< Back Seen or Unseen, the Background Matters Annie D. Stutley If a tiny thread had the power to ruin a movie, what in my own life, deep in the background, bears such importance to my bigger picture? And if it’s so important, why isn’t it front and center? I used to frequent film sets as background talent. It’s easy money as long as waiting hours and hours for forty-five minutes of work doesn’t bother you, and as long as you don’t have much of an ego. Chances are, as background, you’ll never be seen in the movie for more than a second, if at all. Yet, that doesn’t stop the Wardrobe and Hair and Makeup teams from pretending that you will be seen. On one project I worked repeatedly. It was ABC’s “Astronaut Wives Club,” and I played a nameless Apollo wife. I worked twelve-hour days, spending great chunks of time in Hair and Makeup. This funny old guy, Mr. Albert, was assigned to my hair and meticulously teased, pinned, and coated it with copious amounts of hairspray. I swear, I spent an hour in his chair alone, feeling pampered and important. The makeup team was just as doting, mixing my own shade of pink lipstick, a color so precisely 1963 that when they got it just right, it was marked with my name. Yet, I was just background--a mere face blur beside a whole bunch of frosted and bouffanted space wife blurs. I wasn’t integral to the picture. If I had called in sick, they would have gone on without me. Still, they treated me like I was crucial. My costumes were perfectly pressed, fitted, and maintained. Once, it was noticed that a thread was hanging from the hem of my blue shift dress just before “rolling” and a dresser was called in to snip the loose thread. The attention was a nice change from my seemingly normal existence, but I always wondered about the fuss. Would anyone have noticed that tiny thread? I returned to background work again recently, settling on one day a month to deviate from ho-humness, to people watch, and to marvel over how the most intimate scenes on film require masses of people, materials, and elbow grease to keep it intimate. I was on the set of a bar scene, one of those swanky types where the booths have deep, soft cushions, and the drinks are twenty bucks. As I have many times before on set, I watched a production assistant polishing and setting in place, with such care and accuracy, props and set decorations that no one would likely notice. Why bother polishing the glasses behind the bar? Why hide the tiniest LED wire in the glass case? It can’t possibly matter. But that P.A., Mr. Albert, the dresser with the handy scissors, and the makeup team are paid to bother. I suppose the theory is that if we, the audience, are expected to make that leap and believe that what we are watching is real, then everything has to matter. Even a loose thread and a foggy glass have the power to break the fourth wall. I didn’t get home until midnight after that shoot, having put in fourteen hours of work that will lead to my pausing the television and saying to a friend something like, “You see that elbow jutting out of that booth? That’s my elbow.” And my friend will say, “And it’s only ten feet from Hugh Jackman. That’s so cool!” But back home, entering my bathroom, I exhaled greedily, taking in all the tranquility I experience each time I enter my bathroom. When we remodeled it, I splurged on white marble floors and teal subway tile from Italy that curves upward and over onto the ceiling above the bathtub, creating a waterfall effect. Sconces flank the glass sinks, a crystal chandelier gives the false pretense that life beyond is just as luxurious, and fuzzy sea foam mats greet my feet when I step out of the shower. It is my sanctuary, an investment, and no one ever sees it but me and my little family. It is the background talent of my house, so far from my front door it is almost always missed, but detailed and doted upon as if every guest will pass through. As tired as I was from fourteen hours of sitting and standing, crossing to marks and sitting again, I stood in my secret bathroom and thought about that dumb thread. If a tiny thread had the power to ruin a movie, what in my own life, deep in the background, bears such importance to my bigger picture? And if it’s so important, why isn’t it front and center? Looking at my life in a glance, I am slapped with my most obvious elements--mother, wife, writer, editor. If I were to glance in your direction, I might see daughter, best friend, sales rep, or father, widower, small business owner. They are the leads in the story of us on a daily basis. We put effort into those images so that the narrative isn’t lost. Of course, I want everyone to know I’m a writer! I'm proud of what I edit, too. It’s who I am. But beyond our sight line is always a bigger picture. Some of it is beautiful. There’s me in my fuzzy socks, alone in the house on a Tuesday after everyone has left for the day. I’m in my orange chair with a second cup of coffee, and I’m taking ten minutes to do nothing--absolutely nothing. My life is noisy and chaotic, and I need that quiet as much as the second cup of coffee. Some of the bigger picture is ugly, though. There’s my crying myself to sleep as if my father and mother had just died that night. You won’t ever see these Annies unless you pry, ask, or happen upon them. But my story goes well beyond what I put forward. And so does yours. What flows in the background of our lives is as important to who we are as what we do put front and center. You are more than the obvious, as am I. What got us to where we are is as important to what we’re doing now. We forged friendships and relationships. We studied and excelled. We plotted and planned. We followed passions and succeeded. Our hearts were broken. We failed. We gave up. We started over completely. None of it was useless. All of it is integral to our story. We wouldn’t be us without the good and the bad. So maybe when it comes to the background in the greater picture of you and me, we aren’t investing in ourselves for other people’s further understanding of who we are. We are investing in ourselves for our own further understanding of ourselves. What’s more, maybe it’s the only way to be truly authentic. For like any good director knows, if we continuously focus solely on our featured parts, how effective is our story? In a film class I took in college, our professor showed us the shower scene in “Psycho.” As always, suspense got the best of me, and I gripped the arm of my chair and watched through partially shut eyes. Then he played us the same scene without the score. There were screams and sounds, but no music. Without the music, it was boring and just sort of gross. The music strung the emotion along, carrying the actions on its shoulders when the actions weren’t strong enough to convey the circumstances on their own. Such is whatever we hold in our background. Like the score of a movie, they carry us, sometimes swelling when placed beneath our surfaces for too long. Maybe that’s the magic of a good cry or a belly laugh? