“What You See Is What You Get! Right…or wrong?” < Back R U WYSIWYG? David Cowles Oct 15, 2023 “What You See Is What You Get! Right…or wrong?” We live in a crazy world. There’s no doubt about that! Mythology, theology, philosophy, and science are some of the different ways we model this world. The result? Libraries full of conflicting theories…and no indisputable answers. Perhaps we’re overthinking things. Let’s simplify matters: What you see is what you get! Right…or wrong? WYSIWYG has champions across all intellectual disciplines. All we ‘know’ is what we ‘see’ (or sense) so why not build our models based on that data alone? Realism, naïve or otherwise; Materialism, Marxist or otherwise; Positivism, Logical or otherwise, plus Pragmatism and Empiricism – all assume that what you see is what you get. On the other side of the question, we also have some serious contenders: Homeric mythology, Judeo-Christian theology, Eastern spirituality, and Existentialist philosophy, to name a few. If it is true, that what you see is what you get, then we live in a self-contained, ontologically democratic universe, a flat world in which everything (‘what you get’) can be explained in terms of everything else (‘what you see’). Easy-peasy, lemon squeezy! Proponents of this view believe that human experience, aided by the tools of reason (e.g. logic and mathematics), provides sufficient information for us to account, fully or approximately, for the world we live in. So, mission accomplished , right? Let’s call these folks our ‘WYSIWYGs’. Of course, they’ll admit, we do not have all the answers yet, but we are close enough that we are entitled to have confidence that our project can, at least in theory, be completed. Most WYSIWYGs believe that it is ultimately possible to construct models of reality that account for our world within a tolerable range of accuracy based solely on the data of human experience. But is that true? Can a model that relies solely on the data of experience ever give a complete account of that experience, or of experience per se , or of the world that supports such experience? Alternatively, do we need to resort to something outside the realm of direct experience to complete our model? Once we have understood the world to the best of our ability, may we not still ask: “Is this all there is?” “Hold on,” you say. “Nothing is nothing without experience.” And you are correct! (Thank you for reading Aletheia Today .) But based on that direct experience, we can infer that something outside the realm of direct experience is influencing the data we glean from that experience. We can’t directly describe what we can’t experience (it’s ‘ineffable’) but we can describe its contours, the way it templates experience. Crazy? Well, when was the last time you saw the singularity at the heart of a Black Hole? Have you ever heard a ‘Big Bang’? And don’t get me started about strings, dark matter, and the multiverse! We reason from what we know to what we don’t know, every day. Reality is like a jigsaw puzzle…with one piece missing. After several days of painstaking work, the puzzle is complete, and beautiful, but with a hole in it. From the hole, we can deduce virtually everything that can be known about our missing piece, but we still don’t have the piece itself. It is generally accepted today that all models, languages, symbolic systems have limitations, boundaries if you will. The question is whether there is anything beyond those boundaries that really matters. Blaise Pascal wrote, “Faith indeed tells us what the senses do not tell, but not the contrary of what they see. It is above them…not contrary to them.” For Pascal, faith was necessary to complete the picture that the senses paint; for Pascal, faith was the missing piece. How do the differences between these competing views manifest in real life situations? Consider three practical examples: Neurobiologists have made great strides toward understanding the human brain and how it works. But many people feel that we are no closer than we ever were to explaining the phenomenon of consciousness. Certainly, we have theories about the physiological conditions necessary for conscious experience to occur, but have we accounted for the experience per se ? And if not, will we ever be able to do so? Similarly, astrophysicists have made great strides toward understanding the evolution of the universe. Indeed, we seem to have pushed the fog of ignorance all the way back to the first few seconds of time…and perhaps even beyond that, all the way to Big Bang itself. But is this enough? Have we accounted for the phenomenon of being itself? Have we truly answered the age-old question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” Finally, quantum field theory has been called the most successful scientific theory of all time. It predicts phenomena with approximately perfect accuracy; it has never been convincingly falsified by any experiment. That said, do we really understand what is happening at the quantum level of reality? All quantum physicists are capable of making the same astoundingly accurate predictions; yet they use a myriad of different models to account for their results. The positivist’s answer to this dilemma is simply to deny the meaningfulness of the questions themselves: (1) Consciousness is physiology; (2) Cosmos is Being; (3) QFT is its predictions. This last point is what’s called the ‘Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics’. According to Copenhagen , the accuracy of the predictions is all that matters. Models are meaningless. And yet, 90 years after Copenhagen, we’re still obsessed with our models! In Copenhagen, the scientific community shouted in unison, “Grow up!” And we did, for a while, but pretty soon we went back to building our models. The positivists’ solution is simple: meta-questions have no meaning. We have gone as far as we can go because there is nowhere else to go (Nietzsche). If you are still asking questions about consciousness or Being or the reality underlying quantum measurements, it is simply because you don’t understand those phenomena; if you did, you would understand that such questions are meaningless (Wittgenstein). But does saying make it so? Is our proclivity for formulating meta-questions evidence of our mental laziness…or testimony to our human spirit? According to French philosopher Albert Camus , the patron saint of the Absurd, it is human nature to seek unifying principles, even if such principles do not exist or are unavailable to us. Then we are Sisyphus, forever condemned to ask questions that have no answers or whose answers are beyond the grasp of gnosis . But are ‘not-knowing’ and ‘not-being’ one and the same thing? Is ‘absence of evidence’ ‘evidence of absence’? There are indeterminacies inherent in all conceptual systems (Gödel’s Incompleteness) and in all physical systems (Heisenberg’s Uncertainty). These limitations guarantee at least some separation between what can be and what we can know . At their best, anti-WYSIWYGs ground their position on what they ‘see’. For them, experience is a vector pointing toward a reality beyond perception and logic. For example, we ‘see’ things that we recognize as ‘beautiful’. We know they’re beautiful, but Aristotle notwithstanding, we can’t define Beauty, and we certainly can’t account for the presence of Beauty in our world. The same argument can be applied to Justice, Truth, and even Good itself. In a flat, self-contained, and ontologically democratic universe, there is no objective basis for valuing any one entity over any other. Existentialists might say that we are free to assign our own values to things…and they’d be right. But if those values are not rooted in something outside us, what difference do they make? Aren’t they just arbitrary projections of ‘taste’? I refrain from killing you, not because it is objectively wrong (Torah) but because the idea of killing any human being is distasteful to me. Any argument against arbitrariness must refer to something beyond the plane of ontological democracy. (Nietzsche) A world with values cannot be flat; it must be hierarchical, and hierarchy cannot function in a plane (unless you’re talking first class seating on an air plane ). In a flat world, how could the phenomenon of value claim aesthetic or ethical priority over anything else? Ludwig Wittgenstein: “No statement of facts can ever be, or imply, a judgment of absolute value…all the facts described would, as it were, stand on the same level.” How often do we find Wittgenstein agreeing with Thomas Aquinas? Aquinas advanced 5 ‘proofs’ for the existence of God, but only one, the 4th, still interests philosophers: “The fourth way is taken from the gradation to be found in things. Among beings, there are some more and some less good, true, noble and the like. But more and less are predicated of different things according as they resemble in their different ways something which is the maximum…so that there is something which is truest, something best, something noblest…and this we call God.” Thomas may not