pay attention to their elders who control the Party. Could this mean the end of thousands of years of Confucian deference to the patriarch of the family? If so, tremendous changes are in store for a land that absorbed all previous invaders. No longer subject to the dictates of an authoritarian father or a remote state, she can think for herself. Her knowledge of the world is no longer limited to what information is presented to her at home or at state run schools. Furthermore, what she learns through her own experience doesn't stop with her but is shared with her friends who may live back in China or who may be studying physics at Berkeley.

That isn't what the inventors of cell phone technology intended to do. It was the farthest thing from their minds. In any case, the chances are that the girl chattering on her flip phone is entirely ignorant of cell phone technology and probably profoundly uninterested. The inventors laid the groundwork for a new technology, and if they were interested in Chinese philosophy it had nothing to do with the problem of transmitting a conversation over long distances without wires. Manufacturers were interested in knowing if this was an opportunity to benefit their shareholders. Chinese history didn't enter into it. And so on down the line. The girl and millions like her were only interested in talking to each other from far away or across the street, or sending and messages. The girl with the flip phone doesn't know the researcher, the researcher doesn't know the girl. They are pursuing their independent interests. So we now have Twitter, Face Time, and a host of personal messaging services, that facilitate their wishes by adding a new layer of meaning to wireless transmission. Wherever, whenever. The circumference of the earth, time zones, physical separation, are no longer barriers to communication. Those barriers have collapsed. These things didn't just happen, they came about through an interplay among many actors, none of whom had any thought of Confucianism. And yet the subsequent history of the planet may be affected. Nothing in the microcosmic events could be used to predict the direction of this change. It's still in progress.

I'm reading Aquinas' Shorter Summa at the moment- I lack the fortitude to tackle the full version. Medieval (Christian) philosophers have a bad rap as far as I'm concerned. Far from being supercilious and petty, I think they were enormously subtle and penetrating. Thomas lived in a period when Europe was rediscovering the intellectual heritage it had nearly lost when Roman order collapsed. Aristotle was being read again and to some he was a disturbing challenge to the painstakingly constructed philosophical edifice theologians had built since the Dark Ages. It was Aquinas' goal to reconcile Greece with Jerusalem, reason with faith by using reason to justify faith. Atheists routinely deny the validity of faith. But what is faith except an acceptance of a set of premises. Christians accept the premise that there was a man/god named Jesus who came to earth so he could experience suffering and death and lead us to everlasting life. Mohammedans accept the premise that Mohammed wrote the words of god into the Koran. Scientific atheists accept the premise that reality consists solely of matter and energy and that there is nothing to be found outside those parameters.

In fact it is impossible to prove any of these premises. That kind of proof is in an eerie way, a very eerie way, unavailable to us. The religious articles of faith are inaccessible to us because we can't go back in time to verify the facts. The best we can do is search for records and archeological evidence. The scientific criticism is structurally unprovable. If there is another existence separate from the space time structure we experience, and if our faculties of knowing are confined to this space time structure then it would be impossible for us to know about it through the methods science employs. Although it seems as if mathematics is one tool that can carry us somewhat beyond what is usually knowable, the results cannot be demonstrated through the experimental method.

It goes without saying then, that the claims of religious people for the existence of a supernatural realm, of an immaterial and immortal soul, and of a Supreme Being are beyond proof in the scientific, demonstrable sense. Or are they? In the 20th century, before really powerful reflector telescopes were built the existence of Pluto was unsuspected. Nevertheless was studying the movements of the known planets and noticed that they didn't quite follow the orbits predicted by theory. He was able to infer from his calculations that another presence, of a certain mass, must be in orbit outside the orbit of Neptune. Pluto is no longer considered a planet but that hardly matters. What does matter is that an undetectable object was hypothesized on the basis of its effects on other objects in the solar system.

The discoverer was quickly vindicated as optical technology improved, but an earlier astronomical theory was completely demolished by a few late medieval philosophers- Tycho Brahe, Copernicus, who solved the problem of planetary orbits through the use of mathematical models. Galileo with his telescope was able to bring observation in line with the new theory. The older theory, current since the Classical period, assumed that all the heavenly bodies revolved around a stationary earth. The mathematics worked pretty well with regard to the stars, but the planets were different. The interesting thing about Copernicus was that he wasn't trying to overturn 1000 years of accepted science. He was only trying to make the calendar more accurate so the Church could be sure of when to celebrate Easter.

So maybe it's possible to infer the existence of a force, a dynamic, or something that impinges on our universe but which isn't really part of the universe. And just as the Ptolemaic cosmology could not explain the movements of the planets without a veritable tangle of special pleading, neither can science as it is now understood explain the processes of life. Darwinian theory is a bad joke. Quantum theory makes no sense and can't be reconciled with relativity. Every few years somebody comes up with a new idea of how to solve the conundrum but none have succeeded.

We usually think that the reason the ancients thought the sun and the stars revolved around the earth is because it satisfies common sense. Look at the sky. We are at the centre. The sun and the stars rise in the east and set the west. I think that implies a serious underestimation of the intelligence of the ancient thinkers. In fact, the original problem that led the philosophers of the Ptolemaic era to construct their theory remains today, and can be summarized by this well known formulation: Why is there something rather than nothing? In general, the ancients had an answer- God. The trick was to figure out how we could possibly come to understand anything about the kind of Being God would have to be in order to be the Creator of all.

Do we exist?

2010-09-29T11:00:00.000-07:00

The first paragraph of Paul Johnson's The Quest for God outlines the consequences of whether or not one believes in God.

"...If God does exist, and if in consequence we are called to another life when this one ends, a momentous set of consequences follows, which should affect every day, every moment almost, of our earthly existence. Our life then becomes a mere preparation for eternity and must be conducted throughout with our future in view. If, on the other hand, God does not exist, another momentous set of consequences follows. This life then becomes the only one we have, we have no duties or obligations except to ourselves, and we need weigh no other considerations except our own interests and pleasures..."

As clear and concise as this statement is, it omits an important consideration. Mere belief in a Supreme Power does not automatically assume the survival of the soul after death, nor does it automatically follow that the universe created by that Supreme Power has a moral dimension. As far as I know, only Christianity has built into its tenets the assumption that God is good, that He wishes us to be good, and that he gives us the choice of whether to be good or not. Thus we earn our place in his heavenly abode or we spurn it. Of course the underlying assumption is that there is such a thing as "good," and this assumption has been challenged in recent years by certain schools of philosophy.

The first chapter of Genesis presents a brief chronology of how God created the cosmos. It's a chronology not much at odds with current scientific convention. Both cosmologies postulate a sudden burst of creation far in the past in which time and space came into being, energy and matter following in its wake. Before that event there was neither time nor space, but a Singularity, in modern parlance, "And the earth was without form and void," as the bible puts it. The details of "The Big Bang," as it was dubbed by Frederick Hoyle, are subjects of debate, but if we interpret 'light' to be energy, and 'darkness' to be matter, then the statement that "God divided the light from the darkness" would only be objectionable to a scientist for its poetic nature and its lack of mathematical rigour. There is no room for poetry in modern science, while the Bible says little about mathematics, Genesis confining itself to a brief comment on the relationship of the heavens to the calendar.

But there is another creation story in chapters 2 and 3 of Genesis, the familiar one of Adam and Eve, the Garden of Eden, the serpent and so on. These chapters are more like a fable than a sober cosmology, with an even larger, a dominant poetic dimension. Does that mean we shouldn't take it seriously?

Interesting as it is, let's skip over the description of Eden and the rivers flowing out of Eden and concentrate on the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. This is where the fable gets serious. In the midst of beauty and innocence is something else, something that doesn't really belong in such an idyllic paradise. Adam and Eve are enjoined by God not to eat the fruit of this tree or they will surely die. What could that word, 'death,' mean to beings who had no experience of it, who had no acquaintance with evil?

One is moved to ask why God put it there, and the answer is obvious. Without a knowledge of evil we can have no awareness of good. It is as if we have a moral singularity here.

At any rate, Adam and Eve chose to eat of the fruit, and it was that choice that exploded the singularity, the paradise where all was peace and harmony. Not until then the world that we know, the REAL world, where existence is a constant struggle, where death is never far away and is in any case inevitable, where we never really know what is around the next corner, actually comes into being. It is a hard world, our powers are insufficient to guarantee our safety, bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people. As somebody once said life is like a movie where we have come in halfway through. We will never see the ending, but we have to figure out what's happening as quickly as possible... because we are in the movie. We are participants, not mere watchers on high. But it was through the choice of Adam and Eve to partake of that knowledge that caused the creation of the world we are all familiar with. They set it all in motion. God merely acceded to their wishes.

In modern science such a belief would be absurd, but in Platonic science it wasn't absurd at all. Platonists theorized a hierarchy of universes, all connected to each other and yet separate. Our universe is flawed, all things are imperfect copies of a more ideal state existing in a higher dimension. In our universe there is no such thing as a perfect triangle. All triangular things down below are imperfect copies of a perfect template in that higher dimension. Adam and Eve would fit into that sort of cosmology with no difficulty, as perfect templates of which we mortals are but poor copies.

Whether you believe in it or not, this system of thought has grandeur and beauty.

Naturally, as poor copies we must seek guidance to navigate through our brief spans, we seek ways of improving the odds of getting through it with our souls intact. Christianity proposes that there is a solution. As Aquinas put it in the introduction to the Shorter Summa, "...To restore man who had been laid low by sin, to the heights of divine glory, the Word of the eternal Father, although containing all things in His immensity, willed to become small." He took unto Himself our "littleness."

This is the fundamental belief of Christian doctrine, that God came to earth as a man, suffered and died for our sins, bearing a message of hope. Atheists of all ages reply that this is preposterous, yet this belief transformed the world.

Why did Christ come to earth? To redeem the choice made by Adam and Eve. And yet, I'm not sure if we have ever gotten that original story right. Not being a scholar, I'm on pretty weak ground here, but so what. My intent in all of these essays has been to show that belief in God, in an immortal soul, in a grander universe than what can be perceived by our senses is imminently reasonable, but so far I have not brought overt religious doctrine into the discussion, not wanting to outrage the sensitive souls of any atheists who might come across this blog. I guess it's time to cross the Rubicon, and now that I'm retired I hope to be more regular in my postings.

Getting back to Genesis, the implication is that it was the very decision of Adam and Eve to take on the knowledge of Good and Evil that caused the REAL world we know to come into being. This seems even more preposterous than the Gospels' account of a resurrection but I hope to show it is not unreasonable at all-- or at least it's no more unreasonable than the fact that we exist. Atheists always forget how preposterous that is.

Where do I begin?

2010-03-31T11:19:00.000-07:00

TWICE or thrice had I loved thee,

Before I knew thy face or name ;

So in a voice, so in a shapeless flame

Angels affect us oft, and worshipp'd be.

Still when, to where thou wert, I came,

Some lovely glorious nothing did I see.

But since my soul, whose child love is,

Takes limbs of flesh, and else could nothing do,

More subtle than the parent is

Love must not be, but take a body too ;

And therefore what thou wert, and who,

I bid Love ask, and now That it assume thy body, I allow,

And fix itself in thy lip, eye, and brow...

AIR AND ANGELS. by John Donne

Once it grasps that an outer world exists, the self begins to discover where he leaves off and where the other begins. At first it seems obvious. It is his skin, his flesh, that is the outer limit of himself. It is his blood which flows when his flesh is gored, it is he who feels the pain. Beneath his skin, inside his skin, is where his personhood resides. It is his body which is himself.

Gradually, however, an awareness grows that it is not his body which is himself, it is his mind, his consciousness, the awareness itself which is his self. In many ways, his body is also the outer world. This becomes more obvious as we get older and infirmities develop. Then the body becomes an enemy, or at least a beast of burden that must be coddled and fed for it to do the work required of it.

Conversely, he learns very early that he cannot live in isolation. His sense of self requires an awareness of who he is, and that cannot be conceived of without reference to his family, his community, his ancestry, his language, his religious beliefs. This psychic armature he builds around his sense of self is analogous to the physical structure of his body. What he is depends on his physical structure. Who he is depends on his psychic structure, but the boundary keeps shifting. Follow that reasoning far enough, as many have, and, which may be the truth, there is no boundary. For me to be depends on the universe being exactly what it is. Are all distinctions illusory, then?

It is his physical self coupled with his psychic self that is the face he presents to the world.

But if he thinks about it even more deeply, he recognizes that both his physical self and his psychic self are merely shells. A deeper level of selfhood exists which stands above both of these manifestations. That deeper sensibility is the voice that arbitrates, approving or disapproving whatever may seek entry into this protected space.

The origin of this voice is not so easily traced. The materialistically minded defer to the physical structures. The religiously minded invoke a supernatural explanation. These are fairly standard divisions of human mentality. But that still begs the question of why some of us are drawn to one school of thought and others to a different one. One man is drawn to the inner life, another is fond of the objects of the world. It isn't a matter of sitting down at age four with your parents and being asked to choose. We grow into our dispositions as surely as we grow into adolescence, and without being asked for our preferences. Only a few of us systematically ransack our inner motivations, even fewer turn them into schools of philosophy. A few of those, such as David Hume, of Hume's Fork fame, go so far in one direction that they categorically and vehemently deny the validity of the other. But very few materialists would deny the existence of an inner life, and very few idealists would deny the existence of objective reality.

Most members of humankind unconsciously use these unexamined motivations to blithely adopt a set of principles to guide them through life. But although they don't often think about these principles, the deepest of passions can be aroused when they are challenged, and the most abject despondency when they are undermined.

The question remains, why do we wish to believe one thing over another? What is this voice that says yea or nay at every moment of our existence? What is the source of that desire? I can't answer that ultimate question. The only certainty I feel (and it's one of those yea or nay feelings) is the one that says that it is my subjective will that acts on objective reality. Objective reality is passive. It just is, and cares nothing about me or my aspirations. It is indifferent. But I am not indifferent, either about myself or about the objective world. I want to live but that's not sufficient. I want happiness, satisfaction, purpose, validation. And for that I must seek to exert force upon objective reality, I want to shape it, mould it into something it would not be if it weren't for me. Many of these mouldings have to do with my physical well-being, but that is never enough. I may love the natural world, bird song, sunsets, green meadows, but it only makes me want to furnish my life with things I especially like. I want to colour my walls with that burnished glow of sunset, I want to carve a chair from the strong, beautiful wood of the oak tree, I want to make my own songs, I want to situate my house so I can see the mountain in the distance from my porch.

Again, where is the dividing point between me and the world? And while the objective world is readily apparent to my senses, and the many and subtle ways in which I am connected and intertwined with the entire universe, it is not apparent at all to what sort of a universe my inner vision is directed. But it has not escaped my notice that ever since Galileo first invented the telescope our range of perception has broadened to the point where we can almost see as far as the beginning of creation. And yet, already some scientists theorize that more universes exist beyond the one we now see. Perhaps future scientists will figure out a way of 'seeing' them, too. Similarly, our ability to see at the smallest scales has improved exponentially since Leeuwenhoek invented the microscope. First, unseen living things, the microbes, then the structures inside the cell, then molecules and now it is possible to 'see' an atom. The atom was thought to be the indivisible building block of matter until it was shown to consist of still smaller particles, and even those smaller particles are made up of even smaller particles- though 'particle' may not be the proper word. In other words, no matter how far we learn to see outward there is always something farther away, and no matter how closely we scrutinize matter, there always seems to be something smaller.

But so far (in modern times) we haven't devoted anywhere near as much effort to discovering what it is that lives in the deepest parts of our awareness. What is it in me that is aware, and how does it work?

