< Back Faith, Hope and Insanity David Cowles Dec 26, 2024 “Swimming in the sea of Language can be hazardous to the intellect.” “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.” How often have you heard that lately? This tired meme has taken the first quarter of the 21st century by storm. It’s one of those things that seem to make sense, or even appear ‘wise’, at first glance. But does it stand up to analysis? What do call it when we do the same thing over and over again, expecting the same result each time? We call that Science ! The Scientific Method supposes that, controlling all variables, identical input will reliably result in identical output. If this were not so, we could never build a bridge or a skyscraper. Only in the works of J. K. Rowling do fully formed edifices magically appear. So far so good, right? Wrong! Look what we’ve done: we have split the universe of possible universes into two different, exclusive, but all-encompassing logoi (ordering schemes): one side we call science, one side we call insanity. Do I have to spell out the corollaries? Unless you put your faith in science, you are insane! This is a logical chain that only Dr. Fucci could love. And what of the person who thoughtfully responds, “I know I’m not insane and I don’t believe in magic, but I also knows that science has it limitations?” That person does not exist in your metaverse. The flaw, of course, is in assuming that everything in universe (U) must be ‘Either A or B’. ‘Both A and B’ and ‘Neither A nor B’ are not allowed. A World (W) can be dissected by a single cut (A/B) at any angle. A cut is ‘meaningful’ if and only if it is possible to define the two resulting subregions, A and B, so that every point on W is either in A or in B and no point in W is in both A and B. Many points in W, perhaps most points, appear neither scientific (A) nor insane (B). On the other hand, many on W, especially these days, appear to qualify both as science and as insanity…not an easy fete I’ll grant you. Therefore the cut X that ostensibly dissected W into science and insanity is not ‘meaningful’: it fails to deliver its promised result. The set of all U that can satisfy the terms of this cut is the null set. Swimming in the sea called Language can be hazardous to the intellect. It amounts to an encyclopedia (infinite?) of propositions, each suggesting that a particular ‘cut’ can be meaningful . Of course, the real purpose of our ‘cut above’ is the promotion of pseudo-science at the expense of all else. Validity is an afterthought at best. Every P is Propaganda before it is even a fully formed Proposition. It is certainly possible to be both scientific and insane (no wisecracks, please); it is also possible to be neither. Take the first two Theological Virtues, for example: Faith and Hope. Both can be defined as doing the same things (liturgy, morality) over and over again in the confident expectation of a ‘different result’: “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done.” Faith, hope and love are three faces of a single coin. Faith is hope’s foundation, hope’s the first fruits of faith. Love ‘proceeds from Faith and Hope’. Love is both the foundation and the product of ‘Faith X Hope’. Faith allows us to see ‘my neighbor as myself’ and Hope empowers us to seek the collective Summum Bonum in solidarity with that neighbor. Faith can only be faith in someone else, someone who is worthy of love. Hope can only be hope for someone, someone worthy of love. Keep the conversation going. 1. Click here to contact us on any matter. How did you like the post? How could we do better in the future? Suggestions welcome. 2. To subscribe (at no cost) to TWS and ATM, follow this link . 3. We encourage new articles and reprints from freelance writers ; click here to view out Writers’ Specs. Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

< Back Check the Date David Cowles Apr 14, 2022 You can’t resist the urge. You peek back at the front cover. Is this really a book about Eastern Europe c. 1000 A.D.? I am currently reading a book called AD 1000 by Richard Erdoes. It is a survey of Europe at the end of the first millennium A.D. In a general section on ‘the Slavs’, we read that “they were fierce and cruel in war…on the attack they were clumsy but in defense stubborn and unyielding.” And specifically, re the Russians: “What these Rus had in their minds from the beginning was to control the overland route to Constantinople, golden Miklagard, where all the riches of the world could be gotten…it was a watery road down the great rivers to the Black Sea…” You can’t resist the urge. You peek back at the front cover. Is this really a book about Eastern Europe c. 1000 A.D.? Thank you for reading! Thoughts While Shaving is published each Tuesday and Thursday. To subscribe to our newsletter, complete the form below (bottom right) and never miss a Thought! Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

< Back Robert Frost Was Wrong “Waiter, bring me one order of everything on the menu and when I’ve finished, I’ll pay for whatever dish I liked best.” David Cowles Shortly after Niels Bohr produced his quantum model of the atom (1913), Robert Frost wrote (1916) his iconic poem, The Road Not Taken . Apparently a commentary on existential angst and the human condition, Frost’s poem can be read on an entirely different level. It raises questions that haunt the science of Quantum Mechanics (QM) to this day. Of course, that may not have been Frost’s intent; at that time the wide world was just beginning to learn about Relativity. But a poem is a poem is a poem. Once written, it transcends its author and even its milieu. We must meet the text head on, take it on its own terms, regardless of the author’s subjective intent. Bonus : By letting a poem, any poem, speak for itself, we may discover deep connections between consciously intended themes and cosmological intuitions: Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth; Then took the other, just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim, Because it was grassy and wanted wear; Though as for that the passing there Had worn them both about the same. And both that morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black. Oh, I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted I should ever come back. I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood and I – I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference. A hundred plus years ago it was popular to think of Universe as if it were a finely tuned Swiss timepiece, wound by God ‘in the beginning’ and left running mechanically ever since. But by 1900, a series of observations and experiments had made this view untenable, eventually leading to the discovery of Quantum Mechanics. QM showed that there is no predetermined course of events, that they are more a matter of probability than causality, and that Universe at its most fundamental level is best understood as a perpetual series of choices. In the realm of philosophy, this insight popped up as the Existentialist doctrine of freedom. Jean Paul Sartre, the high priest of Existentialism, divided Universe into en soi , which was perfectly deterministic, and pour soi , which was perfectly free. He skirted the problem of dualism by defining en soi as etre (being) and pour-soi as neant (nothingness). Le neant functioned as the negation of l’etre and in this way diversity was reconciled with solidarity. Sartre understood that freedom, while absolute, could not be unbounded. For example, one is not free to draw a square circle or fly to Mars just by flapping one’s arms. Facticity (‘the real world’) imposes logical and physical limitations but those limitations are external to the agent and do not in any way limit or qualify that agent’s freedom. Limitations are part of en-soi , never pour-soi . In The Road not Taken , Robert Frost confronts a simple choice between two options (0, 1). He has a destination to reach and there are two roads that will take him there. Facticity excludes any other option: he cannot fly, he cannot tunnel, he cannot crawl 10 miles on his hands and knees through underbrush. If he is to accomplish his ‘project’ (arrive at his destination by end of day), he has only two choices. There are only two roads he can take. Frost’s preferred solution: travel both roads and still be one traveler. But with his imagination still bound by the limitations of classical physics, he rejects that notion as impossible. QM, however, suggests that such a strategy is possible. In fact, most current interpretations of QM assert that this is the only possibility. Given the existence of two paths with identical start and stop points, Frost must travel both. But how? One possibility, supported by the various “double slit” experiments that gave QM its start, suggests that a quantum follows two or more paths simultaneously but does not ‘decide’ which path will be its ‘real’ path until it is reaches its destination and is observed (measured) by an external agent. According to this view, Mr. Frost can indeed “travel both and be one traveler”; in fact, he must. There’s no other way to get where he’s going. But when he finally arrives at his destination, it will appear to all observers (including Frost himself who is now his own observer) that he has come by one path only. His observed arrival collapses the Wave Function. According to this model, Frost can experience both walks and then, at the very end, ‘he’ can ‘decide’ which walk was more satisfying, select that walk, and make that his actual experience, his history. This interpretation has massive real world implications. Imagine, for