have proven the existence of God, but he may have proven that what you get cannot be reduced to what you see. The existence of Value, if you believe in Value, challenges the underlying premise of WYSIWYG, namely that we live in a universe bereft of ontological gradations. The Latin hymn, Veni Sancte Spiritus sums it up: “ Sine tuo numine, nihil est in homine, nihil est innoxium ”, which roughly translates “without you (God) human beings are empty and everything is noxious”. So, are you WYSIWYG…or anti-WYSIWYG? Admit it, you’d love to be WYSIWYG…and so would I. We could be tenured professors together at an Ivy League university! If only we could convince ourselves… Going solely on what we see, we must accept a world that came to be accidentally, that evolves purposelessly, and that self-destructs inevitably. Suffering overwhelms joy (The Buddha). Islands of order, virtue, truth, and beauty are eroded by entropy, and everything is ultimately erased by time. The world comes from nothing and returns to nothing. All of cosmic history amounts to nothing more than the life span of a self-annihilating virtual particle pair. All the things we do in life amount to nothing more than rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic . Ugh! But on the other hand, abandoning WYSIWYG comes at a price. We must accept that we cannot adequately model the world based solely on experience. We must add elements to our model that we cannot ‘prove’, logically, mathematically, or scientifically. We are necessarily now with Pascal (above) in the realm of ‘faith’. So what might an anti-WYSIWYG model look like? Amazingly, the ancient Greek philosopher Parmenides, often called both the ‘father of western philosophy’ and the ‘father of western science’, provided us with just such a model. Qua scientist, Parmenides was a keen observer and used those observations to construct remarkably accurate models of myriad physical and astronomical phenomena. But, qua philosopher, he understood that the world itself could not be fully explained solely on the basis of such observations. For Parmenides, a world must have two faces or aspects, one seen, one unseeable. He called the former the Way of Appearance ( Doxa ) and the later the Way of Truth ( Aletheia ). Now the Way of Appearance is just what you’d expect: “To come to be and to perish, to be and not to be, to shift place and to exchange bright color.” This is a world we recognize: discrete objects and events, coming to be, then passing away, moving through space, interacting with others, and exchanging qualities in the process. But the Way of Truth is something else again: “What is ungenerated and imperishable, whole, single-limbed, steadfast and complete…Nor was it once, nor will it be, since it is, now, all together, one, continuous…Nor is it divisible, since it all alike is…it is full of what is…” 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 Harvest Issue 2023 Share Previous Next Do you like what you just read? 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< Back And Then... David Cowles Apr 19, 2022 This was perhaps the last time we could say, “God is in his heaven, and all is right with the world.” Back to the year 1000 AD! Millennial years are special years…I mean they only come once every thousand years or so…so they’re pretty rare. Most folks never experience a change of Millennia during their lifetimes. I did, and no doubt many of you did too. Think back to the year 2000 AD! Planes fell from the sky, the power grid collapsed, virtually all electronics, including computers, failed. Except, of course, none of these things actually happened. December 31 went, and January 1 came…thud. December 31, 999: it is likely that the majority of Western Europeans believe that the world would end in the coming hours. Huge crowds filled the Vatican and the streets of Rome; they awaited the Apocalypse. But AD 1000 is important for other reasons. Otto III, the boy king, is Emperor. Riding into battle at the age of 6, leading an army at the age of 12, crowned king of the Germans at 14 and Holy Roman Emperor at 16; Otto was still only 20 years-old in the year 1000. Otto’s lifelong tutor and mentor, Gerbert, sits on the Papal Throne, reigning as Pope Sylvester II. Gerbert was pope, but he may have been better known as the leading scientist and mathematician of his age. This was perhaps the last time we could say, “God is in his heaven, and all is right with the world.” Church and state, the sacred and the secular, science and religion, faith and curiosity all flowed together and co-existed peacefully. And then… Image: Otto III from The Gospels of Otto Thoughts While Shaving is published on Tuesdays and Thursdays. To subscribe to our newsletter, complete the form below (bottom right) and never miss a single 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 Nature of Motion David Cowles Jun 9, 2021 Death. It is the mother of all our fears. Fear reflects our vulnerability and, ultimately, our mortality. Pain, however horrible, is ultimately bearable; death is not! And yet, no one has ever experienced death and no one ever will (the definition of death is “the absence of all experience”). What we think we know about death comes entirely from external observations of other organisms (including loved ones). Death. It is the mother of all our fears. Fear reflects our vulnerability and, ultimately, our mortality. Pain, however horrible, is ultimately bearable; death is not! And yet, no one has ever experienced death and no one ever will (the definition of death is “the absence of all experience”). What we think we know about death comes entirely from external observations of other organisms (including loved ones). 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 What Makes U, U? David Cowles May 16, 2024 “…The ‘you-experience’ is the same for every human being…for every living thing…for every ‘actual entity’. Yet every entity is unique.” Have you ever wondered what makes ‘you’ you ? You are certainly unique, a one off. As your friends say, “They threw away the mold.” But where do ‘you’ leave off and a ‘different you’ begin? And what makes that ‘other you’ not you ? In other words, why are you not me? Why am I not you? Too early in the AM for this? You are the product of a single male sex cell and a single female sex cell. Most likely, your conception was the product of a single act (intercourse) in which as many as 1 billion sperm cells set out in search of an ovum. You are testimony to the fact that at least one male cell reached its destination. Congratulations, BTW! Suppose your conception had occurred on the same ‘occasion’ but resulted from the union of a different sperm cell with that same egg? Same time, same place; same partners, same act. Would ‘you’ still be you ? Presumably you’d be someone - and if not you, then who? And the who you are now? Every successful conception generates a unique ‘you’; it doesn’t matter how close or how distant two potential conception events might be – every conception is unique, as is every ‘you’. Identity is not a continuum. As usual, we have things backwards. We assume you and then we try to associate you with a particular set of physical parameters. In fact, the potentiality for a ‘you-event’ is everywhere, but every actual ‘you’ is a singularity. Imagine you are a ball bearing rolling off an assembly line, smooth and shiny as you like. You are certainly unique in the sense that you are one among many. Presumably, but unintentionally, at some probably irrelevant level of detail you can be distinguished from the other ball bearings in ‘your run’ but for all intents and purposes you are interchangeable. You are both ‘what you are’ ( Wassein ) and ‘that you are’ ( Dasein ). What you are consists of attributes that you potentially share, to one degree or another, with every other entity. That you are is unique to you; however, your experience of being you is exactly the same as every other entity’s experience of being itself. Yes, every entity experiences itself being itself…because that is what an ‘entity’ is! But no two entities are the same. All entities, myself included, draw from a single, common set of attributes (‘accidents’), but every entity, myself included, exhibits these attributes differently – different attributes in different proportions, combinations and arrangements. To borrow terminology from Kant, you and I are noumenally identical but phenomenally unique. Whatever distinguishes you from everyone else is ‘accidental’ but what unites you is ‘substantial’. Everyone experiences themselves as a ‘you’ and that experience is presumably the same for everyone; how could it not be? Being you is… being you ! You are you as I am I. So the ‘you-experience’ is the same for every human being…for every living thing…for every ‘actual entity’. Yet every entity is unique. Riddle : What is the one sentence that is always true in every situation? Answer : “They threw away the mold.” Psychology (mind) is different from Physiology (body). Mind is body and body mind (Ryle), yet ‘the study of