Explore Aletheia Today's Groundhog 2025 issue: where philosophy, theology, and culture intersect. From Mark’s Gospel to Parmenides, faith, and love—thought-provoking insights await! Inside Groundhog 2025 Philosophy From Marx to Mark “The Gospel of Mark is no biography…It’s a call to action, a manifesto, a How to manual for non-violent guerilla warriors everywhere, 1st century…or 21st.” After Parmenides... “Western philosophy is the history of our effort to understand the silence of Parmenides, or to break it.” Theology Apocalypse Now! “We are not midway through the Second Act of a Mystery Play called Salvation… Brunhilda has sung; we just need to applaud!” Christian Anarchism ”A heretical state is not a bad state…A heretical state is not a state at all. There are no bad states. There are only states and pseudo-states.” Culture & The Arts Be Proud...of Yourself! “I’m proud of you is code for I’m not proud of you at all.” We All Live in a Yellow Submarine “The occasional dragon notwithstanding, we hardly ever see monsters in Liverpool anymore.” Spirituality Ephesians 2:10 “In this one verse…St. Paul proposes a radically new model of what it means to be a human being.” Faith, Hope, Love “When we truly love, the Kingdom is already ‘come’ and God’s will is already ‘done.'" 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 Reason, Religion, and Pope Benedict David Cowles Feb 2, 2023 “World War I, Stalinism, Fascism, the Holocaust, World War II, Hiroshima, the Cold War, Vietnam, and now the new ‘30-Plus Years War’ in the Middle East… Rational Empiricism has compiled quite a resume!” Once upon a time, we were all religious. No matter our faith or our denomination, we accepted ‘dogma’ that seemed on the surface, at least, to contradict the evidence of our senses and even to clash with reason itself. We consoled ourselves with a simple, “It’s a mystery!” That might have worked in the Middle Ages or the 1950s, but come on, we’re living in the Age of Science now. Mystery is no longer a comforting friend but the mortal enemy. Mystery is part of Joyce’s nightmare from which we are trying to awake. So, then there came a time when none of us was religious. Every morning, instead of reciting the Shema , we would light two candles, one at the shrine of all things Empirical, the other at the shrine of all things Rational. We’d gone Greek! We became Show Me people, even if we didn’t live in Missouri. We had a new dogma now: “Nothing is meaningful unless it can be verified empirically via scientific method.” Like Jesus before us and the Rabbis before Jesus, we skillfully managed to conflate two doctrines (Empiricism and Rationalism) into a single Great Commandment . Then we discovered that that didn’t work either. Next, a flurry of ‘60s liberal theologians tried to convince us that reason and religion could co-exist – not buying it! Or that, like wave-particle duality, religion and reason dealt with different aspects of a single set of phenomena - that’s just about as satisfying as saying that quantum mechanics and relativity apply ‘on different scales’ or that 22 of 26 dimensions in our universe are rolled up into infinitesimal, plank-sized spitballs. And they thought the Incarnation was a stretch! I mean, just how much "crazy" can one person tolerate? So, now what? Back to the ‘mystery cults’ of Ancient Greece…or on to ‘nihilism’ a la Nietzsche? Enter Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, once the scourge of Liberation theologians, later Pope Benedict XVI. Benedict argued that reason and religion are not just compatible but symbiotic : there is no valid religion without reason and there is no valid reasoning without religion. A big leap! There is scriptural support for this outrageous idea. In the Old Testament, Wisdom ( Sophia ) was God’s first ‘creation’; she was (literally) his playmate , at least before Adam. This tradition is honored today in Kabbala , where Wisdom is the first Sefirot emanating out of Keter (Crown, Godhead). In the New Testament, Wisdom has largely folded into the concepts of Logos (Christ) and Pneuma (Spirit), but it survives in places like the O Antiphons sung during the Season of Advent. “O Wisdom” is the first antiphon, leading ultimately to the more familiar climax, “O Come O come Emmanuel”. But back to Benedict. Check out his May 1996 address to Latin American bishops entitled, Relativism : “…(Karl) Barth was wrong when…he proposed the faith as a pure paradox that can only exist against reason and totally independent from it… It (faith) does not do violence to it; it is not external to it; rather, it makes it (reason) come to itself.” “Faith (without reason) is destined to atrophy, it simply lacks air to breathe… Faith can again liberate reason… (but) faith without reason will not be human.” Who’da-thunk-it? An alliance of Pure Faith and Pure Reason (apologies to Kant) – an alliance against the new ‘axis powers’ of Positivism, Materialism, Paganism, Nihilism. Benedict was right to be concerned…and right to look for allies in the battle ahead. Is this the coming of the Anti-Christ, the beginning of Armageddon, as described by John of Patmos in Revelation ? Only time will tell, but in any event, who would deny that global civilization is in crisis? The cult of Rational Empiricism (above) first took root in the 17 th century, but it only fully blossomed in the 20 th . “By their fruits you shall know them!” Ok, how about this for a tasty harvest: World War I, Stalinism, Fascism, the Holocaust, World War II, Hiroshima, the Cold War, Vietnam, and now the new ‘30-Plus Years War’ in the Middle East. Rational Empiricism has compiled quite a resume! Apparently, it’s a big hit on LinkedIn, but would you hire this applicant? I’ll pass! I’ll stick with Benedict, thank you. 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 Dante and the Yellow Submarine David Cowles “Yellow Submarine did for the Divine Comedy what West Side Story did for Romeo & Juliet…but I very much doubt the Beatles had any idea what they’d done!” “In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself within a dark wood where the straightway was lost. Ah, how hard a thing it is to tell of that wood, savage and harsh and dense…So bitter is it that death is hardly more.” (Dante, Inferno , Canto I) “Liverpool can be a lonely place on a Saturday night… and this is only Thursday morning.” (Ringo Starr, Yellow Submarine ) 650 years after Dante Alighieri completed his Divine Comedy , a rock and roll band from Liverpool retraced his steps. In 1968, they released a modern, ostensibly secular version of Dante’s epic. Yellow Submarine ( YS ) did for the Divine Comedy ( DC ) what West Side Story did for Romeo & Juliet …but I very much doubt the Beatles had any idea what they’d done! Still, the resonance between these two works is inescapable. Dante lived in the theocratic Middle Ages while the Beatles rose to prominence in the hyper-secular ‘60’s. Apparently, “the fundamental things (do continue to) apply as time goes by” ( Casablanca ). Fittingly, YS opens with a Beatles’ favorite, Eleanor Rigby . It is hard to imagine a song better suited to accompany Dante’s evening in the woods…or Ringo’s morning in Liverpool: “Father McKenzie, writing the words of a sermon that no one will hear… No one was saved…Eleanor Rigby died in the church and was buried along with her name. Nobody came….” Not exactly Christmas music! But it certainly prepares Dante, Ringo, and us for what’s ahead. As we shall see, Eleanor Rigby describes the World, not only as it is but as it must be…provided it lacks any transcendent dimension (i.e. provided it is wholly self-contained). Dante meets the Roman poet Virgil who offers to be his guide through Hell: “Thou must take another road if thou wouldst escape from this savage place.” ( Inferno , Canto I) Back in Liverpool, Ringo meets his own ‘spirit guide’, Admiral Fred. Virgil takes Dante, not through Tuscany but on a path perpendicular to spacetime itself – a path normally traveled only by the dearly departed. ‘Young’ Fred does the same for Ringo and his pals. We are familiar with the Egyptian and Tibetan Books of the Dead , the Jewish Kadish and the Christian Last Rites . These are prayers recited or texts read aloud at the time of a person’s death. The purpose is to facilitate the transition from mortality to eternity. While neither recited nor screened bed side, DC and YS should both be considered part of our multicultural funerary tradition. Both offer detailed images of the stages connecting the angst of Liverpool/Florence with the joy of Pepperland/Paradise. “Abandon all hope, ye that enter here,” reads the sign posted above Hell’s gate. The souls in Hell no longer have the capacity for change. They cannot repent and they cannot influence events in the spatiotemporal world. They are defined now by their sins, and they are compelled to live out those sins eternally. They are expressions of determinism. Dante’s Hell is a spiral; all roads, all rungs, lead to Satan. It is a perverse version of Frost’s Two Roads . As Dante and Virgil descend lower and lower in the narrowing gyre, Hell starts to ‘freeze over’, quite literally. At bottom, they encounter Satan, encased in ice; here is the nadir of all being, a metaphor for Absolute Zero, a foretaste of the cosmic ‘heat death’ that awaits us all. Note : Satan and God share an unusual ontological feature. God is Good per se …but also the Agent of Good in the World. Likewise, Satan is the Agent of Entropy (disorder)…as well as being Disorder itself. This is not to suggest any sort of ontological parity between God and Satan, but that is a topic for another day! This is not the end! Immediately, Dante and Virgil discover that their direction has changed. They are no longer descending; they are starting to ascend Mount Purgatory on the way to Paradise. The first and last verses of Paradiso sum it up: “The glory of him who moves all things penetrates the universe…the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.” Back in England (1968), the Beatles are preparing to embark on their own mystical