example, how this might play out in a restaurant. “Waiter, bring me one order of everything on the menu and when I’ve finished, I’ll pay for whatever dish I liked best.” Or what about a lifetime? You follow all courses open to you and then, at the end, you get to choose the one path that gets you the best result. How cool would that be! But this option is not all it’s cracked up to be. First, it isn’t really ‘Frost’ who makes the final decision. That decision is made by the whole experimental apparatus and is more a matter of mathematics (probability) than aesthetics (taste). Second, Frost will have no memory whatsoever of ‘the road not taken’. Similarly, I will have no memory of the dishes I decided not to pay for…or the fun but stupid things I did as a kid. Cruel justice! Hugh Everett’s mid-century “Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics” modifies this picture. According to Everett, every time the Universe confronts a choice it bifurcates, it splits. In one Universe, Choice A is made; in a second Universe, a perfect copy of the first save for this one decision, Choice B is made. According to this view, Mr. Frost must also “travel both”…but he is no longer “one traveler”. According to Everett’s theory, there are now two Frosts, entirely unaware of one another; sadly, they will never meet again. Both Frosts arrive in the same town…but now it is really two different copies of the same town, each existing in its own Universe. Everett’s theory allows Frost only one set of experiences, but he may perhaps be consoled by the thought that an alternate Frost is having the other set of experiences in an alternate universe. Parenthetically, we have proposed a modification of Everett’s model that allows Frost’s many trajectories to intersect – and recombine - ultimately reducing the proliferation of universes that bedevils Everett’s scheme. This model allows the universe to grow but at its current observed rate, not exponentially as with Everett. Note : this solution is dependent on quantum processes being commutative – which goes against current thinking. According to Richard Feynman’s “Sum over Histories” model, Mr. Frost does indeed travel both paths and he remains one traveler. The two experiences merge when he reaches his destination. His memory of the journey is a blend of both histories. It might be more accurate to say that a part of Frost travels one path and another part travels the other path. Feynman’s model does not double the amount of experience Frost enjoys but it does combine experience from both pathways into a single outcome. According to our restaurant metaphor (above), we get to enjoy all the items on the menu…but as samples, or tapas, not as full meals. Now a new interpretation has come along that builds on Feynman. In this thought experiment, known as the Cheshire Cat , quantum data is understood to show that certain properties of the quantum follow one path while the particle itself follows the other. In Alice in Wonderland , the cat’s grin, a property, can appear separately from the cat itself. In the Cheshire Cat experiment, the particle’s spin travels a different route from the rest of the quantum. In The Road not Taken , perhaps Frost’s gait and affect travel one path while body follows the other. Crazy! I know, but it’s Quantum Mechanics. Bottom line: The Road Not Taken is ground breaking…but wrong! Sorry, Mr. Frost, but you can “travel both and be one traveler”. In fact you must, and you will, whether you wish to or not and whether you are aware of it or not. Still, though, GREAT poem! Image: “Observation of a Quantum Cheshire Cat in a Matter-Wave Interferometer Experiment,” by Tobias Denkmayr et al., in Nature Communications , Vol. 5, Article No. 4492; July 29, 2014 David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at dtc@gc3incorporated.com . Return to Harvest 2024 Previous Next

< Back BeHukkotai: Why Land is Different Rabbi Dr. Bradley Shavit Artson "Land is imbued with holiness, which means that, like God, it is beyond human measures of usefulness or control." As we prepare to close the Book of Leviticus, the Torah’s pinnacle, we are left with a message of responsibility, consequences, and possibilities. God presents us with the benefits of making wise choices and the consequences of choosing poorly. Then the Torah provides for the funding of the sanctuary and its staff: our participation with monetary support, pledges of animals or homes. But when it pivots to pledges of land, the Torah shifts gears entirely. Land, you see, is ours to borrow and to use. But humans presume they can own land. In reality, the land makes its claim on us, and we can either open ourselves to its ground rules, or we risk a rootlessness that leaves us clinging when the next sandstorm swirls. We are, as the book reminds us, “resident strangers ( Leviticus 25:23 )” on earth. The Land precedes us and the land will bury us when we no longer need our bodies. We are dust, and we return to dust ( Genesis 3:19 ). On some deeper level of reality, it is all just dust, earth, soil. Judaism directs our attention to the centrality of earth through the regular rhythms of Shabbat (seven days) Shmita (seven years), and Jubilee (seven Shmita cycles). In this last parasha of Leviticus, we are told that when we think we are selling the land, we are actually letting someone else live on it or use it for a finite duration of time. At the next Jubilee year, the land reverts to its designated, original family of caretakers. Land is inalienable, and we are meant to be too. If one consecrates their land after the jubilee, the priest shall compute the price according to the years that are left until the jubilee year, and its assessment shall be so reduced. And if one who consecrated the land wishes to redeem it, they must add one-fifth to the sum at which it was assessed, and it shall pass back to them. But if they do not redeem the land, and the land is sold to another, it shall no longer be redeemable. When it is released in the jubilee, the land shall be holy to the Lord, as land proscribed; it becomes the priest’s holding ( Leviticus 27:18-21 ). There is a holiness inherent in the land, a quality not subject to human dominion and not vaporized by human standards of utility. It is that holy something extra that means were are residents visiting the land, and its only really owner is God, who is also holy, meaning beyond human measures of usefulness or control. Jubilee comes every 50 years to remind us that the worth of creation is beyond our evaluation and does not emerge from ways we find it beneficial. “Proclaim release to all the inhabitants of the land ( Leviticus 25:11 )” because it is in recognizing that worth and value spill beyond the constraints of practical utility or human benefit that we, too, are released. Our worth and value spill beyond how we can be used too. Published with permission and minimal edits from hazon.org. Rabbi Dr. Bradley Shavit Artson is the Roslyn and Abner Goldstine Dean of the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies and Vice President of American Jewish University. He is also Dean of the Zachariah Frankel College at University of Potsdam, training Conservative/Masorti rabbis for Europe. Previous Next

“There is only one I am, shared by YHWH and Jesus…and me…and you…and Rene Descartes (…ergo sum).” < Back The Ship of Theseus David Cowles Jul 15, 2023 “There is only one I am, shared by YHWH and Jesus…and me…and you…and Rene Descartes (…ergo sum).” It’s one of philosophy’s oldest riddles. Time and tide being what they are, the Ship of Theseus requires constant maintenance, and sometimes that maintenance requires us to replace rotten wooden planks with fresh lumber. At some point, presumably, none of the original wood will remain. Is the vessel then still the Ship of Theseus ? Or is it now a brand-new vessel? If the latter, at what point in the gradual replacement process did the Ship of Theseus cease to be the Ship of Theseus ? When the first board was replaced? When the last of the old boards was removed? Or at some arbitrary tipping point (e.g., when original material constituted less than 50% of the entirety)? Of course, the standard ‘solution’ is to say that the ‘Ship of Theseus’ is the vessel’s pattern (its Platonic form), not its materials. But this raises a new problem: we can build a dozen copies of the original Ship of Theseus, and the original and its copies will all share the same form. Must we then say that they are all the Ship of Theseus ? If so, then we have converted a proper noun (‘Ship of Theseus’) into a common noun (‘ship of Theseus’); what would Sister Margaret have said about that? But this is not just a matter of grammar! By converting ‘Ship of Theseus’ to ‘ship of Theseus’ we have moved from a unique, discrete, material object to something immaterial and conceptual, i.e., to a ‘class of objects’ (whatever that may mean). In other words, ‘Ship of Theseus’ and ‘ship of Theseus’ are even less alike ontologically than they are grammatically. Not to put too fine a point on it, but they have nothing to do with one another! Perhaps a problem shrouded in the mists of mythological time isn’t compelling your interest. How about something closer to home then? How about your precious body, yup, that body - the one you build on weekdays at the gym and polish on weekends at the spa? That body is made up of more than 30 trillion living cells, virtually none of which you’re directly aware of. These cells have an average life expectancy of 7 years. Therefore, your body, like the Ship of Theseus , is undergoing perpetual replacement. So then, when are ‘you’ no longer