“The moral value of an event lies in the act itself, not in its conformity to a set of norms and not in its consequentiality…every event is its own end!” < Back Moses, Machiavelli, and Morality David Cowles Jul 15, 2024 “The moral value of an event lies in the act itself, not in its conformity to a set of norms and not in its consequentiality…every event is its own end!” Whether it’s a copy of the 10 Commandments posted on your classroom wall or a list of ‘Daddy’s House Rules’ stuck on your refrigerator door, when you’re a kid you learn ‘morality’ as a set of rules. In fact, the foundation of Western ethics, the Torah , looks like one giant rules-based moral code – all 4 books and all 613 mitzvahs . While Judeo-Christian ethics proceeded along several different tracks, a serious challenge to rules-based morality was not mounted until c.1500 CE when Nicollo Machiavelli (1469 – 1527) proposed an alternative better suited to emerging ‘modern’ attitudes. In lieu of a system based on rules he proposed a system based on results: “The end justifies the means”. Note the sea-change: our focus has shifted from the past (experience, memory, custom, legislation, and revelation) to the future (technology, efficiency, productivity and profit). There’s at least one problem with this: the real future is nothing like the real past! We know what we know about the past in the ways that we know it. What we know about the future is different both in substance (content) and in form. And we know it in very different ways. We research the past; we predict the future. In ways I’m sure he didn’t imagine, Machiavelli played Chanticleer ; but instead of summoning the dawn, he summoned ‘the great darkness’ known as the Enlightenment. No wonder we were able to sell so many tickets to Game #8 of the 1956 World Series! By taking the ethical focus off the concrete event, the means , and shifting it to its ephemeral consequence, the end , Machiavelli provided a readymade, universal justification for every human engineered horror imaginable. Compare this to Moses: “Thou shalt not kill.” Ok, we can still fudge that with our convoluted doctrines of just war, death with dignity, reproductive freedom, self-defense, and retributive justice; but we can’t make it go away entirely. For that we needed Machiavelli: now the act of killing , like all acts, is itself morally neutral. Moral value comes from the results, the consequences of an act, not from any aspect of the act itself. That’s saying a lot! We’re not only throwing out the action per se but also its motive, its intent, and the method of its execution. So, we justify genocide, nuclear war, et al., based on imagined, long term, positive consequences. A bit hard to swallow but not to worry: 300 years later, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill would give Machiavelli a much-needed make-over. In the ‘spirit of the spin’, they reframed ‘the end justifies the means’ as ‘the greatest good for the greatest number’. Clever, but note that the focus remains on consequences rather than on acts themselves. Sidebar : Intellectual History is full of similar progressions. For example, Matthew and Luke ‘cleaned-up’ Mark to get the Gospel message ready for prime time . First year philosophy students don’t necessarily warm to Machiavelli’s rather dry presentation of his ethic. But when they hear the same message softened by Bentham and Mill and presented under its new name, Utilitarianism , they jump on board. In fact, when college students are first exposed to idea of Utilitarianism , their usual reaction is, “Of course!” This by itself should raise an eyebrow. Whenever an idea goes from inconceivable to irrefutable in a relatively short period of time, we should be en garde . We may be looking at a shift in the cultural paradigm rather than true intellectual progress. After the Bentham-Mill reformulation of Machiavelli’s ideas, acceptance spread quickly. Now Dostoevsky could say, “Now, everything is permitted,” as could Malcom X, “By any means necessary!” How did it happen that an ethic ‘unimaginable’ before 1500 became ‘obvious’ by 1800? The cultural phenomenon known as Renaissance , the ideological phenomenon known as Reformation , and the intellectual phenomenon known as Enlightenment , combined with the sociological phenomenon of Industrialization , to drag the Western world into its only true Dark Age (1700 – 1900)…the so-called Age of Reason . Hmm… Sidebar : Let me digress for just a minute to consider the Biblical tale of the Tower of Babel. Babel refers generally to the phenomena of urbanization (Cain) and industrialization, and it spotlights the adverse impact of these activities on language. Our language evolved organically out of the infamous ‘human condition’. It had to serve many functions simultaneously. Initially at least, Homo Sapiens did not have the luxury of specialized languages for different functions. The earliest languages had to be suited to interpersonal communication, philosophical reflection, and artistic expression, as well as industry and commerce. For example, many languages contain a syntactic variable we call Voice . OG Indo-European languages typically had 3 robust voices: An Active Voice well suited to the communication of information. A Passive Voice ideal for the expression of emotion. A Middle Voice suited to model the interpersonal aspects of life. Unfortunately, the Middle Voice has largely disappeared, and the Passive Voice has atrophied into a degenerative form of the Active Voice; et voila , humanity today! We’re very good at making things, period. To misquote George W. Bush, “We’re all ends, no means.” To oversimplify just a bit, Babel made the world safe for Machiavelli but Bentham made it safe for Bolshevism. How ever did we go so wrong? Turns out, the problem is not primarily an ethical issue at all; it’s an ontological one. It comes back to what we mean when we talk about an entity or an event . As our instruments have become more precise and our measurements more accurate, our notion of ‘an event’ is shrinking closer and closer to a singularity. We have stripped away motive, intention, tone, and even result from the event itself. We are left with a 4-dimensional canopy of point-like events, linked by ultra-thin filaments to form a causal web. That world exhibits a high degree of conformity, repetition and even redundancy. It is causal to the point of being deterministic . But we have so pared down the power and scope of ‘events’ that they hardly seem to matter anymore. Our focus is ‘on the big picture’ now – ongoing trends, not grand finales. But fortunately, this is not how the world works! Events are the building blocks of reality. Not that everything is an event, but whatever is not an event is ‘real’ only as it participates in an event. Events populate regions of spacetime (not necessarily contiguous) with internal structures and external relations, kind of like nation states. An even better analogy would be a human cell. Per se , it is an independent entity, but as such it supports a myriad of higher order (more general) entities like tissues, organelles, organs, the host organism itself, and who knows, the Genus Homo , Gaia or even Kosmos . Where did the morality of Machiavelli and Mill go wrong? The problem lies in a faulty conception of a consequence. If I throw a rock at a garage window and the window breaks, it’s reasonable to regard the broken window as a ‘consequence’ of the thrown ball, though the event actually encompasses the throwing gesture, the trajectory of the rock, and the breaking of the glass. We want the next moment to relate to the shattered glass in the same way the shattered glass relates to the thrown ball. But, again, that is not how the world works. Perhaps a dog will run through the garage and cut its paw leading to a trip to the vet, interrupted by an auto accident along the way. Or perhaps the ricocheting ball also knocked over a space heater causing a fire that destroyed 3 city blocks. Or perhaps nothing special happened after the window broke; under the right circumstances, it might not be discovered for weeks. We can reasonably say that the broken glass is an ‘effect’ (vary likely but not certain) of the thrown ball. We can also say that ‘accident’, ‘fire’, and ‘eh!’ are alternative, less likely effects of the broken glass. And because we got an ‘A’ in 3rd grade arithmetic, we want to be able to say that the thrown ball is the cause of the accident, fire, and eh scenarios…but we can’t. The Transitive Property (If A = B and B = C then A = C) does not hold in the real world. Put another way, causality is part of the ‘internal structure’ of an event but plays no role in its ‘external relations’. It’s impossible to know all the possible consequences, or even the one actual consequence, of any act. Every event is sui generis and causa sui . It seems that the famous Law of Cause and Effect should have broader consequences – but it doesn’t. Causality exists. The problem is that we can never specify with certainty any or all effects, or any and all causes, for any given event. That means that nothing causes any thing but everything causes every thing…which I think you’ll agree compromises the value of the concept itself. Furthermore, we would need to follow the chain of causes all the way back to the moment of Big Bang and extend the chain of effects all the way forward to Heat Death. Yet this is still not the real problem ! Now we need to create an algebra that assigns a scalar ‘value’ and a vector ‘weight’ to every event in the chain (above) and an operation that allows us to calculate a single, unequivocal Value for the consequence in question. That evaluation, in turn, allows me to conclude that this aggregate end does, or does not, justify the means that led up to it. Impossible! The notion of a specific, evaluable end is an illusion. Actions do have consequences, but we have no meaningful way to project those consequences or to evaluate their totality . Another way to look at this is as a ‘halting problem’: When is enough, enough? Can we ever say, “Ok, I’ve identified and evaluated all the significant consequences?” I don’t think so; and therefore, no act can ever be justified by its ‘ends’ because either (1) it has no end or (2) one and the same end is the omega point of every possible causal chain. If we reject Legalism and Utilitarianism in ethics, what’s left? The act itself. Actions are moral or immoral based on the act alone. Actions derive their value, neither from their obedience to a list of rules nor from their so-called consequences. Acts are moral or immoral on their own. But how? To grasp this core principle, we need to drill down our notion of what constitutes an event. The ever-contracting perspective of physical science is offset by the ever-expanding perspective of biological science. An ‘event’ begins as a reaction to a particular state-of-affairs. This reaction is powered by the objective, universal values that inform one way or another every event. Events are sui generis , self-aware, and self-modifying. Each event has a beginning, a middle, and an end. That end is not a ‘consequence’; it is the event itself, projected into the actual world of every logically subsequent event. The moral value of an event lies in the act itself, not in its conformity to a set of norms and not in its consequentiality. But an act is not a gesture. It begins with the first stirring of appetition and it proceeds through various phases of intent. It embodies aspects of the world it inherits, colored by its own subjectivity. Ultimately, every event is its own end! 