journey. Pepperland has succumbed to an invasion of giants known as “Blue Meanies”. Young Fred, the Beatles’ Virgil, recently appointed Lord Admiral of the Pepperland Fleet , has just escaped in, of course, a yellow sub (what else?). Its idyllic tranquility shattered, its population “bonked” into a zombie-like state of suspended animation, Pepperland land itself is laid waste (as in the Grail legends). The once rainbow-colored countryside is now a monochrome gray. Just as Paradise was lost but later regained (Milton), so Pepperland has been captured and must now be liberated. Ringo, led by the Admiral and accompanied by his three musical pals, proceeds through a gate of his own. The sign atop this gate simply reads “The Pier”…apt, for this is the launch site for the Beatles’ triumphant Free Pepperland campaign. The Pepper Path runs through a series of “seas” (or branes) that challenge every preconception our travelers have regarding the nature of reality. The first three seas deconstruct the phenomenal world into its basic elements: Time, Space, and Stuff (energy manifested as matter and force). Each of these Seas in turn undergoes its own particular deconstruction. First, the Sea of Time. Our time appears to flow one way (from past to future) at a steady rate – so steady that we hardly notice it. Real time flows at a variable rate and it flows backwards as well as forwards. In New England they constantly talk about ‘the weather’; in Olde England, apparently, they constantly talk about ‘the time’. The plodding phenomenal time that we take for granted turns out to be a very particular expression of multifarious noumenal time. Of course, if time is reversible, then whatever exists can be erased, retroactively…all of which leads to what I call, the Nihilist Conjecture : “Anything that can happen does happen; what can be will be and what cannot be won’t be; everything can be erased and all erasure is retroactive; therefore, everything that ever will be erased has already been erased; and nothing that has been erased ever was; therefore, nothing is, and since nothing is, nothing was and nothing can be, since nothing can come from nothing (Parmenides et al.).” This Nihilist Doxology challenges the competing Christian version: “As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be.” “To be or not to be” was never the question; the question has always been, paraphrasing the jazz favorite, “Is there is or is there ain’t a world?” Because if there is a world, then the Nihilist Conjecture (‘no world is possible’) has been falsified. So is there a world? The second sea, the Sea of Science, does for space what its predecessor did for time . As with time (clocks), human representations of space (Cartesian grids, Platonic solids) determine what space is. Dimensionality is flexible and not an essential aspect of ‘extension’. The third sea, the Sea of Monsters, deconstructs the material world including the phenomenon of life . It shows that what we consider ‘variety’ in our world is, in fact, a very limited and highly selective subset of all the structures and qualities that spacetime could support…and, according to the Beatles, does support. YS anticipates Stephen Gould’s Wonderful Life . In the Sea of Monsters, all possible ‘life’ forms flourish: “Let 1,000 flowers bloom” (Mao). Shape is continuously and indefinitely mutable. All boundaries separating the organic from the mechanical have been dissolved. Platonic forms have replaced by a Chinese menu of customizable combos : “My partner and I would like to order Combo #3, Combo #7, and Combo #12…and we’ll be sharing everything.” What we accept as ‘our prix fixe world’ is the artifact of a limited imagination. This third sea is aptly named. All the creatures are indeed ‘monsters’, not because of how they look or how they are made but because of how they behave (like some children I’ve known – not mine, or yours, of course). Without exception, they are involved in activities that are destructive to themselves and to others. One might question the adaptive advantage of such behavior, but Darwin is not on trial…at least not today. The Beatles’ monsters act exactly like the souls in Dante’s Inferno . Their natures are hard-wired, and they don’t have the capacity to overcome their ‘programming’. They are well outside the ‘state of grace’. Among the various monsters in this sea, one stands out: the Vacuum Monster (VM). As its name suggests, it is the nature of this creature to suck up whatever it encounters. In the “monstrous sea”, creatures threaten other creatures, but the VM threatens everything, first its fellow monsters, then spacetime, and finally, itself alone . The Vacuum Monster is the personification of entropy. In YS , the inexorable process of dematerialization is accelerated. Dante’s Satan, like Evil ( deliver us from… ) in the Lord’s Prayer, is the personification of ‘negation’; and nothing negates like entropy. Sure enough, VM sucks up all the other monsters. Then, seeing that there are no other monsters to suck, it sucks up spacetime, then itself, tail first, like an ouroboros, “into oblivion…or even further”. Like the souls in Hell, the monsters in Yellow Submarine are compelled to act out their destructive personae, even though that activity per se is the source of their desolation. Been there! If any proto-World must self-annihilate, then that World does not exist, never did exist, and never will exist, cannot exist. According to this model, unless anchored to some objective reference point beyond itself, it is inevitable that any possible world would self-annihilate; and if all possible worlds are doomed to annihilation, then no World can possibly exist…ever. Yellow Submarine begins ostensibly as a secular ontology, but it ultimately proves that no consistent secular ontology is possible, other than hardcore Nihilism, which is really an anti-ontology. We are faced with a modern version of Pascal’s Wager . Granted we cannot know for sure whether or not there is a world, we have to put our chips somewhere. At this craps table, the Don’t Come pays Zero; so a Pass Line bet is the only rational option, however distasteful that might be. “I set before you Life and Death, therefore choose (even crappy) Life.” (Deuteronomy 30: 19) Of course, VM does its worst, and predictably we are left with no time, no space, and no stuff. Like Dante before them, our lads have reached the nadir of being, an empty state which the Beatles appropriately call, “Nowhere Land”. This would seem to be the end of our voyage…the end of all voyages in fact…the end of us. But no! It turns out to be just the beginning. As Mary Tudor said, “My end is my beginning.” Nowhere Land may be located at the nadir of Being but, as Dante discovered, your very next step takes you in a different, more positive direction, in his case up Mount Purgatory toward Paradise. But first, it turns out that Nowhere Land isn’t exactly empty after all. It’s not a void. It’s more like the world, as the Book of Genesis describes it, just before creation: "…The earth was without form or shape, with darkness over the abyss and a mighty wind sweeping over the waters.” Not much of a vacation destination to be sure (I’ve been to worse), but not quite empty either. In ‘nearly empty’ Nowhere Land, there remains an irreducible proto-being by the name of Jeremy Hillary Boob, Ph.D. The Beatles aptly call him “Nowhere Man”. Dr. Boob (‘JHB’) is quite literally what’s left of a world after its total annihilation. JHB, you see, is pure information – but that information is so disorganized that it cannot know that it knows what it knows …and it cannot be harnessed to do any sort of ‘work’. So it does not pass the ‘Bateson/Whitehead Ontological Test’: it is not a difference that makes a difference. So JHB does not exist in any accepted sense of the word; he’s Being’s ghost. Stephen Hawking showed that black holes have the power to annihilate everything that falls through their event horizons; but he also showed that these same holes radiate that information back into the cosmos. The Boob is that information. He’s all hair, no head . According to the oldest-known Western philosopher, Anaximander, ‘actual being’ comes about only when two or more ‘potential beings’ grant each other “reck”. Unlike the souls in Dante’s Inferno and the creatures in the Monstrous Sea, Anaximander’s proto-beings avoid the allure of mutual self-destruction and decide, independently of one another (that’s essential) to let each other be ( Let it Be – Beatles). They do not do this out of any hope of personal gain or out of any expectation of reciprocity; they do it out of agape , non-thetic, unconditional Love . Here's how Disney would portray the moment of creation: Our hero is a disembodied voice on the edge of the abyss, crying out, “I grant you reck. I know not who you are or even if you are. Would you mean me well or ill? ‘Here’s no great matter’ (Eliot). I grant you reck, unconditionally…come what may, just because it’s the right thing to do.” Being is Value. This is a decision that all of us in the living world make every day. Every time we treat another as we would want to be treated, with no consideration of ‘results’, and no expectation of ‘reciprocity’, we co-create the universe with God. The souls in Hell do not have this opportunity; by their unrepented sins they have forfeited it. Neither do the creatures in Sea of Monsters; they are destined to destroy themselves and everything around them. There is no native Love in Hell, nor in the Seas of Time, Science and Monsters. So, where does totally selfless Love come from? What is its origin? In a universe powered by mutually assured destruction, the decision to let a potential adversary exist, placing your own existence at risk in the process, is utterly unnatural . Therefore, it has to originate outside the ‘natural’, spatiotemporal, material world. The Love that drives the universe cannot originate inside that universe. (It might have done, but that option is ruled out by the Nihilist Conjecture .) Love is a precondition of World; World