you ? Another problem. You were conceived at the fertilization of one ovum by one sperm cell. One particular ovum, one particular sperm. That’s you …sort of. But what if the same act of intercourse between the same two partners (your biological parents) resulted in the fertilization of a different ovum by the same sperm cell, or the same ovum by a different sperm cell, or a different ovum by a different sperm cell? Would ‘you’ still be you ? Or would you be the sibling of the person you otherwise might have been? Dizzying! And we’re just getting started. Whoever you are, you have millions of virtual siblings (potential combinations of sex cells from the same two partners) and maybe a handful of actual siblings. However much you may share traits with these siblings, virtual and actual, the truth is that you’re not the slightest bit like any of them. You are you, and they are they; you’re not they and they’re not you. The ontological gap between you and your sibling, even your identical twin, is well, not to exaggerate but… it’s infinite. And don’t get me started on astrology? What if you’d been conceived a minute earlier…or a minute later? What if Mercury just went retrograde? Who and what would you be then ? Obviously, this is an unsatisfactory situation. It results in a proliferation of entities that would make even Ptolemy uncomfortable, not to mention William of Ockham – you know William, lead vocalist for the heavy metal band, Occam’s Razor ? The alternative is to accept the uncomfortable conclusion that each human individual is a unique, emergent phenomenon, ontologically unrelated to any other phenomena, actual or potential, no matter how apparently similar they may be. But this ‘solution’ has its own issues. I am looking out at the audience during a lecture I’m giving when I notice that about half a dozen of the folks are, like me, a bit on the ‘plump’ side. I am tempted to say that ‘plumpness’ is an attribute we share but that would be wrong. Each of us is plump in his or her own way. Plumpness in me is unrelated to plumpness in you. My doctor has just put me on a strict ‘heart healthy’ diet while you’re carbo-loading for a part you’re playing in an upcoming film. It is thanks to human rationality and ‘the language tool’ that a concept like ‘plumpness’ can be abstracted from a handful of unrelated phenomena to become the description of a certain imaginary class of objects. In fact, each of us is what we are, as we are, i.e., in our own ways. Phenomena (parts) derive their meaning from phenomenon (the whole). You and I both have a small dark spot on our left cheek. For one of us, it’s a cosmetic beauty mark added by a beautician during a recent spa visit; for the other, it’s melanoma. Something has meaning only in reference to something else. Therefore, any whole, considered in isolation, is meaningless. The parts of that whole, however, do have meaning, first with respect to the whole, then with respect to each of the other parts of that whole. An entity, any entity, is an information matrix. “It from bit.” (Wheeler) Wholes seem to be made up of interchangeable parts, but the meaning of each such part is entirely determined by the unique whole to which it contributes. Therefore, no two parts, no two wholes, are ever identical or interchangeable. Peeling away the layers of this onion is tough work for a sensitive guy. Tears are already streaming down my cheeks, and I have one more, crucial layer left to peel: If you and I have no parts in common, then there are no parameters according to which we can be compared. “Why can’t you be more like your sister?” is not a thing after all! You are you, and she is she; the two of you are neither alike nor unalike. Like implies comparability and you two are, believe me, ‘incomparable’. “I am what I am, and that’s all that I am.” ( Popeye ) Likewise, you are what you are, and that’s all that you are. You are not ‘like me’, nor are you ‘different from me’. We are ourselves alone. But the caterpillar, as always, must have the final word, “Who R U?” Because ‘what you are’ and ‘what I am’ have no axes of comparison, ‘who you are’ and ‘who I am’ must be the same thing. It’s just ‘who is’. In the Book of Exodus, YHWH says, “I am.” Who or what? “I am who am.” (Exodus 3:14) The Gospel of John echoes Exodus, but this time it is Jesus speaking, “I am.” Again, no predicate! John’s point, of course, is that the ‘am-ness’ of YHWH and the ‘am-ness’ of Jesus are one and the same. There is only one I am , shared by YHWH and Jesus…and me…and you…and René Descartes (… ergo sum ). Because none of us has any ‘identity’ per se , we are all merely manifestations of a single process – the process that recognizes potential ‘parts’ and uses them to build novel ‘wholes’. We are children turned loose in a junkyard, looking for parts we can use to make a soap-box for an upcoming derby. No two wholes are the same, no matter how similar they may look; neither are any two parts. But the process by which parts become wholes is unitary…and universal. So ‘me being me’ and ‘you being you’ are one and the same thing; even though (actually, because ) ‘what I am’ and ‘what you are’ have no axes of comparability. So questions like, ‘would you be the same person if…?’ have no meaning. Who you are is immutable…and coincident with Being itself; what you are is entirely contingent. You are who you are regardless of what you are. This is why you can never escape yourself, no matter what you may make of that self. But who you are is neant (Sartre). Who you are is not-being what you are. You are process, the perpetual process of not being what you are, of coming to be what you are not. Perpetual, of course, because you never reach your goal: you never become what you are or what you are not. In the words of the pre-Socratics, who you are is Aletheia (Parmenides), timeless and featureless. What you are is Panta Rei (Heraclitus), ‘everything flows’. “Life is difficult” (Scott Peck). You are not God. Being terrifies you; you are in free fall. Your arms flail as you reach for a handhold to break your fall; there is none. The underside of life is your perpetual effort to bury who you are in what you are: “I’m a big boy now, I’m in middle school, I’m a teenager, I’m in college, I have a career, I’m someone’s significant other, I’m a parent, I’m on the Board of Selectmen (sic), I’m a grandparent, I’m retired, I’m at rest (Rabbit)…I am dust.” What you are is always just exactly what you are, but it is never who you are! You are not like anyone else; you are everyone else. Image: A Fresco from Pompeii depicting Theseus and Ariadne escaping from Crete. According to Plutarch, the Athenians preserved the ship that Theseus used to escape, by replacing the parts one by one as they decayed. David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com . Return to our Beach Read 2023 Table of Contents Share Previous Next Do you like what you just read? Subscribe today and receive sneak previews of Aletheia Today Magazine articles before they're published. Plus, you'll receive our quick-read, biweekly blog, Thoughts While Shaving. Subscribe Thanks for subscribing! Click here. Return to Table of Contents, Winter 2023 Issue Return to Table of Contents, Holiday Issue Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue Return to Table of Contents, September Issue Return to Table of Contents, Beach Issue Return to Table of Contents, June Issue

< Back Genesis and Quantum Computing “Quantum Mechanics is the secret code that unlocks Genesis and when it does, we are surprised to discover that Genesis may be ‘literally true’ after all.” David Cowles “In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth – and the earth was without form or shape with darkness over the abyss…” ( Genesis ) According to Parmenides (c. 450 BCE), this is Aletheia – Truth: without form, without distinctions, without qualities. This is the state of ‘pure potentiality’ (Aristotle). It is the primal manifestation of God, ‘maker of all things visible and invisible’ ( Nicene Creed ), ‘without whom nothing that comes to be comes to be’ ( Gospel of John ) But it also describes the state of quantum superposition. (Schoedinger) Aristotle gave us a model of potentiality ( Physics ) and Plato gave us a model of forms ( Phaedo ), but the idea of potentiality per se is woven throughout the Judeo-Christian tradition, especially in Torah and in the Johannine - Pauline corpus . There is a fine distinction here. God is ‘potentiality’ per se with Trinity as its paradigm. What is potentially is the World…not just the specific world we all know and sometimes love, but all possible worlds (‘cosmic epochs’ – Whitehead) and every possible state-of-affairs within each such world. God is not the World…but God is the potentiality for worlds to be and the potentiality for worlds to be as they are , however that may be. This is Hugh Everett’s Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (1957)…on steroids! The known universe consists of at least 10^80 bits of information. Extending Everett’s theory, each bit is in a state of quantum superposition: not 1 or 0, but 1 and 0. 