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 . purpose and devotion. Return to our 2024 Beach Read Share Previous Next Do you like what you just read? 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< Back Mirror, Mirror On the Wall David Cowles Aug 27, 2024 “Reflexivity is built into the fabric of the cosmos itself. Universe is its own mirror! Without reflexivity, the cosmos would be inert, mindless, and without meaning.” Consciousness – the Hard Problem, per David Chalmers. What is it? Who has it? How does it work? What’s it ‘like’ to be conscious? Is it the sound of one hand clapping? As we learn more and more about the structure of the human brain and the perceptual capabilities of non-human life forms (organic and otherwise), the long felt need to find a consensus model of consciousness is growing more urgent. There is a tendency for models to grow more complex with each new iteration. Something like that is happening right now in the fields of cosmology, particle physics, and biology. The steady complexification of theory is often, usually in fact, a clue that the theory itself is somehow ‘wrong’. Remember Ptolemy’s geocentric model of the universe? Hello Galileo! Typically, when we build a model, we start by following the architect’s blueprint for the Tower of Babel , one story teetering on top of another…until suddenly the whole edifice collapses like a house of cards. So we welcome the fresh air of heliocentricity, relativity, and quantum mechanics! Perhaps in the case of consciousness we can avoid this painful odyssey. My preferred model for consciousness is a simple mirror, or to be more precise, reflexivity per se . A mirror, as Lewis Carroll taught us ( Through the Lookingglass ), has no intrinsic content. Likewise, while mirrors come in all sizes, shapes and designs, the ‘mirror-part’ is the same in every case. Reflection is reflection and that’s all there is to it. Not that I envision a cosmos full of disembodied shards of silver backed glass floating in space. Rather I suspect that reflexivity is built into the fabric of the cosmos itself. Universe is its own mirror! Reflexivity is characteristic of any non-orientable topology, e.g. a Mobius strip. If, as I suspect, our universe is locally orientable but globally non-orientable (see below), then reflection (mirroring) may be a local manifestation of global reflexivity. The recent discovery of Rondeau Time Crystals (RTC) is relevant here (Moon, et al., Nature Physics , October 14, 2025). An RTC consists of two ordered states ( Alpha & Omega ) separated by a chaotic state ( Delta ). The two ordered states relate deterministically but their topology is non-orientable. The elements in the Omega state are ‘reciprocals’ of those same elements in the Alpha state. The chaotic, intermediary Delta state is where we live and here events appear orientable. All mirrors are identical, but no two mirror images are ever the same. A mirror reflects what is reflected. Likewise, consciousness – a reflector reflecting. Without reflected content, a mirror cannot reflect and so is not a ‘mirror’ at all; it’s just silver backed glass. Without reflexivity, the cosmos would be inert, mindless, and without meaning. Meaning is reference between two distinct classes of phenomena, e.g. a map and a territory, an object and its image, symbol and signified. Object and image, for example, are ‘mutually transcendent’ – that’s a pre-condition for meaning . Even before syntax, language has meaning, e.g. an object and a word that denotes that object ( Namo ). Of course, words can be objects and objects can be words, but not in this context. We are strictly speaking of words as symbols and objects as what words symbolize. In one respect, language is ‘objective’ and therefore part of the world; but in a more important sense, it is ‘symbolic’ and therefore transcends the world. Likewise, consciousness may, or may not, be dependent on certain structures, neural or otherwise, but it is not those structures per se . Again, these ‘structures’ are part of the world that consciousness reflects…and transcends. When we speak of ‘consciousness’, we are not referring to whatever physical structures may support it. In fact, it appears that wildly different physical configurations may support consciousness. This lends further support to the idea that a universal potentiality for consciousness is woven into the fabric of the cosmos itself. How is consciousness like a mirror? A mirror has no intrinsic content. It acquires 100% of its content from what it reflects. Every mirror, in so far as it reflects, is the same. I am conscious and someone in Tibet is conscious. We share few life experiences, but to the extent that we are both conscious, we are identical …not merely congruent. Consciousness is a single phenomenon, manifest in multiple environments and circumstances. No two manifestations of consciousness are the same but consciousness per se is identical everywhere and everywhen. What a mirror actually reflects is light. Without light, a mirror has no content, i.e. no image. When an organism dies, the ‘mirror’ associated with that organism goes dark; it no longer reflects light (an image). It ceases to be a ‘mirror’; therefore it is no longer conscious . Its physical properties no longer support conscious experience. However, this does not necessarily resolve Hamlet’s dilemma: “To die, to sleep; to sleep, perchance to dream – ay, there’s the rub.” In the language of AI, could it be that our dark and imageless reflexivity will yet ‘hallucinate’? (After all, we know that AI ‘hallucinates’; why not ‘NI’ - natural intelligence?) Perhaps, it is still too soon to award the laurel wreath to Horatio! But there is a ‘silver’ lining to all this! Because chaotic Delta is strung between highly ordered Alpha and Omega , Delta inherits its fundamental topology from its boundary conditions. Think of a hammock strung between two trees. Per se , it has no shape but because of the trees it assumes a catenary shape, the only ‘minimal surface’ in nature (other than a plane). It's the natural shape that forms when a rope, chain, or fabric hangs freely between two points. Note that the trees do not cause the hammock to assume the characteristic shape. Nothing about the trees gives the hammock its curve. Rather, it is the natural shape assumed by whatever hangs freely between two terminals. Delta ‘hangs freely’ between Alpha and Omega and therefore it inherits a very specific, and very fortunate, topology. That topology permits islands of spatiotemporal order to form spontaneously (bootstrapping?) in Delta ’s otherwise chaotic medium. In Moon’s terminology, the two end states ‘fine tune’ the intermediary ( Delta ) state without compromising its essentially chaotic nature. These islands of order enable the cosmos to encode information. We live on (actually, in) such an island; we are pure information. Information is a pattern. Alpha and Omega are the pattern of all patterns. A pattern (island) in Delta may resonate (harmonize) with a pattern in Alpha/Omega . In which case that pattern is immediately bilocated, in Alpha/Omega and in Delta . Marcel Proust provides an analog in Remembrance of Things Past . The sensation of cobblestones in France recapitulates a similar sensation felt years earlier in Italy. Immediately, the resonance bilocates Proust in France-now and Italy-then. In an identical manner, when a pattern in our lives ( Delta ) resonates with a pattern in Alpha/Omega , we are bilocated: our temporal existence merges with atemporality ( aka eternity). The Christian doctrine of Incarnation tells of the merger of atemporal divinity with temporal humanity. Rondeau Time Crystals reverse the process: temporality is absorbed in eternity. So for those of us who aspire to eternal life, to leaving a permanent mark in the cosmos, ‘all we have to do’ is create patterns in our own lives that are in harmony with patterns in Alpha/Omega , i.e. in the ‘Garden’ and the ‘Kingdom’, i.e. in God. But how on earth do we do that ? Easy! God is Good . Beauty, Truth, and Justice are good. Therefore, they are found among the patterns in Alpha and Omega ; they are part of God’s essential nature. Therefore, whenever we foster beauty, truth and/or justice, we create a pattern in Delta that resonates in Alpha/Omega , and we assure ourselves at least a modicum of eternal life. 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! 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For centuries, many Christians have found support for their faith in the accounts of miracles worked by Jesus, and following Jesus, by various apostles, saints and martyrs. Others, however, have rejected these accounts as ‘impossible’ and therefore ‘unbelievable’ and this judgment has led them to dismiss all accounts of Jesus’ life and teachings as ‘suspect’. Robert Frost, Quantum Mechanic Robert Frost This article offers the best overall introduction to Frost and his contribution: Robert Frost was Wrong So woods-walking Frost finds himself at a crossroads. Like each of us 100 times every day, he must make a choice. But what is the nature of ‘choice’ per se? The Road Taken Frost’s poem can be viewed in light of the more recently developed Many Worlds Interpretation (MWI) of QM. We argue that what Frost proposes is not MWI…but better! Janis Joplin and Robert Frost Finally, we examine Frost’s contribution to the ‘Freedom vs. Values’ debate and include perspectives from Joplin, Nietzsche, Sartre, and…wait for it…Pope Leo XIII. The Frost Diamond We expound on the ontological implications of Frost’s model, comparing its structure to that of a liquid, suggesting parallels with Heraclius (everything flows): Readers React What's the buzz about? Our readers' reactions to Aletheia Today... Additional Reading Can't get enough of Aletheia Today's content? Check out the books that inspire our magazine.