cannot be a precondition of Love. The source of Love must be transcendent. For Dante, that means Paradise; for the Beatles, Pepperland. Take your pick! JHB does not (actually) exist, but he does have the potential to exist. He is in a coherent quantum state. He needs someone (or something) to grant him reck. Enter the Beatles! They choose to befriend the Nowhere Man: “Mr. Boob, you can come with us if you like…we’ll take you somewhere.” As a member of the crew, JHB finds purpose and, with that purpose, he begins to organize his information so that he can use it to ‘make a difference’…which, ultimately, he does. He exists! He becomes a full-fledged ‘person’ after all…Pinocchio, a ‘real boy’. But note: he does not organize himself; he is dependent on something outside of him: Value manifested as Purpose. The Beatles and the Boob grant each other reck and, as Anaximander predicted, ontogenesis ensues (2500 years later)! But to be born out of mutual reck, out of Love, is not to exist merely in the spatiotemporal, material realm; it is to exist in an eternal realm as well. Being is transcendental. To be is to transcend space, time, and matter/energy. It is our thesis that a cosmos limited to space, time and materiality, i.e., a secular universe, is impossible; it cannot exist. Sidebar : It may not be possible to prove directly that there is and must be a transcendent dimension to the World. But it may be possible, using a reductio ad absurdum , to prove that a Universe without a transcendent dimension cannot exist. In that case, the debate must shift to Descartes’ question: Is there something rather than nothing? Is there anything that can justify my saying with complete confidence, “ Sum ” or better yet, “ Est ”? (According to Descartes, there is: it’s “ Cogito ”.) The Beatles have dealt with Time and Space and Life itself; so what’s next? You guessed it, Mind: the Foothills of the Headlands , the land of disembodied thoughts. Its inhabitants want to help the Beatles on their journey, but they can’t. Like Dante’s souls in Purgatory, these creatures are immaterial and powerless to bring aims to fruition. Sleeping yet. Put on some coffee because here’s where things really get interesting! Our next stop is the legendary Sea of Holes, the realm of ‘negative space’. The usual relation of figure/ground is reversed. The sea itself is now the ground, and the holes in that ground now constitute the figure. Nothing has become concrete, so concrete that Ringo is actually able to put a ‘hole’ in his pocket. The topology of this sea is non-orientable. There is no consistent sense of direction, no spatial ordering. It’s like an Escher drawing on steroids. But if the Sea of Holes is non-orientable, then the entire universe in which it is embedded, including Liverpool and Pepperland, must also be non-orientable, albeit less obviously so. We may say that the universe is locally orientable but globally non-orientable because it has the Sea of Holes embedded in it. Think of the world we live in: Earth appears flat (locally) but I’m told it’s round (globally). Dante had his experience of non-orientability on the threshold of Purgatory. “I raised my eyes and thought to see Lucifer as I had left him; and I saw his legs held upward.” ( Inferno , Canto XXXIV) Just as Dante and Virgil turn to leave Hell, Dante looks back and is surprised to see Satan upside down, a reversal of orientation that is the trademark of non-orientable spaces. The Sea of Holes leads to Pepperland…but not so fast! You may only enter through an infinitely thin membrane (an event horizon?) called the “Sea of Green”… and only one of the holes in the Sea of Holes connects to the Sea of Green…and there are innumerable holes to choose from. One could easily spend ‘a lifetime’ searching for the one hole that connects to the Sea of Green and on to Pepperland…and never find it. Neither Dante nor the Beatles can reach their goal without the intervention of grace . Fortunately, our Argonauts do find the Sea of Green, and when they do, they immediately find themselves in Pepperland. Remarkably, Pepperland looks a lot like Liverpool, i.e., it’s drab…and lonely. But the Beatles quickly “unbonk” the Lord Mayor with “a snatch of a tune” and “ready the land to rebellion”. It is only now that they discover that they bear an “uncanny” resemblance to four of Pepperland’s permanent residents, the members of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. In fact, the Beatles are the Sergeant Pepper Band! ‘The Beatles’ under the aspect of spacetime, they are ‘Sergeant Pepper’ under the aspect of eternity. Together, the historical Beatles and the eternal Pepper Band use music to restore Pepperland to its former glory. The Battle Hymn of their Republic: All you need is Love! The Blue Meanies are routed. But in the spirit of Love, the Beatles offer reconciliation: “Hello there, blue people. Won’t you join us?” And of course, they do: “Yes, let’s mix, Max!” Pepperland is restored. Welcome to Paradise! And a special thanks to Dante and Ringo for being our ‘spirit guides’ along the way. 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 Holy Days 2024. Share Previous Next

< Back Escaping Dostoevsky's Polar Bear Aharon Loschak "Try to pose for yourself this task: not to think of a polar bear, and you will see that the cursed thing will come to mind every minute.” Chabad.org invites the readers of Aletheia Today to read this article in full by following this link . Previous Next

< Back The 60-Minute Bible David Cowles Jul 8, 2025 “…If you could digest the entire Bible in just 60 minutes, might that be of interest?” In our unchurched world, there is a growing hunger to understand the Judeo-Christian world view. “What is it that has everybody in such a lather?” Of course, you could ask a Rabbi, Priest, or Minister for help, but that would likely lead to instruction in one particular ‘faith’ while you’re looking for the broadest, most inclusive possible overview. When I was 14, I determined to read the entire Bible over the summer, book by book, from Genesis through Revelation . Yup, while you were at the beach, I was in my room, busy studying. In the end, I settled for an ‘extensive sampling’, but 50 years later a business associate told me his New Year’s resolution was to read the entire Bible, end to end, before the end of that year…and he did it! I doubt many folks would be willing to commit to such a project today. But what if I could make the task a little less daunting? Instead of an entire year, or summer, what if you could digest the entire Bible in just 60 minutes? Might that be of interest? I’m not talking about a summary; I’m talking about actual Bible verses, quoted verbatim, with minimal contextual notes in between. I have selected 24 short passages from the Judeo-Christian Bible that I believe offer the sort of overview people are seeking. At a minimum, I hope you’ll come away saying, “Ah, so that’s what all the noise is about.” So enjoy! And as for the 99 hours I just saved you? You’re welcome! Most gods of the 2nd millennium BCE created the universe merely by willing it, reducing our world to the status of a wholly owned subsidiary of God, Inc. Not so YHWH, ‘God’ in the Judeo-Christian tradition: Genesis 1: 1 – 4 (Creation) Our world is not just a figment of some god’s imagination. Marx was right! The material world is real. YHWH created this world by ‘letting it be’, ‘seeing that it was good’, and then ‘separating (e.g. light from darkness) and gathering’ (e.g. water into seas). YHWH follows that pattern through all 6 stages of creation. Long before Charles Darwin, the authors of Genesis 1 produced their own, remarkably accurate, theory of evolution. We encounter YHWH again in the calling of Abraham (Abram), the Patriarch of Jews, Christians and Muslims alike and, by extension, of us all. Genesis 12: 1 – 3 (Covenant) Abraham is the Bible’s first existential hero. Responding to God’s call, he leaves family, friends, and an upper middle class lifestyle to become a nomadic immigrant in a strange land. In recognition of Abraham’s faith, trust, and courage, YHWH establishes an eternal Covenant linking Abraham and his descendants (and ultimately all human beings) to God. We resume our story on the slopes of Mt. Horeb. The Hebrew people are now slaves in Egypt. Moses, himself ‘fostered’ by members of Egypt’s extended royal family, encounters YHWH in a perpetually burning bush. Exodus 3: 1 – 6, 13 - 15 (Moses) These verses may be the most important in the entire Bible because this is where God formally introduces himself to us. He meets us in history and in the context of daily life; he tells us who he is and even lets us know his name. From here on, we’re on a first name basis with Divinity. The first 5 books of the Bible constitute Torah (The Written Law). It includes the Ten Commandments, made famous by Cecil B. DeMille and Charlton Heston. But the crux of the new Social Contract is buried in an obscure text: Leviticus 25: 1 – 13 (Jubilee) The social contract outlined here is by far the most radical social program ever conceived: a completely egalitarian re-distribution of productive wealth (Capital) every 50 years! Marx could only dream… This ‘Jubilee’ theme plays a significant part in Jesus’ ministry and in the Constitution of the early Church. Joshua entered the Promised Land with all the swagger of a newly minted presidential front-runner. Armed with a party platform developed during 40 years of wandering in the wilderness of Sinai, the Hebrews were ready to conquer Cannan, by persuasion if possible, by force if necessary. At that time, the walled city of Jericho was the unassailable ‘capital’ of Cannan. The city’s rulers were so confident that they regarded Joshua’s military maneuvers outside its walls as mere entertainment. And yet, Joshua captured the city in just 7 days and with nary an arrow fired. Joshua 6: 1 – 5, 15 – 16, & 20 (Jericho) Joshua’s weapon of choice was liturgical dance, spelling out the details of God’s ‘plan’ for Cannan! But this was only the coup de grace ; it followed a period of