Self and other

2010-03-19T06:11:00.000-07:00

When it comes right down to it the only way we know about anything directly is through our feelings. Some things hurt, others feel good. This is probably the first knowledge we have as we take that first breath and feel the air on our naked skin. We open our eyes and see light. Vague figures handle us, and we have no control over what they do. We soon notice there are some things we like and some things we don't. We get hungry. Sometimes it is too warm or too cold. We learn that to remedy our dissatisfactions we must complain to those beings who handle us. Unable to speak or ambulate, lacking strength or even teeth, we are helpless. But if we make the right noises someone will come and give us food or clean our bottoms or tuck a blanket around us. We soon come to realize that this person has a name, mama, and it becomes important to learn how to make that sound, mama. Because when that magic word is uttered, smiles and coos reward us, and then we are happy together, which is something very important, but not exactly in the same way as food is important.

As the months go by we are so engrossed at learning everything we can about this little circle we inhabit that only gradually do we become aware that it is a part, a very small part, of a greater world. Our powers are growing too but not as fast as the outer world. So busy are we at learning 'the rules' that we are not inclined to think about a fundamental truth that forms the foundation of all our aspirations. That truth is this: there is a me, and there is a world apart from me. How does he know this? Because the world does not always respond to his demands. In the beginning a child hardly knows the outer world is separate from himself, but because everything he wants comes from outside he is inclined to think it exists for him. It is an unpleasant surprise to discover that he cannot have everything he wants. There are two realities. One is the inner reality of needs and wants. Those he knows about from direct experience. It is himself. The other is the outer reality from which we seek satisfactions. That is the other. You could almost say that maturation is the process of defining the difference between oneself and external reality. Life is a struggle to define what we are. Where do I begin and where does the rest of creation begin?

Cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am, is the conclusion of a long sequence of logical reasoning arrived at by the philosopher Rene Descartes. It is because he is able to think that he knows he exists, and he knows this by introspection. But isn't it just the opposite? Isn't the experience we have of the outer world what convinces us that we exist? Absent all sensory input could we really know of our own existence at all?

It soon behooves a child to learn as much as possible about this outer reality because it has a will independent of his own, and furthermore it's desires do not coincide with his own. Sometimes the outer world's aims are in conflict with his. Competitors may be hostile. Predators see him as food. It is impossible to learn enough on a case by case basis, and he soon learns to look for connections between these separate cases. All fire burns. If I pull the cat's tail he will scratch me. Large things are more to be feared than small things as a general rule, but small though they be, wasps carry a painful sting. A jar on top of the fridge usually has cookies in it, and if I pull the chair over to the fridge I can reach it when nobody's looking. Life is full of rules and lessons, and though it's fun to learn by oneself, it is sometimes a good idea to listen to the experience of others. We have learned there is an order to the world, and we find we can manipulate it to some degree.

Science is nothing but a refined version of these investigations. Science is all about that external world. But science can tell us nothing about the interior world, though it has made a few pitiful attempts.

Primarily, it has no basis for accounting for why we place a value on useless things- like beauty, love, friendship. When scientists try to explain they invoke the mysterious force they call natural selection, because obviously (to them) something useful has to be involved. The solution then is to find how these values contribute to our survival. However, the unasked question is, why survive? Why live? Living is a hell of a lot of trouble. But even if it wasn't, even if all physical needs were met- fed an adequate diet every day, given shelter from the elements, protection from all dangers, provided with every comfort- we know that we would not be satisfied. Something would be lacking, something that has nothing to do with the survival of the body.

Often it is thought that the thing lacking can be satisfied by satiating bodily pleasures. But there is only so much sex one can have, only so much food one can eat. Those things we obtain from the outside, but the desire to live comes from the inside, and so does the desire to do more than merely live.

In the real world, Plato observed, such a thing as a perfect triangle could never be found. Our world is one of decay and imperfection. Only in the ideal world of geometry did a perfect triangle exist, and this perfect world could only be known through introspection. This in itself is part of the search for beauty and order, and I would contend that it is the primal human drive. We live to seek beauty and order, to disentangle the confusions of the experienced, external world.

Subjective vs objective

2010-03-16T05:57:00.000-07:00

In recent years there has been much debate over the validity of objective knowledge. The word 'objective' comes from medieval Latin and means 'the things presented to the mind,' but in common parlance it refers to the common sense notion that there are things in the world that have a separate existence from us. A horse is a horse to both me and thee. Not only is it common sense, but all rational thought, including science depends on it. An object, therefore, is something external to the self.

On the other hand, 'subjective' refers to inner feelings. A horse is a horse, but how I feel about a horse may not be the same to me or thee. To a jockey, a horse is valued according to how well it can run. To a horsefly, a horse is a banquet. What the horse thinks is hard to tell.

Certain schools of thought in Western philosophy have used the latter observation to cast doubt on the validity of objective knowledge. They are especially fond of trotting out, not a horse, but a broomstick, and partially submerge it in a pool of water. "Yikes," they cry. "Our eyes deceive us. They tell us that the broomstick is bent where it enters the water. So much for objectivity. So much for the value of our observations." The fact that human beings are perfectly capable of compensating for the refraction of light is forgotten in the exciting glow of self-congratulation. How clever they are. Dumbfounded by this brilliant insight, another school of philosophers, the post modernists, labouring mightily, took the logic one step further. Obviously, if we cannot trust our perceptions then there is no absolute truth. One man's truth is just as good as another's. Eureka! Thus, by a commodius vicus of recirculation we arrive at Howth Castle, now known as cultural relativism. Relativism is a word made magic by the theories of a Swiss customs clerk.

Einstein's theories of relativity, incomprehensible to most of us, and the even more baffling theories of quantum mechanics summed up in a document called the Copenhagen Convention, delivered a more telling blow to the idea of objective reality. Alas, they seemed to say, and proved it beyond doubt to all the world at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nothing is what it appears to be, and it is all but impossible for the human mind to grasp reality except through the workings of increasingly esoteric mathematical formulations. But still, they needed Hiroshima to prove the theories. It's pretty hard to argue against the objective truth of two incinerated cities.

But the objective world is only knowable to us through our senses. This was already noticed by Plato and his followers. Plato imagined a higher existence where the perishable and imperfect things known to our senses had a perfect, immutable and ageless reality, knowable by us not through our senses but through reason. Running with this idea, his successors over the following centuries imagined more and more elaborate spheres of existence, guarded over by hierarchies of angels or other fantastic beings. This became the accepted science of all the civilizations of the ancient world and lasted until the time of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and others who showed that the stars in the heavens were not arranged in the perfect spheres that the theory predicted. The earth and human beings were no longer at the centre of creation but merely insignificant specks in a vast ocean. From then on the prestige of our reasoning faculty waned while the importance of observations based on measurements gained importance. Numerical reasoning became the sine qua non of scientific reasoning, but the only way to establish the truth of the mathematics was by reference to the observable world.

We have never stopped puzzling over this issue. An English philosopher had a few things to say

about it.

All the objects of human reason or enquiry may naturally be divided into two kinds, to wit, Relations of Ideas, and Matters of fact. Of the first kind are the sciences of Geometry, Algebra, and Arithmetic ... [which are] discoverable by the mere operation of thought ... Matters of fact, which are the second object of human reason, are not ascertained in the same manner; nor is our evidence of their truth, however great, of a like nature with the foregoing.

Put into the formula that became known as Hume's Fork, it comes out like this:

Statements about ideas - these are analytic, necessary statements that are knowable a priori.
Statements about the world - these are synthetic, contingent, and knowable a posteriori.

Which line of reasoning led to this conclusion:

If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.

Here in a nutshell we have the foundational reasoning behind modern scientific atheism. As a statement of how the game of science should be played it is admirable. How much can we learn about the workings of nature by sticking to those two rules? Quite a lot. It's an extremely valuable and beneficial tool that has taken us from the beginning of time to the edge of the universe, from the unimaginably large scale of galaxies to the infinitesimally small scale of the atom. It's shown us that matter and energy are only different phases of the same thing. It is an incredible achievement. But when it is claimed that what science reveals is all there is to know then that is not a statement of science but of metaphysics, and nothing about metaphysics can be known in principle by use of the scientific method.

The application of scientific principles as a practical and powerful tool of inquiry has provided us with unprecedented material well-being. The conversion of science as a tool into science as a philosophy is perhaps the most important factor in explaining why humanity went insane in the 20th century.

Science in decline

2010-02-27T09:06:00.000-08:00

Ideas vs things, logic vs the senses, grammar vs words, objective vs subjective- this is how we make sense of the world into which we are ushered at birth. Sounds pretty dualistic, doesn't it? Much of the history of Western thought and culture is the story of what we think about these dilemmas. At the moment we are sliding down a slope, though not many know it yet. Science is a faith as much as Catholicism, with which it shares a few basic assumptions, mainly that the universe follows laws accessible to reason. Catholic thought asserts that the creation we observe is a Great Thought emanating from the mind of a Supreme Creator. Where is the evidence, the Scientific Atheist asks?

The faith scientists have in objective truth reached its high point in the 19th century. I won't go to any trouble trying to fix this point, but I would say Karl Marx and the behaviourist psychologists marked the apogee, and World War One marked the beginning of the slide. One of the articles of faith of humanists and other varieties of scientific atheist was that Reason and Objective Truth would lead to a better, saner world. With superstition vanquished, religious wars and persecutions would end. Enlightened savants would lead us to a paradise on earth. Somehow, it didn't work out. Marxism was the political wing of Scientific Atheism and it has been the most lethal political system men have yet devised. Figures are hard to calculate because many of the perpetrators, or their successors, are still in power. Without counting related damage, the number of human beings killed by their own socialist, atheistic governments in the twentieth century approaches one hundred million. I repeat 100,000,000, over three times the population of Canada. And yet atheistic socialism does not lack for enthusiastic apologists, many in places of influence, especially in schools, the media. They are especially well established in the bureaucracies of all nations, and the United Nations. How they are able to justify themselves I have no idea.

Nevertheless, their influence over the mentality of the world's societies is on the wane, as is the materialistic dogma that inspired it. And so the pendulum has begun to swing back the other way.

The most obvious example is the environmental ideology. With one foot in the materialist camp, it regards itself as scientifically based. On the other hand, it has another foot in a far more ancient world view: Pantheism. Pantheism believes that the things and forces in nature are themselves divine. The classical mythology we know from Ovid is a very beautiful version of Pantheism. But whether they know it or not- and most of them don't- scientists and especially Darwinists, are also Pantheists. They would deny it of course, replying that Pantheists believe all things have soul, and they don't believe in the soul. Actually, they have just changed the words. Instead of Proserpine and Minerva, they invoke Natural Selection and Random Mutation. Scientists don't put faces on these forces to be sure, but that may be coming as the powers of prediction they have depended on begin to wane. At that point pseudo science comes along, like the climate change hysteria. Lacking proof of the desired result, climate 'scientists' had no compunctions about falsifying the data. We'll be seeing a lot more of that. What is actually happening is a loss of faith in the possibility of being objective. This loss of faith is so severe that it is a commonplace of modern philosophy that we can't know anything, that there is no such thing as truth. This is a school of philosophy known as postmodernism and it has confused many a mediocre mind. The More confusing the better!

Although I have emphasized the problems of materialism, I don't mean to say that it is wrong and the idealist view is right. What I think is wrong is the belief that for one to be right the other has to be wrong. That's where my discussion of words and grammar in language and logic and the senses in everyday experience comes in. I have tried to show that they work in tandem. Without a grammar for a word to act upon language could not exist. It would be an impossibility. Likewise, the scientific method is sound. An idea is proposed, a hypothesis. To prove or disprove it, an experiment is devised and carried out. The idea acts on the felt world to produce a predicted result- or not. Either way the experiment is successful, as eliminating bad ideas is just as important as finding good ideas. It's a way of eliminating the noise, of separating the wheat from the chaff.

It's a very good system, but I think it there are many more implications. But it is rather dualistic and philosophers have the same attitude toward dualism as Miss Muffet had to spiders. Calm down, fellows, and take a deep breath. It's going to get a lot worse.

Beauty

2010-02-21T11:37:00.000-08:00

Up until now I have been trying to establish the importance of reason, which is the human ability to perceive the non-material but very real logical structures of the universe we inhabit. It occurs to me to ask if those logical structures exist before they are thought of. For instance, did language exist before there was a language? Certainly there was a potential for language as living creatures very early on learned to vocalize. Birds sing, cattle bellow, elk trumpet. Hadrosaurs were a very successful and diverse type of herbivorous dinosaur. In their variety they were notable for the strange shapes of their heads which are now thought to have been echo chambers for amplifying their vocalizations. We might imagine that without cars, trucks, jet planes, leaf blowers and ghetto blasters that the cretaceous would have been a peaceful and serene time. Apparently not, with herds of gigantic dinosaurs calling to one another from miles apart. Again take note- once a behaviour is learned the behaviour influences physical change. Although they may not have had language in the sense that humans do, nevertheless the vocalizations had meanings intelligible to all members of the included group. Obviously, no hadrosaur coffee klatsch ever convened with the idea of starting down the road toward evolving a language, so we can't really say that the thought created language. But why did the hadrosaurs make such a big deal about bellowing, whistling, shrieking, for each others delectation, if that's what they did?

An evolutionist would try to explain these anatomic and behavioural features in terms of DNA, an incredibly complex molecular structure that transcribes proteins of unbelievable subtlety. The difficulty is explaining how such complexity came to be. The evolutionist has in his quiver two arrows. Random mutation and natural selection. Random mutation means that code errors will occur from time to time. Most of these will be detrimental, but a few will be beneficial. Natural selection means that the good ones will persist into the future and the poor host with the detrimental mutation will perish. Not mere death, but extinction. Cruel nature selects. Stick out your neck with some wild and crazy idea and you'll get it chopped off, chop chop.

But I have another theory. The theme of these posts is largely, how do we know what we know? And I have followed Plato in theorizing that not only do we have our usual five senses, of sight, hearing, etc, we also are able to know things through our minds, which can 'see' by the light of pure reason. I would like to propose we have another way of knowing things, and it's a way that Plato didn't particularly like. The poets raised his ire, who he accused of being liars and twisters of the truth. Many poets do distort the truth, as do many philosophers. Even nature fools us. For instance, our senses tell us unequivocally that the earth we stand on is solid and immovable, while the sun and moon are smallish objects which rise on one horizon and set on the opposite. So our eyes tell us. Similarly, the stars and planets are mere pinpricks of light that roam the night skies. Truly, human beings have venerated these celestial presences as far back as we have been human. But it took reason to demonstrate, and a long, arduous process of reasoning, that the earth is not only moving, but that it is but a tiny fragment of moist rock orbiting a star which is itself only one of billions upon billions of suns. The geometers of Plato's era started us down that road when they calculated the circumference of the earth, and Plato, a geometer, was probably contemptuous of the myths telling of gods cavorting in the sky.

What poets and artists and musicians deal with- at least they did until the twentieth century when they came unhinged- is beauty. Art isn't exactly based on reason, even though all arts are built on a highly rigorous logic, and it isn't exactly based on the senses, even though each art works through one or more of the senses. In this way, beauty is a lot like logic. It manifests itself through matter, but matter itself is not beauty. But it is unlike logic in that we perceive beauty directly. When we see a blazing sunset we don't need mathematical calculations to tell us we are witnessing something beautiful. It doesn't matter to our appreciation of the sunset that the earth revolves around the sun. We don't have to know about nuclear fusion to enjoy the sight of the sunset. When we hear a beautiful piece of music we don't need to know anything about sound waves or decibels. Perhaps knowing something about key signatures enhances our appreciation but only to the composer is that sort of knowledge essential.