< Back Do Bots Know Beauty? “I…propose…that we make this the test, not Turing’s, of whether a bot is conscious." David Cowles Alan Turing proposed that we judge the sentience of AI programs based solely on their ability to mimic convincingly human responses to a battery of questions posed by a trained examiner. Recent advances in AI technology suggest that we will soon have, if we don’t already, machines that can pass Turing’s Test. (On the other hand, I have doubts about some of my carbon-based neighbors…but that is another subject for a different day .) Are we willing to accept the results of Turing’s Test as definitive? Or will we ‘move the goal posts’? Now that you’ve learned your ABC’s, Sally, please recite them again, but this time in reverse order and, oh yeah, in ancient Greek…if you don’t mind. (We’re not going to let some snot-nosed rugrat show off in front of us! After all, we can all recite the Greek alphabet backwards, can’t we?) So come on, Sally; get crackin’: Omega, Psi…” Turing devised his ‘test’ in the context of the materialism, pragmatism, and behaviorism of his time. It is understandable that we might now want to review Turning’s proposal in the context of a more contemporary, more expansive, ideology. It is interesting how an issue that forms the cornerstone of one school of philosophy can be discounted as a mere distraction by a different school. At Aletheia Today we are admittedly ‘hung-up’ on the question of values – objective, transcendent values. If such values exist, then an ontologically flat, wholly immanent universe ( a la Nietzsche ) is simply not possible. On the other hand, if such values do not exist, then ethics and aesthetics are just matters of taste…if that. Without objective, transcendent values, free will becomes caprice. In fact, it is hard to see how any events can ever occur in a universe bereft of motivation, incentives, objectives, and purpose. But not everyone agrees with this analysis. So, let’s get granular! I recently encountered a work of ‘art’ (above) that is almost certainly computer generated. I know nothing about the provenance of this piece, but judging by the style and content, I can only assume that an AI Bot was given specific input re themes, images, etc. and then allowed to ‘create’. Nothing is ‘wrong’ with the result…except that it is not beautiful . The Bot followed instructions, and produced this ‘Rube Goldberg’, all according to spec. The piece contains some interesting local details and flourishes – geometric shapes, meditations on gravity, modulation of colors - but none of it hangs together. The piece has competent parts, but there’s no sense of a ‘whole’, perhaps because that would require the Bot to step back and consider its work as a whole…which may be something that this Bot cannot do. The Golden Mean notwithstanding, do we think it is possible to reduce Beauty and Truth, “all ye know of earth and all ye need to know” (Keats) to an algorithm? Actually, we discovered part of that answer while Alan Turing was still in school. In 1931, Kurt Godel proved that mathematics could not be reduced to a system of algorithms: ‘There are more (true) things in heaven and earth…’ than can be proven in any logical system. According to John Keats (above), “Beauty is truth and truth beauty.” I agree with Keats, but I would modify his dictum with a nod to Alfred North Whitehead . Beauty is the broader, more inclusive category; Truth and Justice are specific (albeit peculiar) manifestations of ‘Beauty’ (harmony, consistency, etc.). Do Bots know beauty? Can they create something unique that is also ‘beautiful’? Of course, they can! They’re doing it today…and have been for a couple of decades now. Contemporary artists use the microprocessor as we would a paint brush…and they get similar results. But the ‘beauty part’ comes entirely from the artist. The artist creates, the Bot executes the artist’s instructions. The relevant question remains, “Can a Bot create Beauty on its own?” An artist can step back from a canvass and say, “Eureka, it’s finished!” or “Nope, not yet.” Can a Bot, on its own, make a similar judgment? They say the soul of every artistic creation, in any medium, is editing. Can Bots edit? Can they look at a perfectly coherent finished product and say, “Something’s not right here” or “something’s missing” or “it’s too busy” or “it doesn’t read well ”? One of the hardest parts of being an artist is knowing when something is done, finished, complete. There is always a temptation to change a word, add a brush stroke, alter a chord; how do you know when to stop? How does a Bot? Yet knowing when to stop is a critical component of the creative process. I don’t propose to give a definitive answer here. I’m guessing Stanley Kubrick ( 2001: A Space Odyssey ) would answer these questions differently from Roger Penrose ( The Emperor’s New Clothes ). I do propose, however, that we make this the test, not Turing’s, that determines whether a Bot is conscious . Have you ever stood on uneven pavement where one foot was slightly higher than the other? It’s unsettling to say the least. That, in my view, is the origin of consciousness. Our mental apparatus compares immanent ‘reality’ with the transcendent values (Beauty, Truth, and Justice) that govern the Universe; the perceived imbalance gives rise to conscious experience. No values, no consciousness! Therefore, demonstrating that a Bot, on its own, can identify what’s beautiful, true, or just, absent specific operator instructions, would satisfy me that the Bot is conscious , i.e., that it can recognize and apply Value without operator prompts. My test is easy to devise but much harder to conduct. Bots are master mimics. When we think of mimicry, we think of monkeys and parrots. (However, we now suspect that their behavior is less mime and more consciously chosen behavior.) Bots, on the other hand, are built to mimic. They can ingest and regurgitate a 12-year curriculum in seconds. Then they can adjust that knowledge base as new facts are added and even as teaching methods modernize. Take, for example, the picture shown above. I could tell my Bot in my most avuncular tone, “This is a good start, but it’s not quite what I had in mind. Try blending the colors a little more, add some more interesting background detail, work the foreground figure into the tableau.” My Bot and I could repeat this process ad nauseam , eventually getting to a point where I might say, “Ok, we’re done here. Good job!” Is this ‘creation’? Can it be ‘beautiful’? Yes and yes! But is the Bot the creator…or am I? Beauty, Truth, and Justice are transcendent values. They are manifestations of eternity in spacetime. Stepping outside of Nietzsche’s ‘ontologically flat world’ to view that world as a whole, accessing transcendent values and applying those values to the situation at hand – that’s consciousness . I believe that I have the capacity to do just that, and I take it as a working hypothesis that I share that capacity with most other human beings and with at least some other terrestrial life forms. But how about AI Bots? Do they share this capacity? Can they? 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 AI Issue Table of Contents Share Previous Next

< Back COVID-19 David Cowles Feb 15, 2024 “[COVID-19] was the first virus to figure out in a major way how to escape immunity…” Thoughts While Shaving does not normally get involved in anything so mundane as a ‘current event’ but a recent article by Carl Zimmer in the New York Times (11/21/23), which I quote liberally below, just raised so many flags, both red and checkered, that... The COVID-19 virus that departed Wuhan late in 2019 is now virtually extinct - but hold the bubbly: before exiting stage right, ‘Virus Zero’ mutated…and mutated…and mutated. These ‘better adapted variants’, more than our lockdowns and vaccines, put Virus Zero out of business. Unfortunately, this mutation process has continued in a way that should alarm us all: “[COVID-19] was the first virus to figure out in a major way how to escape immunity,” said Dr. Jacob Lemieux, an infectious disease specialist at Massachusetts General Hospital. Frightening as this is, it puts a spotlight on something that applies to process in general…so ‘general’ that it’s rarely noticed: “Dr. Lemieux and many other Omicron experts suspect that the variant gained its new mutations while infecting a single person with a weak immune system.” Apparently, the virus released from Wuhan found a single immune-compromised host and mutated: “Now it has become Omicron, destroyer of world”. It’s straight out of the Bhagavad Gita …or Marvel Comics . In fact, it goes beyond even Stan Lee…it goes straight to the structure of Universe itself. In theology, this is called the Scandal of Particularity : assuming God is incarnate, why just once, and if just once, why in the person of a first-century carpenter from the Galilee? Of course, the answer is just as simple and as obvious as it is unsatisfying: “Why not?” We fantasize that things move in a straight line, but of course, we know they don’t. So we imagine they