espionage, infiltration, agitation, and a heightened class consciousness. The Liberation of Jericho was perhaps the first recorded instance of a successful proletarian revolution. Would that the revolutionaries of 1776, 1789, 1848, 1871 and 1917 had paid more attention to Joshua. The Fall of Jericho began a 250 year period known as the time of Judges. There was no permanent or centralized government. Imagine ‘there’s no state’, John Lennon! Charismatic leaders arose ad hoc when circumstances required and were confirmed in office by popular consensus. Otherwise, YHWH ruled directly through the 613 mitzvoth of Torah and the consciences of individuals. Judges 21: 25 (Theocracy) Not that the temptations of political and military power were not everywhere. After a string of military victories, the people clamored to make Gideon their King. But in a Sherman inspiring moment, he declined: Judges 8: 22 - 23 (Theocracy) But the people were not satisfied for long. Surrounded by strong, centralized monarchies, they pined for ‘their piece of the pie’. Samuel, the last of the great Judges (his sons were disasters), delivered a passionate defense of YHWH’s rule: I Samuel 8: 10 – 18 (Theocracy) We might just as well be reading Benjamin Franklin. Unfortunately, Israel did not heed God’s warning. They chose a king, first Saul then David, and the rest, as they say, is ‘history’: Israel was divided, conquered, and exiled. “Who’d a thunk it?” ( Hairspray )… other than Samuel, and of course, YHWH. Fortunately, history had a Track B: Wisdom . By rejecting Theocracy, Israel was abandoning not only the Covenant but also the cosmology of Genesis . In its place, Israel developed a rich, proto-existentialist philosophy: Ecclesiastes 1: 1 – 11 (Wisdom) Am I reading Solomon…or Sartre? History also had a Track C: Prophesy. Covenant theology did not suddenly disappear; it remained underground, kept alive by an archipelago of prophets, speaking truth to power: Isaiah 42: 1 – 9 (Prophesy) Many of the prophets pair a searing indictment of the status quo with a utopian vision of the future, modeled on the Garden of Eden. Who were their political consultants? Anyhow, much of their teaching focuses on the coming of a Messiah and the restoration of Theocracy: Jeremiah 31: 31 – 34 (Covenant) During the tumultuous first century CE, Judaism was fractured. Numerous ‘sects’ and ‘parties’ - the Essenes and the Zealots, the Pharisees and the Sadducees, the Scribes and the Sanhedrin - all competed for the hearts and minds of the faithful based on their differing interpretations of the prophets’ message. Into this cauldron stepped Jesus of Nazareth. He offered a new interpretation of Torah that built on the Wisdom and Prophetic traditions and that ultimately transformed his branch of Judaism into a separate religion, Christianity. Jesus’ public ministry begins in his hometown synagogue (Nazareth). A young man by Rabbinical standards, Jesus (age 30) has just returned from 40 days in the desert. He rises to read from Torah and infuriates his bougie audience by proclaiming a Jubilee (above), i.e. the immediate and total redistribution of all productive property. Luke 4: 16 – 21 (Jubilee) The foundational principle of Christianity, The Great Commandment, is not a Christian invention. It is simply a juxtaposition of two verses from Torah – a pairing already in circulation before Jesus’ time. Matthew 22: 35 – 40 (The Great Commandment) The Great Commandment is deceptively mundane. This is no Categorial Imperative (Kant) nor is it the Golden Rule. Jesus uses this meme to proclaim congruence among each of us, our neighbors (‘as yourself’) and God (‘like it’). Elsewhere, however, Jesus does offer a fresh interpretation, application and extension of Jewish theology, cosmology and ethics. His teachings are summarized in two lengthy New Testament passages: The Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5: 1 – 7: 29) The Last Supper Discourses (John 14: 1 – 17: 26) But if you’re following the 60-minute plan, you can settle for: Matthew 5: 3 – 12 (Beatitudes) Matthew 6: 9 – 13 (Lord’s Prayer) John 15: 9 – 12 (Last Supper) The story of Jesus’ passion, crucifixion and resurrection is widely known. It is unnecessary to retell it here. However, a few things stand out and call for our special attention: Luke 22: 14 – 20 (Eucharist) Like each of us, Jesus is an historical phenomenon: one and done! But Christ also exists outside of spacetime: everywhere, all the time, all at once! Christ is both the locus of history and an event within that history and Eucharist is a physical manifestation of this reality. Jesus is fully divine and fully human, not half and half, but all and all. Being human does not mean merely physical suffering. It also entails ‘the dark night of the soul’, the overwhelming sense of despair and isolation that comes over all of us at one time or another as we stand on the edge, peering into the dark and silent abyss. This is the terrible price we pay for the total ontological freedom spelled out in Genesis . Matthew 27: 46 (Despair) Critics of Judeo-Christianity often base their views on the so-called Problem of Evil: “Why do bad things happen to good people?” Jesus’ crucifixion, despair, and death answer that argument. The ontological freedom of the created world is so complete that even God, incarnate in the world, must hit rock bottom . Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances get considerable attention in all 4 Gospels and elsewhere in the New Testament. However, one event in that narrative is particularly powerful and provocative: Luke 24: 13 – 35 (Resurrection) As suggested above, the early Church embodied Marx’ notion of ‘permanent revolution’ in the form of ‘perpetual Jubilee’, the on-going redistribution of wealth: Acts 2: 42 – 57 (Jubilee) Ultimately, Christianity is focused on the end times, the Eschaton, the Apocalypse, summarized first by St. Paul and later by John of Patmos: I Corinthians 15: 19 – 28 (Eschaton) Revelation 1: 8 & 22: 13 (Eschaton) In the end, God is all in all. Christology, the theology and cosmology of Christianity, is magnificently summarized in two brief hymns: John 1: 1 – 5 (Christology) Colossians 1: 15 – 20 (Christology) So that’s it! Did I keep my 60 minute promise? Thanks for taking this trip with me. I hope you enjoyed yourself and I hope you feel your time was well spent. Should your plans call for future air travel, I hope you’ll once again consider flying Aletheia Today . Thank you! 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 Achilles and the Tortoise David Cowles Aug 23, 2021 You’ve no doubt heard about the race between Achilles and the Tortoise. My 8 year old grandson has so I assume you have too. It took place 2,500 years ago. The tortoise challenged Achilles (an anachronism in itself) but asked Achilles to give him a head start (1/2 the distance to the goal line). Supremely confident , Achilles agreed. You’ve no doubt heard about the race between Achilles and the Tortoise. My 8 year old grandson has so I assume you have too. It took place 2,500 years ago. The tortoise challenged Achilles (an anachronism in itself) but asked Achilles to give him a head start (1/2 the distance to the goal line). Supremely confident , Achilles agreed. While the bookies were taking bets, a philosopher named Zeno proved, using just the universally accepted assumptions of ordinary math and logic, that Achilles not only would not win the race but could not win it. I won’t repeat the proof here…maybe another time. Where the betting had overwhelmingly favored Achilles, now it swung over to the tortoise. The race began and ended in seconds: Achilles 1, Tortoise 0. You can imagine that Zeno’s neighbors were none too pleased. Was Zeno’s argument flawed? In my opinion, it was not! So, what went wrong? Zeno hadn’t proved that Achilles would lose the race; what he had proved was that there is something terribly wrong with our logical and mathematical assumptions. More on Zeno in later posts. 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 Nature of Time David Cowles Confining events within a single order of magnitude reinforces our tendency to categorize events as past, present, or future. After all, if a quantum of experience can be no more than one second long, almost everything must seem past or future from that perspective. At first glance, our lives seem to be strings of bead-like events. No sooner have we experienced one sensation, thought, feeling, or action than another takes its place. We have a vague sense that we can string these events along a timeline and group them as past , present , or future . But on further reflection, it is clear that this idea is absurd. Events don’t succeed one another like conscripts boarding a warship; they overlap. I am all at once aware of many sensations, thoughts, feelings, and acts; it’s hardly ever clear when one stops, and another begins. Events are not points…or beads. Events have duration and different events have different durations, and the duration of one event necessarily overlaps with the duration of at least one other event. The human nervous system is attuned to events that fall within a certain range, i.e., events with a duration of somewhere between one second and one-tenth of one second. If an event has a duration of less than one-tenth of a second, we normally don’t register it at all, unless perhaps as undifferentiated background. If an event has duration of more than a second, we normally try to break it up into multiple, sequential events. Our naïve sense that events normally last a second or less has everything to do with our perceptual & cognitive apparatus and absolutely nothing to do with the nature of events themselves. Whatever the world may be, we experience it in one second bursts . There is absolutely no theoretical reason why event duration should be confined within a single order of magnitude. On the contrary, we know that there are events with durations orders of magnitude shorter than a second and there is no reason not to assume that there are other events with