This kind of beauty gives us pleasure, but not the kind of pleasure that comes from eating a tasty meal or copulating with a lover. Aesthetic pleasure is experienced through the mind more than the body. Our stomachs are soon filled, our debaucheries soon leave us depleted. Attempts to extend those pleasures much beyond their natural uses leads to a diminishing sense of fulfillment. The glutton grows fat and diabetic, the roue needs more and more perverse stimulations to achieve arousal. Those unable to attain the desired pleasurable feelings through food, sex, or other means often turn to chemicals. For these people the mind becomes the enemy. It craves satisfactions they are unable to gratify and so it must be destroyed. Drugs that deaden the pain or conversely deliver ecstatic feelings become a necessity.

But the pleasure we derive from observing a beautiful sunset never diminishes but enhances us. We feel drawn toward something. We may not know precisely what it is we are drawn to, but we know it is a good thing, that we are better for it. We also know that someone who can't appreciate the beauty of a sunset lacks some essential element needed to be fully human.

Western thought of the last few centuries has lost faith in the value of our capacity to perceive beauty. It is a train of thought that denies even the existence of anything other than material objects, and therefore every explanation for the observed world must refer to those material objects.

For the next few posts I will try to refute that view.

The power of limitations

2009-10-28T20:58:00.000-07:00

Life, language, money all have a material nature. Proteins in the case of life, words in the case of language, gold or silver in the case of money. However the physical facts alone are insufficient to explain the essence and meaning they represent. Each system (like little universes each with its own laws and entities) has a logic without which it is useless. The logic of life lies in its genetic structure which operates in a similar way to grammar in language. Money has a logic too, as a unit of value so humans are able to exchange goods and labour efficiently. If the logic- the relationship of value to the standard represented by gold- is violated, then money dies, and so does a modern economy along with its elaborate arrangements devised for keeping accounts. It's not possible for money to be whatever we want it to be any more than it's possible for a flesh and blood creature to do whatever it wants. It isn't possible for a tuna to live on land. It isn't possible for a human to breathe underwater. Likewise, a word has to have a settled meaning. It would be absurd if I should define a tuna as a fish in one sentence and as a pound of butter in another. A word needs a meaning agreed upon by all the speakers of the language or else the language becomes useless.
Strangely enough these limitations aren't weaknesses but strengths. All of the adaptations that make it impossible to live on land endow a tuna with a superbly sublime ability to function in the sea. Almost all creatures vocalize, but only humans have learned how to transmute sound into a full-fledged language. In a sense, we decided we didn't need tooth and claw. The ability to speak made it possible to have a complex culture which has made it possible for us to swim as well as a tuna, fly as well as an albatross, and kill with an efficiency far exceeding T. Rex. We take in air to supply oxygen to our blood which delivers it to our individual cells, and also to remove the waste gas, CO2, which is produced as our mitochondrial organelles burn sugar. Speech utilizes this escaping gas through vibrations in our larynxes amplified by the echo chambers of our sinuses. A neat trick which no scientific theory based on a materialist set of assumptions could possibly predict. Most other animals use chemistry to communicate with one another, but we use sound, just like birds. Only we have developed that logic much further than any other creature.
I didn't use the trope of "little universes" lightly. Only when a limiting set of principles is established is it possible for one of these little universes to come into existence.
The universe of living things seems to be possible through limiting itself to the properties of the carbon molecule. Culture is possible by limiting itself to to the properties of language. By assigning to a unit of currency the role of measuring worth the enormous potential of human ingenuity has been unleashed.
It even seems as if the universe itself is a limiting set of principles, but I'll try to remember to get to that later. Science has gained great power by limiting itself to the study of the physical facts as we are able to perceive them and mathematics has gained its power by limiting itself to numbers.
Games provide a seemingly trivial illustration of how a set of limitations can create a new set of possibilities. There are fifty two cards in a standard deck, and by limiting the way those fifty two cards can be deployed an almost inexhaustible plethora of games has been invented. Random doesn't work in card games, just as random doesn't work in the construction of an organic creature. From the limitations structure is created. Structure is the opposite of random. Structure is limitation, definable as much by what it isn't as what it is. In order to create a card game, it is necessary to place limits on what a card may do. The rules of a game are those specifications. They are what makes poker different from gin rummy. How many players. How many cards to a hand. How dealt. How played. The cards are like vocalisms, the rules providing meanings to the vocalisms and a grammar. A given card has a certain meaning. There are certain things it is allowed to do. Card games can be classified according to species and class. Is the game a whist variant or does it belong to the genus rummy? Or poker?
This same rule can be applied to any game. Ball games. Baseball and football are both ball games requiring players with the ability to throw and catch but they could hardly be more different. The rules for each game are radically different and to do well a player must adapt himself to those rules. There is always a temptation to cheat, but if the boundaries are stretched than the whole game changes and it is no longer truly baseball or truly football. Therefore, a player is not allowed to put a hunk of lead in his bat or ride a motorcycle to steal second base. Just as in living things innovations are not allowed.
When a set of limitations is initially imposed it may not be at all clear to the originators exactly how things will play out. The true possibilities of the game only become clear as experience is gained. Even when experience is accumulated, especially obvious in a game like chess, no one person can know all the permutations. Each separate game is a new adventure… in effect a new universe. The players learn to navigate the universe by accepting the conditions imposed by the rules. One can say of an enthusiastic bridge player that he is a devotee of the game, appropriating a word from religious terminology.
This is all very peculiar when you think about it. Consider: a card game is an invention of the human imagination, and yet individual human beings are incapable of grasping the universe of possibilities the card game presents. Otherwise it would be possible for someone to play an absolutely perfect game. However the community of bridge players is a repository of bridge wisdom of which each player may partake. Bridge is even more interesting than most card games due to it being played by partners so that each player must take into account the expertise of his team mate. Some games are so well played they become famous. Devotees of the game study them. They become objects in the real world just as much as a chair or a theorem in geometry.
This is also true of language. No speaker of a language can know the entire range of possibilities of his language whether it's an advanced literary language like Latin or English or an oral language known only to a community of a few thousand. In other words, the language has an almost independent being. Individual speakers partake of it. Moreover, language constantly changes, just like genetic information constantly changes, so it not only has a community of living speakers, but a larger community of speakers who are no longer alive and who have yet to be born. When a master of language comes along whole communities of scholars arise to study his words. Think of Shakespeare and try to imagine what the English language would be like if he had never been born. It's impossible. The most unlettered speaker of English owes him his means of communication without even knowing it. Not confined to the enrichment of language, a great national poet shapes the very thought patterns of his culture. If it's difficult to imagine English without Shakespeare, it's impossible to imagine the Hebrews without the Bible. I think it's fair to say that without the Bible they would not exist. And so it is with language as a whole. Language is our invention, what makes it possible for us to be human. Without it we could not exist in our present form. All our other attainments are contained within the possibilities of language.
All of these cultural manifestations might be thought of by mathematicians as a subset of language. Would that include their own discipline? But can we really say culture is a material object as much as a chair? Well, obviously I can't look out the window and see a big cloud of English floating by. I can't smell or hear this abstract entity from which I draw the words on this page. Nevertheless the life of every human being is based on communing with it. I don't know if any other word will do. We are ready at birth to commune with the language of our people. The capability is inborn, but the specific language must be learned. We may not be able to see, hear, touch or smell it, but while we can function in society without one of those senses, we cannot function without the ability to perceive and interact with our language which is a thing exists independently from our individual selves. We create it, we use it, but it is not possible for any individual to contain the entirety of it.
If a language or a game or any sort of logical system could be any arbitrary thing we might imagine then we could conclude that it was just a mental artifact with no independent existence. It could be whatever we wanted it to be. But as soon as a vocabulary and a grammar are devised it declares its independence. From then on we become communicants with its mysteries and must puzzle out its nature.
Which brings us back to the question of how we know a thing, and if the senses we commonly use to perceive the external world are supplemented by another type of sense, another type of perception.
I think this was the central question Plato was trying to work out when he proposed another type of light, the light of pure reason. Of course this raises a number of other questions. He tried to answer the one about where the light came from by saying it came from the Good and he tried to answer the question of what it was that we saw through our sense of reason by saying that the objects of our everyday experience had a greater, more perfect being in a higher existence. These 'forms' have been the subject of debate ever since. They are a conjecture that quickly ran into trouble, but maybe there do exist structures in the universe that are only amenable to reason and maybe we can learn more about them and more about ourselves and the universe in the bargain. Maybe nothing is quite what we have come to believe.

The universe as a great thought

2009-05-12T13:07:00.000-07:00

Materialists of whatever variety think they have simplified all those abstruse problems of existence that have troubled philosophers and theologians for as long as creatures of that ilk have existed. Forget about unprovable speculations, like God, the immortal soul-they are nothing more than the fevered imaginings of the human race in its primitive, unenlightened stages, they say. Now that humanity has reached its maturity, we have science and mathematics which have helped us resolve all those ancient questions, and we have found out that the universe needs no explanation. It just is and that's all there is. We can learn everything there is to know by picking it apart, examining its components and searching out the laws that govern interactions among those parts.
It reminds me of what Jesus said on the cross: "Father forgive them for they know not what they do." My guess is that he was speaking not only of the rejection by the Judeans of his message of love, redemption and peace, but of their failure to perceive the miracle of their own creation. Likewise modern materialists. The kind of proof they demand, based on the rules they have set forth, is not forthcoming...not because proof is absent, but because the way the question is framed there can be no proof. As I've tried to explain in metaphorical language, there is nothing in the internal evidence of a movie to suggest the complex process of conception, organization, technology and hard, tedious labour that goes into making it. The content, or the meaning, of the movie has even less to do with the physical facts of manufacturing the physical artifact, whether on film or digitally encoded. The movie itself has a meaning entirely different from its physical facts. A young Judy Garland sings, "You made me love you, I didn't want to do it, I didn't want to do it...' Nothing can be learned about the meaning of the song, of her voice, the beauty of her youth, her performance from studying the properties of acetate. Charm, youth, beauty- how can that be measured anyway? Materialists will rightly point out that nobody would have seen or heard Judy without the acetate. They might even say that Judy no longer exists, and the only reality she has is the shadow cast by a beam of light shining through that acetate film.
So one can neither find in the shadows on the screen direct evidence for the existence of cameras, film, means of distribution- the kind of proof atheists demand for the existence of God- nor can one find in the materials of the film the purpose of the film- its meaning, ie, plot, characters, emotion.
This is why if I were trying to justify the materialist position I would be frightened by the difficulties of my task. Even more so when it is obvious that at least when it comes to human activity the thought, desire, intention often precedes the coming into existence of a new reality.
When we move into the more abstruse realms of scientific investigation things get worse. Theoretical physicists speak of the arrow of time and puzzle over why it only points in one direction when their equations can find no reason why it shouldn't point toward the past as well as the future. We don't experience time as an arrow so much as a wave. We are caught in it and it bears us along willy nilly on it's crest. We live in the perpetual now. Nothing in the past or the future exists in the sense that we can touch it. Yesterday is gone, persisting only in our memories and in artifacts which might be termed a kind of memory. The future we anticipate with anxiety but no sure knowledge. Perhaps we build things to make the future more knowable. If we had the prescience of a god, perhaps time would then appear to us as a landscape appears to us now, composed of mountains and valleys, seas and plains, full of times to which we can travel as easily as we can to a neighboring town. But since we are not gods we can never travel to yesterday, nor even see or touch it in any way. In the eternal now it simply doesn't exist. Another way to think of it is that the entire cosmos and everything in it is in a continual state of creation. How can a materialist explain time which is not a thing at all? It's true that theories have been devised to explain how time works in relationship to speed and acceleration, but the explanations seem to raise more questions than they answer and seem to deal mainly on a cosmic scale. Quantum theory seems to deal with phenomena on the atomic, submicroscopic scale. We earthlings occupy a territory in the center.
The materialist dogma not only proposes that everything can be explained by examining the physical facts of the universe, but that the process by which these facts- solid matter, heat, light, distance, ourselves, others- come about is mindless. This is the true distinction between the traditional assumptions of Christian thinkers and the new model proposed by the atheistic materialists. Because even the new model still assumes a consistent pattern to the fundamental laws of science. But it can't even begin to explain why it should.
However, I have long been convinced of the truth of the dictum that says the universe is more like a great thought than anything else. I would go further and say that the universe has a personality. Not that this is an explanation. But looked at in this way the universe makes a lot more sense. Things come into focus. New lines of inquiry are suggested. It also makes me feel better. The universe is the product of a mind, and it is the product of a mind not unlike my own, although vastly greater than mine can ever be.