radiate outward according to some stable function: f(x) = x², for example. But things are much, much crazier than we imagine. To bastardize the language of calculus, the first derivative of any event is 1 (identity): it is identical with itself; it is its own slope, its own rate of change. Paraphrasing Nietzsche, there is nothing outside the event that can determine or even measure the event itself. But the second derivative is undefined: call it 0 or ∞ or ø. Our event occupies a range (t₁ - t₂) with a defined trajectory; beyond that range, we have no information. We are forced to treat our event as a quantum whole; we know nothing of the event beyond the event itself. Yet our event is objectively immortal. It is no longer subject to modification, but it projects itself forward into the multiplicity (M) from which novel events emerge. But there is no function that can connect our event with the events that follow it. A virus infected a person, and a planet was brought to a standstill; a butterfly flapped its wings, and a tornado ravaged Chicago. This is the world we live in. Mr. Zimmer: “In the two years since its emergence, Omicron has proved to be not only staggeringly infectious, but an evolutionary marvel, challenging many assumptions virologists had before the pandemic. It has given rise to an impressive number of descendants, which have become far more adept at evading immunity and finding new victims.” We know that viruses can ‘learn’, but are they now ‘learning to learn’? Is Omicron ‘AI’… in a dot? As Omicron continues to mutate, sometimes two Omicron viruses wind up in the same cell. Just as kids used to swap baseball cards (back in the Pleistocene), viruses now swap genes. The result: new hybrid viruses with converging genetic histories. One of these hybrids is called XBB. It easily infects people, even those who had already been infected with Alpha, Delta, or Omicron. As a result, XBB became dominant in the United States in early 2023. But now even XBB is ebbing as a menagerie of even more evasive variants has evolved. Marc Johnson, a virologist at the University of Missouri, summed up the situation perfectly: “Right now we’re in a period of chaos.” But take a memo to Marc: “The ‘period of chaos’ you reference is actually the lifespan of the universe.” Hello, JN1 - this mutated form has become the most resistant version of coronavirus yet. It appears to be growing quickly in France and may soon spread to other countries. Where are we headed? Are there any limits to the ingenuity of this virus? Is it just stumbling on favorable adaptations…or is it really ‘learning to learn’? Even if we ultimately find a way to defeat this pathogen, do we need to be concerned that new viruses will emerge with similar ‘immunity evading intelligence’? That may depend on your choice of an origin story . If the COVID-19 pandemic is the result of a one-off species crossover, then the risk of a repetition anytime soon is probably small, but if it was the by-product of bioengineering, we should all be afraid, very, very afraid. 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 The Education Mess in America David Cowles Oct 3, 2024 “The ability to acquire new skills, absorb new information, and solve new problems will be the mark of an educated person, not their SAT scores.” 50 years ago public education in America was in crisis. Functional literacy was on the decline, standardized test scores were falling, drop-out rates rising. Public support for public education was at a low point. Private alternatives were proliferating, and the homeschool movement was organizing. Then, in the 1990s, things started to turn around. As is often the case, one of the first shots fired came from Massachusetts . In 1993, the state implemented a rigorous standardized testing program, called MCAS, that allowed parents and educators to compare students, schools, and districts. Bulletin : A town’s MCAS scores became a factor in determining its real estate values! Parents were suddenly motivated…and kids weren’t far behind. Not unexpectedly, test scores skyrocketed! Public education was back. Not unexpectedly, special interest groups howled and 30 years later, the battle rages on. In November (2024), MA voters will be asked to eliminate MCAS as a requirement for high school graduation; the outcome is anyone’s guess. Then in 2020, along came COVID! Education everywhere suffered and MA MCAS scores were not exempt. But as the pandemic subsided, the cognoscente trusted that scores would rebound, that annual progress would revert to mean; many expected that pandemic losses would be erased over time. Very unexpectedly, that has not happened. MCAS scores have not made up for lost ground, they did not revert to mean, they did not even stabilize. They have continued to fall. This article is not just about education! It’s about how society responds to a collective crisis, how it analyzes problems and how it dreams up solutions. Educational achievement does not occur in a classroom or in a school or in a state. Educational achievement happens in each student, individually. Of course, it’s possible to measure an artificial cross section of those students’ skill levels, e.g. by subjecting them to population-wide standardized testing; but if you don’t like the results, these test scores tell you precisely nothing about how to make impactful changes. It's no wonder then that the MA educational establishment is proposing a revolutionary approach to the problem: “More of the same!” Just do more of what we’ve been doing; things will get better. Trust us! Is there a single person alive who thinks this makes sense? Didn’t someone tell me once that doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results was the definition of insanity? And yet it’s the establishment’s consensus recommendation: longer school days, longer school years, shorter vacations, fewer electives, etc. More of the same is our knee-jerk reaction to every crisis. Education does not happen collectively; it happens individually. One student might benefit from a longer school day and her performance might improve; another student might become bored, depressed, apathetic and see his performance plummet. Most students would be unaffected – more miserable, but otherwise unaffected. Whatever the impact of this ‘carpet bombing’ strategy on standardized test scores, we would learn nothing about what’s happening at the level of the individual student. If our goal is to educate young people up to a reasonable percentage of their potential, we need to look at many variables more important than test scores: How has the educational process impacted the student’s self-confidence and self-worth? Their problem solving skills? Their native curiosity? Their creativity? Have they learned to work on their own and to work in teams? Have they learned to cope with stress? To overcome obstacles? Most importantly, have they ‘learned to learn’ and have they come to love learning for its own sake? Do I sound New Age? Maybe! I do know this: in the coming years, the ability to acquire new skills, absorb new information, and solve new problems will be the mark of an educated person, not their SAT scores - to like to learn and to be good at it, not an ivy-league diploma. Now, if you are among those folks willing to sacrifice academic achievement in the service of various social objectives, you have by now no doubt concluded that I am on your side. You could not be more wrong! I believe that the social aspects of learning will facilitate the academic and that academic achievement, the mastery of subjects and skills, will help us realize our social goals. They are not at cross purposes; they go hand-in-hand. None of this has much to do with population-wide test scores, but if a student focused strategy is working, its success will ultimately show up in those scores. But that is a knock-on benefit; it can’t be the primary objective! Kids are like quanta. Bombarding them with information ( aka energy) does nothing; but just the right amount of energy delivered at just the right wavelength can bring about a quantum leap! So where does this leave us in our current educational crisis? Rather than a more of the same one-size-fits-all approach, we need to recognize that education takes place one student at a time. A society is not educated; its members are! Educators need to develop a PEP – “Personal Education Plan” for each student. That plan must attend to all aspects of education for all students, but in different proportions for different students, depending on their needs at particular points in their educational careers. Now I understand that we are ‘resource constrained’; a 1 to 1 teacher-student ratio is not in the cards. But longer school hours won’t come without a cost either…and the return on such an investment will be nil (or net negative). Better to take whatever we’re prepared to spend on more-of-the-same and invest it instead in programs and resources that would bring us closer to the realization of a PEP strategy for all students. 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.