10^160 universes! Everett assumed that each unique combination of 1’s and 0’s had to constitute a unique universe, but quantum mechanics allows us to achieve the same result within a single universe, as long as that universe and everything in it is in a state of quantum superposition. Such a Universe functions as a quantum computer where all possible values of every variable co-exist. But why? We inherited a system of logic from Aristotle in which every bit is 1 or 0 – not 1/2, not 1 and 0. It’s called the Law of the Excluded Middle . It’s worked well for us in a wide variety of applications, so why should the Universe behave any differently? It's a matter of topology. For the purposes of this article at least, all topologies are either ‘orientable’ or ‘non-orientable’. You’re familiar with the orientable. You have a sheet of paper. It has two sides: an obverse side and a reverse side. Make a mark on the obverse side; you won’t find any mark on the reverse side. Now run your finger along the surface; oops, you’ve fallen off the edge! Sorry about that but that’s orientability for you. You can keep it! In non-orientable topology a sheet of paper has only one side so any mark is always there, regardless – no hiding; and your finger will never run off the edge. Cool beans! But we don’t live in that sort of universe, do we? Do we? Fortunately, an orientable universe with at least three spatial dimensions allows us to build a physical model of what a non-orientable world would look like. It’s called a Mobius Strip, and you can create one yourself in about 10 seconds. First, find a cash register receipt, preferably from CVS or Target (longer is better). Grab onto the two ends. Now twist one end and scotch tape it to the other end. Hello, ‘God’; welcome to my humble universe, you creator of worlds, you! So now let’s play. If you’ve never played before, prepare to be dazzled. Run your finger along the paper as you did earlier (above). Go on and on and on. You can go on forever. You’ll never fall off. Your two sided strip of paper has become a one sided loop. Amazing! Now imagine making a virtual mark (like an arrow) anywhere along the strip. Imagine sliding that arrow 360° along the strip until you return to your starting point. What’s happened? Your arrow is still there, but now it’s upside down. So go around another 360° et voila , your arrow has resumed its original orientation. Your loop displays symmetry, but it’s 720° symmetry, not the 360° symmetry you’re used to. Stange world this! Now let’s go back to your arrow. Place it anywhere on the loop. If it starts out pointing up, then when you’ve gone 360° around the loop it will be pointed down, so over time every spot on the loop is in superposition everywhere: ↑ and ↓ (0 and 1). A Mobius Strip is a quantum computer! Ok, great fun, but what does this have to do with us. We don’t live in Mobius’ non-orientable space; our universe is orientable, ‘from event horizon to shining event horizon’. Except it isn’t! The observable universe may be orientable, but not the entire universe is observable. The event horizon is the limit of the universe we can observe. But as Lewis Carroll realized, there is no reason to believe that the universe ends at its observable limit, especially as bits of the observed universe are slipping across the event horizon every day. Go back to your Mobius Strip. Take any finite segment of that loop. It’s orientable, even though the loop itself is not. You could say that the non-orientable loop is the overlay of an infinite number of orientable loop-segments. So we may live in a non-orientable universe after all! The observable universe is finite, bounded and orientable, but the Universe per se is likely finite, unbounded (Hawking) and non-orientable. But back to Genesis : “God said, let there be light, and there was light (1 and 0)…and God separated the light from the darkness (1 or 0)…Then God said, let there be a dome…to separate…the water below the dome from the water above dome (1 or 0).” Separating and gathering, in 6 days God built a quantum computer. On the 7th day he rested. Of course he did. Everything was done! All possible values for all possible bits were in place. There was nothing more to do but let it run! But we’re still left with a problem. We seem to live in an orientable universe. If the entire Universe is in non-orientable superposition, how is it that regions of Universe (“loop segments”) appear to be orientable? To understand this we need to look at how local systems in superposition acquire classical values. Schoedinger’s cat, basking in a sort of suspended animation, acquires its fate only when some outside agency interacts with the experimental apparatus. Universe, however, by definition, has no outside agent – unless you wish to invoke God (a la Berkeley). But that is not necessary, at least not at this point. A feature of Universe, indeed a feature of all systems, is that it interacts with itself. Contrary to Bertrand Russell, IRL every ‘real’ set is a subset of itself. I know, “Paradox!” Deal with it (you dealt with Zeno). That ‘self-assessment’ generates classical values and an orientable topology. In Mobius terms, it creates a ‘loop segment’. How does this process manifest in ‘our’ world? We call it ‘choice’ or ‘action’. Every time an agent makes a choice, exercises free will, the multiplicity of potential values collapses down to a single actual value. As Robert Frost noted, every path ‘diverges’ (1 vs. 0). Both paths lead to the same destination (‘Omega Point’) but once a choice is made, that choice becomes irrevocable, effectively annihilating the other option…for that traveler. As Universe observes and interacts with itself, we experience consciousness and agency (free will). The phenomenon you know as ‘you’ is actually the Universe being aware of itself and acting on itself. Every action, every choice, however automatic, routine or constrained, is motivated by Value (e.g. Beauty, Truth, Justice). As Nietzsche argued, Value is not part of Universe; it transcends it. So now may be the time to bring God into the picture! God is Good. God is Value and it is Value that underlies choice, that motivates action, that is realized as values . Absent God, no Value; absent Value, no conscious perception; absent consciousness, no free will; absent free will, no true agency; absent agency, no action; absent action, no events; absent events, no Universe. So Quantum Mechanics is the secret code that unlocks Genesis and when it does, we are surprised to discover that Genesis may be ‘literally true’ after all. David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at dtc@gc3incorporated.com Return to Table of Contents Share Previous Next

You may be thinking, “WHAAAT? That’s impossible! Who could live without numbers? If they don’t have them, then they must invent them, right?” But you would be wrong. < Back Prepare to Be Shocked David Cowles Oct 15, 2022 You may be thinking, “WHAAAT? That’s impossible! Who could live without numbers? If they don’t have them, then they must invent them, right?” But you would be wrong. What shocks you? A scary movie? A failing grade on a math quiz? Your favorite sports team coming from behind at the end to score an upset victory? Well, maybe, but keep reading, there are much bigger surprises ahead. When I was very young, one of the first things I learned to do was count. “One, two, three…” When I could finally count all the way up to 10, it was a big deal! It was even bigger when I learned that I didn’t have to stop at 10 but could go on counting… forever . I was a big shot…until I discovered that all my friends could count forever too. Of course, I didn’t know it at the time, but it has always been taken for granted that all human beings learn to count forever, and that no other species can count at all . A nice, neat way to package the world to ensure that we come out on top. Except that this picture is totally wrong! So…prepare to be shocked: Shock #1 : Many animals can count. Monkeys and apes can count. So can birds, especially parrots, crows, and ravens. Fish can count as well as some reptiles. Some members of these species can even do arithmetic . Shock #2 : Some members of some species can count and do math better than you…or at least better than you when you were very young. Are you struggling with math? Perhaps a pet parrot could help you with your homework. (We know that some parrots help other parrots learn arithmetic. Who knows, perhaps the first student teacher was a bird.) Shock #3 : While it is true that some animals perform better than some humans in some situations, not to worry! You’ll come out ahead in the end. Animals learn to count quickly and at a very early age, but as far as we know, their math skills are limited. Most can’t count beyond the number 9. Apparently, they will never know what you and your friends learned early on: counting is forever. Shock #4 : Not all human beings count. They can count, but they don’t. Their languages have no words (or very few words) for numbers. Imagine English without ‘one, two, three…’ or Spanish without ‘uno, dos, tres…’ Because they have no words for numbers, they don’t learn to count, and they certainly don’t learn to do math. Who are these lucky kids who don’t have to learn arithmetic? As you know, human beings live all over the world, in almost every nook and cranny, but for the most part, we’re all connected, linked to one another by roads, airplanes, telephones, television, internet, etc. Counting spreads! Most human beings are connected…but not all. Some live in small, close-knit communities called tribes. Some of those tribes are still almost totally isolated from the rest of the human world, and not all of these tribes count like we do. It turns out that many of the world’s smallest cultures have no numbers beyond three (e.g., 1, 2, more than 2); some have no numbers at all ! You may be thinking, “WHAAAT? That’s impossible! Who could live without numbers? If they don’t have them, then they must invent them, right?” But you would be wrong. They don’t have numbers, and they don’t invent words in place of numbers because they don’t want numbers; and they live quite nicely without them, thank you. Now, perhaps you’re thinking, “Gee, this doesn’t sound so bad after all. Maybe I would like to live in such a tribe. Better than taking math quizzes every week!” Before you say goodbye to your parents and purchase a one-way ticket to the Amazon Rain Forest (or some other remote location), why not live without numbers for just a single day? Try it: no counting, no arithmetic. (I suggest you pick a day when you don’t have to be in school.) Don’t worry, you’ll mess up. We all do! We’re so used to numbers that we often use them without thinking about it. Just notice when you do. If you want, you could keep a journal. Write down the things that happen to you, the problems you overcome, and the times you mess up and let a pesky number sneak through the back door. You can have fun playing this game on your own, or you can play it with a sibling or some friends. Here are the rules; they’re pretty simple: (1) you can’t use numbers of any kind: no 0, no 1, no 2, no 1st, no 2nd. (2) you can’t use words that take the place of numbers. For example, you can’t use words like all or some . These words are just numbers in disguise. Don’t be fooled! It’s ok to say that something is big or small , but don’t say that something’s bigger or smaller than something else. See why? Are you game? Give it a try it and let us know how it goes. Would you have any use for $50? (I know that’s a number, sorry.) No problem! Just send us an email saying that you tried to live ‘number free’ for the day and describe your experience. You’ll be entered into a drawing for a $50 cash card, which will take place on Halloween night; do we need to allow more time? Would this be an interesting extra credit project for a grade school class? Send all entries and suggestions to editor@aleteheiatoday.com . Put “Number Challenge” in the subject line. Good luck! David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com. Share Previous Next Do you like what you just read? Subscribe today and receive sneak previews of Aletheia Today Magazine articles before they're published. Plus, you'll receive our quick-read, biweekly blog, Thoughts While Shaving. Subscribe Thanks for subscribing! Click here. 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< Back Voice Verbs David Cowles “I am stuck on Band-Aid ’cause Band-Aid’s stuck on me!” So says the jingle for one of the world’s most iconic products. But more importantly, and quite unexpectedly, this slogan is one of the best examples of ‘middle voice thinking’ in American pop culture. “I am stuck on Band-Aid ’cause Band-Aid’s stuck on me!” So says the jingle for one of the world’s most iconic products. But more importantly, and quite unexpectedly, this slogan is one of the best examples of ‘middle voice thinking’ in American pop culture. We are used to sentences built around active (or passive) voice verbs. (The passive voice is just the active voice turned around.) ‘Billy hit Tommy’ and ‘Tommy was hit by Billy’ describe the exact same event but each with a different focus. The active voice puts the focus on Billy (the one who hit) while the passive voice focuses on Tommy (the one who was hit). But what about the more likely scenario that Billy and Tommy are simply fighting. In English, we have to say, “Tommy and Billy hit each other.” Clumsy! Other languages, especially ancient languages, often include a third voice, the ‘middle voice’. If English had a middle voice, there would be a form of the verb ‘to hit’ that would convey simply the ‘middle voice’ reality of this event. In Icelandic, the language with a middle voice that is closest to English, you usually just add ‘st’ to the end of the root verb to make it middle voice: “Billy and Tommy hitst,” for example. The band-aid jingle highlights this dilemma. Is the bandage stuck on you (active voice) or are you stuck on the bandage (passive voice)? Or are you and the bandage ‘stuckst’ (middle voice)? See how the active and passive voices distort slightly what happens with a band-aid. It takes a middle voice verb form to properly convey what is actually going on. So, who cares? Well, we all do or at least we all should. The current active-passive dualism makes us prone to think in categories such as ‘maker-made’, ‘employer-employee’, ‘ruler-ruled’. I’s exploit it’s. For some purposes, the dominance of active/passive voice verb forms may make practical sense. After all, this is the language of the industrial revolution: skyscrapers and assembly lines. But it is decidedly not the language of interpersonal relations. The philosopher Martin Buber called the proper relationship between two persons ‘I thou’ (rather than ‘I it’). ‘I thou’ is Buber’s way of introducing middle voice thinking into languages (German and English) that do not have a middle voice verb form. One of the most profound lessons of the New Testament is that what I do to another is simultaneously done to me. I am both the subject and the object of my actions. But without a middle voice verb form, we Anglophones have no easy way to express this ethos – and therefore we tend to lose sight of it in our everyday lives – at immense personal and social cost. Previous Next

< Back Is the Universe Real David Cowles “The most important thing we’ve learned is that we know so much less than we thought we knew.” What must it have been like to stare up at the stars c. 2000 BCE? The Universe is your patch! You have qualified dominion over the animals and plants, and you can imagine setting sail on that great whale rode ( Beowulf ) we now know as the Milky Way. It is easy to see how we might have fallen prey to hubris . “I’m the king of this castle!” Things look a bit different now, don’t they? We know so much more, and the most important thing we’ve learned is that we know so much less than we thought we knew. Of course, in absolute terms we have exponentially more data points; but relative to what is available to be known , our noosphere is shrinking. For one thing, much of what we thought we knew has turned out to be wrong; for another, each new, hard-won kernel of gnosis has shone a spotlight on vast new regions of ignorance. Once upon a time I knew nowt about arithmetic. Then someone showed me that 1 + 1 = 2. Cool beans! Then what about 1 + 1 + 1? Or 2 + 1? Or 2 + 2? In a couple of years I’ll give you Principia Mathematica. Imagine that X stands for everything there is to know, and Y stands for what we do know. In 2000 BCE, Y might have been 10% of X. Wow! But 4,000 years later, things have changed. What we know now is more like 1% of what is available to be known. We are learning what we don’t know faster than we’re learning in the first place. As fast as we learn more about our universe, the faster we learn how much more we don’t know. Sidebar : If this process continues unabated, we may reach the coveted mystic state of absolute unknowing. In 1900 CE, we were like 4-year-olds. We knew everything there was to know. By 1950, we’d learned that there was a lot more to be known than we’d imagined. To make matters worse, we realized that much of what we thought we knew in 1900 wasn’t what we thought it was. By 1950 we’d begun playing with computers; 75 years later, our computers are playing with us. For 50 years, we programed our computers; now computers program themselves. How long before those same computers program us? “What is man (sic) that God should be mindful of him?” Good question, but it was easier to answer when homo sapiens was top dog in a Universe we imagined to be less than half the size of our solar system. Not so easy to answer in the context of a Universe that is 14 billion years old and contains a trillion galaxies. Or in the context of a body that is made up of nothing but 30 trillion independent life forms (cells). Now what is ‘man’ again…? We have absolutely no right to expect our tiny lives to matter. But if that’s so, then all the agony of living has been for naught. In the cosmic context, we are sparks. What is just is. It’s not good, or bad; it just is. It came to be without regard to values of any sort. Even ‘order’, a prerequisite of Value, is in ever dwindling supply. In fact, order max’d out at Big Bang. Like a well wound watch, our universe is slowly running downhill. By some estimates we’re already about 15% of the way to Heat Death. To the extent that order is related to Value, the high point was 14 billion years ago, and every moment thereafter is a step in the ‘wrong’ direction. Look at it another way. The primary values - Beauty, Truth, and Justice – can all be appreciated as different manifestations of ‘order’. Without an ordered background to draw from, none of these values could be operative. Therefore, if they are at all, they must be gradually disappearing. Not much to look forward to, is it? A world which will necessarily become uglier, less truthful, and more unjust over time. (Hmm, sound like somebody’s political system?) Such a Universe is simply a process of self-annihilation. If Being = Good, then Entropy = Evil; and so Jesus taught us to pray, “Deliver us from evil”. And consciousness? According to this model, consciousness is the accidental consequence of increasing entropy (Hawking). It is a trace left behind by the order that is vanishing. Living consciously in this world is like watching your uninsured McMansion burn to the ground. No wonder folks are depressed. Unless none of this is true! Recent advances in neuroscience suggest that consciousness (self-awareness, recursion) is coincident with life itself. Like love and marriage pre-1950, you apparently can’t have one without the other. As far as we know, all life is cellular. It is apparently the minimal condition required for DNA to be expressed, conserved and replicated. According to this model, the DNA molecule evolved only once on Earth, and it evolved in tandem with a cellular superstructure. If and when we discover non-terrestrial life, we may find phenomena that we want to classify as ‘living’ but that has nothing like DNA and/or no such cellular structure; but all that is mere conjecture now. As soon as the Earth had sufficiently cooled, the first DNA molecule was synthesized…and expressed as a conscious cell. As far as we know, in the 4 billion years since that momentous event, not a single new DNA molecule and not a single new cell has formed. Remarkable! That means, as far as we can say with any certainty, life and consciousness are one-offs. But of course, we’ve only surveyed a tiny corner of this vast universe. If Universe came to be accidentally and spontaneously and if it will ultimately self-annihilate, then what is it anyway? Here our academic overlords are split: either (1) the universe is real but has no meaning, no value, no purpose, or (2) what we call ‘universe’ is not real but only virtual. According to this later interpretation, the Universe ‘exists’ in same way virtual particles ‘exist’…it doesn’t. A virtual particle is a particle still born; it has no being . It is a sub-momentary dispensation from the great Neant that ultimately comes to nothing. Turns out though, the two models are identical, one framed in the vocabulary of Idealism, the other in the language of materialism. Gregory Bateson’s seminal contribution to Western philosophy is his insight that ‘being’ applies only to entities that ‘make a difference’. To be is to be different and to make a difference; an actual entity is “a difference that makes a difference”. Whatever is not distinguished from its inherited world and/or does not make a distinguishable contribution to the inheritable worlds of other entities…is not! Camus and Sartre applied such a test to the existence of ‘God’. For them, God is an entity whose existence, or non-existence, makes no difference. Therefore, whether God exists theoretically or not, God does not exist. In the language of symbolic notation (A υ ~A) = ~A. We might say the same of Universe. Whether it’s fully virtual or merely meaningless, it cannot ‘be’ because either way, the events that constitute it make no difference. Alternatively, the Universe is a locus of events, real events because each event is a difference that makes a difference. According to the ‘Standard Model’, events within Universe are actual entities because they are differences that make a difference, but not so Universe per se . That won’t wash! If Universe is annihilated at Heat Death, so are all its constituent events. Therefore, the great chain of difference is broken. In that case events are real only in the context of each other but not in any objective sense. So then, what of Universe itself? Events within Universe are real because they are differences that make a difference. Does Universe? Yes, but if and only if Universe is ‘different’ from the mere collection of events that make it up, and if there is something to which Universe can matter. If so, that ‘something’ must transcend the universe itself. Yet Universe must remain true to its name ( uni ). Only, Universe itself can meet this test. The Universe is a massively non-linear ‘perpetual recursion machine’. Every event shapes the whole as the whole shapes every event. Is this paganism? Or pantheism? Neither. The Universal process of perpetual recursion transcends the Universe itself. It is a manifestation of the Trinitarian God, the paradigm of recursion. David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at dtc@gc3incorporated.com Return to our 2024 Beach Read Previous Next

< Back Liberty and Virtue David Cowles Jun 25, 2024 “How do Liberty, Justice, and Virtue fit together?” In an earlier TWS, we spoke about Barry Goldwater and we quoted from his iconic acceptance speech to the 1964 Republican Convention: Extremism in the defense of Liberty is no vice… Moderation is the pursuit of Justice is no virtue! Which raises an interesting question: how do Liberty , Justice , and Virtue fit together? We define Virtue as the pursuit of Good, manifested as Value (e.g. Beauty, Truth, Justice). But according to Jean-Paul Sartre, there is only one Value and that’s Freedom ! For Sartre, virtue is what protects and extends freedom; vice is what erodes or restricts it. Is it possible that Goldwater and Sartre disagreed about something? Only everything! Sartre was an atheist, a Marxist, a self-proclaimed Communist, while Goldwater…was not. They disagreed about almost everything…but not this. Virtue is the intentional pursuit of Value (e.g. Beauty, Truth, Justice) and Liberty is a prerequisite for all intentionality and therefore for Virtue. Without freedom of choice, none of our exertions, by themselves, rise to the level of Virtue. In the public forum we are most often concerned with the value of Justice. An actor freely choosing to promote Justice is virtuous. Values are the lures (Whitehead) that motivate events. They are responsible for what we call intentionality . Every ‘novel event’ (all events are novel) seeks what is Good by applying a unique constellation of values to the Actual World. Every event selects, combines, and applies values differently, but there are no events without values motivating them. Goldwater’s proclamation was interpreted as an eye-poke by the party’s so-called ‘liberal wing’. Nelson Rockefeller led a delegate walk-out which effectively doomed Goldwater’s candidacy. He would never fully recover from Rocky’s ‘Cow Palace Putsch’. But what’s interesting here is not so much the vagaries of presidential politics, but the unstated, yet clearly implied, message sent by the peripatetic delegates: Liberty should be defended, and Justice should be pursued - but with moderation. Other values may take precedence. For example, Order, Civility, and Machiavellian Pragmatics. According to this ethic, ‘Liberty and Justice’ are not absolute imperatives; they are merely goals which, all things being equal, we ought to pursue. But in targeting these values, we must balance them against competing values like security, stability, and tranquility. So what’s wrong with that? In the ‘normal course of events’, a free actor compares the Ideal (Value) to the Actual (World). If that actor responds by working to bring the Actual closer to the Ideal, we call that Virtue. To whatever extent Liberty is restricted, Value is camouflaged, and Virtue undermined. Virtue, and the triumph of Value, can only occur in the context of Liberty! In 1964, there were no Patrick Henry’s (“Give me Liberty or give me Death”) in Rocky’s corner. But what’s important here, IMHO, is that important public figures in the US signed off on Rockefeller’s platform. It followed closely on the heels of Better Red than Dead , a European movement advocating unilateral disarmament in lieu of nuclear war with the Soviet Union. For a significant percentage of Americans, ‘domestic tranquility’ now trumped liberty and justice in their hierarchy of values. Scary! Liberty and Justice, along with Beauty and Truth, are Divine Values. They constitute God’s essence. They’re what it’s like to be God. While these values are often compromised in our everyday lives, such compromises can never be ‘justified’. Call them what they are: ‘accommodations contravening the interests of God and humanity’. 1964 saw the public proclamation of a new American anti-ethic. Post WWII, Liberty and Justice were ‘reclassified’ as preferred states rather than absolute imperatives. They are two factors, along with many others, to be considered in the formation of public policy. ‘Liberty & Justice’ (Goldwater ’64) is fine and dandy, but not at the expense of ‘Peace & Prosperity’ (Eisenhower ‘52). Is this ringing any bells? Does it call to mind any other times in the life of the nation when demands for Liberty were considered ‘too extreme’ and true Justice could only be pursued ‘incrementally’? How about the Abolitionist movement of the 1850’s? Or the Civil Rights movement in the 1960’s? Today, we are so obsessed with the vilification of all things ante-bellum that we miss some key points. Pro-slavery politicians weren’t necessarily against either Liberty or Justice per se – far from it! They simply believed that these Values needed to be ‘understood in context’ and that any reform of the status quo should take place ‘gradually’ and ‘organically’…and we need to be sure it’s ‘sustainable’. Where have you heard all this before? True, we cannot reasonably expect total Liberty or perfect Justice prior to the Eschaton. However, that does not relieve us of our responsibility to advocate for those values and to defend them without waiver. There is no Scriptural or Constitutional sanction for compromise. Some band-aids just have to be ripped off! Keep the conversation going. 1. Click here to comment on this TWS. 2. To subscribe (at no cost) to TWS and ATM, follow this link . 3. We encourage new articles and reprints from freelance writers ; click here to view out Writers’ Specs. Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