Value

2008-11-14T06:43:00.000-08:00

Language is about conveying images from one mind to another. Things and actions are denoted by words. How words interact with each other is conveyed through grammar. Thousands of languages are spoken in the world and each language is a world unto itself closed off to anyone outside that linguistic community. The language in turn shapes the members of the community, shapes the very mind of the community. Thus a language, an exceedingly abstract construct, has the power to shape how people think. The language of the community also serves to signal whether someone is a member of the community or not, because languages aren't so easy for an outsider to learn. Nevertheless, every normal human learns to speak his own language effortlessly. Without any help from a grammarian, any five year old can perfectly well express complex thoughts in his own language.
Money is a far simpler thing to use than language, and yet it is far more difficult for the average person to understand. It crosses, even erases cultural boundaries and reduces economic relationships to a single number. At an every day level money is comprehensible to anyone who can count. At the level of abstract theory the monetary system seems incomprehensible. Money is described as debt. What does that mean? It means that when you have ten dollars in your pocket the world owes you ten dollars worth of goods or services. But money has a far more basic definition. It is a unit of value.
Everyone understands price tags. In the supermarket it says, "russet potatoes, $.50 per pound. Easy. The shopper has five dollars to spend on potatoes for which he can obtain ten pounds of potatoes, fifty cents being worth a half dollar. But how is it decided that a pound of potatoes at the supermarket is valued at a half dollar? There's the mystery. What is a dollar and how does it translate into potatoes, tractors, an hour's worth of a plumber's time? Who decides? Not even the strictest of tyrannical regimes can enforce the value of a dollar relative to a pound of potatoes, although many have tried, usually with ruinous results. Only the market can do that. And how does the market establish a value? Every individual who makes a decision whether to pay $.50 for a pound of potatoes helps decide. Let's say the price was $.25 per pound yesterday, and the shopper had every intention of buying twenty pounds with the ten dollars he has in his pocket and spending the other five dollars on two pounds of pork chops and a bunch of carrots and some onions. What does he do when he finds out the price has gone up? He might buy fewer potatoes. He skips the pork chops. He might buy rice instead of potatoes. He might go to a different store. In any event the store owner may not be able to sell as many potatoes as he expected. He might lose money instead of turning the fat profit he had hoped for. The market decided it would rather do without potatoes than pay $.50 a pound. So the next day he marks them down to $.39 to get rid of them. That's the way the market works.
In truth, the buyers and sellers are not negotiating how many dollars a given quantity of potatoes are worth so much as how much a dollar is worth. It may seem to amount to the same thing, but it doesn't. What's true of potatoes is also true of oil, lumber, a toaster, a hat, and especially gold. If you read the financial section of the paper and you look up the price of gold for that day, you might see it quoted at $500.00 per ounce. In reality, it doesn't really mean that. It means a dollar is worth one five hundredth of an ounce of gold. This is because the supply of gold doesn't fluctuate that much because it is a rare metal. Neither does the demand fluctuate that much. In times when the unit of currency is in a state of declining value the demand for gold does increase because nobody wants their stores of cash to depreciate. A rush to exchange worthless paper for solid gold ensues. But the actual value in terms of assets does not fluctuate very much unless there is a shortage of those assets. For many years the value of a dollar was pegged at $35.00 per ounce of gold, but in the end the value of gold is the bedrock of any currency even without official endorsement. This had the effect of enforcing discipline on the money markets. As soon as the central authority tries to issue more paper than gold is worth, inflation will begin to distort the economy. Ignore the fundamentals and catastrophe follows, as in Zimbabwe where a cup of coffee now costs billions of Zimbabwe dollars.
Unbundling the value of a currency from gold often results in economic chaos as schemers like George Soros and Warren Buffet figure out how to game whatever system is in place. This prompts capitalists to promote a return to the gold standard and socialists to politicize the banks. The twentieth century provides numerous examples of what happens when socialists try to fit the market to their own theories.
Gold has one big problem. It is inert. Profit is good thing. Someone with a talent for growing the economy should be rewarded and profit is a perfectly good measure of that reward. Reduce this to basic terms. A farmer to be successful has to at least have enough grain left beyond what he can consume to save for seed, and if he is prudent he will set aside another share for bad years, just as in biblical times. But suppose his crops are so bountiful he still has a surplus of grain. It does him absolutely no good to save it until the mice eat it. He looks to do something else with it. He might trade some of his surplus with someone else, say a shepherd in the hills who has more wool and cheese than he knows what to do with but lacks grain for bread. If the farmer and the shepherd make an exchange they are both better off than they were before. Notice that one did not have to suffer loss in order for the other to profit. They both profit. They can concentrate on what each does well with the resources at his disposal. They are better off together than they were separately. This is very easy to understand. The inevitable problems arise when cleverly predatory people who don't want to farm or herd grab the surplus for themselves, perhaps destroying the source of wealth in the process. Socialists are very good at destroying wealth and so are the linear descendants of bandits. They do this by punishing the people who produce wealth.
Gold coinage for all its advantages had the distinct disadvantage that it was possible to hoard it. No spoilage to worry about. Unfortunately, when gold is hoarded it is out of circulation and therefore inert. It does nobody any good, not even the hoarder. It just makes him extremely attractive to thieves and robbers. And why not? What good does it do locked up in a chest somewhere? Better to grab it and spread it around, except that it's always been far easier to rob poor people of what little they have. When gold is hidden away in a vault the wealthy man's savings cannot be used as seed money to increase the wealth of the community as a whole. This is why the transition away from coinage to paper notes and numbers in ledgers caused such a rapid expansion of the economic base in the west. All of a sudden it was possible to use money to make more money.
What held things back for some centuries was the distrust by the Church of interest bearing loans. I am a great admirer of the Church but in this the patriarchs were mistaken- at least if a prosperous and well fed populace is considered a good thing. Intuitively, it seems somehow immoral that a wealthy man should grow even wealthier merely by putting his excess money out to rent. But the wealthy man doesn't just toss his money to the winds. He chooses where to put it. This is the skill he has. He knows where it will do the most good. At the same time, he takes the risk of losing his investment. This is also a good thing as failure is one of nature's best teachers. It not only starkly illustrates bad decisions, it also separates the rabbits from the lions.
But without gold as a reference point it is exceedingly difficult to establish the value of any given good or service. Today the US dollar has largely supplanted gold as the reference point, but since the general public is largely ignorant of the arcane art of monetary policy, it's entirely possible for all sorts of shenanigans to take place without anybody but insiders being cognizant...until everything blows up in their faces. At the time of this writing we have been afforded an opportunity to witness a meltdown of the financial system as a result of shenanigans known as hedge funds, derivatives, sub-prime mortgages each of which attempts to do one thing in its own way: pretend there is value when none exists. This prompts average investors and savers, like home buyers, to transfer their earnings to something they think will grow in value but which is overpriced in the first place. Eventually the bubble will burst. There are a lot of smoke and mirrors involved in setting the value of something when the unit of value is chimerical. Nevertheless, wherever it has been adopted the modern system of money capitalism has ushered in prosperity and ease unprecedented in the human experience. It is not reserved for the few, but available to the many, to anyone who is willing to participate. We like to think of technology, science, democracy, social factors like a work ethic, whether protestant or Confucian, as the drivers of this prosperity, but without the modern banking and monetary system there would be no way to organize this economic activity. Socialists have proven over and over that they can't do it. Every socialist system ends up impoverishing its subjects. This is because socialists, try as they might, are unable to make the value of something be what they think it should be.

History of money II

2008-10-29T09:23:00.001-07:00

When I was younger my favourite type of reading after science fiction was history and I don't know how many histories of the Roman Empire I read. I tried to understand how a civilization that was so powerful in its day could collapse. From its beginning in mythological legend to its historic demise at the hands of Germanic invaders, Rome is an engrossing story, one that begins in dreamtime and ends in collapse and ruin, a real life tragedy. The histories I read were primarily popular narratives which emphasized the doings of armies and emperors, and each writer had his own particular explanation for why it fell. One common theme running through many of the accounts was the debasing of the currency. Debasement means, of course, that the precious metals used in the coinage are diluted with metals of lesser value, mainly copper. While the historians all had different theories about what caused the debasing they all agreed it was a bad thing.
But let's back up a little and ask why the currency was always and ever under pressure to be debased. The short answer is that the emperors needed money to pay off their debts and they incurred their debt in order to pay the legions. The long answer then as now is that there is never quite enough money in the system to finance expansion. In recent times the desire to pump more money into the system has led to orgies of canal and railroad building in the nineteenth century, dotcom bubbles in the twentieth, and a mortgage bust in the twenty-first. In Roman times it was the army that kept the commerce routes open and made everything else possible. It was the Roman army that built the roads, the aquaducts, the port facilities, and the strongholds at the edges of the empire. Within the empire thus protected a rule of law was enabled to flourish. It was possible for a Roman trader to travel from Syria, through North Africa, across to Iberia, and eventually make his way to the borders of the wild Picts in the north of Britain. He could then continue on back to Gaul, crossing the Alps to Italy, take ship to Greece, Asia Minor and back to Syria, buying, selling and trading all the way. Language was no problem as long as he spoke Latin or Greek. The coinage of Rome was good wherever he went and he was protected by Roman law. It was thanks to this Pax Romana that Paul of Tarsus was able to spread his message, whether through personally visiting the newly founded churches or using the Roman postal system to convey his epistles along the roman roads or in Roman ships.
Try to imagine what it would be like to shop if the smallest denomination was a thousand dollar bill. That was roughly the case in the early days of coinage. It was good for large items like the purchase of land and slaves but not much good for buying a loaf of bread. I think this may have been another one of the pressures leading to a debasement of currency. As money became more common, smaller and more numerous economic transactions could be conducted with it. And money is much more convenient than barter so when more money is in circulation trade will increase. Economic activity migrates from the home to specialized shops and tradesmen. Penelope no longer weaves her husbands winding sheet in the palace loft. She buys it from a cloth merchant, to the detriment of literature perhaps, but she has more time for politics. Everybody wins. I think.
This is why the money supply has grown almost continuously in the centuries since coinage was invented. When it does fail, as it did at the end of the empire, so does civilization as we understand it. In Europe a dark age lasting centuries followed. Long distance trade virtually ceased. People could only consume what was produced locally. Civic life ceased. When money slowly came back into circulation it allowed central monarchies to begin to reduce the strength of local military warlords. Money expands the reach of economic activity. People become richer. Taxes flow into government coffers. The prince who adapted to the monetary model prospered and grew powerful, his court turning into a magnet for impoverished knights and lesser nobility who now owed their standing to the largesse of the prince.
In Italy the Renaissance was ushered in by merchant princes like the Medici in Florence who had the wherewithal after hiring mercenaries to fight their incessant wars to commission works by Leonardo and Michaelangelo. A mania took hold among them to amass collections of Greek and Latin manuscripts.
It was during the Italian Renaissance that pieces of paper began to replace coin. This is a major milestone in the evolution of money. Promissory notes, letters of credit, and many other instruments were invented to reduce the ever present danger of robbery in a world no longer protected by a central authority. The political of Europe was hopelessly fragmented with every jurisdiction issuing its own coinage. This provided an opportunity to money changers in Italy who took on the chore of converting one currency to another while taking a commission for themselves. As they accumulated capital they were able to get in the business of advancing loans. The Church prohibited interest at the time so the money changers had to be rather creative in how they earned income from loans. These money changers soon realized that it wasn't necessary to ship coin every time a commercial transaction took place. An entry in a book would do the job quite well. Before long entries in books represented by pieces of paper in circulation, backed by the reputation of the banker, substituted for real gold and silver. Our word 'credit' comes from the Latin word for belief. Money was distancing itself from a connection to gold and silver and becoming a figment of the bankers imagination. This marked an enormous increase in the money supply available for economic activity but it also made it difficult for the non banker to comprehend. In essence, banking had become a kind of priesthood. Our modern banking and currency system is in direct descent from those Florentine money changers.
Even after all these years the priesthood is still prone to making catastrophic blunders but because the system has grown more and more arcane, fewer and fewer people understand it. Cast loose from its gold and silver moorings when the world's major economies went off the gold standard, money became a purely imaginary construct. Those who grasp its dynamics can grow fabulously wealthy and are able to influence world events- even going so far as precipitating a money market crash in order to propel a favoured (malleable?) candidate into the most powerful political office in the world. A trimmer was a name applied to a person who trimmed the edges off coins and saved the gleanings to his own profit. The art of trimming has come a long way since the old days.

History of money I

2008-10-29T09:23:00.000-07:00

Money. Somebody recently wrote that he had a love affair with money but that it was an unrequited love. That about sums up my relationship with money. In other words, me and money are not on intimate terms. If money is a dame she's a high maintenance gal to whom I don't pay enough attention. Truthfully, I don't love her enough and in return she declines to honour me with her favors. In other words I have been spared, as O Henry put it, "those ills attendant on superfluous wealth." In still further words, I am not exactly an authority on money.
I hope the old gal won't be too insulted if I poke around in her private parts for a few posts.
Maybe I'll start out with a nutshell history of money. Money is essentially a medium for storing and distributing wealth. Itinerant pre-agricultural societies could accumulate no more wealth than what they could carry but wherever settled agriculture established itself seed grain had to be set aside from the present harvest and saved or there would be no more harvests. The very fact that grain is relatively imperishable compared to most other foods is one of the main reasons civilized society succeeded and grew wealthy. So it's entirely fair to say that farmers were the first capitalists, their stored grain being the first form of capital. But money hadn't been invented yet, so a way was needed to organize the distribution of capital, and the ancient temple priests took on that task. They learned writing to keep track of who owed what to whom, they learned arithmetic to calculate how much, they learned geometry to resolve disputes over land ownership, they learned how to build cities and grain storage facilities, and they organized armies to protect themselves from people who would take it away. Evidence seems to point to Mesopotamia as the area where this sudden change in human destiny occurred, and it was not long afterward that war between Mesopotamia (present day Iraq) and the nomads of the plateaus and mountains to the east (present day Iran) began.
I say suddenly, because all these developments, writing, cities, a priestly class of scribes, settled agriculture, arithmetic, were invented within a few generations and the world has never been the same since.
But they didn't invent money and this was a handicap. Then as now gold, silver, jewels, and other things humans covet represented value, and they were used as standards of value by which the relative worth of other forms of wealth could be measured but it was a cumbersome system. Nevertheless, it took another 3000 years before somebody in the kingdom of Lydia in Asia Minor got the bright idea of issuing disks of gold and silver, of standardized units of size and weight, stamped on each side with images of kings and deities as symbols of trust.
This was another monumental change in human affairs. All of a sudden a man's wealth could be stated in terms of how many of these disks were in his possession, regardless of how he had come by his wealth.
A few words here about gold and silver. It's commonly thought that these metals are intrinsically valuable. They are not. They are useless. They can't be eaten, they are too soft to be made into tools or utensils, and gold is too heavy to carry around. However, gold and silver are shiny and people like shiny things. They are rare, which arouses innate human covetousness. "Aha, I have one and you don't." And they don't (especially gold) deteriorate over time. These are the qualities that make those metals ideal for use as a currency.
Is it an accident that Greek and Roman dominance of the Mediterranean world coincided with the adoption of coined money or is it a consequence? I don't mean to minimize the importance of Greek ideas and culture or Roman engineering and military genius, but how far would it have gotten without the enormous increase in trade and commerce made possible by coined money?

Language III

2008-09-27T06:39:00.001-07:00

Since the days of the Greeks we have had a science of logic which uses terms like deduction, induction, syllogism, etc. I am not so much interested in the structures of logic as what it is, how it works, and anyway I think many of the logical conundrums that have puzzled philosophers over the centuries are really linguistic problems and not true logic problems at all. My idea of logic depends on a given truth from which consequences are drawn. Medieval philosophers started with the premise that the universe was created by God, that he was a God of love, and that He was all powerful and all knowing, infinite, eternal, omniscient, omnipotent, and all loving. (These attributes, taught to me in catechism, puzzled me from an early age. It was equally hard for me to imagine a universe that didn't end as one that did. If it ended, then what was left? Even empty space is something. Yes, I really did spend a lot of daydream time thinking about this when I was ten years old or so.) From that foundation Medieval philosophers built their arguments. Whatever eternity was, it was a fact. God was a fact. That he was Good was a fact. Subsequent philosophers,unable to accept those premises have tried to find something that is ultimately true from which to proceed, and more recently they have decided that there is no real truth. That in itself is a premise which has led them, and the world, into a strange wilderness of the soul. The Eastern religious view of the world as a recurring illusion from which we should try to escape only carries the logic further.
By logic I mean the steps that follow a given set of premises. It doesn't mean the logic leads to truth. Quite often it leads to insanity. The logic is not necessarily at fault but sometimes it is. In this way it mimics language. Some would say that logic is language but that argument falls down when you realize there are other types of logic. Musical logic comes to mind, or mathematical logic. There are others, and as far as language goes it is often claimed that each language has a different logic that is related to vocabulary and language but separate from it. the example I am thinking of is Classical Greek which is said to lend itself to subtle differences in meaning impossible to express in translation. Could the language of a people shape the way it thinks? That by absorbing the logic of his native language actual changes in his neurophysiology are made? This is something that might be testable and thus acceptable to scientists as 'proof.'
Standard logic is just one species of the genus. A book I picked up the other day on logic provides this example of a standard logical problem: The Queen is rich/Either the Queen is rich or pigs can fly. This formulation the author calls a disjunct because the second statement doesn't follow from the first. But how do we know it's a disjunct? Because we already know that queens and pigs have nothing to do with each other and in any event pigs don't fly. But there is nothing wrong with the two statements from a linguistic point of view. All the words are valid, and the grammar is correct, allowing the person uttering the statement to convey the thought with perfect clarity. If it was spoken to someone from another planet who had a perfect understanding of the language but knew nothing about pigs, queens or flying he would have no reason to question it.
I think a reconsideration of what logic is can clear up a lot of that confusion, because at the root of the confusion is the interaction of grammar with vocabulary, as in language. It is absurd to try to find meaning based solely on grammar, which is what logicians try to do. It is equally absurd to try to understand the meaning of a string of words without a knowledge of the grammar. This is what scientists do. Scientists try to infer the grammar by studying the words, logicians try to understand the words by studying the grammar. To put it in semi -mathematical form, words + grammar = meaning. We humans crave meaning. We find meaning through the evidence of our senses mediated by reason. And reason seems to be the faculty we use to perceive patterns that are not directly related to the proverbial four senses. So is reason our fifth sense" Do we perceive patterns directly and are they just as real as rocks? In life we are more certain of what our senses tell us because our senses boil down to two: pain and pleasure. We try to get it right because being wrong can result in pain or worse. But to make sense of the world we have to use reason which enables us to perceive patterns that are not the material objects but which sometimes inhere, sometimes not, in the objects themselves. Furthermore, before we can judge the validity of a statement, we must already have an understanding of what truth is. We may not know what the truth is until we experiment, and it may be exceedingly difficult to know the truth, but we have no doubt that there is such a thing as truth. Unless you are a modern French philosopher.
Important point:
Meaning isn't the same thing as truth.
Of course we know about lies and deceptions but people are surprisingly easy to mislead. The science of logic began as a way of helping to determine the logical validity of a statement and avoid being misled. Numerous logical pitfalls were discovered.
Take the liars paradox. There are many variations but the simplest goes like this: I am lying. Obviously, if I am lying I am telling the truth in which case I am lying...by telling the truth. It's very interesting to explore the ambiguities of language and often commentators are so shocked they are led to deny the possibility of knowledge.
True it is, as any writer can attest, that conveying a precise picture in language of something he sees is immensely difficult if not impossible. So he might bemoan the deficiencies of language. But that would be to miss the bigger picture, which is this: language is incredibly effective. It is truly miraculous how much information can be conveyed with language. Civilization is made of language. Not even the simplest of human cultures could exist without language.
In effect we no longer inhabit a world governed solely by material processes. We also inhabit a universe of our own creation which we breezily refer to as culture- and language underlays all human culture. If there is such a thing as natural selection then the environment we now select for is one of our own making, and this environment is composed of thoughts, ideas and a multitude of things we don't even have words for. This is what language does.