durations orders of magnitude longer than a second. Confining events within a single order of magnitude reinforces our tendency to categorize events as past, present, or future. After all, if a quantum of experience can be no more than one second long, almost everything must seem past or future from that perspective. We need to ask a different question: How do the myriad events that constitute our lives relate to one another? Are they always laid out more or less neatly along a timeline, like clothes drying in the sun, or are more complex species of ordering possible? It turns out that any two events may relate to one another in 6 different ways: (1) They may be tangent (i.e., sequential) (2) They may overlap . (3) One may be embedded in the other. A model universe that is connected in these three ways and only these three ways does not fully account for the phenomena of connectedness (solidarity) that we experience in everyday life, or in the laboratory, so we so must continue. In these first three modes, connectivity is a function of overlap: at a point, across a region, or in the entirety. Therefore, in these modes, connected entities do not require space or time to operate, and we do not need a concept of space or time to understand them. On the other hand, the connectivity delivered by these three modes, even working together, is fragile, and in my view, too fragile to account for the persistent and enduring universe we experience. This level of connectivity lacks redundancy (and therefore it lacks resiliency.) It can neither correct itself nor reinforce itself. The entire House of Cards is always ‘just one false negative’ away from total collapse. From here on, though, things get more interesting. The final three modes of connectivity provide the glue needed to hold our world together and allow it to function as an organism: (4) Two events (A and B) may be disjoint, but both events may overlap a common third event (C). This is the special case of relatedness that single-handedly leads to the popular notion of “past, present, future”: when three events are connected in this way, one is commonly, if arbitrarily, thought to be in the past and one in the future of the third event (the so-called present). In this mode, A and B do not overlap. Therefore, A and B do not directly influence one another. A and B both overlap C. Each potentially influences C and both are potentially influenced by C. Therefore, indirectly, A and B may influence one another after all, through the mediation of C. Let’s do a deeper dive! The phenomenon of time ‘happens’ when and only when A influences B and B influences C and no other ‘influential pathways’ are operative. No reflection, no recursion, and no reciprocity; no 3 R’s. But there is no a priori reason to assume that influences are linear. For example, influences couldrecur (as in a loop ) . A could influence B and B could influence C and C could influence A. “Karma is a b*tch!” In this model, A, B, C together constitute a self-organized unity, a triangle, an uber-event snatched from the ‘flow’ of linear time. Perhaps this is the origin of ‘societies,’ groupings of events (or entities) that function, at least sometimes, as one single coordinated entity. So-called societies include the persistent and enduring groupings we know as objects . This phenomenon is what we call recursion ; it lies at the heart of what we call identity . Or perhaps, while A is influencing B, B is busy influencing A. This phenomenon is what we call reciprocation , and it lies at the heart of what we call relationship . Finally, as A is influencing B, A may be influencing itself in the exact same way. “What I do unto others, I do unto myself.” This phenomenon is what we call reflection ; it lies at the heart of what we call growth . In this last case, A’s relation to B is also A’s relation to itself. It is the contention of this essay that events are ultimately connected like the vertices of a Platonic solid (e.g., a tetrahedron), not like points on a line. Every event (node) connects with every other event, exhibiting multiple forms of connectivity in the process. Our naïve concept of linear connectedness is valid only when confined to each individual edge of the Platonic solid, and then only when the connecting line segment is viewed as a vector. Linear connectedness, if it’s even a thing, is a very special and limiting case of the broader, more inclusive, reality. Imagine a child sketching a Tetrahedron on a piece of paper. She starts at a point (call it A) and draws a line segment (vector) from point A to point B. Then she draws another vector from point B to point C and so on until all 4 vertices are connected with each other by these vectors. So, what’s wrong with this? Well, first, does anyone really think this is how Tetrahedra come to be in nature ? Second, note that she cannot complete the Tetrahedron without (1) lifting her pencil off the page or (2) retracing (and reversing) a step. This should set off alarm bells everywhere. Nature does not lift its pencil off the page, nature does not retrace its steps, and nature does not reverse itself. (5) #5 is a more generalized version of #4. We're just extending the notions of #4 to physical fields. Now we’re talking connected and disjoint light cones instead of mere regions. If there is no single event or string of events (C) that connects the fields associated with two disjoint events (A, B), then A and B are said to be simultaneous : in the language of physics, they “lie outside each other’s light cone.” But even simultaneous events may enjoy a species of connectedness. Two events (A, B) may lie outside each other’s light cones, but both may lie in the light cone of a common third event (C). In this case, we can say that A and B are simultaneous with respect to each other but not with respect to C. (6) Finally, two events that lie outside each other’s light cones, which in turn are not mediated by any third light cone, may nonetheless constitute a single event. The two events are said to be entangled . The existence of this mode of connectivity (‘spooky action at a distance’) was a matter of conjecture until John Bell proved it in 1964. “Bell’s Theorem,” as it’s called, has since been verified experimentally by Alan Aspect (1971) and many others. Is this list of possible modes of connection exhaustive? Suppose there are two events that do not enjoy any of these modes of connectedness. What can we say about such an event pair? One thing only: we must say that no such event pair exists ! A and B do not exist for one another. Looking more closely at these modes of relatedness, we can see that they fundamentally resolve into just two modes: Serial Connectedness (#1) and Embedded Connectedness (#3). The remaining modes are hybrids of #1 and #3. This prompts further reflection. Is one mode of connectedness more fundamental, more substructural than the other? Is one a special case of the other? Does one ‘emerge’ from the other? If we could find a phenomenon that exhibited one mode of connectivity and excluded the other mode, that would go a long way toward establishing one mode as the more general, more substructural mode. I believe we can do just that: The 6th mode of connectedness allows two disjoint events (A and B) to function as a single event (C). The phenomenon of quantum entanglement described here requires as an absolute condition that the two disjoint events not connect (serially) with any other events. Any sort of serial connectedness would abort the embedding event, but without an embedding event, the two embedded events would not exist in a common universe (since they would lack any connection to one another). Therefore, without quantum entanglement, Universe as we know it would not exist. Which is what John Bell proved, QED . While we can observe the effects of quantum entanglement only under very specialized laboratory conditions, we should not conclude from that, that such events are rare. I would speculate that the Universe consists of more event pairs with “entangled connectedness” than with any other form of serial or embedded connectedness; but that is mere conjecture. In any case, the existence of entangled connectedness is sufficient to prove that serial connectivity is not a universal characteristic of all events in the Universe. Embedded connectivity, therefore, must be the more general case of connectivity, and, therefore, the sub-structural mode! Imagine that! A mode of connectedness not thought of before 1900 and unproven before 1964, turns out to be the primordial mode of connectedness across the universe. Where does this leave time ? It is a particular manifestation, linear and serial, of a much more varied concept of connectedness. That is the nature of time! 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. Previous Next