< Back Albert Camus “Either death is ultimately subjected to something greater and more general than itself (Being) or death ultimately subjects everything to itself and then nothing else has any meaning or value.” David Cowles Albert Camus (1913 – 1960) may rightly be called the philosopher of the Absurd. In his essays, stories and plays, he mercilessly confronts the world on its own terms and finds that he cannot reconcile his human urge to unify and explain all experience with the world’s incurable plurality and lack of coherence. He finds this situation ‘absurd’! Confronting Absurdity, one has, according to Camus, three options: commit physical suicide, commit philosophical suicide, or accept the absurd and live absurdity to the fullest. So Camus begins his master philosophical reflection (1942), The Myth of Sisyphus : “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.” (All quotes in this essay are from The Myth of Sisyphus unless otherwise noted.) If living in this world is incurably absurd, why do it? Why go on? Why not just end it as quickly and as painlessly as possible? “Does the Absurdity dictate death?” Ultimately, Camus rejects the option of physical suicide. Like ‘philosophical suicide’ (below), it negates the Absurd; but it also amounts to running away from what’s real. Camus claims no priority on the recognition of the Absurd. Throughout his essay he acknowledges other philosophers and writers who have confronted the Absurd: Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Jaspers, Husserl, Sartre and Dostoevsky, among others. “…All started out from that indescribable universe where contradiction, antimony, anguish or impotence reigns.” But Camus gently accuses all of them of committing ‘philosophical suicide’, of “hoping in spite of everything”. To paint with an overly broad brush, Camus suggests that each of these men uses the terror of the Absurd to ‘prove’, in the end, that there must be some order, some purpose, some meaning capable of overcoming that terror. This Camus rejects. In fact, Camus’ uniqueness rests on his unwillingness to seek relief in some species of phony faith or false hope – relief from the terrifying conclusions forced on us by the Absurd. “A man devoid of hope, and conscious of being so, has ceased to belong to the future.” What makes Camus’ brand of nihilism particularly heroic is his willingness to maintain his position while freely acknowledging that he does not know whether he is right or wrong. Radical skepticism is closely related to nihilism, precluding any philosophical certainties: “I don’t know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I do not know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it. What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms.” Both Camus and Sartre admit that is possible that God exists but, unlike Pascal, they attach no importance to the matter: “Hence, what he (the absurd man) demands of himself is to live solely with what he knows…and to bring in nothing that is not certain. He is told that nothing is. But this at least is a certainty.” In this Camus reveals himself to be a proper child of the Enlightenment: ‘Live solely with what he knows…bring in nothing that is not certain’. This seems obvious to us denizens of the scientific age, raised as we were on Ayer, Wittgenstein, and Austin, et al. But it would seem very odd to anyone born before, say, 1700. In those ‘unenlightened times’, what was not ‘known’ was a matter of ‘faith’ and faith was the foundation of knowledge. Camus offers a concise exposition of the Existentialist’s dilemma: “Of whom and of what indeed can I say: ‘I know that!’ This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it exists…I can sketch all the aspects it is able to assume…but aspects cannot be added up …” Camus is dragging Descartes out of the head and into the heart. Furthermore, he is asserting a paradigmatically existentialist doctrine that the sum of all qualia can never lead to even a single etre . In this he bridges Parmenides Hot Link and Sartre: “Between the certainty I have of my existence and the content I try to give to that assurance the gap will never be filled. Forever I shall be a stranger to myself.” In other words, my existence will always surpass my essence: “This world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge, and the rest is construction…” Camus may justly be called the philosopher of the Absurd, but 300 years earlier another Frenchman, Blaise Pascal, focused on a similar problem in his Pensees : “We do not require great education of mind to understand that here there is no real and lasting satisfaction; that our pleasures are only vanity; that our evils are infinite; and, lastly that death…threatens us every moment…There is nothing more real than this, nothing more terrible…For it is not to be doubted that the duration of this life is but a moment; that the state of death is eternal… When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after…I am frightened…” Faced with an analysis of the human condition similar to Camus’, Pascal came to a very different conclusion, known as Pascal’s Wager . From a common starting point, Pascal and Camus draw diametrically opposed conclusions. Camus’ absurd man “has ceased to belong to the future” while for Pascal, there is no good other than the future. Of course, Camus and Sartre would both accuse Pascal of ‘bad faith’, of ‘philosophical suicide’…but I’m not sure Pascal would care. It is also worthwhile to compare Camus with Whitehead and Jung. They both view God as the process of essence acquiring existence. Everything evolves, everything grows, including God. The early books of the Old Testament seem to endorse this view. Abraham argues with God and uses reason to deflect his intentions; Job uses law to force a peevish and recalcitrant God to ‘be God’ and act justly. We are trained to think that all action has a motivation, a purpose, a goal; if there is no future, no transcendent meaning, no objective values, no hope, then how does one go about living one’s life? If we reject physical suicide and refuse philosophical suicide (hope), then what options are open to us? “No code of ethics and no effort are justifiable a priori in the face of the cruel mathematics that command our condition…All systems of morality are based on the idea that an action has consequences that legitimize it or cancel it. The absurd enlightens me on this point: there is no future.” Contrast Camus’ concept of freedom with that of Pope Leo XIII. Leo, of course, believed in transcendent values, in objective Truth and in the imperative of Justice. Therefore for Leo, the only real freedom is the freedom to do what is right (just) and profess what is true. To do otherwise is to be enslaved (by evil) for who would voluntarily profess something she knew to be false or do something she knew to be wrong? For Leo, that person would be living in ‘bad faith’. By contrast, Camus’ freedom is unfettered by concepts such as transcendence and objectivity. Camus’ heroes are free to create ex nihilo . In that sense, we are all gods. (Psalms 82: 6, John 10: 34) “It was previously a question of finding out whether or not life had to have a meaning to be lived. It now becomes clear, on the contrary, that it will be lived all the better if it has no meaning…That idea that ‘I am’, my way of acting as if everything has a meaning…all that is given the lie…by the absurdity of a possible death…Death is there as the only reality.” The foundation of the Judeo-Christian world view is found in Exodus 3:14 where God tells Moses, “I am who am.” Camus undermines a 3500 year tradition by claiming that ‘I am’ is per se a lie. In this he resonates with certain Eastern traditions that reject the concept of ‘self’ entirely. Contrast St. Paul: In the end even death is subjected to Christ and Christ to God. For Camus, death subjects everything to itself; that is the essence of the Absurd. Everything hangs on this point! Paul and Camus would agree that death and meaning are utterly incompatible! In fact, they constitute the archetypical incompatibility: not ‘life and death’ but ‘death and meaning’. Either death is ultimately subjected to something greater and more general than itself (Being) or death ultimately subjects everything to itself and then nothing else has any meaning or value. This is the fundamental divide underlying the intellectual history of the Western world. “Before encountering the absurd, the everyday man lives with aims, a concern for the future…He still thinks that something in life can be directed. In truth, he acts as if he were free…” “Belief in the meaning of life always implies a scale of values, a choice, our preferences. Belief in the absurd, according to our definitions, teaches the contrary…In an absurd world, there can be no scale of values, no value driven choices or value based preferences. Choices, actions cannot be justified by anything outside themselves.” So given that suicide and bad faith are no longer options, how does one live? For better or worse, Camus tackles that question head on. We explore Camus’ lifestyle prescription in a companion article on this site. Spoiler alert – It isn’t pretty! Image: Portrait from New York World-Telegram and Sun Photograph Collection , 1957. David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com . Return to our Summer 2023 Table of Contents https://www.aletheiatoday.com/thoughtswhileshaving/applied-camus Previous Next