Language II

2008-09-27T06:39:00.000-07:00

Just as living tissue has an identity (as dog, rhododendron, Aunt Mary...or bone, neuron, chloroplast) that is not intrinsic to the cell, words have roles aside from their dictionary definitions. It may be a noun, and if a noun it may be the subject, direct object, indirect object, of the sentence of which it is a part, which sentence has a significance beyond the meaning of the word. Furthermore, the word is a word in a particular language. And of course the word is really only a puff of air, a squiggle on paper, a series of 1's and 0's in a hard drive which also have no intrinsic value at all. Just like the DNA in a cell, a phoneme can express itself in any number of ways. Those ways may be finite in number but genes are the means by which every form of life on earth is transcribed into a living, breathing thing, just as that finite set of phonemes is responsible for every language humans have ever spoken.
As the terrestrial gene pool is shared among multiple creatures spanning generations, humanity's languages are shared among individual speakers spanning generations. Like genes, language is used to transform the material of the planet. Unlike genes, language has no true material existence, although material people are required to generate the language that turns clay into bricks and bricks into houses in the same way proteins are needed to transform the chemistry of the earth into cells and cells into livers. Except when it stops working properly we don't give much thought to our livers, but livers too have a significance beyond the materials from which they are composed. In Air and Angels, John Donne said,

..But since my soul, whose child love is,
Takes limbs of flesh, and else could nothing do,
More subtle than the parent is
Love must not be, but take a body too..

And what exactly are the works of man other than words that have taken limbs of flesh? First comes the thought, the idea, the will, a dream, then theories are devised, plans made, activity organized, and the material of the planet is transformed into something that did not previously exist. All this would be impossible without language.
Complex social order does seem possible without language, as in ants, bees, termites, unless you want to label the sharing of information via pheramones language. It may very well fit some definitions of language, in which case you could say that language does not depend on the medium it uses. If we gain knowledge of extraterrestrial life we may find that it does not depend on the materials we are used to- carbon, water, oxygen, nitrogen- but expresses itself in entirely unforeseen ways. Such is the stuff of science fiction.
As it is, our human language is such a commonplace part of our existence we seldom think how marvelous it truly is. One of the most marvelous things about it is that it is not under any sort of central control, not even in France which has an academy dedicated to maintaining the purity of the language. Words and phrases may spontaneously erupt from who knows where and spread through the speech community like a virus, and a few years later they may disappear just as quickly. Conversely, speakers of Indo European languages who have been separated for thousands of years and thousands of miles, cut off from each other by geological and political barriers, retain words in common. The classical language of India, a country separated from western Europe by oceans, mountains, deserts, hostile political groups, and a vastly different climate, is called Sanskrit, a word easily understood in any language with a Latin heritage. 'San' means holy, as in saint, and 'skrit' means writing, as in script. Sanskrit, as classical Latin is to some extent an artificial language, refined and promoted by a priest-like class of scholars. Latin was for centuries after the demise of Roman power a common language for educated Europeans, and it would be hard to overestimate the importance to English of all those Latin words we have adopted. They came into our language by many routes, but without them we wouldn't be able to carry on the business of an advanced culture.
It is estimated that there exist 6000 languages on earth and attempts are being made to reconstruct a primordial language from which all are descended. This is based on the assumptions that language first appeared only once and that remnants of this speech can be recovered at this late date. Whether or not these assumptions are true, the effort should be hugely rewarding. However, I suspect that human communities are perfectly capable of entirely replacing the words of its language within a few generations. People are demonstrably capable of combining elements of several languages into new constructs variously called creoles, pidgins, jargons with which speakers of dissimilar languages use to communicate with each other, complete with simplified grammar and hybrid vocabulary. If the example of Chinook Jargon is any indication, cultures alien to each other have more difficulty hearing and pronouncing unfamiliar sounds than learning unfamiliar words and grammatical structures. Sometimes I think of English as pidgin French. Hybrid words, simplified grammar, and a very quick evolution characterize English. Our most common words are usually Germanic in origin, while our huge lexicon incorporates words from Latin, some directly, some indirectly through French. No child has any inkling of any of this as he learns to speak and yet he unknowingly learns the history of Rome at the same time.
Nobody set out to invent Chinook Jargon, or English. They evolved spontaneously, one as a trade language along the northwest Pacific coast the other as a way for a new set of overlords to communicate with a conquered people.
How has English been shaped? to a large extent it was shaped by literacy and the printing press. Even today England is rich with dialects. Londoners, Liverpudlians, Glaswegians, and Oxford dons are easily identifiable by their speech, but standard English comes from the London dialect Chaucer wrote. A few centuries later it was an instrument worthy of Shakespeare who transformed it. What astrologer or prophet could have foreseen that the son of a glover in provincial Stratford on Avon would be responsible for massively reshaping the English language? The king didn't appoint him to the task. Entirely on his own volition he wrote his dramas, comedies and histories to be performed on stage in front of an audience of riotous Londoners. For money. And ever after his phrases and vocabulary have become the common property of all English speakers. In a very real sense Shakespeare still lives, and we live in the word universe he created. But not even Shakespeare affected the cadences of our daily speech as much as the Authorized King James translation of the bible. Is it mere coincidence that as our culture has abandoned its reverence for the bible its literature has become impoverished?
This brings us to another point. The language, like the greater culture which is largely constructed with language, is bigger than any one person can contain. An infant is born with a predisposition to learn Language in the abstract, but with no knowledge of the specific language he is about to learn. Without that language he can never become a fully developed member of human society. Literally, a person without language is not a human being. For that matter, without language there would be no human beings. Oh, there might be human-like apes prowling the forests, gathering fruit, digging roots with sticks, killing the occasional unlucky wild goat for meat. But they would not be human, they would be another variety of chimp.
It seems that sometime in human history language itself became part of the environment to which we adapted and that it was this adaptation that changed us from being another type of chimp to being human beings who rule the world. From being a means of signaling the presence of a predator, or the location of ripe berries language allows us to learn about the lives of Abraham and Sarah who have been dust for perhaps three thousand years. Roughly a hundred and twenty generations separate us from Abraham and Sarah but their story is now read in every part of the world. Where in the bone and tissue of the larynx is there any hint of such a capability? One of the fundamental tenets of science is that from an initial set of parameters the entire history and content of the universe should theoretically, if not practically, be predicted. And did the larynx cause language to evolve- or did language cause the larynx to evolve? The former is the neo- Darwinian theory, the latter closer to the Lamarckian view.
My view is that there is a dialectic at work, a back and forth, as in the grammar of language versus the words, or the concrete versus the theoretical, or the ideal versus the concrete. But there must be more to it. Is there some unacknowledged force of nature, something akin to the electro-magnetic, that draws us on? We have a ready made vocabulary for this sort of thing, but words like soul and spirit turn scientists blue in the face, and in any event they have been appropriated by druids, wiccans and suchlike. So I will call it a latency force. Since I just thought of it I'll have to give it some thought.

Language I

2008-09-14T17:57:00.000-07:00

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."
This is how the Gospel of St. John begins, almost a rephrasing of the first verse of Genesis, which goes, "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." God spoke and all we know was created. First came the Thought and then came His Word. The Word, Logos in the original Greek, is a mightier and weightier word than it is in English.
In Genesis much is made of words. We are not told how Adam and Eve came by their names, but we are told that the names of all living things were conferred by Adam while they passed by in a ritual procession. For both Greek and Hebrew it seems there was something momentous, even frightening about words. Perhaps they thought more deeply about such things than we do.
The Greeks went so far as to analyze their language and devise a grammar to describe it, as did the Latins as they acquired the trappings of sophisticated culture. Grammarians in England devised a theory of grammar for their language that mimicked the Greek and Latin theory. Those of us who struggled through the resulting grammar classes (do they still teach grammar in the early grades...or ever?) found out that words not only have meanings in themselves, they have functions which also have names. Verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs tell us how words function in a sentence, but the more important distinction is between words and grammar. Names are a big deal, as the Genesis story emphasizes, but without grammar nouns, verbs, adjectives, aren't enough to convey much meaning. You can say 'moose,' 'shot,' 'cabin,' 'pajamas,' and various other words but if they are not in the right order we will be puzzled at the meaning intended. Even a native speaker can get the grammar wrong, as in the joke that originated with Groucho Marx: "While I was staying in a cabin out in Wyoming I got up in the morning and shot a moose in my pajamas." Comeback: "If he was wearing my pajamas I would have shot him, too."
All languages have grammar whether or not a science of grammar has been devised for that language, and as the joke shows inattention to grammar can result in unintended hilarity.
The point is that language has two elements, the words themselves, and grammar, or syntax if you prefer. English uses word order to convey ideas not intrinsic to the words themselves, while Latin, Greek, and many other Indo-European languages use inflection. A noun, verb or modifier changes its ending or some other part to indicate who does what to whom. Thus a Latin or Greek verb may take a hundred forms. The system is nightmarish to learn, but has the advantage of precision. The Groucho joke wouldn't work in Latin.
So language is a lot like some other things I have discussed here. There is the thing itself and there is the logic behind it. There is a dog and there is a classification called canis. A dog can be weighed, measured, seen, kicked, it can bite, shed its fur all over your couch, but species is a word that designates a pattern and none of those things can be done to or by a pattern.
It seems that language corresponds to the material world in this way. Words themselves are abstractions, symbols, whether as a sound or further abstracted by symbols on a page or 1's and 0's in a hard drive. Would a rose by another name smell as sweet? I hate to take out the poetry, but a rose would smell the same if we called it an outhouse. (Nevertheless, one of the techniques of spin doctoring is to change the plain word for something into something that will divert attention from a real problem. It works quite well.)
Scientists spend a lot of time trying to figure out when and how humans evolved speech, or whether apes, whales, or other creatures also have speech. This requires them to try to define speech, and symbolism seems to be at the root of what distinguishes a warning scream from an arbitrary sound that says, "Leopard in the bushes," as opposed to "Stay away from my banana!" I don't want to get into this controversy. I want to concentrate more on some characteristics of language that I have seldom heard mentioned, and for that human language works best if only because we all have a profound personal knowledge of language whether we have studied grammar or not, or even if we can read.
Staying with the subject of grammar, that Groucho joke points to something interesting. The grammar can be correct while the meaning is false. "The moon is made of green cheese," is a grammatically valid statement that just happens to be wrong. This corresponds to any statement that depends on logic. Often the logic seems impeccable, but the experiment doesn't work.
This leads to the second point. To make any kind of communication it is necessary to have both grammar and words. You can't say anything about "leopard in the bush" by saying "noun, verb understood, preposition, article, noun."
While it may turn out that baboons do have the ability to make such communications with each other, or even to lie about it, only humans have the ability to teach each other through the use of vocalizations alone how to set a trap for a leopard. This is an enormous difference, so enormous that it amounts to a difference in kind not just quantity. Human language is more than just more of the same. And yet there are similarities that should not be ignored. In totality, the story of language has a lot to show us about every other aspect of existence.

The Elizabethan World Picture

2008-09-09T09:31:00.000-07:00

Almost every well-read person is familiar with the work of the great authors even if only by reputation rather than through personal knowledge. But there must be hundreds of lesser lights who deserve to be better known. E.M.W. Tillyard's The Elizabethan World Picture is one of them. It opened my eyes to a thoughtscape I didn't know existed. And yet I had a lifelong familiarity with bits and pieces of it. These bits and pieces are like the ruins of old castles and monasteries, or sections of masonry incorporated into newer walls of our culture. This thoughtscape is basically neo-platonic, and at one time it was what everyone believed. It had the same place in the way people thought about things as science does today. It was only in late medieval times that it began to be seriously challenged by Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler and others. Their new science swept over the previous thoughtscape like a tsunami.
Tillyard's book is a snapshot of the state of the public thoughtscape in Elizabethan England, the age of Shakespeare, John Donne, Edmund Spenser, John Dowland and so many others in which one of those inexplicable eruptions of human creativity convulsed Europe at that time and London thronged with explorers, poets, scientists, and sermonisers. The new science still coexisted side by side with the older neoplatonic science. The purpose of Tillyard's little book is to show that a knowledge of that elder science is indispensable for an understanding of those great Elizabethan figures.
Neoplatonism is the shorthand term I use but Tillyard doesn't. He contents himself with describing the salient features of the system as understood in that time and place and leaves it up to the reader to pursue the topic further should he wish.
He emphasizes that this was the way everybody thought and quotes extensively from various writers to prove how commonplace was this way of thinking. This was the science that had been grafted onto Christian dogma. Christianity is based on the gospels and epistles which tell of God become man to suffer on the cross for the redemption of mankind. But scripture says very little about the universal order beyond the fact that it was created by God. That was where the neoplatonic/ptolemaic system came in. It seemed to describe the universe in an entirely logical way. And the math worked. It was that system that the calculations of Copernicus et al shook to its foundations.
I have been more interested in its role in the history of thought than its literary aspect, but I am also attracted to it. There is something beautiful and in harmony with the human heart about that older system, and there something in our modern system I find cold and inhuman. In the neoplatonic/ptolemaic system the soul of man was integrated into metaphysics, astronomy, and all of creation. For Christians Man is the reason God created the universe. And I think this is an innate belief all human beings have, though often dismissed mainly through the influence of modern science which sees man as a mere accident, on an insignificant planet, not much different than an amoeba or a rosebush. A philosophy known as 'Deep Ecology' goes further and suggests that Man is a cancer on the earth. This philosophy permeates political movements as diverse as PETA, Planned Parenthood, the Green Party and it teaches us to hate ourselves.
By contrast, the neoplatonic/ptolemaic system saw Man as an essential link in the mystery of Creation, which itself was holy and sacred.
Our link is part of a cosmic Great Chain of Being that includes not only all visible things but a multiplicity of other invisible universes inhabited by supernatural beings known as Angels, both blessed and damned. The system was hierarchical starting at the bottom with 'inferior creatures' and proceeding upwards to the very throne of God.
Tillyard quotes, among others, Sir John Fortesque, a jurist writing on the law of nature:
So that from the highest angel down to the lowest of his kind there is absolutely not found an angel that has not a superior or an inferior; nor from man down to the merest worm is there any creature which is not in some respect superior to one creature or inferior to another. So that there is nothing which the bond of order does not embrace.
The details of this chain are elaborated well in the book, for instance that the highest form of one class connected to the lowest form of the next class. The dolphin is the highest of the fishes, the king of its kind. This logic also justified the hierarchy of society with a king at the top followed by nobility and winding up with common labourers. Also there was a hierarchy of races which helped to justify black slavery, neither was there any room for democratic ideals.
Another element of the system was the theory of Corresponding Planes. Not only was there a hierarchy of substances, living beings, angels, there was a hierarchy of Planes of existence. Tillyard explains: The different planes were the divine and angelic, the universe or macrocosm, the commonwealth or body politic, man or the microcosm, and the lower creation...the mind is like an ocean because it is microcosmic, it contains all the bounty of the seas in little.
In other words every aspect of the material world has a corresponding aspect in the celestial sphere.
I can't explain why I felt it was appropriate to insert this little digression at this point, except that it illustrates how one world picture can be so thoroughly overthrown in just a few short centuries. Its example should be a cautionary tale for the arrogant Daniel Dennetts and Richard Dawkins of the world. It also fits in with my theme of how thought, an immaterial, intangible activity, is a precursor to the appearance of that material reality they worship. Even more importantly I think that cultural heritage amounted to a projection of the human soul onto the universe so that the universe became a mirror image for mankind in which everything outside him corresponded to what was essential within. Our own era's science, for all its many successes, is still in its youth. And perhaps as the adolescent matures and mellows out it will find there was much wisdom in its parent.