< Back The Owl and the Pussycat David Cowles “The entire story makes no sense…unless there’s something special about that ring, something you can’t get at Harrod’s at any price.” No, our title does not refer to a pub in London. If it did, I would certainly be having a pint there right now. Rather it is the title of a poem by nineteenth century poet Edmund Lear, a man more famous in kindergartens than in universities. Edmund Lear is identified as an author of “nonsense” poems and stories, a charge he readily accepts. How not? His collected works include such titles as Nonsense Songs & Stories and The Book of Nonsense . Most critics have been content to accept Lear’s self-identification at face value. But what if there is something more going on here? Consider the words of St. Paul. In his First Letter to Corinthians , he writes: “The message of the cross is foolishness…we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles.” But he also writes, “Yet we do speak a wisdom to those who are mature…we speak God’s wisdom, mysterious, hidden.” Is it possible that something similar could be going on with Lear? Could there be wisdom ‘hidden’ in his apparent nonsense. And if so, what deeper meaning might lie beneath the surface of his work? Let’s take a close look at Lear’s most famous work, The Owl and the Pussy-cat : The Owl and the Pussy-Cat went to sea in a beautiful pea-green boat, they took some honey, and plenty of money wrapped up in a five-pound note. The Owl looked up to the stars above and sang to a small guitar, “O lovely Pussy! O Pussy, my love, what a beautiful Pussy you are, you are, you are! What a beautiful Pussy you are! Pussy said to the Owl, “You elegant fowl! How charmingly sweet you sing! Oh let us be married, too long we have tarried: But what shall we do for a ring?” They sailed away for a year and a day to the land where the Bong-tree grows, and there in the wood, a Piggy-wig stood, with a ring at the end of his nose, his nose, his nose, with a ring at the end of his nose. “Dear Pig, are you willing to sell for one shilling your ring?” Said the Piggy, “I will.” So they took it away and were married next day by the Turkey who lives on the hill. They dined on mince and slices of quince, which they ate with a runcible spoon; and hand in hand on the edge of the sand, they danced in the light of the moon, the moon, the moon, they danced by the light of the moon. No prosecutor worth his salt would have a moment’s difficulty making a prime facie case for nonsense here. The defense on the other hand, contending that there is method in this madness, certainly has its work cut out for it. But let’s give it a go! Our argument starts with the very first line…and with the title itself. An owl and a pussycat, indeed! Tales of animosity between birds and cats permeate all of literature right down to Sylvester and Tweety . The notion that an owl and a pussycat could peacefully co-exist, much less fall in love, seems absurd. Yet it is the premise of this poem. Oddly though, this juxtaposition is reminiscent of another story told 2500 years earlier by the prophet Isaiah (11:6): “Then the wolf will be the guest of the lamb and the leopard will lie down with the young goat; the calf and the young lion shall browse together with a little child to lead them. The cow and the bear shall graze, together their young shall lie down; the lion shall eat hay like the ox.” Isaiah’s imagery introduces the Messiah, and with the Messiah, the Eschaton, Isaiah’s vision of the Kingdom of Heaven. The resonance of the Lear and Isaiah texts alerts us to the notion that there may be eschatological issues at state in Lear’s poem. We learn early that our amorous pair is by no means skint. In fact, they have ‘plenty of money’, so much in fact that they can afford to use a ₤5 note like a rubber band. “Plenty of money” - I doubt even you would say that – affluent though you are. Besides money, they took honey – an interesting choice for a long voyage. (What are they, 5 years old?) Even more interesting because neither species ever eats honey. Owls and cats are both carnivorous predators; so why would they take honey? Again, we turn to Isaiah: “…The lion shall eat hay like the ox.” But there is yet another way to read this. Honey is the archetypical spiritual food (“the nectar of the gods”). Mead, the beverage of choice among the divine set, is made from honey. In this reading, the ‘honey’ is not a dietary item at all but the currency of gnosis . The image balances the spiritual (honey) and the secular (money). Our couple feels it needs a ring, but apparently not just any ring will do. If it would, they have access to many fine jewelers in London and, as we know, they have ‘plenty of money’. They are not bargain hunting. They need a ring that recognizes the inviolable equality and independence of the marriage partners, even as it celebrates their union. Our couple does not wish to consecrate their marriage with a symbol of division and exclusion. So of course they do exactly what you and I would have done in similar circumstances: they sail away for a year and a day to the land where the Bong-tree grows, because I mean you know you can’t find a suitable ring anywhere in London! They’ve landed. Now for that ring? “How much must a ring cost on Bong Island if even Harrod’s couldn’t meet their needs?” I wonder. Voicelessly, I warn my animal friends, “You’d better shop around, get multiple quotes, haggle with the merchants.” But they had barely disembarked when they spied a Piggy-wig, standing in a wood nearby with a ring at the end of its nose. Apparently, our intrepid adventurers are not shoppers. (I can’t imagine why you’d go to an exotic island if not to shop for knickknacks, machine made in China?) Nor are they in any mood to bargain; and we shan’t even discuss the wisdom of buying a piece of jewelry from a pig on a beach, especially after it has spent time in his porcine snout. Our pair makes a ridiculously low offer for the ring, ‘one shilling’, and it is accepted immediately. Now for our EU cousins, a shilling is 1/5th of a British Pound, equivalent to about a ‘Quarter’ US. But don’t forget inflation. Lear’s shilling would be worth about 3 pounds today. Still not a stretch for our lovers; after all, they use ₤5 notes as fasteners. So obviously the entire story makes no sense ( quelle surprise! )… unless there’s something very, very special about that ring, something you can’t get at Harrod’s. Well, how about a whole new ‘topology’ (i.e. ‘cosmic shape’)? When you buy a ring at Tiffany’s it will always have an inside and an out, no exceptions, not for any amount of money. Every ring divides the world in two (in/outside).The sacrament of marriage, on the other hand, is about eliminating such divisions: ‘and two shall be one flesh’. If a ring is to symbolize the sacramental power of matrimony, it can’t be any ring we’ve ever seen. So, it’s Bong Island…here we come! To properly symbolize marriage we would need a ring with just one side, with no inside or out. Imagine showing that off at your next high school reunion! Unfortunately though, it’s not available in New York or London…or even in Paris, or anywhere else in a cosmos plagued with an orientable (inside/out) topology. But what if were available on Bong Island? A one sided mathematical object exists but only in a cosmos with a ‘non-orientable topology’; it’s called a Mobius strip. Could it be that Piggy-wig’s ring is just such a one sided object? On a Mobius strip, there are no fixed beginnings or ends and no fixed orientation (e.g. ‘up or down’). It allows you to travel around it continuously, always coming back to an arbitrary starting point; however, each time you return to the starting point, your orientation has been reversed. Therefore, symmetry requires 720° rather than the 360° we’re used to. So, ring bought, now it’s off to be married by some ‘fool on a hill’, some Turkey. (I’ve heard members of the clergy referred to as ‘turkeys’ before but here I think Lear is taking about an actual bird…who knows?) First the wedding, then off to the reception for dancing, dancing, dancing…and a feast! One catch though: no knives or forks. The only utensil provided by this traditional Bong Island wedding venue is a ‘runcible spoon’ – whatever that is. And so we now have two mysteries to explain: the spoon…and of course the ring! ‘Runcible’ is a neologism unique to Lear. Its meaning, if indeed it has one, is entirely uncertain. If there’s a consensus, based mostly on context, I suppose it would be ‘slotted spoon’. If so, that would make it a very poor eating utensil indeed…and that might have been Lear’s point exactly. I would make a case, however, for a slightly different interpretation based on the possible etymology of the root word, ‘runc’. I must tell you, however, that I am indebted to Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 for much of this analysis: Old English ‘hruncian’ (to wrinkle) could have been Lear’s primary source for the root in ‘runcible’. It derives from a Proto-Germanic verb ‘hrunkon’ (to wrinkle, crease or fold). That root appears as well in Middle English as ‘ronke’ (wrinkle) and in Old Norse as ‘hrukka’ (also wrinkle). And this makes linguistic sense: phonological developments from ‘hr’ to ‘r’ and between ‘o’ and ‘u’ are common in Germanic languages. So, by this analysis, a ‘runcible spoon’ is a wrinkled, creased or folded spoon… Heck, we were better off with ‘slotted spoon’ even though there is exactly zero textual support for that choice. A wrinkled, creased or folded spoon would be almost as difficult to eat with as a slotted spoon… but at least it respects the language of Beowulf . Plus it ties back to the ring. Suppose the spoon is an extension of the same non-orientable topology as the ring. Three dimensional objects (spoons) that embed a Mobius strip are called ‘ Klein Bottles ’. In our world of 3 spatial dimensions, Klein Bottles are not physically realizable, but if they were, they could hold no liquid. Why? Because like all non-orientable objects, they are one sided and therefore have no inside or out. In this admittedly speculative interpretation, the ‘runcible spoon’ is the 3-d correlate (Klein) of the Piggy-wig’s nose ring (Mobius). It suggests that there is a consistently non-orientable topology in play on “the land where the Bong-tree grows”…as there was in Eden. What better way to end our tale than a dance: “Hand in hand…on the edge of the sand…by the light of the moon”. What a climax! A dance of Sufi dervishes! What better metaphor than dance to symbolize the resolution of all conflict into universal harmony (Isaiah) and what better place to dance than at the ‘edge’ of the world, the point where orientable spacetime disappears: Sandymount Strand (James Joyce), Finis Terra (Santiago di Compostela), the Restaurant at the End of the Universe (Douglass Adams), Bong Island (Edmund Lear). This transubstantiation of our humdrum orientable universe has a sacramental aspect. The topology of Eden was undoubtedly non-orientable. It was only by eating the apple that dualities were manifest: naked/clothed, good/evil, life/death. Fast forward, the scourge of orientability colors every aspect of life in our ‘fallen’ world: “I’m in with the in crowd; you are odd man out; Warsaw Pact vs. NATO, citizen vs. alien; 1% vs. 99; labor vs. management; red state vs. blue; Yankees vs. Red Sox.” As contrasts, these dualities are enriching; but as conflicts, they impoverish us. So in every way, this is the wedding of the ages. It restores primal non-orientability, both symbolically and physically. In Revelation , the final book of the New Testament, Christ is identified as the Alpha and the Omega and in the non-orientable topology of the Eschaton, Alpha and Omega are one! 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

< Back Think like an Octopus David Cowles Aug 3, 2026 “The cosmic showdown, Homo vs. Octo, may be overhyped. Rumors of a $250,000 ticket price are exaggerated… My advice to scalpers: stick to Taylor Swift!” 1200 words, 6 minute read 2.5 million years ago was ‘just last week’ in life of our 4.5 billion year old planet (Earth)… but what a week it was! Back then, the genus Homo , our genus, first evolved in East Africa. At the time, your ancestors didn’t make much of a splash. Standing 4 feet tall, weighing 90 pounds soaking wet, and having few natural defenses, Homo failed to put the fear of God into the giant hyenas, crocs, hippos and saber tooth tigers that shared Africa’s horn. But we weren’t stupid: “There’s a whole lot of killin’ and eatin’ goin’ on here and we can’t compete. So let’s follow the Alpha predators, at a respectful distance of course, and feast on their leftovers.” And so we became scavengers of the plains. Of course, the proto-Marxists among us complained that we were living off ‘crumbs from the table of imperialism’… but Tiny Tim will have his Christmas pud’! Liberal lions were happy to leave some choice morsels (not too many of course, they’re liberals, not anarchists) for the pathetic scavengers but the Leonid Lords warned against the practice: “Your generosity may fuel a revolution of rising expectations. One day, you may face these beggars across the barricades.” These well-considered warnings only provoked laughter. Misguided whelps would continue to ‘feed the wild animals’ (as they called it). But surprisingly, the Lion scouts, the hunters, backed the idle Lords (politics sure does make strange bedfellows). It seems the Homo community included a seer who’d been overheard delivering an oracle to his followers: “One day lions will live in cages, and your descendants will feed them their leftovers.” Even then, members of the genus Homo were known for their keen sense of humor, so the Pride shrugged off this second warning too, albeit a bit more nervously. The seer had noticed what everyone else had overlooked…or disregarded: Homo thinks differently from Panthera (‘big cats’) and eventually that difference would deliver an unstoppable evolutionary advantage. Well “it’s yesterday once more” and now it’s my turn to play prophet. There are genera (plural of genus for those of you who skipped Latin) today whose members think differently from us and that difference may one day translate into a new round of evolutionary advantage…at our expense. “Meet the new boss!” (The Who) Better than the old boss? Researchers have discovered a mutation, unique to Octopus, that allows their cells to produce certain proteins, critical in the thought process, with remarkable fidelity. According to an article in Scientific American (7/29/2026), Richard Han, then a graduate student in the lab of Harvard Medical School cell biologist Amy Lee, was examining Octopus RNA—the molecules that carry the genetic instructions that cells use to build proteins—when he noticed an unusual break in the genetic sequences that formed ribosomes, the cell’s protein-makers. This segment of ribosomal RNA (rRNA) is identical across every other animal species that’s been studied, so Octopus’ unique deviation jumped out. To figure out how this mutation affects ribosome function, the researchers engineered it into certain bacteria. The altered bacteria made fewer protein building errors. Neurons, being long-lived, are especially vulnerable to protein production errors which slow thought and increase the incidence of error. So next time Junior brings home a bad report card, don’t be surprised if he tells you that your RNA is to blame. If he’s precocious, he may even suggest that gene therapy (CRISPR), rather than the usual punishments, would help him raise his grades. The advantages of this mutation are obvious, so it’s unclear why this evolutionary step should have been confined to Octopus genera and specifically to those species of Octopus (shallow water) that split off from their deep-water counterparts roughly 100 million years ago. Octopus’ prodigious intelligence is all the more surprising when you realize that they don’t have a central nervous system. Rather, their whole body functions as a decentralized data processor. The left tentacle literally doesn’t know what the right tentacle is doing. As Scarecrow discovered in the Wizard of Oz , brains do not create consciousness, consciousness configures brains (and/or other cognitive organs). While vertebrates’ evolution of a central nervous system was a big deal, a leap forward that the genus Homo exploited to obvious advantage, it is not the whole story. Powerful as they are, brains are very inefficient. They are remote, fragile, and super sensitive. Processing takes place far from where ‘boy meets world’. Plus, brains need to be protected, and temperature controlled, so a heavy, thick skull and a semi-permeable membrane are required. It seems that Octopus has found a better solution. The cognitive function is distributed throughout the body. As in Roman Catholic political theory (subsidiarity), decisions are made locally , i.e. as close to the action site as possible. But the cosmic showdown, Homo vs. Octo , may be overhyped. Rumors of a $250,000 ticket price are probably exaggerated. One of Homo’s signature traits is its ability to adapt. Already there is evidence that we are starting to think like our Cephaloid cousins. Blockchain is a form of distributed intelligence that auto-corrects errors; it already supports segments of our financial industry. My advice to scalpers: stick to Taylor Swift! Now we learn that the European Union is adapting Octopus neurology and blockchain technology to create an automated intelligence network, known as a “digital targeting web…Project ASGARD” (from Norse mythology). The system has been cobbled together over the course of four months—an astonishing pace for weapons development usually measured in years. Its purpose is to connect directly everything that looks for targets (‘sensors’ in military lingo) with everything that fires on them (‘shooters’). Say a reconnaissance drone spots an enemy tank. In conventional operations, the soldier operating that drone would pass the intelligence through a centralized chain of command to a decision making authority. But a targeting web like ASGARD operates more like an octopus, whose tentacles act autonomously while also collaborating in pursuit of collective strategic goals. Consider some post-WWII military engagements in this light. In 1970, Nixon unleashed an invasion of Cambodia’s Parrot’s Beak in an unsuccessful effort to disrupt North Vietnam’s logistical command and control. 5 years later, Saigon unexpectedly fell to a well-coordinated attack. Now fast forward to the Gulf Wars. The allies knocked out Iraq’s central command structure at the beginning of each conflict. ‘Blinded’, Sadham was unable to anticipate or counter US troop movements. Had Iraq developed and deployed an ASGARD system prior to its invasion of Kuwait, Gulf history might have played out differently. But the lessons of the Octopus transcend warfare! Alzheimer’s and dementia are associated with plaque deposits in the brain which may result from protein production errors. It is conceivable that we will soon be able to harness Cephaloid biology to eliminate these scourges from the repertoire of human tragedy. Don’t count us out yet! Or we may end up serving new, hopefully benevolent, eight limbed masters. 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

< Back Deus Absconditus David Cowles Nov 22, 2022 “First, pay the cancellation fee and cash in your first-class ticket to Lhasa.” The Intellectual History of the West is a protracted game of hide-and-seek: God hides, we seek. The game can end in only one of three ways: Eureka! I found Him (or at least, I see his reflection). (Theism) I can’t find him; there is no God! (Atheism) I haven’t found him yet . I’m still looking, but the bartender just gave ‘last call’. (Agnosticism) God has not ‘absconded’; he is hiding, but he’s hiding in plain sight. God is here, right here, right under our noses. Some ‘see’ him; some don’t. God is like that, he’s a Gestalt. Magic says, “ Now you see it, now you don’t!” Theology says, “ Either you see it, or you don’t!” What is it that I’m supposed to see? Value. Do you see ‘value’ (e.g., beauty, truth, justice) in people, in things, in events? That’s God, or if you prefer, the reflection of God. It’s true, no one can see God face-to-face, but if I can see God’s reflection in the cosmic mirror, isn’t that just as good? Either way, I know he’s there. What kid has not called out, “I found you, I see your reflection in the mirror?” You see him…or you don’t. If you do see him, worse luck, because you can’t unsee him. Once seen, always seen! When you open your eyes in the morning, God. When you’re in your office, there he is. Watching TV, he’s there. Even as you slide into the dream world at the end of your day…et voilà! Every time you make a value judgment, you invoke God. The reflection of God in the world is what we call ‘value’. Whenever you experience ‘value’ in some object or event, if you do , you’re seeing God’s reflection. Everything has value. To be is to have value, but value varies. When you say that something is ‘better’ than something else, you’re seeing God’s reflection more clearly in the one than the other. Better is a function of Good and Good is God ! Everything is good because everything reflects God. But “now we see (God) through a glass, darkly” (I Cor. 13:12). The Good that is God