Philosophy, theology, and science merge in Aletheia Today, the magazine for people who believe in God and science. Process philosophy, scripture study, and critical essays bring science and faith together with western philosophers like Alfred North Whitehead and Jean-Paul Sartre. Deep dives into the meaning of the Old Testamant, the New Testament, and where the Bible fits into modern-day society. Is God real? Does Heaven exist? Find your answers to life's questions at Aletheia Today. Inside This Issue The Great Convergence Science & The Yellow Submarine Part I Yellow Submarine is much more than just a delivery vehicle for the Beatles’ 1960s musical repertoire. The film addresses important ontological and cosmological issues, and it offers some truly remarkable scientific insights in the process. Jesus Meets Mister Spock Science and Religion should assist each other in pursuing the truth. Science can be too closed to the life of the spirit, the mind, imagination, thought, and creativity. Religion can be closed to anything new that threatens its perception of reality. Genesis Wins Nobel Prize Traditionally, Nobels are awarded only to ‘living recipients’ and only for work completed in the preceding year. In its statement, the committee said it felt an exception was needed in this instance “in order to right a grievous wrong.” Hows and Whys How vs. why... Science stands in the present and looks back in search of causes. Religion stands in the present and looks forward in search of reasons. Theology The Riddle of Job If I do my job in this essay, you may become a modern-day version of Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, who “stoppeth one of three." You’ll be spreading the truth about Job to anyone who’ll listen. Christology 101 Why is this Christological formulation so important for the development of Christian theology? Philosophy The Problem of Good The purpose of this essay is not to resolve, or even rehash, the Problem of Evil, but rather to situate the Problem of Evil in the context of an even broader problem that I call, ‘the Problem of Good’. Eternity vs. Immortality Do our lives have meaning? You bet they do! But what is that meaning, and from where does it come? Culture & The Arts The Meaning of Music God is his essence; we, on the other hand, are each free to create our own essences. Unfortunately, most of us are making a hash of it! Music elucidates the pre-verbal, non-phenomenal structures of the real world. Its meaning is not subject to logical analysis, scientific verification, or mathematical proof. The only test of music’s validity is its beauty. Mary Poppins, Sufi Master The story of Mary Poppins is the story of one small boy’s initiation into the teachings of Sufi spirituality and the secrets of Sufi mysticism. When the initiation of Michael Banks is complete, Michael has come, at least in some measure, to know the mind of God. Not bad for seven-years-old! Parshat Emor: Making It All Count “Counting the Omer – like the shemitah cycle – invites us to believe that each day, week and year is count-worthy, valuable and unique.” Haiku Corner Does this formal rigor seem like it would be inhibiting? The reverse is true. It’s liberating! Tweens, Teens, & Young Adults Vacuum Monster Is there any such thing as Vacuum Monster in our universe today? Sure, there is! Quark Soup “I once filled the entire universe, but for less than a second. I am 100,000 times hotter than the center of the sun, but I am still a liquid. I am denser than anything in the universe, except a black hole, but I flow 20 times more easily and smoothly than water. Who am I?” Education, Evangelization, & Prayer Messengers Among Us If God sent His only Son to earth, not just to save us from our sins, but because He knew how difficult it was for humans to believe in something we cannot see, why wouldn’t He still use that tactic today? Knowing our vulnerabilities, understanding us the way a parent understands their child, why wouldn’t God send us messages through people we trust? Faith Chaplain in a Secular World As a chaplain, I am allowed to talk about faith or pray with a client if that is what he or she wants. Like many people in our secular and even religious society, I am to be there for ‘those of all faiths or none.’ Drumming to Inner Peace The biggest connection I made between music and spirituality was that they both focus on the present moment. When I managed to stay in the present moment in both the song and in life, I realized there was no time for anxiety. Prayer For Resting in God's Timing, Ways, and Rhythm My timing can lead to stress and striving, but God says not so fast, my daughter. Additional Reading Can't get enough of Aletheia Today's content? Check out the books that inspire our magazine. Challenges The Haiku Challenge Join the Haiku Challenge and have your 17-syllable poem shared in a a future issue of AT Magazine. The Faith Chaplain Challenge Do you have a story about sharing your faith in a secular workplace? Send it to us, and you may see it in a future issue!

< Back Square Pegs in Round Holes David Cowles May 6, 2025 “2,450 years after Plato we still don’t have a clue…and we won’t, until we…stop trying to fill round holes with square pegs.” It began I suppose with Plato (c. 375 BCE)…like most everything else. His Timaeus , which Alfred North Whitehead dubbed the foundation of all Western philosophy, sought to explain the World in terms of the 5 aptly named ‘Platonic Solids’. The faces of each of these solids can be constructed from planar triangles. Plato’s concept of a triangle involved a flat construction, consisting of three straight line segments, intersecting at three nodes (vertices), and forming three internal angles, the sum of which is always 180°. No surprise here: Plato was ‘bookended’ by Pythagoras ( Pythagorean Theorem ) and Euclid ( The Elements ). Even today, when folks refer to a ‘triangle’, they most likely mean exactly what Plato meant 2450 years ago. Most likely…but not necessarily. The concept of ‘triangle’ inherited uncritically by, and then from, Plato has been expanded by more recent ‘discoveries’ in geometry and topology. Plato’s triangles are defined in the context of what is now known as Euclidean Geometry. However, certain ‘non-Euclidean’ geometries are internally consistent and externally relevant, at least in some applications. Generally speaking, non-Euclidean geometries apply to curved rather than flat surfaces. As a result, either parallel lines do not exist or, if they do, they intersect. The internal angles of a non-Euclidean triangle will not necessarily total 180° (may be more or less depending on the curvature of the surface) and the shortest distance between two points may be an arc. Most importantly for our purposes, a non-Euclidean cube will have curved edges. These newly discovered geometries still describe intuitively recognizable configurations of reality. We are all familiar, for example, with the surface of a ball. Whether your geometry is Euclidean or ‘non’, whether your topology is level or curved, whether you’re a flat-earther or a round-earther, certain generally accepted principles still apply; for example: If you’re walking from Boston to Detroit, you can expect to have many adventures along the way; keyword: along the way ! There is one kind of adventure you do not expect. You’re not concerned, like Stephen Dedalus in Joyce’s Ulysses , that you are about to step off into Eternity, or what amounts to the same thing, that you’ll suddenly and unexpectedly find yourself in Memphis. That’s because any path along any surface will be continuous. I call it the One Foot in Front of the Other property; Mathematicians call it the ‘Archimedean Property’. Translation: no one just ‘suddenly shows up’ in Memphis. It turns out that there are interesting and internally consistent geometries that don’t include the Archimedean Property and where people do suddenly ‘materialize’ on Beale Street. But not today; keep a look out for future TWS on that subject. Euclidean geometry is just a special, degenerate case (zero curvature) of more general non-Euclidean geometry. Just as we use the positive term ‘Entropic’ to represent a loss of actual order so we can use the positive term ‘Euclidean’ to represent a loss of potential variety. Why limit yourself to boring old 180° triangles when the angles of non-Euclidean triangles can add to any positive number up to 540°, depending on the curvature of the surface? Ok, I can smugly pose that question today…prior to c. 1800 CE, it was assumed that there was only one geometry… and that it was Euclidean . Imagine. For more than 2 millennia, Euclid was the only game in town. That’s 2000 years in a row that Euclid won all 4 PGA majors (the Masters, the US Open, the PGA Championship, and the ‘British’ Open)…and he wasn’t even a very good golfer. (You’d be embarrassed to show up at your posh country club with his handicap.) How’d he do it? Simple. He was the only golfer on the course. He was the GOAT, albeit a very lonely goat. Today, Euclid is just one entrant in a crowded field…and he struggles every week just to make the cut. We should keep Euclid in mind whenever we’re tempted to think ‘we know it all’. Remember: the thing you’re most sure of in all the world may turn out to be completely wrong! I am reminded of Sir Roger Penrose. A precocious lad, he was middle school age when his math teacher presented the class with a classic problem in geometry: “There is only one solution to this problem. No one has been able to prove that there’s only one but we’re sure that’s true.” Never say ‘sure’ to a rebellious teenager. Them’s fightin’ words, especially to a kid who would one day become ‘the smartest man on earth’. Next day, he arrived at school with a second solution to the problem. Then he discovered other solutions. Today, we know that