mind’ is very different from ‘the study of body’. Apparently, mind and body describe the same phenomena, but from different perspectives, attested to by the radically different vocabularies required. Likewise, Ontology is different from both Physiology and Psychology. Most of us go through life thinking that we are what we are; but according to JP Sartre, the reverse is true: We are not what we are; we are what we are not. Think of all the things that have happened to you, all the experiences that formed you, all the chance occurrences that impacted the course of your life; none of them has anything to do with you . You are now who you were at the moment of your birth (or before) and who you will be at the hour of your death. “Pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.” Regardless of what marvelous or horrible things you’ve done or have been done to you, you are, always have been and always will be, just you …now and at the hour of your death. This is the hour of your death! Every sufficiently large and structured set of elements constitutes a ‘you’. Every ‘you’ is the same you , even though every you is unique. Every ‘you’ is what it is in the same way; there is only one way of being ‘you’. However, what ‘you’ are is entirely unlike what anyone else is. Or, if you prefer: I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together… ( Beatles, I am the Walrus ) 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 Self, Inc. David Cowles “You’re the CEO of Self, Inc…What’s your mission statement?” You can’t open a business today without a Mission Statement. Before you manufacture a single widget or serve a single burger, you have to tell the world all the good things you’re going to do for it: “Our mission is You , our customer, so we will always deliver a quality product at a fair price. We are committed to maintaining a healthy environment through sustainable business practices and a carbon neutral footprint. We cherish diversity. We offer all members of our business family a competitive, living wage, a generous package of workplace benefits, and opportunities for personal and professional growth.” How’d I do? Around the turn of the century (yes, we can say that now and mean 2000, not 1900), it was fashionable for self-helpers to proclaim, “You are the CEO of Self, Inc.” It’s not wrong. So, M/M CEO, what’s your mission statement? “I just want to be happy, And I want my life partner to be happy too. I want my kids to have happy childhoods, And satisfying adult lives. And, of course, I deserve to be happy too.” Well, sorry, but I won’t be buying any stock in your IPO. Apparently, you didn’t get Life’s memo. I think you should sit down for this. Ready? “No one is happy…and no one is ever going to be happy!” It’s not that life is so terrible (unless it is); it’s because happiness is not a thing. For the most part, life is just life. And life doesn’t make anyone happy. It’s not supposed to! That’s not what life is; that’s not its purpose. Does water make a fish happy? Or does it just enable it to be a fish? When you were very, very small, someone whispered in your ear, “The purpose of life is happiness.” Unlike other whispers, this one took. I mean, why not be happy? As if! No one chooses to be truly miserable, yet all of us are miserable, at least some of the time. Then what is happiness? The absence of misery? Ok – but do we require something more – like ecstasy (not the drug) or euphoria or contentment…? So according to your mission statement, the purpose of life is your happiness. When you say that, do you mean that’s the purpose of all life…or just your life? All life? Then you’re a megalomaniac. Just your life? Then you’re pathetic. Sorry, but you’ve been given the great gift (grift?) of life…and you plan to spend it, How? Crouched in a corner, wrapped in cotton batten, mumbling, “Please don’t hurt me,” until it’s all mercifully over? I’m not on board. If Happiness is my Summum Bonum and if Life is what makes me happy, then “Woe is me!” Life ends, so Happiness must end, and ‘ Bonum ’ must vanish. Good that vanishes certainly can’t be Summum Bonum . If your goal in life is your own personal happiness, then either (1) you are unhappy today, or (2) you are afraid of being unhappy tomorrow. Either way, your happiness is incomplete; so the search for personal happiness is in fact a symptom of unhappiness . I’ve just arrived at Heathrow. “Sir, what is the purpose of your trip? Business or pleasure?” “Business!” I answer, it transforms my restless wandering into an arrow headed trajectory. Now a purpose accomplished can undoubtedly generate a sense of self-satisfaction akin to happiness; but it was not the purpose of my trip. The purpose of my trip was to do business; happiness might be my reaction if the business goes well. Suppose I had answered, “Pleasure!” instead. Pleasure is me drinking real ale on the lawn of a pub called, “The Apple and the Butterfly”, eating steak and kidney pie with a glass of port at lunch, visiting the Tate Modern, and strolling Kew Gardens. Would these pleasures make me happy? “Of course,” you say, automatically. But maybe not! Pleasure and happiness do not always go hand in hand, do they? Happiness is a measure of my success in accomplishing my purpose, but it cannot be that purpose. The instant we make our happiness our purpose, we manifest our unhappiness. Happiness then is a one word oxymoron. Say it, “Happiness!” There, you did it, congratulations, now you’re an ‘Oxy Moron’. Put that on a T-shirt! Purpose does not emerge over the course of an event (it may self-modify); it wraps around the event. Purpose must be present ab initio . There are no purposeless acts, no matter how much we’d like to convince ourselves otherwise. Ultimately, the success of any event, its ‘satisfaction’, is a measure of the degree to which the event fulfilled its purpose. Purpose motivated the event, organized the environment, and energized the action; now it measures the outcome. In the terminology of Alfred North Whitehead, happiness is a subjective form that may accompany an event. It’s not the event itself; it is not the purpose of the event; it’s not the event’s subjective aim . It is not any part of the event itself, nor is it part of the event’s superject (its ‘objective immortality’). Essentially, it’s a superfluous artifact of consciousness, much like the appendix in human physiology. Jack and Jill went up a hill to fetch a pail of water. Jack fell down and wore a frown, but Jill was filled with laughter. Was the water fetched? Check. Did Jack and Jill both perform as expected? Check. Then how do their moods figure in? Every event has a unique purpose that entails a novel mix of Beauty, Truth, and Justice. So now at last, the sales pitch you’ve been waiting for: Will you hire me to rewrite your mission statement? I was thinking of something along these lines: “Make me a channel of (your) Peace, A conduit of Beauty, Truth, and Love.” Let me know what you think. Or have you heard something like this before? 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 Next

“Some folks are ‘happy’ living their lives on a beach; others need a boardroom; some need a bar.” < Back Happiness David Cowles Mar 1, 2024 “Some folks are ‘happy’ living their lives on a beach; others need a boardroom; some need a bar.” In the Yule 2023 Issue of Aletheia Today Magazine (ATM), we pointed out some issues with the doctrine known as Utilitarianism , popularized in modern Western philosophy by the liberal John Stuart Mill and the socialist Jeremy Bentham. Classically, philosophical Utilitarianism has been based on an ethical imperative, usually formulated as ‘the greatest Good for the greatest number’. In our earlier article, we avoided the temptation to weigh in on the nature of the Good itself. Instead, we discussed issues related to the generation and distribution of that Good according to the utilitarian formula. According to Mill, happiness is ‘the Good’, the Summum Bonum ; we know this because no one would ever choose to be unhappy rather than happy. Some people choose chocolate over vanilla (no idea why), but no one ever chooses to be unhappy rather than happy, do they? Of course they do! They enter monasteries, they go on fasts, and in extreme cases, they even self-flagellate (figuratively…or literally). The problem with this counterargument is that these apparently unpleasant practices do, in fact, make their practitioners ‘happy’. In rare cases, we’re talking masochism; in most cases, we’re talking about a willingness to endure ‘superficial’ unhappiness (pain) in service of some ‘deeper’ happiness, ‘beyond the Pleasure Principle’. This semantic ‘trick’ makes it impossible for me, or anyone, to refute Mill…but it also robs Utilitarianism of its heuristic power. If I do X, then by definition, doing X must be calculated to make me happier than not doing X. Therefore, every time I do anything , I substantiate utilitarian theory: I always choose the option calculated to make me happiest. Otherwise, why would I choose it? And so in reality, I