Uncertainty

2008-08-14T06:03:00.000-07:00

Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle is one you often encounter if you should try to learn about quantum physics, one of the most profound intellectual achievements of the 20th century. In a nutshell it states that the more you know about the particle nature of light the less you know about its wave nature. You can observe light as a wave and make a statement about it, in which case you will not be able to observe it as a particle. Or you can make an experiment on a light particle in which case you will not be able to make a statement about it's wave nature. At least that's the best I can do to grasp the idea. Because light has two natures, almost in the same way as a living thing can be thought of as a single thing- your dog Betsy, for instance, or as a Labrador retriever. You who have known Betsy since she was a puppy will be able to enumerate the individual traits she has that make her different than any other Labrador in the world. But if you want to know what it is that makes Betsy a Labrador instead of a border collie you will have to look for commonalities she has with labradors which distinguish her from a border collie while ignoring the traits they have in common.
I doubt that I really understand the Uncertainty Principle as it pertains to quantum mechanics, but as a fact of everyday life it makes perfect sense to me. It wasn't until I read about the principle that I really began to think about it. Now most people would scoff at the notion that an esoteric idea from a field of knowledge that even baffles the scientists who are intimately familiar with it could have anything to do with everyday life. And what could it possibly have to do with the topics I've been writing about since I began this blog?
Well, it turns out there are a lot of situations where the more you know about one thing the less you know about another. Take a map, for instance. A Google map will do quite well. Pick out a town, any town and type it in. Franklin County, Virginia, for instance. Google will immediately present you with a very detailed map of said community, but if you are unfamiliar with the Eastern Seaboard of the US it will not be very enlightening. Where is it, exactly? You will have to pull back to find out how far it is from the Cumberland Gap. And you can do a lot of zooming in and out before you get a very good picture in your mind of the geography of Franklin County, Virginia. Because the more detail gained of the local area the more information lost about the bigger picture of the surrounding area. And if you zoom out to get an idea of the bigger picture you lose knowledge of finer detail. This is a (nearly) inescapable fact that anyone knows who has ever used a map but because it's such a common experience nobody ever really thinks about it. But what if this everyday experience was an instance of a fundamental law that applies to the whole universe?
Interestingly, the Heisenberg Principle doesn't only invoke the subject of the observation, light, but it requires an observer. The observer's decision to make the observation is essential to the experiment. Without that decision the experiment, and therefore the action would not take place. Now if you think of your life and life itself as a constant experiment, with every move made being a step into the unknown, then what is the significance of 'deciding'? According to quantum theory the decision itself has to be factored into any analysis of real physical events. The decision is what made the event take place.
Does this arcane principle of quantum physics have an equivalent in everyday life? Obviously, our entire panoply of technological civilization consisting of cars, ships computers, roads could hardly exist without first taking shape as templates in the human mind. Now that these material objects do exist, they are subject to our purposes and could do nothing otherwise. They are agents of our will. A car does not become a car until someone gets in the driver's seat and drives.
Conventional scientific materialism, it should be noted, also requires an actor as well as an acted upon. But it isn't noted, neither is it ever asked what exactly is being acted upon. Is it because language deals so well with nouns that we have this penchant for naming things? Does this facility lead us astray as some philosophers theorize? t, inserts a key in the ignition, and drives off. Isn't this a lot like the way our physical bodies, those internal chemical factories, work? This idea is anathema to modern science. It implies that teleological forces are at work, and that just can't be, can it?

Tracks on Mars

2008-07-25T06:29:00.000-07:00

An image recently posted on a web site: tractor-like tread marks impressed onto a barren sandy landscape curve back toward a preternaturally close horizon. The reason the horizon seems foreshortened is that the picture is of Mars, taken by a camera mounted on a vehicle sent from earth to explore the planet's surface. Now, if life can be explained as a property of the constituent materials that form its physical structures, then we also have to say that it is a property of those constituent materials (the complex molecules and the principle elements that compose them) that they will eventually gather themselves together and be propelled from the planet Earth to the planet Mars where they will leave tractor tracks that can be photographed and transmitted for viewing back to Earth. Isn't this an obvious absurdity?
It seems that scientists can be just as blinkered as anyone else- maybe more so, since their brand of blinkered approach has been successful at doing things like sending machines to Mars. Hopefully I'll be able to explain why a blinkered approach can have power to bring about physical changes in the fabric of the universe, but for now I'll cite a representative example of that blinkered view as it tries to explain away the uniqueness of life and reduce it to a mere physical process just like any other to be found in chemistry.
The name of the biochemist is Norman W. Pirie* writing in the essay, "The meaninglessness of the Terms 'Life' and 'Living.'" He compares the gradations between inanimate matter and life as analogous to the gradations from acid to basic in chemistry, which seems to be dependant on the kinds of bonds formed by the hydrogen atom. And therefore all can be explained in terms of 'one quantity- hydrogen ion concentration.' There you go, folks. Apparently, if a suitably intelligent being from a universe completely unlike our own was informed of the principles of hydrogen ion concentration he would be able to predict the formation of living beings who would send machines to neighboring planets.
Now, I don't mean to ridicule professor Pirie as I am sure he was a fine and competent biochemist. But the trouble with people who spend their lives with their noses jammed up against their fields of expertise, is that they tend to see everything in terms of what they are intimately familiar with. They rarely have reasons to question their own logic as long the work they do extends the knowledge within their field. And for laboratory scientists that means the evidence of their senses as enhanced by their instruments is what counts. Theory and logic are ad hoc affairs which very much resemble what theologians call faith. A Freudian will go into a supermarket and see nothing but phallic symbols lining the aisles. An accountant will tend to interpret the world in terms of assets and liabilities.
But while Pirie can tell us that the quality we call 'acidity' is associated with the concentration of hydrogen ions in a given substance, he can't say exactly what acidity is. Acidity is an abstraction, just like heat is. Heat is something that burns. Its a label we use to denominate a physical sensation. Science is what picks apart the factors that cause that physical sensation and we have mathematics that make it possible to calculate those factors. But ultimately we haven't yet explained the sensation. Nevertheless we know very well that there is such a thing as hot.
And here's the thing: we know very well from the evidence of our senses that things like heat, acid, light, etc exist, but we don't know very much about them except through our ability to reason. And so I don't really think we've progressed that far since the days of Plato in answering the extremely basic question of what we know and how we know it. If twentieth century philosophers are any indication it would seem we are totally lost. They've all come a cropper. Existence is just as mysterious and unfathomable as ever.

*From The Origins of Life by Cyril Ponnamperuna

Evolving

2008-06-09T08:57:00.000-07:00

We don't need a theory to tell us that life, even in its most rudimentary forms, actively transforms inert matter into the substances it incorporates into its physical being. This is known from clear observation. It's called eating. We multicellular creatures almost from the start adopted a body plan to deliver nutrients to the cells that make up our various forms. This underlying body plan consists of a mouth, a gut, and an anus. Materialistic science proposes a theory which asserts that this orchestrated activity is a property of the substances that make up every living thing. This means the various elements, like carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, which assemble themselves into incredibly intricate and complex molecules like sugars, lipids, proteins, which become blood, skin, bone, nerve tissue. This means the blossoming of an embryo into a child is no different than the combining of sodium with chlorine into common salt. But living things act differently than inanimate substances.
Salt is a crystal and we are told that some crystals propagate themselves in ways analogous to living things, thus indicating how life originated as a natural, ie random, phenomenon. Which has continued to transform itself into more and more complex chemicals. Obviously, it's hard to imagine how life could exist without the chemical constituents of the physical body. However, looking at the tableau of life on earth it seems equally obvious that some other principle is at play than randomicity. It appears to this observer that life, that utterly intangible concept, is the opposite of random; it intentionally uses the material constituents of the universe to assemble a physical presence in that universe.
Because Life is the ultimate abstract concept. We humans along with daffodils, slugs, and lichens, use virtually identical materials to create radically different organisms which have radically different affects on the physical earth. Living things are responsible for the makeup of the earth's atmosphere, for the structure and distribution of rocks in the continental crust, perhaps for seeding clouds to form raindrops, and for moderating the climate so that wild swings of temperature are avoided. As a result of life, the behaviors of living things, this planet of ours is an entirely different kind of object than it would be if it was lifeless.
Most of this action is a byproduct of the chemical activities which take place within a cell, and there is no suggestion here that some sort of conspiracy took place among the spirochetes and the polyps to come up with all this but there is no denying that the world that has come about through their influence is a place more congenial to life than it was in the beginning.
In fact it became so congenial that a veritable explosion of life has occurred not only in the amount of inanimate material that is now either alive or of organic origin ready to be recycled again, but in the kaleidoscopic variety of life, far beyond the most vivid imagination. This amounts to a riot of invention. Even now researchers are being surprised by new and unbelievable discoveries.
Much of this explosive diversity seems to be due to the 'invention' of the eukaryote cell which seems to be linked to the 'invention' of sexuality. Researchers are constantly finding new ways living things have of exchanging genetic information. It could be that viruses and cancers are such methods. But with sexuality and a nucleus this exchange of what amounts to an accumulation of knowledge about experimental investigations. Death might also be thought of as another innovation that promoted the diversification of life forms. Bacteria are basically immortal because they proliferate by dividing. An individual bacteria can die but its clones continue on. Therefore the accumulation of 'knowledge' within the genetic apparatus is slow, although it now appears that interspecies exchanges of genetic code is more common than suspected. Sexual reproduction regularizes the exchange of genetic information which results in more rapid innovation. These innovations are more structural than chemical, or more accurately the chemistry of individual cells specializes. Both plants and animals have light sensitive cells, but plants use them to produce sugar and animals use them to see with. The whole story is available for examination, but what was already a difficult problem in Darwin's day has only grown more intractable as more information has been accumulated by scientists. At the time for instance, the idea of separate species didn't seem problematic. There were dogs, cats, apes, flies toadstools, and it was all perfectly straightforward except in certain unusual cases. The discovery of genetics seemed to simplify and resolve the questions of how, but does it? In animals, energy production is largely a function of mitochondria. Although enclosed within the nucleus mitochondria are actually separate organelles with their own genetic structures. Mitochondria more or less define what an animal is. Plants derive their energy from a different organelle, the chloroplast, which is able to convert sunlight into sugar, which can be metered out in the precise quantity needed by the plant for growth and reproduction. It is now thought that chloroplasts and mitochondria were originally independent entities which the precursors of plants and animals hijacked for their own use. There don't appear to be any free ranging mitochondria or chloroplasts roaming the oceans or the dry land nowadays. Question: do we use them for our benefit or do they use us for theirs? They may have started out as parasites or infections, and parasitism and infection are major issues for all living things, even us two legged geniuses. A recent type of parasitism recently observed is a fungus transmitted from cats to rodents. Harmless to cats, the fungus causes the rat or mouse to be attracted to the smell of cat piss. Could it be that those strange ladies living with hundreds of cats have contracted the same infection?
But not all parasitism is harmful. Sometimes it's entirely beneficial, in which case the relationship between host and guest is called symbiosis. As in the complex population of microbes living in our guts without which we would not be able to digest our food. Certain varieties of E. Coli perform these services for us, and it is well known that cows are only able to digest grasses with the help of microorganisms that convert otherwise indigestible cellulose into sugar. Neat trick. Without those bacteria cows would die out...and all that flatulence that so terrifies the econazis. But without cows to keep those grasses in check who knows what calamities would transpire. Sounds like a business opportunity for the Goracle. But for the purposes of this discussion, can cows be considered a species apart from the happy bacteria busily fermenting cellulose in all those bovine stomachs? And how is this explicable in terms of Darwinian theory? Cooperation, competition, parasitism leading to terrestrial transformation. Neat trick.
Here's an interesting factoid I read of not long ago. It had to do with fruit flies where the writer informed his readers that there is more genetic variation within one species of fruit flies than there is spread out among the entire order of mammalia. I have no reason to doubt this information since it was conveyed by someone who had spent his life studying cladistics, but if this is so then what exactly does genetics have to do with species- by which I will continue to mean dogs and cats and rats and so on.
I am asking all these questions not because I am trying to discredit the idea of evolution. I have no doubt it took place. But how? And what does it mean to our understanding of the universe, ourselves, God, art, time, and this strange experience of being alive?

The Domains of Life

2008-04-06T09:56:00.000-07:00

Not so long ago biologists had a nice and tidy classification system for life on earth. There was the animal kingdom and the vegetable kingdom and the only uncertainty was to which kingdom certain problematic life forms belonged. That's all changed. The new dividing line is between prokaryotes and eukaryotes, and more recently a third fork, the archaea, has been identified. These deepest roots of the tree of life classifications are now called domains. The domain archaea represents what are most likely the most ancient of organisms that thrive in all sorts of hellish environments, like next to undersea lava flows, in boiling geysers and deep in the bowels of the earth where pressures are so high that water won't boil no matter how hot the temperature. These archaea, until recently unknown, may be the largest component of earth's biomass. Interestingly, there are indications that we multicellular eukaryotes are more closely related to the archaea than to the more familiar bacteria that live on the surface of the earth. According to some theorists the archaea are survivors of journeys through interstellar space. The late Fred Hoyle believed life was ubiquitous throughout the universe and actually mediated star formation. He was a pioneering giant of cosmology who didn't believe in the Big Bang theory. In fact, he was the one who coined that expression. One of the reasons he came to this conclusion was that he didn't believe the Big Bang theory left enough time for the building blocks of organic life to arise through random processes. If the actuarial figures he quotes are correct no circumstance is imaginable in which even the enzymes that form the building blocks of life could have spontaneously come into existence. This may sound like a pretty radical idea, but he wasn't trying to be radical. He was trying to save the theory...the theory of a materialistic origin of life.
Other advocates of conventional evolution theory have also seen difficulties and tried to find ways out. The idea of a gradual accumulation of mutations is one of those difficulties and some writers think the discovery of homeobox genes solves the problem. The problem is this: major classes of life forms don't appear gradually in the fossil record but all at once. The naturalist Steven Jay Gould spent a career pondering this problem and proposed a theory called punctuated equilibrium, based on his study of the Burgess Shales. This is not a theory, it's a description, a word, a verbal shorthand for, "there are epochs in geologic history when the earth is dominated by one type of life form- such as dinosaurs- which suddenly end and another dominant life form suddenly explodes in numbers and diversity- such as mammals- occupying ecological spaces once occupied by the now defunct biological order." This completely undermines the theory, but the homeobox gene clusters at first glance seem to save the day. This is a type of gene that mediates the expression of the rest of the genetic activity of the organism, and it takes very few changes in the way homeobox genes transcribe genetic information to cause massive changes in the organism as a whole. It is a master gene set, an amplifier. They are found in multicellular life forms, in fact they are what make organized multicellular life possible. But how do the homeobox genes know when to kick into gear? We have had nearly two centuries of fairly meticulous observers who would have noticed if homeobox genes had a habit of suddenly going wild. Nevertheless it's a good thing to know, that any given creature can fairly quickly alter its form. If it needs to. But how does it know it needs to? How does it know that its adaptations for survival are no longer operable and need to be changed? How does it settle on a new set of blueprints? This is really what's necessary to save the theory of natural selection, which also is just terminology, like punctuated equilibrium, not really a respectable theory. Just because you've got a name for something it doesn't mean you understand it. Terminology is not explanation. Incidentally, the homeobox genes are the most conservative gene sets yet studied, being virtually identical in man and mouse, whose complement differs from fruit flies mainly in number.
Calling homeobox genes a set of blueprints may seem no more than metaphorical language but if they function like blueprints then maybe blueprints are a metaphor for homeobox genes. Metaphors are linguistic markers to help us understand the unfamiliar by likening it to the known. I like to use the abacus metaphor for the entire genetic concept. An abacus is used to do arithmetic. But an abacus is not arithmetic. Similarly, I think genes are used to do life but they are not life. I also like the metaphor of a movie. As an informed member of modern society you know that the movie unfolding before your eyes is the end product of a huge production apparatus. But there is in the movie itself no evidence of the existence of cameras, directors, writers, electricians, catering trucks, or investment deals. Materialists, whether scientific or hedonistic would have us believe there is nothing behind the smoke and mirrors of this weird thing called life and they can't bring themselves to acknowledge the possibility of an influence on our world that can't be learned from the physical facts discerible through the senses. Buddhists would have us believe that the material world is nothing but an illusion. Phenomenologists and post modernists don't believe in reality either. But I think they are all wrong.
I believe in evolution. It's funny to have to say it that way, like saying I believe in astrology. But there is no doubt in my mind that all life that we know of has a common ancestry and that from that theme this madcap world of ours took its present configuration. I am not the least bit offended by the idea that I'm related to a slime mold (as some have suggested) so the ape thing doesn't bother me at all. There may be variations of the currently accepted picture, such as the panspermia theory suggests.
But here's where I have a problem. It is said that between apes and humans there is only a few percent difference in genetic code separating us. That few percent has to carry quite a bit of freight. For instance, chimpanzees don't have a literature. They don't sit around campfires and tell funny stories about how great grandpa chimp stole a bunch of bananas from a mountain gorilla. Orang utans show no curiosity about the moon let alone do they scheme how to fly there. No Shakespeare, no Bible, no Euclid, no Rembrandt, no TV shows, no discernible effect on the climate, although they have been observed cheating, lying, stealing, killing and even having wars which proves to some that the apes are just like us. But generally they are the real noble savages in the estimation of the econazis who think humans are a blight on the earth.
Well, if those few differences on the DNA chain are sufficient to cause all the changes to the landscape caused by human agency then materialism has a lot of explaining to do.

The universe as a great thought

2008-03-31T07:07:00.000-07:00

For an entity to have volition it follows that that entity must need to perceive the existence of something external to itself. When Descartes made his famous formulation he concluded that it was the act of thinking itself that proved he existed, but I think feeling comes first. This means the ability to feel pain and pleasure, in order to have something to think about. You can think of just about anything but it's through pain and pleasure that reality intrudes. The cosmos isn't always what we want it to be. The universe has rules and in order to preserve its integrity a living entity must learn these rules. Moreover, we have wants, the first of which is we want to live. This is where thinking comes in. Or maybe you might want to call it adaptation. But if adaptation is an act of will, as I contend it is, then you might as well call it thinking.
Thinking also requires memory, since one of the first things that needs to be learnt is that the conditions in this external world, the source of those sensations of pain and pleasure, vary from place to place and over time. Genes are coded memories. When we think of evolution we think of dinosaurs, cockatoos, starfish and the myriads of life forms that exist or have existed. But geneticists, like the presocratic philosophers have come down with the opinion that life is reducible, not to water, or air, or earth, but to the gene, and that all these forms are variations on a theme of the capacity of the carbon element to form compounds with other elements If that's the case, then what exactly is the point of these myriads of life forms?
We are told that the process known as evolution is a mindless and mechanical affair of random and deterministic events, just like the formation of stars as clouds of hydrogen coalesce through the influence of gravity. For Darwinian evolutionists natural selection and random mutation are equivalent forces to gravity and the other elemental forces postulated by physicists. In other words, life is something that is acted upon. This is the clockwork theory of the universe, a cliche but apt. Clockwork, not meaning clock like, but something that is wound up and set loose, like a toy car, until it fizzles out.
But living things are anything but passive. They act upon their surroundings and change them. When you think about it from this point of view the universe is more like a great thought than a wind-up toy.

Stayin' Alive

2008-02-21T06:55:00.000-08:00

If science is about the measurement and quantification of physical things, then what exactly is a species? A dog is a physical thing, but what about dog? What about mammal, or reptile, or tree, or star, or planet? Yes, we can see and measure individual dogs, snakes, elms, stars, trees, and we can see that these individual entities share certain features that distinguish them from other types of entities. Although individual dogs vary enormously in size, colour, shape, and many other characteristics, they all have other very definite things in common. Likewise any other class of things we can think of. And while it is certainly possible to reduce any given dog to its constituent components, whether to bones, fur, DNA, or atoms, it is clear that the generality 'dog' has no physical being whatsoever and is neither measurable nor perceptible to the senses. It is a concept, but a concept that manifests itself in physical things, as if some sort of invisible template lurks in the empyrean, a higher plane of existence than ours from which all individual things on earth are created.
Most of Plato's dialogs take place between Socrates and his friends, and for the most part his friends are pretty dumb. But in the Parmenides dialog Socrates defers to the older man. It's not an easy dialog to read, all about the logical problems associated with proving the existence of The One versus the Many. I take these terms to mean God and matter, and the discussion is interesting to me because the argument is based on logical reasoning, not as with modern scientific atheists on the evidence of the senses. The most stunning statement Parmenides makes is that The One is completely unaware of the created world.
The article on Parmenides in The Big View website states his view that, "...the senses deceive us and hence, our perception of the world does not reflect the world as it really is. Instead, the real world is something above our apprehension and can only be apprehended through logic." Phenomenologists have a similar analysis.
Not much of Parmenides' own writings survive. In them he seems preoccupied with proving the universe to be fundamentally one single thing. The reasoning is hard to follow and it's hard to be sure what he really meant, but Socrates/Plato was inspired by the problems presented by Parmenides' theory to make a dialog out of it where Socrates was left speechless. When he thought about these problems he wanted to "...run away, because I am afraid I might fall into a bottomless pit of nonsense, and perish..." I can sympathize.
When studying the physical world- plate tectonics, brownian motion, harmonics, levers or whatever, it's difficult enough. What does it all mean? Beyond a certain complexity calculations quickly become insoluble. Climatologists still can't predict the next day's weather. Newton's laws accurately describe the orbit of Mars around the sun, but the swarm of asteroids between Jupiter and Mars is a different thing, and the vast quantity of bodies outside the orbits of the planets are even more inscrutable. To tell the truth, as marvelous as the discoveries in physics have been, they only illuminate the simplest of phenomena. Nevertheless, the processes are pretty well understood. There may be a multitude of things to study, but one salient feature stands out: there is order in the universe. Things work the same on earth as in the stars. As far out as we can extend our perceptions, the same laws are observed.
And isn't it astounding that no matter how great the distance there is always something more. No matter what the scale there is always something larger, and there is always structure, order, form. The same is true when we look inward to the small. Only a few centuries ago scientists turned the lens from looking into the distance to looking at the tiny things found in a drop of pond water. And now we are able to show images on the molecular scale. Again, no matter how closely we look we find order, structure and form.
Since the onset of the scientific age we have accumulated more information than any one person can possibly absorb. Arcane theories of relativity and quantum mechanics unintelligible to the average person nevertheless make possible many of the technological marvels we have come to take for granted. But have we advanced in our understanding of the meaning behind these complex theories and what does all this information tell us about ourselves? How do we dig ourselves out from under this avalanche?
Maybe we could start by thinking about how living things differ from the inanimate things that are more amenable to scientific reasoning, more predictable in response to stimuli. Darwinists and geneticists have been determined to fit their theories ov evolution and inheritance into the same theoretical frameworks that have been so successful in the physical sciences. But the facts don't fit the theory.
This is the one fact I aam speaking of: living things behave in fundamentally different ways than inanimate things. Living things have volition. No matter how small or simple the organism, it has preferences. Unlike you or I, a rock would be indifferent to being unable to move at the bottom of a ditch filling with water.
Being alive is actually a great deal of trouble, with far more opportunities to experience pain than joy, and staying alive is an unrelenting struggle. Why do we put up with it? Albert Camus thought it was the only question that mattered.

Love and sex

2008-02-11T08:48:00.000-08:00

"Every sensation, he says, is devoid of reason and incapable of memory; for neither is it self-caused nor, regarded as having an external cause, can it add anything thereto or take anything therefrom," is how Epicurus states his case. At first glance it seems to be true. "Hence it is from plain facts that we must draw inferences from the unknown...All our notions are derived from perceptions with some slight help from reasoning." These perceptions produce movements in the mind, or as logical positivists would have it, mind is a property of matter. Frankly, I think this formulation is a rather astounding claim for matter, but never mind. Since sensations are primary, it only follows that they are 'good,' and thus pleasure is logically the goal of living. Because it also follows from his logic that the objects of our perceptions (including our bodies) are the only realities, therefore at death our bodies revert to those minuscule, indestructible atoms, and the you that was vanishes like a puff of smoke.
Plato wasn't so sure that pleasure and sensation could be equated with good. "He who is the victim of his passions and the slave of pleasure will of course desire to make his beloved as agreeable to himself as possible," he expounded in the Phaedrus dialog. In other words when pleasure is equated with love, the lover will seek to dominate the beloved for the sake of the pleasure he derives from the beloved. Neither did he think that reality was reducible to matter: "The soul through all her being is immortal..." "...Only the self-moving, never leaving self, never ceases to move and is the fountain and beginning of motion to all that moves besides." For Epicurus the key to understanding the universe was matter, and for Plato it was energy...which he called the Psyche.
Noun and verb, as if you could have one without the other. Yet, in both philosophy and common belief, these are the two warring factions. Entire eras of our history can be defined in terms of these contrasting views. For many centuries Platonism ruled. It was made to order for the Christian era, without which that immense thought-structure could have had no logical justification. But in the last few centuries the ghost of Epicurus has seemingly vanquished Plato to the attic, along with old clocks, broken toys, 386 computers and all other outmoded items.
The dialectic even filters down to how Valentine's day is commemorated. In the bookstore last week two tables devoted to the occasion were set up so that you almost stumbled over them as you went through the entry. This is called marketing, but what was being marketed? Sex. Pleasure. The senses. One title I remember was "The Loin King." Ha ha. A book of sex coupons flanked it, illustrated editions of the Kama Sutra a little further down, etc. Nothing at all about love, unless you think that love is just a wishy washy synonym for sex. Curiously, the rear of the table is taken up with tomes of advice for losing weight. Because obviously if you are fat you're not going to do very well at the local pick up bar. So what happened to Valentines that used to promise love eternal, and yours alone? Why, these sentiments depend on an awareness of something nobler and higher than mere sex, something unexplainable in terms of the here and now, something that only makes sense if you believe in a transcendental constituent in the human make up: an immortal soul; something like what Plato tried to envision.
I'm not trying to make this into a diatribe on the morality of promiscuous sex. I would like instead to learn if there can be such a thing as morality, or honour, or love, or if these ideas really exist apart from the physicality of being. These are really tough questions, and they aren't just of academic interest as the Valentine's Day display showed. What we believe has a profound affect on how we organize our communities and how we live our individual private lives. For the most part, the general consensus since the 19 century has been that truth is only to be found in physical causes so that when a science of psychology was pioneered, the mind was entirely ignored. A generation of behavioral psychologists pretended it didn't exist, a philosophy that was made to order for the nazis and the bolsheviks. Observation of behavior was expected to reveal all. As the study of genetics advanced behaviorism of the whole creature was superseded by the study of the behaviors of certain complex carbon-based molecules. There is no doubt at all among geneticists that all behaviors of living things can be explained through DNA.
I don't mean in any way to disparage the work of geneticists, with one major caveat. They want to believe life can be treated like any other scientific concept. That's why an embryo is nothing more to them than a mass of inert tissue to be poked and prodded, experimented on, and disposed of just like any other chemical broth. In molecular biology scientists have found their own atomism and have joined the ranks of nuclear physicists as hard scientists. The knowledge they have added to our civilizational bank is immense. But I think that in contemplating the mystery of life and consciousness that we are led to an entirely different conclusion. Living things are not mere assemblages of chemical constituents. Life is different. And maybe by contemplating these mysteries of life and consciousness we might end up discovering entirely new worlds of thought and understanding, maybe even new science. And it amazes me that Plato and Parmenides discerned the implications of these questions over 2000 years ago. I think the careful observations of generations of students since then has only added to the mystery because they do not point to a materialistic origin of being.

Epicurus vs Plato

2008-01-31T16:28:00.000-08:00

The philosophical justifications for scientific atheism in our tradition go back to the Epicureans. The Epicureans introduced us to the idea of atomism, which proposes that all matter is reducible to infinitesimally tiny particles they called atoms. I've always been curious as to what logical path led them to this conclusion, because it was a brilliant insight. We think of Epicureans now as being people who like to eat well and live the good life but it was originally a school of philosophy named after Epicurus who founded it. It would be a pleasant sojourn to digress into the history behind the idea but this blog isn't primarily concerned with history. Neither is it meant to be scholarly. What I want to do is extract some of the fundamental ideas that shape our culture and one of the main threads originates with the Epicureans which is a good thing to know.
In essence the Epicureans claimed that the only valid knowledge possible comes through the senses. Everything else in their thinking proceeded from this premise, and it ultimately led to the assertion that pleasure was the most important goal a man could strive for. One might ask how they could be sure, since the argument itself is an example of reasoning, not something that can be known through the senses. I'll give them a little slack, though, because it's been a pretty productive axiom upon which to build a sound observational science.
But science would also be impossible without reason, especially the highly abstract form of reasoning known as mathematics. According to tradition Epicurus was born seven years after the death of Plato, and Plato had an entirely different idea that was probably based on his thoughts on geometry. Geometry and philosophy were popular hobbies among the Greek leisure class of his day. The essential thing that Plato noticed about geometry was that it didn't depend on sensory input. In fact there is no such thing as a line, or a point or a triangle in the real world. And how do we know that a square plus b square equals c square? We know these things because we have the power of reasoning. But what is reasoning? Plato theorized that there was a kind of invisible, purer than earthly light, the light of pure reason, corresponding to the light that let's us see things in our sensual world, that illuminated our minds. This was how we were able to reason.
And ever since then there has been an antagonism between the two conceptions of reality, an antagonism that manifests itself in numerous controversies, but right now I would like to draw attention to these two theories of knowledge, and suggest that this is not an exhaustive list. There are other ways we have of knowing.
A third way of knowing was introduced to western thinking when the Graeco-Roman world came up against a group of Semites which occupied Judea. These Jews worshiped an omnipotent, omniscient, immortal deity, a creator of the entire universe who was not contained within the existence we humans know. This deity could not be seen by us, although in times past he had appeared to various prophets and ancestors; records of these visitations were kept by a priestly class which which arbitrated various rituals, practices, laws of behavior. If the god could not be seen, if the god presided over creation in some ethereal universe beyond the reach of our senses, then how could his existence be known? Through faith, a concept that grew to dominate human thinking for the next 2000 years.
One more way of knowing is the way of the artist, poet, composer, architect, even the philosopher and the scientist: the imagination. Imagination is the faculty we use when we wish to bring something new into the world. A song, a sculpture, a story, an airplane, a theory.
The present day theory of science privileges the senses and reason over imagination and faith. Faith is considered an outmoded, discredited form of ignorance rather than knowledge. Scientific theories are logical constructs that are validated by an appeal to the senses... observations, in other words. This is as true of simple mechanical calculations as it is of quantum theory.
While science is wildly successful at manipulating the forces that make it possible to send a rocket to the moon or develop strains of rice and wheat that are productive enough to feed our billions, it has been less successful at ordering human society. In fact, attempts to scientize social structures, as with the bolsheviks and the fascists who have caused more human destruction and misery than any previous dogmatics in human history.
The poor artists don't know what to do. If there is one segment of endeavor which has been decimated by the materialistic doctrines of scientific atheism more than religious institutions it is art. Without belief in transcendent reality then the artist has no idea where his impulse to create comes from, and so he turns to death. It is what he sees, and it is what he portrays in modern art. No longer can he see the transcendent in everyday things and activities. Instead of heroism he sees brutality. Instead of showing the beauties of the human form he tears it apart and reassembles it in grotesque ways. This is self mutilation. The sad little golem I photographed could not be a clearer expression of 'A portrait of the artist as a dead man.'
We live in an age of terrible demoralization. But why? And is there any way out? What if there has been some terrible misunderstanding? I think there has been. And although I don't claim to know all the answers I think I can raise some good questions and point to a new direction. God help me.

Lost art

2008-01-17T12:42:00.000-08:00

This morning after walking downtown this crisp and clear January morning, my eyes watering from the bright sun, I finally sat down for my coffee. What was playing on the house system was an especially obnoxious pop song, I think it was the vile Cat Stevens, aka Abdullah or something, whose whiny voice evoked images of a skulking sewer rat. Not what I want to hear in the morning. Amazing that a bookstore owned by a Jewish woman would display the work of someone who wants to exterminate the Jews. Sometimes I wonder if all those centuries of dhimmitude have left a permanent mark on the Jewish soul.
Anyway, thanks to the wonders of iPod and a nice set of Shure ear plugs I have a way of circumventing the crassness of the modern idea of music. And what a contrast. It was Jussi Bjoerling's turn to randomly appear, singing a duet from Aida with Jonel Perlea, La fatal Pietra. And all of a sudden I'm in a different world, a world of beauty and nobility. I understand hardly a word of Italian, and I don't know the story of Aida, but it doesn't matter. There has never been another voice like Jussi Bjoerling's, and Verdi's music can be incredibly effecting even without a knowledge of the words. (With opera I sometimes think I like it better without the words.) Just the music and the human voice is all that's needed to transport me to another and more perfect sphere of cosmic reality.
An acquaintance of mine asked me yesterday if I had heard the CBC program where the topic "Why we like jazz" was discussed.The answer to me was obvious: jazz is great music, a fresh and new musical idiom that extended the possibilities of music. Thus it will always be new, and thanks to the invention of recording technology, will always be available for rediscovery by a new generation. My reply posed the question of why anybody liked hip hop. I know a lot of people claim to like it, just like a lot of people claim to like broccoli, but I suspect they are lying and future generations will be incr4edulous that anybody listened to it.
I'm not doubting people believe they like hip hop or broccoli. People are capable of believing just about anything if they think everybody else believes it, and the more preposterous the belief, the more hostile they become towards a nonbeliever. Hence the loathing true Bolsheviks felt toward Trotsky, or the rabid Islamist toward the Jew. More than mere logic is involved. Our deepest, most irrational impulses govern the outpouring of hatred of the believer toward the apostate because his entire personal conception of reality, his sense of self, is undermined. Panic and fear bubble up from the depths and the believer loses his bearings. Instead of engaging the non believer in a rational and courteous conversation where he tries to understand the other's point of view, he sees only enemies who must be destroyed. I mention these points because I intend to insult some dearly held beliefs as I go along. But there's no way out of it, no way to be nice.
The deeper question is why we listen to music, compose poetry, carve images on mountain sides, wear color coordinated outfits, mow our lawns, and worry about whether one set of beliefs is true or not. Why do we plan for the future, for our children's future, or care about people starving in Africa? Isn't it enough just to eat, stay warm, seek pleasure, have sex, avoid pain and toil? Why worry about anything but my immediate needs, why worry about what anybody else does? Why do we need to be loved, have friends, crave self-respect? And why do we need beauty? None of these questions can be answered by a utilitarian/materialistic explanation...they don't even make sense.
Yet materialism is a belief system itself, one that has permeated western attitudes for the last few centuries. It's a system of belief that has produced casualties, the most recent being a disregard of beauty. Beauty is out. The grotesque is in. Hip hop is only one recent example in music (I use the term loosely) but you could go back to the early days of rock and roll. Poor Elvis was grotesque. Madonna copulating with a brass pole on stage is grotesque, an image not even Dante could have imagined for his Inferno. She, Alice Cooper, the Rolling Stones, and so many others have carried the grotesquerie way beyond anything Elvis could imagine. He at least still had some lingering attachment to melody and sentiment. With him the yowling school of singing first broke through to the mainstream. Now yowling is everywhere. There is rock and roll yowling, country and western yowling, "world" music yowling, in fact it's almost impossible to escape it. This is the real air pollution, not carbon dioxide which actually helps plants grow.
While it may be a mystery why people believe what they believe- as Will Rogers quipped, 'People know a lot. The trouble is, most of what they know is wrong.'- there's no doubt that what we believe is vitally important to how we act. What is it we believe now? I mean what are the beliefs that drive people to vote a certain government in, or to listen to obnoxious noises or to strap explosives to their bodies?
Last week when it was so sunny and clear I spent an hour strolling through Fort Rodd Hill near Victoria and thought about those suicide bombers. How is it they hate the world and their lives so much that they will connive and plan to kill and maim as many people as possible, I wondered. How could they ignore the overwhelmingly beautiful world we are lucky enough to awaken to when we are born? Life is an immersion in wonders to be explored, beauties to be contemplated and all they can think of is death. The suicide bombers are not the only ones who seem impervious to the beauties of this world. It's a disease of our age, as much in the children of the west as in the children of the middle east. It seems especially common in the art world.
I've never been especially drawn to the visual arts but on occasion I browse through a copy of Artforum magazine at the library. Apparently an up to the minute periodical of what's going on in the upper strata of the art world, it's chockablock with images of decay and mortification. Flipping the first few pages of the December '07 edition, the reader is regaled with two images, one of a man, one of a woman, superimposed on each other. Which image is which is made even more ambiguous by the prominent sexual parts. The woman holds a large, erect penis protruding from her genital area through the rear of the male and emerging from between his legs below a patch of penisless pubic hair. I think the name of the artist is Jonathan Monk who was having an exhibition of his work in Paris. An emasculated man and a defeminized woman is what he takes away from his ideas about sexuality. Of course when homosexuality, baby killing and so on become normal and accepted then humans no longer have organs of generation. Their purpose is reduced to those brief moments of ejaculatory pleasure. There is no connection anymore between the generations. Sex is no longer the bridge between the past and the future. Love means nothing, in fact is obsolete, except as an entry in the thesaurus under sex. A few pages further on a young man dressed in a black suit, tieless, with a baseball cap stands in front of a white fence. Untrimmed weeds, grass, shrubbery seem ready to devour him. In fact the suit suggests coffin attire as if he is about to become compost. What meaning the artist had in mind is not something I am interested in. A few more pages and I see a 'Chocolate Santa Butt Plug,' the brainchild of one Paul McCarthy. It is an advertisement. The product was for sale, the perfect gift for the hip metrosexual on your list. As I progress through the issue, it's too tedious to describe the sad scenes that unfold. In between the advertisements (it's all about money, you know- don't tell anyone) are articles covering various scenes across the country and around the world. What must it be like to inhabit a world of such sterility?
Taking the contents of this magazine as representative of our times, what am I to make of it? First, I should say that the artists seem to have just as good an eye for colour, composition and imagery as any generation of artists. But what is wrong with them? Why are their gifts dedicated to the service of what seems to be a death cult?
I've always thought that all art is religious. Again, we can't help it. It's a fundamental reality like gravity, time, space. So what religion do these artists follow? If there is any message to all the art presented in this magazine it is pain, a great desparate groan of pain. This is exactly like a scene from Dante's Inferno.
But the sin here is that they have no beliefs, except certain visceral ones: existence is evil. Life is a big mistake. Human beings are inherently savage. Death is truth.
Where did all this come from? Historically, art has dealt in the transcendent aspects of the material world and found beauty and hope there. The artists were our guides. Where are they guiding us to now? And who were their guides?

A little bit of nostalgia

2008-01-02T10:03:00.000-08:00

I can still remember when horse drawn wagons laden with milk and bread plied the streets of my Edmonton hometown, sharing the road with streetcars. In the winter the motive power of those wagons provided us with free pucks for street hockey. I liked the bread wagons because they had a little step in the back that you could hop onto and ride. Not many of the side streets were paved, giving rise to great clouds of dust in the summer and muddy boots when it rained. People didn't walk their dogs. When Skippy had to do his business he went to the door and barked until someone let him out. When he wanted to come back in he used the same method. What he did while he was out was not something that worried us.
Children had similar freedom to roam. We were expected to fight our own fights and if we hurt ourselves doing stupid things we got little sympathy. For most of my childhood in the old neighborhood we spent a lot of time climbing the trees that lined our street. I don't know of anyone who broke a bone. Boys mostly played cowboys and Indians with toy cap pistols, and girls mostly played with dolls and tea sets. Most of the fun things we boys liked to do were frowned upon by adults; girls were tattletales who we avoided as much as possible. The other thing about girls was that they didn't like the games we boys played, but they always wanted to butt in. So we avoided them as much as possible. It was a great time to be a boy. We had bb gunswith which we pestered the rabbits in the ravine. We climbed on top of box cars down at the train yards. We made rafts to float on the ponds during the spring melt.
On the other hand in school we were expected to be quiet and listen and there was the strap if we didn't. It was considered sissy to cry when you got the strap and nobody wanted to be a sissy, even though we didn't know what the word actually meant. Far worse was in store for you if Dad got word that you were misbehaving at school. Nobody got driven to school, and we weren't let in until just before school started no matter how cold it was outside.
A desire to read comics motivated me to learn the alphabet and how it worked and so I knew how to read before I went to school. No teacher necessary. A comic book cost ten cents and had 52 colourful and intriguing pages. I also liked to listen to the radio--TV did not exist in the scope of my knowledge base. It wasn't until I was almost in my teens before TV came along and I didn't like it as much as the radio shows. My imagination conjured up an image of superman that was far superior to what I saw on the fuzzy black and white TV set.
I didn't know of any kid's mother in my neighborhood who worked. It was a man's lot to bring home sufficient funds to put food on the table and pay for the home. Women were first and foremost mothers and were loved and honored because of it. Most people grew vegetables in the back yard. A chicken was a large bird that would feed a whole family, arriving from the market with head, feet, and many interior items still intact. My grandfather liked the gizzard. The chicken had been plucked, but pinfeathers had to be burned off over the gas stove.
Most people went to church regularly, rules of behaviour, based on deeply held Christian beliefs, were strictly enforced in school, our history and moral standards were praised as an example to the world. Great men in history were admired and we were urged to emulate them. In my Catholic school saints and martyrs were especially revered. We were taught about the recent war, how our young men had sacrificed their lives to preserve us from a malevolent tyranny. We were taught about the secret police and the concentration camps in Soviet Russia and the relationship between Soviet expansionism and the Korean War. (It hadn't yet been dubbed a 'police action.') We had the best, wealthiest, freest society the world had ever seen, where poverty, disease and fear were vanquished. Edmonton was a new city, the fastest growing city in the world, a city with destiny and every day came breathtaking news of some new development.
As far as I knew this was how things had always been and how they always would be. Little did I know that under the surface of our collectivity of thought and belief big changes were brewing. The surface of the sea was calm but turbulence from below was welling up and it would soon generate a tsunami that would inundate the seemingly solid continents of conventional certainties. The tsunami hit while I was in the Navy between 1961 and 1965. When I went into the navy the world was still recognizably normal, when I got out everything had changed. The drama took place on campuses where students rioted in the name of free speech. Somehow, in the minds of these campus radicals the freest, wealthiest civilization in the history of the world had become something evil and tyrannical. These same campus radicals, who are now firmly tenured in their little academic domains thanks to the thuggish tactics they used, are now the most virulent opponents of free speech and they have seeded the media and the education establishment with their brainwashed graduates. It's lunacy, a lemming like dash over the cliff, a will to suicide. (I don't know how lemmings got that rap, but it's too good an image to let mere accuracy spoil things.)
But underlying the lunacy has been a long evolution of thought and belief in the western tradition, one major current in an ongoing dialog, in opposition to another counter current. It's like a great wrestling match that's been going on in one form or another for centuries. The contestants represent two different and seemingly incompatible strains of thought, the idealist and the materialist, and for the last several centuries, and especially in our present epoch, the materialist has the idealist pinned to the canvas. It seems.
In my view all humans are idealists, or to put it another way, we are religious beings. We can't help it. But there are individual elements of society who fancy themselves atheists. They are misled. Caught up in arcane proofs and disproofs of god they are unable to see themselves, or the fact that the materialist world view they espouse is itself a metaphysical statement, and one that is just as impossible to prove as the claim others make for a supreme being.
It's not only in the arena of thought and philosophy this battle is waged, but also in the arena of politics. So many blogs are focusing on politics that the internet has, as somebody recently remarked, become an echo chamber. Or a suite of echo chambers, depending on which echo you prefer. I would rather avoid those and get back to where we were before the sixties came along. Not that many things aren't better now, but I think they could be a lot better. A lot of very good things are happening now...the internet, for example, and all the miracles of the digital age. And yet, I think our civilization, which engendered the digital age, is in real danger, and that its greatest threat comes from the inside. The exterior threats would be inconsequential otherwise, mere pinpricks. In particular, science, while it is the source of so much good, has adopted the philosophical construct of scientific atheism, and for not very good reasons. Furthermore, that philosophy, a pillar of our modern age, is ultimately self destructive.
But first, and this might take a while, I will try to show that Materialism, the basis of scientific atheism, is just plain wrong, and that it can be shown to wrong by simple observation. I don't know how well I'll succeed in this project. but I'll give it my best shot.

My new blog

2008-01-01T21:25:00.000-08:00

My last (not final) post at Beyond the West was about The Green Knight, a late Medieval Arthurian story written in a conservative dialect of Middle English. Almost incomprehensible now, it is tough going for the best of readers, and yet it is such a fascinating story that it's definitely worth the trouble. The first verse, after briefly reciting the legend of the founding of Britain by a refugee from the Trojan War, dispenses with alliteration and takes up a new-fangled rhyming scheme:

...Felix Brutus
On many bonkes full brode Bretayne he settes,
Where werre and wrakke and wonder
Bi sythes has wonte therine,
And oft bothe blysse and blunder
Full skete has skyfted synne

,
and it is from this verse I have taken the name for this blog. Bliss and blunder, where blunder is more akin to terror than it's modern sense...the twin peaks of life in the mortal zone. But history is more a record of blunder than of bliss, probably because blunder is more exciting.
My reason for choosing this line as a title has more to do with metaphysics. It is a dialectical statement. Pleasure and pain are the bookends of living experience, and a good laugh helps to get us through our years of earthly existence. The opacity of Gawain's language makes it difficult to perceive the humour of the most exalted hero of King Arthur's court being made a fool of by a giant green man. We laugh, but it is a serious business. When we pause for a few moments in our daily struggles, sometimes we reflect. What's it all about, Alfie?
That's going to be the subject of this blog. There has been a drastic collapse of morale among those of us who are heirs to the European intellectual legacy with the result that we no longer believe in ourselves. One symptom of that demoralization is the the elevation of the grotesque to godhead by our artists. My next post will be on that topic.