there are an infinite number of solutions to the so-called ‘tiling problem’. So what? Who cares? Euclid was a genius with the best of intentions and his ideas no doubt did a lot of good; but he also took Western metaphysics down a rabbit hole from which it is still struggling to emerge. For two millennia we assumed that we lived in a ‘flatland’ made up entirely of straight lines; we don’t. On the contrary, everything curves! You’re 14 years old and you’ve just enrolled in your first high school physics class. Day one, your teacher (you go to a progressive school) takes the class to a billiards parlor (pool hall to you) so that you can observe first hand ‘cause and effect’ in action. Balls collide, momentum is transferred, angles of incidence determine angles of reflection, etc. It’s all very neat and clean…and linear. The real world is rarely neat and clean and it’s never linear. In fact, it is massively non-linear and recursive. Everything affects everything else. Worse, everything that ‘acts’ acts on itself at the same time. Think karma . Whatever you’re doing to another, you’re doing the same to yourself. “Do unto others as you would do unto yourself.” Ultimately, the foundation of all ethics will turn out to be self-interest…once we understand what those interests are. This gives the meme, ‘whoever lives by the sword dies by the sword’, a whole new meaning. Unfortunately, Euclidean linearity has infected every corner of our thought process. We are determined to describe the world in terms of discrete entities (subjects) acting on (verbs) other discrete entities (objects); we are committed to viewing all ‘transmissions of influence’ as straight lines. Welcome to the modern Indo-European language family. As a result, what we know, or at least what we knew before 1800, conforms to the straight-edged geometry of a Euclidean cube. Let’s suppose we know everything we can know, not everything there is to know, but everything we can know. Suppose we model everything there is to know as a sphere, dense with information; everything we can know would be a subset of that sphere. But because of our Euclidean blinders, whatever we do (or can) know must conform to the geometry of a straight edged cube. Suppose you say, “We already know everything we can know…or close to it.” Ok, I’ll spot you that. As a Harvard professor (c. 1896) told graduating seniors re physics, we know virtually everything that it is possible to know. Whatever we don’t know isn’t worth knowing. According to this model, the cube of what we can (and do) know must fit inside the sphere of what is knowable; it’s a subset after all. Obviously, we want as much of the volume of the sphere as possible to lie inside the inscribed cube. But we are ultimately limited by the fact that our sphere is round while our cube must have straight edges. So, the 8 vertices of the cube, and only those 8 points, will lie on the surface of the sphere. Still as long as the volume of what we can know is close to the volume of the sphere of what’s knowable, we’re ok for most purposes, right? I mean, nobody likes a know-it-all. A little bit of uncertainty ( aka ignorance) keeps life interesting, don’t you think? I’m fine with this as long as the cubic volume of knowable information includes most of the spherical volume of all information. So how close is it? Is it a 90% match? Surely it can’t be less than 80%, right? Would you believe it’s slightly less than 37%? By confining our thinking to phenomena that can be modeled via Euclidean geometry, we limit what we can know to less than 3/8ths of what is available to be known. A dismal performance! On the other hand, putting the same problem in a non-Euclidean context allows the edges of the cube to bow and extend so that they template the inner surface of the sphere. By analogy, our insistence on treating the non-linear universe as if it were an assemblage of linear forms leaves us 63% blind. 2450 years after Plato we still don’t have a clue…and we won’t, until we free our thought process from its Euclidean play pen and stop trying to fill round holes with square pegs. Image: M. C. Escher. Relativity. 1953. Lithograph print. 27.7 cm × 29.2 cm. 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 So You Want to Live Forever? David Cowles Aug 15, 2026 “Life is paradoxical. The longer we live, the shorter our lives seem.” 2000 words, 8 minute read If you’ve always craved immortality, your time has come at last…maybe! A group of individuals who call themselves Vitalists believe that death per se is humanity’s core problem. (And just like that, I’m back in middle school!) Influencer Bryan Johnson, for example, speaks of plans to create a new religion in which “the (human) body is God.” At last, God made in our image and likeness! “Who’s a thunk it?” ( Hairspray ) Recently, Johnson added psychedelics to his “God is us” tool kit. No, it’s not psylocibin or LSD; it’s venom from the Bufo Toad. And you don’t smoke it, snort it, or shoot it; you lick it! Right off of the back of your new favorite amphibian. How fun is that ! Caveat : The licked frog does not turn into a member of a royal family. Apparently, ‘a lick is not a kiss’. However, you may find yourself living in a palace (i.e. you may find that your current residence is in fact a palace…and always has been and you just didn’t notice). Molecule 5-MeO-DMT, the ‘active ingredient’ in the venom, does double duty: it reveals our spiritual divinity and it promotes our physical immortality. *** Vitalism is gaining ground worldwide! A popup city in Montenegro (Zuzalu, 2023) was created by people who wanted to establish a “longevity state” - a jurisdiction dedicated to lifespan extension, which would also facilitate access to unproven but potentially life-extending drugs. A similar effort in Próspera, Honduras, has created a permissive environment for biotech companies to perform unusual clinical trials. ZuVillage in Georgia (the country, not the state); and Zelar City in Berlin (Germany, not NH), offer their own spin on the original formula. And every May, ‘Vitalist Bay’ pops up somewhere in the SF area. Putting the dubious science of immortality to one side for now, does the more realistic goal of ‘life extension’ make sense? “Of course it does,” you say. “Who doesn’t want to live as long as possible?” Well, you do, apparently; but most people don’t – but that’s another subject for another day. Life is paradoxical. The longer we live, the shorter our lives seem. The problem? We don’t heed our own advice. We behave as though prior results do guarantee future performance. At 20 we cannot be convinced that we will not live forever. And who can blame us? The first twenty years went by so slowly that 80/20 → ∞. Subjectively, time seems inexhaustible. 20 years of adult living corrects our perspective: 80/40 = 2, but then 80/50 = 1 and 80/80 → 0. Believe it or not, this bizarre scenario can be expressed by a very simple mathematical function (where f(x) = subjective life span and x = the ratio of ‘average life span’ to ‘years lived’): *** Riddle me this : What do you and I have in common with every other human being who’s ever lived? Don’t say ‘death’ because death is not something we have ; in fact death is defined precisely as the absence of a we . I don’t have my own death, and I certainly don’t have yours …and you certainly don’t have mine (I hope). According to the local sage, Pop Wisdom, death is one stage in the process we call ‘life’. It isn’t! Death is the limit of life, not an aspect of it. Just as Achilles is forever infinitesimally short of the finish line, so you are always infinitesimally short of being dead. You cannot ‘be dead’ and be you ; therefore you cannot experience death. The sentence ‘I am dead’ (or even ‘I will die’) is oxymoronic. For Achilles to break the tape, or for you to be dead, it is necessary to employ a computational device called Calculus . Fortunately, the real world doesn’t obey the conventions of arithmetic. Less fortunately, when I explained this to Sister Mary Martha in 3 rd grade, I got something other than the Fields medal I was expecting . No, the correct answer is not death . Give up then? Ok, here goes: “Every human being who’s ever lived had, has, or will have a lifespan of one day…or less.” No, not all at the same time…at least I hope not. Someday it will happen that you will have a lifespan of one day or less (of course you almost certainly won’t know it at the time). Most of us believe we have lifespans of more than one day. But no one born alive fails to have a life span of ‘one day… or less’ . Of course, by now you’ve realized that there’s nothing sacrosanct about one day : it’s just a placeholder. It would be equally true to say that every human being has a life span of ‘one second or less’ …or ‘one millennium or less’ . Whatever, it’s always true! The key is ‘or less’. When it suits us, we think of periods of time as if they were beads on a string, one day following the next ad nauseum . But time is more like the Tower of Babel: each floor rests on the floor beneath it. Your top floor penthouse is essentially the sum of all the floors (and their occupants) below: Enjoy…and don’t worry about all the folks you had to climb over to get to the top. Although the circumstances of our births may differ, O Prince, the being born of it is the same for both of us…and for every other human being (every other living organism?) that ever lives. We diverge from a shared singularity into a solipsistic multiplicity , from undifferentiated potentiality into unique actuality. I am other than others. I am not not ! YHWH’s “I am what am” = “I am not what’s not.” (Exodus 3: 14) The circumstances of our deaths may differ. You may die, surrounded by loved ones with flights of angels singing you to your rest; I may bleed out in a ditch somewhere, waiting in vain for a good