substantiate nothing. If that makes you uncomfortable, as it does me, you may ‘phone a friend’ for assistance. Patched into a gathering of Logical Positivists , in Vienna (1925–1935), you will hear that no proposition is meaningful unless it can be falsified. The basic premise of Utilitarianism, GGG#, cannot be falsified: it is impossible to imagine any objective, empirical data that would disprove it. How would I go about proving that some people choose to be unhappy rather than happy? What sort of instrument would I need to measure the quantity (not to mention the quality ) of someone’s happiness ? Let’s test this hypothesis with two examples from opposite ends of the spectrum: First, when I was barely yet a tween, I recall my grandmother going on about all the ‘sacrifices’ she made each day for the good of our family. She did a lot, no doubt! But cheekily, I countered, “You do what you do because doing it makes you happy.” Unwittingly, I was channeling Mill…at 10. No big deal: an even younger Mill channeled Plato…in the original Greek! The things she did, admittedly often repetitive and strenuous for a person her age, nevertheless gave her purpose and her life meaning. Watching TV game shows, hanging out in bars, or engaging in prostitution would probably not have made her happy. She would have been much less happy had she chosen not to do the things she did. None of which makes her any less virtuous! My second example requires us to travel back a bit in time. You may not remember it, but I was once burned at the stake, by John Calvin, no less (not to drop a name). Make no mistake, it hurt…a lot, but it came with the satisfaction of knowing that I had been true to my beliefs. Had I recanted and been spared, I would have had to endure a lifetime of shame, self-doubt, and regret. I chose the option that made me less unhappy …no matter how painful. All of which begs the question: “What is happiness anyway?” Is it a positive state that one can aspire to and even work to bring about? Or is it merely the absence of unhappiness? Consider the example above: “Recant or burn!” Neither will make me happy ‘happy’ but, I suppose, one might make me ‘less unhappy’ than the other. Reading Mill, you get the immediate sense that you are measuring unhappiness (e.g., poverty) rather than the much more elusive quantity known as ‘happiness’. It is the avoidance of penury that makes one happy, not a surfeit of riches. We are often reminded, correctly, that money does not buy happiness, but the myth of the ‘happy hobo’ is just that…a myth. As human beings, we are much better at defining what makes us unhappy than what makes us happy. We know what we don’t want; we have a harder time deciding what we prefer instead. But rest assured, whatever we choose to do, we will have chosen the option intended to make us happiest…always, every time, 100%. In the earlier article, we argued that the utilitarian formula for the distribution of Good was vacuous; now we’re arguing that the utilitarian definition of Good is itself meaningless, and beyond even that, that the concept of happiness itself has no meaning. It is as if we added the words, “…and it makes me happy,” to the end of every declarative sentence. Because we add this meme to every available utterance, it is utterly meaningless. It is impossible to devise a set of circumstances in which it doesn’t apply. Some folks are ‘happy’ living their lives on a beach; others need a boardroom; some need a bar. What makes each person happy is not the venue; what makes them happy is the conviction that they are doing ‘what they ought to be doing’ at the time. Don’t let that ‘ought’ scare you! I’m not talking the 613 mitzvahs of Torah here. At any point in time, you have a sense of what you ought to be doing, or at least what you ought not to be doing. We are not here proposing any objective criteria for ‘ought’. In fact, this is where the concept of happiness becomes relevant after all. We are happy at those times when we’re doing what we feel we ought to be doing. But BYOO – Bring our own ‘ought’! It won’t be my ought…but so what? Be an Old Testament judge: Do what is right in your own eyes (Judges 21:25). But laying such analysis aside, Mill still faces insuperable hurdles. How does one define ‘the greatest good for the greatest number’? Is it a simple matter of arithmetic? Ʃ A+B+C…Z. In that case, a solution in which one person monopolizes 100% of the Good is at least conceivable. Of course, that is not what the liberal Mill or the socialist Bentham had in mind. They assumed some sort of distributive calculus – which is all well and good, but not part of Utilitarianism per se . Sidebar : If the meaning of life is ‘42’, then perhaps we can say the sum of all possible Good is ‘10’. Our job as philosopher-monarchs is to determine the distribution of that Good among, say, 10 beneficiaries. Turns out, the Utilitarian test, greatest good for the greatest number , can be satisfied using any distribution formula whatsoever, provided that 10 units of Good are distributed over 10 potential beneficiaries. Literally no one thinks this! And that fact alone demonstrates the absolute vacuity of Utilitarianism. Every practical version of Utilitarianism conceals another value (or set of values) which is the real driver. For Bentham, that value might have been ‘equality’, for Mill it might have been ‘liberty’ (including opportunity and the pursuit of happiness); for someone else, it might be ‘monopoly’, and for yet another, ‘productivity’ (whatever distribution of goods will generate the most total value). These are real driving values. The utilitarian formula is the veneer that attempts to clothe these values with invisibility, to hide them under the transparent mask of irrefutability. Mill and Bentham did not appreciate the full significance of the Industrial Revolution. Quantities are not fixed. They can grow (or diminish). A workable economic system needs to be concerned with the aggregate quantity of ‘goods’ as well as the just distribution of those ‘goods’. A professor of mine, John Rawls ( A Theory of Justice ), made a valiant attempt to reconcile Mill and Bentham and rescue Utilitarianism in the process. He proposed a system under which everyone would be guaranteed a certain minimal quantum of ‘happiness’ (goods), with the balance allocated among the beneficiaries in the way most likely to generate the greatest aggregate quantity of goods. The effort is valiant and no doubt correct, as far as it goes, but does it have any real content? Basically, Rawls states that there are three ‘goods’: (1) liberty (personal, civic); (2) prosperity (economic sufficiency); and (3) opportunity (economic freedom, the pursuit of happiness). I didn’t need to spend $250,000 on an Ivy League education to know this much. In fact, I can fit it on a bumper sticker for my next presidential run: “Liberty, Prosperity, Opportunity”. Curious to see what my opponents come up with! Would “Slavery, Poverty, Despair” be too much to hope for? 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 . Click the cover image to return to Spring 2024. Previous Next Share Do you like what you just read? Subscribe today and receive sneak previews of Aletheia Today Magazine articles before they're published. 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< Back Is Hell Empty? David Cowles Mar 17, 2026 “You are bolted to the choices you made during your lifetime, not as punishment but as a projection of who you’ve chosen to become.” 1750 words, 8 minute read Dante’s Inferno is like Tokyo at rush hour. Souls are stacked across 9 levels as if God had followed the blue prints for a modern Supermax…and as usual there’s a long queue at the River Styx, souls patiently waiting for their chance to ‘abandon all hope’. Does this sound like Theater of the Absurd? Something from Ionesco perhaps? Or Beckett? And BTW, Estragon, what’s your rush? Eternity isn’t going anywhere; it’ll still be waiting, whenever you get there. According to a popular eschatological model, the souls of the departed appear before a heavenly tribunal where their past sins are reviewed and rewarded (or not) as appropriate. That is not Dante’s vision! Dante subscribed to the views of Thomas Aquinas: each soul effectively chooses its own fate. All sin is idolatry – the placing of something ahead of God. We’re all guilty of it from time to time. We cut a corner, put ourselves ahead of a neighbor, seek joy in overindulgence. What’s your Higher Power? Is it God (Beauty, Truth, Justice)? Or Mammon (Wealth, Power, Fame, Lust)? When all else has failed, where do you turn? What’s your last resort? What’s your ultimate concern ? ( Tillich ) According to Dante & Aquinas, anyone living may choose to follow a new Higher Power at any time. Death bed? No problem! ‘St. Dostoevsky.’ Once dead, however, that plasticity is gone and you are bolted to the choices you made during your lifetime, not as punishment but as a projection of who you’ve chosen to become. You are exactly the person you always wanted to be. Congrats on that, BTW! *** In Hades’ Supermax each tier is associated with a particular subset of sin. For example, Tier 4 is reserved for the greedy. Very thoughtful of God! This arrangement ensures that inmates will have things in common with their neighbors. I mean, Paradise isn’t Paradise unless you can share the experience with someone else (just ask any Parrott Head) and Hades is Paradise for those entombed there. During your lifetime you rejected communion with God (a foretaste of Paradise) in deference to lust, gluttony or… Therefore in Hell, you will find yourself in the cell block that affords the most faithful realization of your highest value. Imagine a Hogwarts where ‘student choice’ replaces the Sorting Hat. Dante stated poetically and masterfully what I will now attempt to describe clumsily and in prose (apologies in advance): Being is Information. “It from bit.” (Wheeler) “A difference that makes a difference.” (Bateson) The Universe consists of information and information is encoded in patterns. “It’s patterns all the way down, Dr. Hawking.” Each quantum of Being, each ‘event’, has a unique pattern associated with it. Think QR code. That’s it’s handle…forever, and it encodes whatever values the event instantiates. God is an event, a quantum of Being, the quantum of Being that is key to decoding all other quanta. God is the universal Rosetta Stone. God is Good. Primordially, all possible patterns reside in potentia in God…but only to the extent that those patterns are consistent with God’s Nature, i.e. with the Good . You are a ‘society of events’ (Whitehead), events related to one another according to a particular logos that constitutes your identity, your persona . Each event encodes its own specific mix of values. To the extent that those values form a pattern that resonates with patterns encoded in God’s Primordial Nature, sympathetic vibration transfers that pattern from our mortal plane to God’s eternal realm. The values we instantiate ‘on earth’ are substantiated ‘in heaven’. ( Lord’s Prayer ) Whatever we do in spacetime we do eternally, provided it is consistent with God’s values – i.e. the building blocks of Paradise. Dedicated followers of Aletheia Today will recognize this phenomenon as a ‘ Rondeau Time Crystal’ , a quantum of being that includes both a spatiotemporal and an eternal aspect in a single event. *** Imagine the heavenly tribunal (above): The soul of the departed approaches St. Peter, trembling (that’s the soul trembling, not the saint). “Relax, you have nothing to fear. You’re in charge here.” Peter can be very reassuring as he escorts you into the hermetically sealed projection booth. “I’m going to show you two versions of Eternity. The first (A) includes all your contributions, all your actions; the second (B) erases those actions from the record. Now let’s be clear. Your actions had consequences IRL, some intended, most unintended, some known, most unknown. This is not about them; they remain the same under either option. It is just your actions per se that are subject to review here, not their effects. You can’t change the flow of history, but you do have one last chance to determine the role you play in that history. “Examine both scenarios, take all the time you need, then you decide, and whatever you decide, that will be so. Just please remember two things: (1) whichever option you choose, you are choosing that option, not just for yourself today, but forever and for everyone; and (2) if you choose Option B, it will be as if you had never existed, i.e. you will have never existed! Effectively, you will be expunging yourself from the universal record, from Being itself…but the choice is yours. Like I said, you’re in charge.” *** I interviewed St. Peter for this article. He explained that he was proud to have processed his 100 billionth human soul. “So,” I ventured jokingly, “Has anyone ever chosen Option B?” Peter looked up at me in amazement: “Everyone chooses Option B!” You could have knocked me over with a fly swatter and, obviously, Peter noticed. “When they see how glorious the world is without them in it and compare it with the horror of their actions in the world with them, they cannot bear to immortalize the latter. Invariably, they take the hit. “Often times they’ll add an explanation: e.g. ‘I wouldn’t want to live in a world I’d lived in’, or ‘when I see who I could have been and what I could have done and the mess I made of the opportunity, I see now that Option B is the only just scenario’.” “Everyone enters the world with a determination to create Beauty, to discover Truth, and to institute Justice: that’s God’s universal gift; but not everyone follows through. When a soul realizes that it has destroyed Beauty, concealed Truth, and corrupted Justice, the revulsion is overwhelming.” “So,” sez me, trying to recover a bit of standing in Peter’s eyes, “Then heaven’s empty.” I paused for effect, “Every soul’s in Hell.” Again, Peter is disbelieving. Could I possibly be this clueless? Or was I just pulling his leg? I can see he’s considering a sarcastic response but his better angels triumph and he decides on civility instead: “A decision by a soul,” he begins slowly, speaking in measured tones, controlled and without affect. “A decision by a soul to self-immolate is the ultimate act of self-sacrifice, of charity, of love. It constitutes a ‘perfect act of contrition’ and reflects obedience to the Great Commandment: Love God…and your neighbor as yourself. “How could any soul capable of such an act be anywhere other than in Paradise with God? No, my friend, Heaven’s not empty, Hell is.” *** Ok, so now I get it, I think, at last, maybe: “No one is so evil as to wish himself on others.” Sartre famously said that Hell is other people ( No Exit ); he was wrong. Hell is not ‘other people’, it’s ourselves. My conversation with St. Peter caught me by surprise…but it shouldn’t have. Herman Melville ( Moby Dick ) pointed out that this is precisely the message of the Old Testament Book of Jonah . Jonah is tapped by God to save the sinful city of Nineveh by calling its citizens to repent. Jonah refuses and books passage on a ship bound for Gibraltar. Jonah resorts to the ‘geographic gambit’ in his chess match with God…but to no avail. God catches up with Jonah just east of Tarshish. He threatens to destroy the ship and drown its crew. Knowing that the crew’s fate is in his hands, Jonah offers himself as a sacrifice. With surprising reluctance, the crew assents and Jonah is cast into the sea. But God notes his repentance and his sacrifice, forgives him and saves him in the belly of a whale until he can be coughed up onto friendly shores. The example of Jonah, who had no expectation of salvation, should give us faith that we will make the same decision when it’s our turn (and make no mistake about it, it will be our turn). Salvation is a Catch 22 …inverted! We all sin but faced with the reality of inflicting the consequences of that sin on others, we invariably get cold feet, proving beyond doubt that a spark of Good (i.e. God) remains in each of us: that spark ( Shekinah ) precludes us from entering Hell. Sorry, Charon. So hop on the Express Train bound for Glory! But wait, we’ve got to shed some baggage first. In your case, a hat box; in my case a semi. As Peter explains, “You have to leave your sins behind. Sin does not resonate with any of the patterns that reside in potentia in God’s nature. Therefore, nothing sinful can cross the body-spirit barrier into Paradise. But you, i.e. whatever’s left of you, are most welcome.” Whatever’s left of me? Hmm, I knew it was too good to be true! Now let’s just hope I have been associated with enough good in my life for it to be worth saving. Turns out, you can take it with you after all…but only insofar as you have it in the first place, i.e. only insofar as it is good. *** Rothko’s Black on Maroon evokes a vision of hell not through flames or demons, but through a suffocating atmosphere where color itself becomes a form of spiritual confinement. The dark, hovering rectangles feel like thresholds that never open, suggesting a state of eternal suspension or inward collapse. In this reading, hell becomes an emotional condition—an endless, silent room where the weight of darkness presses in from all sides. 