< Back Friedrich Nietzsche “Value-based judgments assume a transcendent point of view and sooner or later, that way of thinking leads to God-talk and any such talk is strictly verboten.” David Cowles In the course of Western philosophy, one occasionally encounters a thinker whose work is so original that it is a stretch to locate it within any specific school or tradition. I have 3 such thinkers in mind (but of course there are others): Nicholas of Cusa (c. 1450), Friedrich Nietzsche (c. 1885), and Ludwig Wittgenstein (c. 1940) – three gentlemen with different backgrounds, writing in different epochs, utter a common admonition, best expressed by Wittgenstein: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” These are the meaning police . 20 th century Analytic Philosophy rejected most of the Western philosophical tradition as being ‘meaningless nonsense’. Wittgenstein softened this assessment, relabeling it “ important nonsense”, but nonsense nonetheless. Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas? All nonsense, most of the time. Oh philosophers, how painful it must be to learn that you’ve spent your lives studying the equivalent of Edward Lear literature! It’s so, but take heart, what may be ‘nonsense’ is at least ‘important nonsense’, and that modification makes all the difference. After all, the same could be said of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerti – ‘nuff said! People have successfully poked holes in Cusa, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, but no one to my knowledge has successfully prosecuted a full-frontal assault on any one of them. Nor are they ever likely to. Their core positions are congruent with one another…and for my money, at least, virtually incontestable! Have you heard this one yet? A 15 th century priest, a 19 th century atheist, and a 20 th century academic walked into a bar… and they spent all afternoon together, drinking, laughing, and sharing ideas. From their relatively solitary perches, these three non-conformists are part of what I call ‘the conscience of Western philosophy’. They impose standards that every philosophical system should have to meet in order to be taken seriously. Think of them and their ilk as the ‘Greek chorus’ that accompanies Intellectual History. But like other such choruses, their warnings often go unheeded. “How dare you require my Truth to be meaningful!” So, moderns that we are, we ignore the warnings of conscience and go right ahead doing whatever it is that we wanted to do, or think, in the first place. We’ll talk nonsense if we want to, when we want to, and as much as we want to, and you can’t do anything to stop us! So there! Nicholas of Cusa instructs us that the most we can say about God is… absolutely nothing. Any declarative statement about God merely takes us deeper into error. The highest number on Cusa’s Truth Scale is zero. Wittgenstein instructs us that the most we can say about Metaphysics is… absolutely nothing. But we’re here to talk about Nietzsche! Nietzsche instructs us that the most we can say about Ethics is… (no surprise twist here) absolutely nothing. Value-based judgments assume a transcendent point of view, and sooner or later, that way of thinking leads to God-talk and any such talk is strictly verboten, but let Nietzsche speak for himself: “What alone can our teaching be? – That no one gives a human being his qualities: not God, not society, not his parents or ancestors, not he himself…The fatality of his nature cannot be disentangled from the fatality of all that which has been and will be…it is absurd to want to hand over his nature to some purpose or other. We invented the concept ‘purpose’: in reality, purpose is lacking… “One is necessary, one is a piece of fate, one belongs to the whole, one is in the whole – there exists nothing which could judge, measure, compare, condemn our being, for that would be to judge, measure, compare, condemn the whole… But nothing exists apart from the whole!” ( Twilight of the Idols ) In this work, one of his last and written in the final year of his sanity (1888), Nietzsche ventures a summation of the views he articulated over the previous 16 years. In contrast to dualism, determinism, and materialism, Nietzsche offers a refreshing ontology based on the concept of “the whole”. In that sense, he anticipates by 50 years Whitehead’s Philosophy of Organism and by 100 years the New Age concept of Gaia . All values are qualities, but not all qualities are values. According to Augustine et al., all qualities are good . To the extent that anything is not good, it is just deficient in some good quality. Criminals are not ‘bad’, they are just ‘insufficiently good’. All qualities are good, but most are not normative. To the extent that a quality is normative, it is a value . Take painting, for example. Red and blue are qualities. They are not normative; the artist may use either freely. Beauty is the operative value …and it is normative. The artist must strive for ‘beauty’ however she conceives it. Color is a choice (quality); beauty is a norm (value)! As Picasso once famously said, “If I don’t have red, I use blue;” the results speak for themselves. The Old Testament Book of Job , one of the earliest examples of philosophical literature in the West, is a 40 chapter exposition (in dramatic form) of the concept of values . In Job , values are normative…even for God! But not for Nietzsche! In fact, the very concept of ‘norms’ has fared badly over the most recent 150 years. Norm appears to conflict with Will and like two-year-olds the world over, we are all about our Will . The notion of ‘norms’ is incompatible with a ‘flat universe’ (speaking ontologically, not cosmologically). That’s a problem for us because a ‘flat universe’ is virtually synonymous with a ‘democratic universe’, and we are in love with the idea (if not the reality) of democracy . Norms only have a home in hierarchical universes, and we hate hierarchies of any sort: nobility, aristocracy, clergy, bureaucracy, umpires, one-percenters…you name it. But A can only be normative for B if A exists apart from B; otherwise, A is just part of the structure of B (i.e., not a value, not a norm). So, we can honor Cusa by remaining silent about God and we can honor Wittgenstein by remaining silent about Metaphysics. No problem, I’m more interested in football anyway! But to honor Nietzsche, we would need to remain silent about values…and that proves to be very difficult, if not impossible. Take Albert Camus , an important 20 th century author, for example. Camus begins his master philosophical reflection (1942), The Myth of Sisyphus , with a blistering attack on the concept of normative values. He is paying proper homage to Nietzsche; but then, about halfway through, he veers off: “I cannot conceive that a skeptical metaphysics can be joined to an ethics of renunciation…” He rejects the free choice of mystics the world over (Taoists and Dominicans alike) who prefer a contemplative life to the hurly burly of the daily grind. But what gives Camus the right to reject anything? Effectively, he is imposing his own normative values: “…What counts is not the best living but the most living…value judgments are discarded…A man’s rule of conduct and his scale of values have no meaning except through the quantity and variety of experiences he has been in a position to accumulate…” Jaw dropping! Value judgments are discarded…unless they have to do with the quantity and variety of experiences. In place of the traditional values of Beauty, Truth and Justice, Camus substitutes Quantity and Variety. Quantity may be the new quality, but as a ‘value’ it is still normative. The 2 nd half of Sisyphus provides a litany of lifestyles that Camus judges to be consistent with a recognition of the Absurdity of Existence. Working backwards, who made Camus the arbiter of consistency ? On what does he base his assessments if not on transcendental values? Otherwise, we’re just dealing with his neurotic prejudices and bourgeoisie tastes. Sisyphus would then be reduced to a psychological monograph rather than a true work of philosophy. And who made Quantity and Variety normative, or what makes them so? According to Nietzsche, the source of such norms, like any norms, if they are real and truly normative (not just options), must be transcendent. Somehow, Camus misses, or ignores, this. Much as I admire Camus, and enjoy reading his work, it is clear to me that he is the very paradigm of Sartre’s bad faith . Camus himself sums it all up spectacularly: “For on the one hand, the absurd teaches that all experiences are unimportant, and on the other it urges toward the greatest quantity of experiences.” Really? Someone wrote this? Do you ever suffer from insomnia? I find sometimes a good, heartfelt belly laugh helps me relax. So next time you’re tossing about, imagine Nietzsche’s reaction had he been able to read The Myth of Sisyphus. At first, he would have been ‘all puffed up’ – well, as puffed up as Nietzsche could ever get. “How gratifying to see that my work has had such an impact,” he might have thought. And then…OMG! (I can’t stop laughing just thinking about it. The expression on his face! Priceless.) Nor is Camus an outlier. It seems that bad faith runs in the community of philosophers. The French Existentialist Camus sells out Nietzsche; but at the other end of the ideological see-saw, A.J. Ayer, the English Logical Positivist, follows the exact same trek. First, he denies the reality of transcendental values and then he proposes his own such values, e.g. kindness . We appreciate kindness because we accept the reality of transcendental values, but what makes kindness normative for Ayer and his lot? Who says it’s better to be kind than not? Not everyone! Think Machiavelli, Sorel, even Stalin. So, what makes it so, Professor Ayer? So we honor Cusa and Wittgenstein and Nietzsche, but then we systematically ignore them. Our attitude toward ‘the conscience of Western philosophy’ is similar to the attitude of many professed Christians toward the teachings of the Church. For you, good; for me, not so much! David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com . Return to our Beach Read 2023 Table of Contents Previous Next