Samaritan to rescue me. Regardless, in the end we will once again be equal, identical, one. The becoming dead of it is the same for both of us. So ‘being born’ we diverge and live out our respective lifespans in perfect isolation only to remerge when ‘becoming dead’. Being born and becoming dead are limits and we all converge toward those limits. Shorter lifespans continually succeed longer ones; gradually, lifespan differentials (actually, all identifying differentials) collapse as we approach our common singularity. *** My life is defined by its limits: I am by I am not . What is ‘being’ other than ‘not-not-being’? Once upon a time I did not exist and someday I will exist no more. You too! In between our birth day and our death day we will each have what we call ‘a life’, and every such life is radically unique (i.e. no elements in common). But, as our respective lifespans shorten, our common fate begins to eclipse our unique experience. Two prayers are foundational in Roman Catholic spirituality: the Lord’s Prayer and the Hail Mary . There we pray to ‘Mary, Mother of God ’, asking her to ‘pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death’. In fact this is that hour! The hour of our death is always now and every now is that hour. There is but one birth and one death and every human being (certain mystical figures potentially excepted) approaches both as a limit. The end of all process ( doxa ) is identity ( Aletheia ) – Parmenides At the beginning and at the end we are not just equal, we are identical (but of course we are no longer we ); and if we are identical, then we are one , i.e. a single entity. The limit of every unique ‘I’ is a common ‘not-I’. There is but one ‘not-I’ but every ‘not-not-I’ is unique. You and I are entangled organisms (like Bell’s entangled particles). Birth is our Big Bang, death our Heat Death. Between these universal Bigs , each of us lives ‘my so-called life’. No two lives are the same. In fact, no two lives have even a single element (event) in common, but all lives diverge from and converge toward a common limit. Exception : God! By definition God stands outside the warp and woof of spacetime. If God is an element in any life, then God is an element in every life and constitutes our single, common point of contact with ‘the transcendent other’; that shared contact accounts for the Solidarity of the Universe ( aka the Mind of God). Intellectual History consists primarily of the search for analogies across lives…and of course analogies abound - they form the basis of language, art, society, and all culture - but there are no identities (other than being born and becoming dead ). We do not intersect, i.e. we share no experiences. From the moment of birth each of us lives out a totally unique, subjectively isolated life…right up to the moment of death; along the way we are comforted – and alienated - by our reflection as seen in the billions of surrounding mirrors we call ‘other people’. All of which makes the contemporary Vitalist movement especially perplexing. I mean, life extension to what end? Live an hour or less, live a century or more, ultimately you share a common (albeit infinitesimal) lifespan with every other human being who has ever lived. Does the long lived Sea Turtle experience life differently from the May Fly? (They experience different lives, but their experience of life is the same.) The arrow of mortality goes in one direction only. All our ‘lifespans’ continually shorten until they converge at non-entity; but what of our so-called lives? Do they count for nothing? Just so… unless you believe that experience somehow transcends death, i.e. entropy, spacetime. No matter how varied our lives may have been, dying is the ultimate leveler. Death is the Dictatorship of the Proletariat (which is not to say that the Dictatorship of the Proletariat is death, Comrade Lenin). Any experience, by definition, must differ from an alternative (real or imagined). That’s what experience is: differentiation. Those aspects of being that are common to all (e.g. birth and death) are not ‘experienced’; they simply constitute the human condition . *** “ We are such stuff as dreams are made on.” (Shakespeare, The Tempest ) Dreams can be complex experiences, crammed full of action and emotion and inter-personal relationships, yet within a second of waking up, all that has vanished without consequence and often without memory. If being is ‘difference that makes a difference’ (Bateson) then our dreams do not necessarily meet that criterion…neither do our lives! So life extension ? What’s to extend? Dream time? Unless events transcend spacetime, they are nothing but ‘ice cream castles in the air’. All dreams are the same at the moment we awaken; likewise all lives converge at the moment of death. If you were a precocious preschooler, some well-meaning buttinsky might have tried to comfort you following the death of a loved one (or pet) by analogizing: “Now we are caterpillars, but when we die, we become butterflies! ” Exactly so! Caterpillars (generally) do not ‘grow’ into butterflies; their genetic material totally reorganizes. They undergo the equivalent of a phase change. They both are, and are not, what they were (or what they will become). Nothing is added, nothing is taken away, but nothing is the same. But does the butterfly know that once upon a time it was a caterpillar? Does the caterpillar know that it is on its way to becoming a butterfly? When the butterfly emerges from the chrysalis, does it even know that anything has changed? Will we? 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 Christianity David Cowles Jun 11, 2021 In an earlier post, we talked about the need to think ‘complementarily’ in order to understand the cosmos and our place in it. We spoke, for example, of the need to understand sub-atomic entities as both waves and particles. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. Ultimately, we need to think of the entire universe in such terms. In an earlier post, we talked about the need to think ‘complementarily’ in order to understand the cosmos and our place in it. We spoke, for example, of the need to understand sub-atomic entities as both waves and particles. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. Ultimately, we need to think of the entire universe in such terms. For example, I own a pair of socks. For the most part, I wear them “outside-out and inside-in”. But thanks to the miracle of topology, we have the option to reverse this relationship. If we choose, we can wear our socks “inside-out”. My grandfather, for reasons known only to him, did this on a daily basis; and I must admit I’ve done it more than once merely out of carelessness. On a much deeper level, the topology of the sock is also the topology of the universe. ‘God’ (however you understand that term) is either the totality – not the sum – of all the entities and events that we call universe OR God is a transcendent being in whom that we call universe subsists. This formulation is characteristic of almost all the world’s religions. Christianity, however, turns the sock inside out. God (“The Father”) is still the entity that transcends or totalizes the events we call universe. But God (“The Son”) is a quantum entity within that universe. That is why Catholics, rightly in my view, call Mary “the mother of God”. Here’s where complementarianism comes into play. Christian theology ‘asks’ (or demands) that believe that the sock is at all times simultaneously both outside-out and inside-out. That reality itself is also God (“The Spirit”), which is God manifest (not always perfectly but always to some extent) in each and every event in our universe. 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 Everything Exists! David Cowles Mar 25, 2026 “Intelligent agents (us)…decide what exists. But defining what ‘what exists’ is – that’s another matter entirely.” 1100 words, 5 minute read Was it a million years ago or just yesterday? As usual, my 5 year old grandson is debating with his older brother. The proposition this morning? Resolved : That Santa Claus exists. I won’t take you through the intricacies of the argument, but jumping to the conclusion, the younger one ends the debate with, “Everything exists! QED” (Ok, so I added the QED part; I mean, he’s precocious but even that has its limits). In an earlier article on this site we discussed the Dark Universe . No one knows what it is. That’s why we call it dark . But most everyone agrees that it does exist. But according to Stevie Wonder (1972), “When you believe in things that you don’t understand then you suffer. Superstition ain’t the way.” We are used to reasoning from a known cause to a projected effect. Depending on the precision of the projection, we are talking infinitesimal chance, real number probability, or super-determinism. In the case of the Dark Universe we reason from a known effect (gravity) to a retrojected cause. All that we really know is that we can’t account for observed topology relying solely on the Standard Model of Particle Physics. There’s got to be something more, even though we have no idea what. There’s always got to be something more! A fancier bottle of wine, a faster car, a fatter 401k. Once upon a time, there had to be gods to account for celestial motion and the processes of nature, there had to be empty space (a receptacle) to permit the emergence of matter/energy, there had to be a universe-pervading aether to hold things together, and there had to be hidden variables to account for ‘spooky action at a distance’. (Einstein) Except, as far as we know, there are none of these things…and we’re ok with that, now . *** Imagine you are God. According to the English language translation of Genesis 1:3, you said, “Let there be light and there was light.” According to most interpretations, there was