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 Plato, Socrates & Time Crystals David Cowles Nov 26, 2025 “The climax of the Phaedo is a debate between Socrates and Simmias on the nature of the soul… but now we know the answer!” In the 4 th century BCE, Plato, Athens’ leading philosopher, wrote a series of dialogs allegedly based on his first and second hand encounters with Socrates 25+ years earlier. (Gospels : Jesus :: Dialogs : Socrates?) Perhaps the most famous of those dialogs is known as the Phaedo : it recounts the last hours of Socrates’ life, spent in conversation with his devoted disciples. One is reminded of Jesus’ Farewell Discourses recorded in the Gospel of John . The climax of the Phaedo , however, is a debate between Socrates and Simmias on the nature of the soul. According to Plato, Socrates gets the better of his interlocutor (as always), but most philosophers feel that neither argument is totally persuasive. But now we know the answer! Simmias introduces the topic by proposing a popular model: soul : body :: attunement : lyre. A lyre, of course, is a musical instrument made of ‘wood and wire’. As such, the lyre has no significant use or value (except perhaps as an antique); but when the strings are ‘tuned’ in a particular way, the instrument ‘springs to life’ and suddenly acquires the potential to produce music (Beauty & Truth). Simmias suggests that the soul is similarly an ‘attunement’ but this time of the ‘blood and bones’ that constitute a body. When the components of our body are properly ‘tuned’, we say that the body has life ; that ‘attunement’ is what we mean by soul . Now this model is instinctively appealing, but it has a major drawback: once the lyre falls into disrepair, or even out of tune, it is no longer able to produce great music. According to this analogy, the soul survives only as long as the parts of the body remain properly aligned. Death is misalignment. That means that the soul is mortal and co-terminal with the body. This is something that Socrates, on the day of his impending execution, can understandably not accept. So he proceeds to develop a model that supports his preferred conclusion (immortality). Sartre would doubtless accuse Socrates of bad faith ; but we should be more charitable…at least until we’ve spent our own time on desolation row . (Dylan) Socrates begins his refutation of Simmias from the premise that the soul must be immortal because the contrary would imply that “the soul, though more divine and lovelier than the body, may still perish before it, being a kind of attunement.” Indeed, a lyre is likely to go out of tune before the instrument itself is physically destroyed. He also considered the status of ‘virtue’ under the attunement model . Are we to equate ‘the Good’ with a ‘finer attunement’ of the strings? All life is attunement; is what we call ‘evil’ nothing but a relative loss of tonal quality? “Do you believe in life after death?” That’s how we muggles artlessly introduce the subject of the soul. Prior to 2025 CE, we had no better answer to this question than those offered by Simmias and Socrates. But now we do! On October 14, 2025, Leo Joon Il Moon, et al. published a paper in Nature Physics detailing the discovery of a new phase of matter they’re calling Time Rondeau Crystals , aka Rondeau Time Crystals (RTC). You’re familiar with crystals. The rock on your finger is one. So is the hunk of quartz that’s holding down papers on your desk. And, of course, so is each flake of snow that is falling just now outside your window. We are surrounded by crystals, space crystals that is, and our lives are better for them. A space crystal is a pattern of molecules that endlessly repeats in an appropriate extensive medium. Imagine if we could create a time crystal , a pattern of events that endlessly repeats across time? Wait! I saw that movie, Groundhog Day . A beauty! And two dozen years later, Eureka! We found it – the first time crystal . Who says science doesn’t imitate art? Didn’t the Quantum Mechanics imitate the Cubists? But for all the hoopla , the discovery of time crystals wasn’t the breakthrough we’d hoped for. Process within a time crystal, i.e. the cycle of events, is 100% determined. Therefore, the time crystal was useless as a model for processes that include an element of indetermination, from mere randomization to conscious agency (free will). Until now! Discovery of Rondeau Time Crystals changes everything. The cycle of events in an RTC has three phases. The Alpha and Omega phases are fully determined, as above. However, they are separated by a third phase, I’m calling it Delta , that is entirely indeterminate, i.e. chaotic. Indetermination and determination are not incompatible after all. Free will does not preclude causality. Kaos does not undermine Logos : “The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.” (John 1:5) Rather, order propagates non-locally…and stochastically. Just as quanta remain entangled over vast stretches of (relatively) ‘empty’ space, so the ordered phases of an RTC exhibit entanglement across a chaotic gap. But it gets even better! First, the Omega state, though co-determined with the Alpha state, can be slightly skewed with respect to Alpha . Think of the inversion of an image along a Mobius Strip or of the aperiodic tiling of a surface: difference need not entail disorder. Second, the so-called Delta state, while incurably chaotic, can be ‘fine-tuned’ (there’s that phrase again) in a way that permits local islands of temporary order to emerge epiphenomenally without compromising Delta’s globally chaotic state. Think of the hammock in your backyard. Strung between two trees, it assumes a catenary shape; that is its topology. It lets you nap in it. But that shape is not a function of the trees or of the hammock; it is a function of the entirety. Likewise, RTCs. Think Shakespeare’s Tempest : “… the baseless fabric of this vision— the cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself…shall dissolve, and…leave not a rack behind.” “Leave not a rack behind” – so Simmias was right after all. The soul is an attunement of the body and it vanishes like scenery once the set is struck. Not so fast! An ephemeral pattern arising in the Delta phase may evoke a sympathetic (harmonic) response in the pluripotent and eternal Omega phase. In this way, freely formed but transient patterns in Delta may be eternalized in Omega . But there is a catch…ultimately, a happy catch. Each attunement is unique. It appears in indefinitely many media, but it is one and the same attunement in each. So, if Delta and Omega both manifest the same attunement, that one attunement must reconcile and exhibit the ontological features of both media. In the same way, Jesus is both fully human ( Delta : Mortal) and fully divine ( Alpha/Omega : Eternal). He differs from us only in that he is free from sin. His humanity must not conflict with his divinity. God is eternal presence . Because any pattern in Omega is eternal, it must be compatible with God’s essential nature ( Alpha ), i.e. the Good. Therefore, patterns arising in Delta only elicit an echo in Omega if and to the extent that they are ‘good’ as Good is manifest in Delta , i.e. as beauty, truth or justice. This disposes of Socrates’ second argument, i.e. that evil must be more, or less, than ‘poor tuning’. In fact, whatever is less than ‘good’ in Delta will find no resonance whatsoever in Omega ; it will die in Delta . And where does this leave you ? Your sense of self, your identity, your consciousness? British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead constructed a much more elaborate scheme and concluded that there was no place for personal identity in God’s Consequent ( Omega ) Nature. Whitehead was wrong! To whatever extent a pattern in Delta is reproduced in Omega , all aspects of that pattern will be conserved. If a pattern in Delta includes consciousness as part of its subjective form, there is no reason to suppose that it will lack consciousness in Omega . To argue otherwise would be to claim that consciousness per se is incompatible with God’s essential nature. So where does this leave us? Both Simmias and Socrates are wrong…and right! The soul (life itself) is an attunement and it does perish with the body. However, to the extent that the patterns generated in Delta are ‘good’, those patterns are eternally resurrected in Omega . This is the eschaton, the so-called ‘last things’, Death, Judgment, Heaven and Hell. Death is the loss of attunement; Judgement identifies those patterns in Delta that are consistent with God’s essential nature ( Alpha ). Those patterns enjoy ‘eternal life’ in Omega , i.e. Heaven ; other patterns evaporate without a trace. That’s Hell . *** Paulina Peavy’s I Am Alpha and Omega (c. 1937–1970s) blends mystical symbolism with visionary abstraction, presenting the cosmos as a living, spiritual continuum. The painting reflects Peavy’s belief in cyclical time and divine evolution, using layered forms and luminous color to evoke the eternal “beginning and end.” Through its fusion of text, sacred geometry, and celestial imagery, the work portrays Alpha and Omega as both a cosmic force and a guiding spiritual presence. 