is more faithfully reflected on some surfaces than on others. We may surmise that Mother Theresa better reflects God than Josef Stalin. May we turn to physics for an analogy? Just an analogy . God is the Higgs Boson of value (God : good :: Higgs : mass). If you like, God is ‘the cosmic field’ that imbues all things with value, just as the Higgs is a field that imbues some things with mass. To be is to have value, and God is the sole source of value, so to have value is to reflect God. Nietzsche did not believe in God, and he was intellectually consistent about it; he did not believe in value either. According to the ‘standard model’, all mass is attributable to the Higgs Boson. According to Judeo-Christian theology, all value is attributable to God. But just as some particles are ‘heavier’ than others, so some experiences are ‘better’ than others. “… On earth as it is in heaven.” In heaven everything is - fully, completely, perfectly. And on earth? On earth, things are generally not full, complete, or perfect. Heaven is a permanent state of Being ; earth is a perpetual process of Becoming …and Perishing . Either way, God is there. For believers, God is a supernova; his light floods the cosmos. Once you see it, you can’t miss it. For non-believers, he is a black hole. You can’t ever ‘see’ a black hole, but you are subject to its persistent gravitational pull anyway. Seeing may be believing, but believing is also seeing. Where must I go (nowhere), what must I do (nothing), to see this supernova? First, pay the cancellation fee and cash in your first-class ticket to Lhasa; then make your spouse happy: tear down the dilapidated shed in the backyard that was ‘someday’ going to be your hermit’s cell. Then, “Do not move, let the wind speak, that is paradise.” – Ezra Pound; or “Be empirical, look!” – The Beatles. Image: Flaring Black Hole Artist Concept: This artist concept illustrates what the flaring black hole called GX 339-4 might look like. Infrared observations from NASA WISE reveal the best information yet on the chaotic and extreme environments of this black hole jets. Secondary Creator Credit: NASA Thoughts While Shaving is the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine ( ATM) . To never miss another Thought, choose the subscribe option below. Also, follow us on any one of our social media channels for the latest news from ATM. Thanks for reading! 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’s Contract David Cowles Dec 27, 2025 “Plato is addressing a question posed in the Book of Job: Why do good things happen to bad people?” 1200 words, 6 minute read Plato is notoriously mistreated on this website. He took the insightful but spare constructions of the pre-Socratics ( Parmenides , Heraclitus, et al.) and covered them over with ‘five and dime’ tinsel and grotesque ornaments. Yet in my view at least, he did not reach the depth of insight found in Saints John and Paul (or even George and Ringo). Sucks to be Plato! He’s a classic middle child wedged between Parmenides and Paul in the P-family genealogy. Still, there must be some reason we continue to read him. Take a look at the Epilogue Plato attached to his most popular Dialogue, The Republic . It tells the story of Er, a mythical character who returns to life after being dead for a short period of time. (Sound familiar?) Plato uses this forum to present a complex theory of reincarnation that includes cross species metempsychosis, karma, free will, chance, necessity, and fate. One stage of this reincarnation process involves God presenting each emigrating soul with a Contract (actually more of a Waiver of Liability ) to be agreed upon prior to the awarding of a new body: “Ephemeral souls - now is the beginning of another cycle where every birth is a harbinger of death. No daemon (guardian angel) shall cast lots for you; rather you shall choose your own daemon (fate). “Let him to whom the first lot falls pick first the life to which he shall be chained. Virtue is not relevant here; each soul will share in virtue according to how it values it. All blame belongs to him who chooses; God is blameless.” Let’s unpack. Each soul chooses (not ‘designs’) the circumstances into which it is born, i.e. her mis-en-scene , facticity (Sartre), Actual World (Whitehead). Souls choose from a pre-set inventory of available life situations (i.e. Forms), and they select in an order determined by the casting of lots. Form chosen constitutes the substructure of the soul’s identity. Caveat : Getting the #1 draft pick is not necessarily an advantage; the temptation to choose wealth and power often proves overwhelming. Sometimes the very last pick is best because it comes with the least risk of attachment. Nobody else wanted it; why should you? Blessed are the poor in spirit. Unlike Christian and Hindu eschatology, there is no connection here between virtue and one’s life circumstances. Effectively, Plato is addressing a question posed in the Book of Job : Why do good things happen to bad people? Answer : people choose their own lives ab initio . That choice determines their individual circumstances . And once the choice is made, it’s locked in…at least for this cycle of birth and death. What people do with these lives, to what extent they choose virtue over vice, is an individual decision unrelated to the vicissitudes of Hogwarts’ Sorting Hat ( Harry Potter ). That’s why we often see great piety among the disadvantaged and debauchery among the favored few. This, however, raises some important issues not considered by Plato. We may wish to assume, for example, that virtue-loving parents are more likely to provide their offspring with a nurturing environment. Therefore, society’s collective level of virtue would play a differential role in quality of life for future generations…but there’s no one-to-one correlation. Still, in the end a rising tide does raise all boats, so we really are ‘all in this together’. No one is ‘saved’ until everyone is saved? Sidebar : Judeo-Christian theology (e.g. Jeremiah, Ephesians ) puts a little different spin on this. All life circumstances are intentionally prepared by God as opportunities for each of us to step in and make the most of them. But back to Plato : each soul makes two choices, one irrevocable, the other moment-by-moment: (1) Which of the remaining available life situations do I choose for my upcoming incarnation? (2) To what extent will I dedicate this life to the pursuit of Virtue? All ‘blame’ (if any) belongs to the one who chooses (i.e. us). God is blameless. If this is meant to be a theodicy, it certainly gets high marks for originality. I am envisioning a rewrite of Schopenhauer’s classic: The World as Chance (lots) , Necessity (circumstances) , and Free Will (virtue). I chose my own destiny (Form). From there, the moral quality of the universe is solely the product of the freely willed actions of its intentional agents. The Devil didn’t make you do it! But your Free Will operates within circumstances you chose but did not design. Adding another layer of complexity, your will, while 100% free, may be influenced by experiences from your past lives. You may wish to repeat comfortable patterns, or you may have learned to avoid those habits at all costs; either way, those experiences will likely influence your choice of birth parents and, perhaps, your day to day decisions after birth. Of course, those of us who believe in old fashioned biology, sociology, and psychology can account for exactly the same phenomena via a totally different pathway: A child inherits parental traits (DNA), imitates adult behavior (upbringing), absorbs society’s ambient norms and values (culture), and reacts in a unique way to the universal ‘whips and scorns’ of childhood (personality). To Plato’s credit, his model allows three apparently incompatible modes of being (Chance, Causality, Consciousness) to function harmoniously as parts of a single process. However, it’s not exactly an ‘Occam-friendly’ arrangement. Still, 2400 years later, there are important parallels between Plato’s model and today’s (post-1900) cosmological consensus. Chance is no longer a bit of chaos intruding on cherished order; it is an irreducible element in all quantum mechanical processes. And we now know that things separated by spacetime can nevertheless be linked by a phenomenon known as ‘Entanglement’. Plus, we no longer think of consciousness as something uniquely human. Most of us acknowledge consciousness in various primates and among certain sea mammals, and many see evidence of self-awareness and agency throughout the Animal Kingdom…and beyond (e.g. plants, fungi, even bacteria). And that’s just Team DNA . We need our model of consciousness to extend to non-carbon life forms as well (AI & SETI). Finally, it is increasingly clear that ‘the problem of consciousness’ is not going to find a solution within the realm of classical physics. Current theories speak of consciousness in terms of quantum processes, universe-spanning fields (panpsychism), recursive loops, differance (Derrida), and/or holography ( fractals ). Plato’s dialogs are full of stuff and nonsense…and profound insights! When we view the Platonic corpus through the lens of 20th century (sic) science and philosophy, it is easy to spot the gems and extract them from their withered husks. The recent (2025) discovery of a new state of matter, Rondeau Time Crystals (RTC), has provided Plato’s model with important confirmation. In an RTC each ‘quantum of process’ cycles endlessly through repeating phases that seem to align perfectly with Plato: chaos/chance, causality/necessity, and consciousness/free will. Perhaps the old guy was on to something after all. *** Apollo and the Continents is a dynamic 18th‑century oil sketch by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo in which the sun god Apollo is placed at the center of a cosmic allegory, surrounded by planetary deities and personifications of the four continents to suggest a worldview of celestial harmony and worldly reach. 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.