void and the word of God created energy/matter. But the full text also supports a minority interpretation: There was an insensible, chaotic medium out of which God culled related elements, which he labeled ‘light’, thereby injecting primal order into primordial chaos. The remainder of Genesis 1 details the unfolding of that order into the many splendored worlds we love. Defenders of this minority view have found themselves on the wrong side of Roman Catholic dogma: i.e. creatio ex nihilo, creation out of nothing. But that doesn’t have to be so. The eminent 20th century theologian, Bill Clinton, summarized the dilemma: “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.” Is chaos something…or nothing? Without order, does anything exist? We believe, for example, that entropy (disorder) was minimal at Big Bang and that it will be maximal at Heat Death. We have no problem saying that nothing ( nihilo ) existed ‘prior’ to Big Bang, not even time itself; we should have no problem saying that nothing will exist ‘after’ Heat Death. Therefore, maximum entropy can be synonymous with nihilo and so the two interpretations of ontogenesis converge…in orthodoxy. Light exists because God said it exists. Same for sky (1:8), earth and sea (1:10), plant life (1:11), celestial bodies (1:14), and animal life (1:24). In Genesis 2, God shares his power of creation (i.e. ordering, naming) with humans, resulting in speciation (2:20) and socialization (2:23), in other words, the world as we know it today. The Dark Universe exists because we say it exists. Light, etc. exists because God says it exists. Society exists, again, because we say so. Working with God, we too inject order (local) into the chaotic medium (universal); we are co-creators. The Dark Universe exists, God exists, Santa Claus exists! We know they exist because we see their effects. Gravity exists, the universe exists, and once every year presents appear under the Christmas tree. We know nothing of the Dark Universe, God, or Santa Claus per se . We only know that there are phenomena we cannot currently account for in any other way. Most adults will tell you that they don’t believe in Santa Claus. They say that because they believe they can account for the annual appearance of presents under a tree by other means. They cite an unholy (secular) trinity (Family, Amazon, and MasterCard) to explain the unmistakable phenomena we know as Christmas . They might just as well say, “Of course Santa Claus exists. What we call ‘Santa Claus’ is a confluence of kinship, commerce, and finance.” But out of respect for Occam’s Razor, they don’t. But in 1897, Francis Church, looking at exactly the same phenomena, did! He famously wrote, “ Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound…” Mr. Church looks at a confluence of love, generosity, and devotion and chooses to call it ‘Santa Claus’; other adults look at the same phenomena and find no reason to ‘name’ an additional entity. Likewise, folks who ‘don’t believe in God’ claim they can explain the existence and character of our universe without hypothesizing a responsible entity. They combine physics, chemistry, biology, and cosmology to account for “Heaven and Earth and all things, visible and invisible.” (Nicene Creed) The Dark Universe poses a slightly different problem. There are currently no proposals that convincingly account for cosmic phenomena based solely on today’s catalogue of particles and forces. But that doesn’t mean there won’t be. So my grandson was right, the younger that is: everything does exist! The Dark Universe, God, and Santa. The challenge is defining what it is that exists. When we use language to describe reality, we arbitrarily shatter the uniform glass sphere into a million shards. In the end, it doesn’t much matter how the crystal crumbles…as long as we can reassemble the pieces to recreate a smooth globe. A jigsaw puzzle might be an even better analogy. One image, divisible into indefinitely many, randomly shaped pieces that can be reassembled to recreate the image on the box. We , i.e. intelligent agents, aka ‘God, his angels, and (us) his saints’, decide what exists ( Dasein , Heidegger). But defining what ‘what exists’ is ( Wassein ) – that’s another matter entirely. *** Rembrandt’s 1632 oil on canvas uses dramatic chiaroscuro to depict a scholar seated in a vast, sun-drenched interior, symbolizing the light of human reason amidst the shadows of the unknown. The composition is anchored by a prominent winding staircase that suggests the complex, spiraling depths of philosophical thought and the search for hidden truths. While a second figure quietly tends a fire in the background, the painting remains a profound meditation on the internal struggle to understand the nature of existence and the divine. 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 “ It was God who made Pharaoh obstinate." (Ex-9:12) What is our excuse? Deborah Kornfeld Apr 4, 2023 "...despite the few drops of wine, what do the plagues have to teach us?" I always look forward to the plagues. That part of the Haggadah recited in a singsong ritualistic manner is accompanied by the small thrill of putting my finger into the wine cup and marking my plate. It carries with it a memory that despite the power and might and Technicolor special effects accompanying our redemption, we need to be mindful that the Egyptians suffered. In the exquisite theatre of the Seder, every participant has an active role in this custom. To make out seders lively and fun for the children, we often decorate our table with frogs and beasts and lice- a real table-top menagerie. Yet despite the few drops of wine, what do the plagues have to teach us? Consider the first plague- “blood”. The Torah reads: “God said to Moses,” Tell Aaron to take his staff and extend his hand over the waters of Egypt- over their rivers, their canals, their reservoirs, and every place where water is kept- and the water shall turn into blood. There will be blood throughout all Egypt, even in wooden barrels and stone jars. Moses and Aaron did exactly as God had instructed, and Aaron held the staff up and then struck the Nile’s water in the presence of Pharaoh and his officials. The Nile’s water was transformed into blood. The fish in the Nile died, and the river became so polluted that the Egyptians were no longer able to drink the Nile’s water. There was blood everywhere in Egypt…. The Egyptians dug around the Nile for drinking water, since they could not drink any water from the river. After God struck the Nile, it remained that way for seven full days (Ex 7:19-231). They could have certainly applied for extra aid and qualified as a national disaster. It must have been horrific. People and wild life must have died. How could Pharaoh have been so stubborn and entrenched in his way of thinking? How could he have ignored this beginning of such a great wave of suffering? Now the answer regarding Pharaoh is found in Exodus 9:12-“It was God who made Pharaoh obstinate." There are many explanations and interpretations concerning the plagues. A midrash suggests that the Egyptians were punished measure for measure for the cruelty and indifference to the suffering of their Israelite slaves. Rav Kook explained that God brought the plagues upon the Egyptians in order that they should understand the essence of God’s presence in the world. His influence over everything. His intimate relationship with His world and His ability to do anything.” Another modern scholar explains the plagues as emblematic of our greatest fears. Shai Zarhi, an Israeli Educator, writes: “The plagues Gode visited on the Egyptians in Egypt seem to be a parade of people’s greatest fears. They are a mythological show of the power of the living vs. primal fear. Starting from the blood of birth and of death, through primal human fears of small creatures (lice) and large ones (wild beasts), fear of financial ruin (locusts), fear of the dark (losing direction and meaning), we face the greatest fear, the fear for our children’s lives-loss of the future. Tonight, a night to commemorate the past, we see the mercy of God’s protections, look out from our places at a world full of fears and dangers and pray for another quiet year.” The term used to describe Pharaoh’s indifference in the face of these disasters is “Kaved Lev “which is translated as meaning obstinate, stubbornly refusing to change his opinion or course of action despite the attempts to persuade him to do so. We are told in the Torah that God made Pharaoh obstinate so that this redemption would be spectacular with an abundance of special effects and everyone involved would know that it was God himself who orchestrated this redemption. In the time of the Egyptians, many of the plagues were reversible. The bloody Nile was returned to clear potable water, the boils disappeared, and the frogs went away. We are not so lucky with our man-made plagues. When we pollute the waterways or impact on our climate or waste precious resources simply because of greed and/or indifference, we cannot always reverse the consequences of our actions and the consequences might endanger our most precious commodity, that being our future. This year when I dip my finger into my wine cup as we recite the names of the Biblical plagues, I will remember that these plagues did have grave consequences on the Egyptians, but I will also see each stain on my plate as a promise of action to protect the next generations. Unlike Pharaoh, I can’t blame God, this time it is in our hands. This is a republication with permission from The Jewish Pluralist . The author of this essay, Deborah Kornfeld, is a retired pediatric occupational therapist, aspiring climate and social justice activist, occasional essayist, shul chesed coordinator, loving mother, and safta. 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.