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 Proving Parmenides David Cowles Jul 9, 2026 “Advances in science and philosophy allow us to say now with confidence: Parmenides QED.” 2000 words, 8 minute read “…What-is is ungenerated and imperishable…whole, single-limbed, steadfast, and complete; nor was it once, nor will it be, since it is now, all together, one, continuous…Thus coming-to-be is extinguished and perishing not to be heard of…it is not right for what-is to be incomplete; for it is not lacking, but if it were, it would lack everything…Therefore, it must either be completely, or not at all.” Parmenides’ epic poem, On Nature , is the oldest substantially extant text in all of Western philosophy; it dates from the middle of the 5 th century BCE. Before Parmenides, only bits and pieces survive. In the fragment (#8) quoted above, the father of Western philosophy describes Being in the realm of Aletheia (truth, uncovered, revealed, Sanskrit = Brahman ). But Parmenides goes on to describe what it is to exist in the alternate realm of Doxa (appearance, seeming, Sanskrit = Maya ): “To come to be and to perish, to be and not to be, to shift place and to exchange bright color…” Earlier, in an often underappreciated fragment (#1), Parmenides described the relationship between the two realms: “It is right that you should learn all things, both the steadfast heart of persuasive truth ( Aletheia ) and the beliefs of mortals ( Doxa )…how things that seem had to have genuine existence, permeating all things completely .” Our stated preference for so-called ‘truth’ over ‘mere’ appearance has led almost all commentators to imagine that Parmenides was advocating Aletheia at the expense of Doxa . Clearly (#1 above), this was not Parmenides’ intent. That said, Parmenides’ fundamental all or nothing proposition has proven controversial…highly controversial…until now. Advances in science and philosophy allow us to say now with confidence: Parmenides QED . *** At about that time, but 1500 kilometers to the south, the Book of Job , including some of the oldest texts (2 nd millennium BCE) anywhere in the Bible, was getting its final makeover. Aletheia Today has written extensively about Job ; mercifully, we will not repeat that here. Suffice to say, the epic ends with God and Job locked in furious debate over the process of creation and the nature of justice. Heady stuff! Their debate introduces two astonishingly 20 th century ideas. First, Job contends that God must be subject to the same ethical imperatives as humans. God does not transcend the Law, God is the Law ( Torah ). He must exemplify the law (Whitehead) and cannot contravene the law. Amazing! But God’s response is even more surprising. In his best imitation of a 1970s American hippie, God shouts, ‘Ecology! Ecology!’ at his accuser. One can only imagine him waving a ‘little green book’ like the Maoist Cultural Revolutionaries of the 1960s. Essentially, God argues that his ecological responsibilities take precedence over his duty to act justly. God’s argument is somewhat persuasive…at first; but later, under Job’s deft ‘no-cross cross’, God admits that his concern for the environment is at least in part a function of his subjective preferences. God reveals his vulnerable underbelly in a way that is not replicated anywhere in Judeo-Christian scripture, setting the stage for Job’s historic legal triumph . Let’s listen in on God’s testimony: “Who cleaves…a path for the thunderstorm to rain down on land without people…spreading grassy growth? “Who endowed the ibis with wisdom and gave understanding to the cock? “Who provides rations to ravens when their children cry out to El (an ancient name for God) as they wander without food? “Who sends forth free the wild ass...who scorns the city’s clamor, hears not the cries of a driver?” God cannot be overly concerned with the complaints of one individual when there is an entire Universe needing to be managed. Ingeniously, God turns the tables on Job: If you think it’s possible to do better, go ahead and try…but don’t hold me to a standard that you yourself are unable or unwilling to meet. “If you have an arm as strong as El’s…look for the proud and lay him low and crush the wicked where they stand.” But then God goes off the rails. He defends his ‘creative choices’, but he also confesses a personal attachment that undermines the objectivity of his argument. The balance of God’s testimony concerns two of his creatures, Behemoth (Hippopotamus) and Leviathan (Sea Monster). “Behold Behemoth whom like you I created….Behold the strength of his loins, the power in his belly’s muscles…his bones like an iron rod.” And Leviathan? " Of all that's under heaven, he is mine . I cannot keep silent about him, the fact of his incomparable valor…Even 'gods' live in fear of his majesty; they're in terror of the ruin he wreaks…He has no match on earth, who is made as fearless as he? …Over beasts of all kinds he is king." (41:43-26) God’s ecologically motivated care for the Cosmos is laudable; his Nietzschean amorality, less so. God reveals a touch of Narcissism here. He is ‘crushing’ on his creatures. Still, God has made an important point: the Cosmos is not a collection of creatures; it is creation itself, whole, entire, and of a piece. In order to sustain human life, it may be necessary to foster ‘grassy growth’ in uninhabited regions of the planet. *** In his opening speech (3: 3 - 5), Job offers to remove himself from the equation: “May the day disappear, the day I was born, and the night that announced, ‘a man has been conceived’…let darkness expunge it.” Job makes it clear to the ‘cosmic court’ that he is prepared to put at risk not just his present life and future prospects but his existence per se - past, present, and future, the whole enchilada, never to have been, never to become, never to be. From Job’s perspective, we can divide the biosphere into organisms that live, lived or will live. But from the cosmic perspective this is a distinction without a difference. Presumably, everything comes to be, is, and then is not, so what’s the difference? From the cosmic perspective, entities can be divided into two classes, those that ‘be’ (past, present or future) and those that ‘be not’ (past, present and future). The class of entities that do not experience being is a boundless, undifferentiated void: Bobby Kennedy’s ‘things that never were’…and never will be, Whitehead’s set of all unrealized propositions. In a cosmic game of Texas Hold ‘em, Job has just gone all in on God. He has called God’s bluff. The whole universe is waiting for God to wipe out this annoying pipsqueak, but God double clutches, he cannot call. He doesn’t have the cards. In a stunning reversal of fortune, the creator of heaven and earth folds, and Job walks off with the entire pot (quite literally in this case). *** Parmenides and the Job-poet faced the same problem, how to juxtapose becoming (and un-becoming) with being, and they came to the same conclusion: it can’t be done! Being and becoming are not opposites. Being is Being, period, regardless of whether it is mortal, immortal, or eternal. Becoming and perishing are ‘accidents’ of Being; they describe the contingent experience of being but not its necessary essence. This is where ordinary language trips us up. Properly speaking, the verb to be should only appear in the present tense, indicative mood. I mean, that makes sense, doesn’t it? What can you say about being ? It is, or it is not, (0 or 1); anything else is a corruption. Was and will be , might and should be , are forms of to be highjacked to express not being . (Of course, these pseudo-forms are extremely useful in everyday life, even if, like geometric forms, they don’t correspond to anything material.) If something is, it cannot not be. It is, or it is not, period. You cannot meaningfully say, “It is and it is not.” If it is, it is, and if it’s not, it’s not. Of course, from a subjective perspective within fluid spacetime, things are coming to be and ceasing to be all the time. But from an objective perspective beyond spacetime, they are…or they are not. *** “…Nor was it once, nor will it be, since it is now…Thus coming-to-be is extinguished and perishing not to be heard of.” “…It is not lacking, but if it were, it would lack everything…It must either be completely, or not at all.” What would it mean to expunge a quantum of being, any quantum of being, from the cosmos? To flip a bit from 1 to 0, from being to not being? To be expunged is never to have been. An ‘expunged event’ never occurred; it never set in motion any of the falling chains of dominoes that intersect it. Every interaction of one quantum of being with another triggers waterfalls of dominoes in all different directions. It’s like a particle collision at CERN. Come to think of it, it is a particle collision (just not at CERN). Every time one quantum of being (call it ‘A’) interacts with another quantum (‘B’), both are irrevocably altered by the event (entangled). If the interaction of A and B expunges B (so that it never existed), everything around A changes too ( It’s a Wonderful Life ); and in almost no time ( Six Degrees of Separation ) the effects of that change have radiated out into every nook and cranny of the anthroposphere. And not just prospectively. Presumably B was a node in many intersecting causal chains (e.g. X, Y, Z). If X → B, Y → B and Z → B and if we allow A to preclude even the possibility of B, then our three causal chains (X, Y, Z) would need to disappear (also expunged) or be irrevocably altered. In the first instance, it is easy to see that the annihilation would cascade through the universe at the speed of ‘the propagation of influences in the medium’ (e.g. the speed of light in a vacuum, c). In the second instance, where causal chains survive but in altered form, those alterations would cascade, inevitably annihilating certain entities in their path. Eventually, the process would run out of phase space, causal chains per se would vanish, and total annihilation would ensue. Annihilation in the second instance would likely be orders of magnitude slower than in the first. But would we even notice the difference? But total annihilation is impossible! The Universe exists, it is not a node on any causal chain, it cannot be annihilated, and since the Universe consists of its elements, those elements would be safe from annihilation as well. Are you getting the picture? It’s an all or nothing proposition! To the extent that your physical being is an effect , prior states of affairs would need to be altered to eliminate that effect (i.e. you). If a particular chain of causes terminates organically (e.g. in natural death), that termination will have been part of the causal sequence itself. On the other hand, if the termination were ad hoc , then the causal chain itself would have to be rebuilt, retroactively, to eliminate you from the catalogue of its effects . Effects are not optional. Causes are not capricious. It is a major fallacy to imagine that you can preclude a certain effect without thereby altering its causal chain…in both directions! Therefore, every quantum of being is modified if just one quantum is modified. Every quantum is annihilated if just one… Adjusting for rate limitations on the propagation of influences, the effect of any local modification would be immediate and universal. And if a single quantum of being were to be expunged? The Cosmic fabric would unravel and the universe as we know it would exist only as a pile of thread, now and forever: “ Formless and empty with darkness over the abyss.” (Gen 1: 2) “Therefore, it must either be completely or not at all.” QED Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? 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< 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.

< Back Time for a New Turing Test “…This modified Turing Test is designed to root out ‘Carbon Privilege’, the unstated but nearly universal assumption that carbon-based life forms are somehow ‘better’ than their silicon siblings.” David Cowles The current shock wave of progress in Artificial Intelligence (AI) has given new energy to the ancient ‘problem of other minds’: How do we know whether other entities have ‘minds’ that function like our own? Originally, the focus was on you ! How can I know whether you are ‘real’ or not? I assume that I am ‘real’; actually, I define what real is! Are you humanoid? You don’t (always) look humanoid. Perhaps you are a robot designed to look human and programmed to behave accordingly; or perhaps you are a zombie: perhaps your behavior is entirely unconscious. Not for any lack of trying, the ‘other minds' problem’ remains an open field of inquiry, but that ‘field’ has recently expanded from the dimensions of a squash court to those of a Canadian football field. Now I am less concerned with you and more concerned with a bevy of other organisms and pseudo-organisms clamoring for protection under the pending Most Favored Species Act, currently held up in the Senate by Rand Paul. Maybe I’ll concede that you are at least sentient…for purposes of this essay only, of course. Big of me, I know! But what about Timmy’s Lassie? Pirates’ Polly? Poe’s Raven? What about the 30 trillion cells that make up my body? Or the trillions of symbiotic bacteria thriving in my gut? And what about all the life forms we’re about to discover on the many ‘ exoearths ’ crammed into our presumably life-teeming universe? Finally, what about our machines? Hal 9000, R2D2, Deep Mind ? Alan Turing, the Enigma-cracker, is credited with developing an eponymous test to determine whether a given ‘machine’ possesses a humanoid mind, e.g., whether it is conscious. Here’s how Turing’s test works: ‘A’, presumably an able-minded human being, is our examiner; ‘B’ is our examinee. Neither can see nor hear the other; they communicate only via a series of written messages passed back and forth between the two. If A cannot distinguish B’s responses from those of a human being, B is judged to be humanoid. What could be more ridiculous! Imagine your favorite TV cop show adopting this format. Detective A has just arrested ‘usual suspect’ B, presumably with probable cause, and charged B with a capital crime. Now, it is up to A to question B and then, based solely on B’s answers, to judge B guilty…or not. No witnesses, no forensics, allowed! A is subject to no oversight and B is entitled to no legal representation; there is no right of appeal. Detention, interrogation, adjudication, and execution often take place on the same day. I doubt that show would last a full season. How often do you think B would walk away scot-free? Why? What’s to stop A from finding B innocent? Well, for one thing, A made the arrest, so we may presume he has a vested interest in the verdict. Plus, A knows B’s record; she must’a dun’it! But isn’t this exactly what happens with a Turing Test? A actively questions B; B answers, passively. We know upfront that A is a carbon-based life form, a human being, unaided in this instance by any mechanical intelligence; B’s ontological status is undetermined. In fact, A knows ab initio that B is suspected of the crime of being ‘artificial’; but can he ‘prove’ it? So, the test is biased by design, but that’s not the half of it. Put yourself in A’s trainers. If B is human and A says ‘machine’, everyone gets a good laugh; but if B is machine and A says ‘human’, A loses his job. In any case, the pressure is on A to find the revelatory flaw in B’s pattern of communication. In the cosmic game of hide and seek, we humans tend to find whatever we’re looking for…whether it is there or not. (“Seek and ye shall find.” – Matthew 7: 7-8) The problem is that we’re all flawed: human or not, carbon or not, we all screw up. Imagine if you were sent to the ‘scrap heap’ every time you said something nonsensical or illogical…like you were when you were a child, for instance. Would any one of us survive a single day? There are two possible versions of this test. In one version, A knows that B is a machine; the only question is whether the machine exhibits humanoid intelligence. In the second version (Searle’s Chinese Room), B could be a machine or a human, or a human pretending to be a machine or a machine pretending to be a human, or a human pretending to be a machine pretending to be a human or a machine pretending to be a human pretending to be a machine, or… Got it? Now, say it back to me, so I can be sure. Translation: it’s a mess! The Turing Test was intended to expand our horizons; instead it demonstrates just how constricted those horizons are…and it reinforces those restrictions. We are conditioned by our modern Indo-European language to reduce the world to nouns (subjects and objects) and verbs (active and passive). Sadly, the Turing Test fits in perfectly with this fallacious model of reality. A is the subject, B is the object, and the test itself is the active voice verb that connects them. As a result, the ‘relationship’ between A and B is a vector; there are no feedback loops. Now imagine the same test designed differently: There are 6 hermetically sealed booths: 3 contain human beings, 3 contain machines. The booths are sorted into the following configuration: H-H, H-M, M-M. Of course, neither the subjects nor the experimenters know which pair is which. In fact, there are neither examiners nor examinees. Each participant (human or not) is charged with identifying the ontological status of its partner. A test ends when all 6 participants have signaled to their controllers that they have reached a conclusion (or when an agreed upon period of time has elapsed). Of course, the test can be rerun as many times as you wish to confirm the results. Compared to the original Turing Test, this modified design is more methodologically sound; it also models more closely real life experience. After all, it is rare that the relationship between two nominal entities can be adequately described by a simple vector. Relationships are feedback loops, and verbs that properly model such relationships are neither active nor passive; they require the largely extinct middle voice ! This modified Turing Test is designed to root out ‘Carbon Privilege’, the unstated but universal assumption that carbon-based life forms are somehow ‘better’ than their silicon siblings. Our new test creates a level playing field. It lets machines evaluate us as we evaluate them based on the same criteria. Who knows, maybe our silicon siblings will discover new and better criteria or procedures. And there is an unintended bonus! The new design will show how machines evaluate each other, for example, how I evaluate you , my precious little bucket of bolts. 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 Harvest Issue 2023 Share Previous Next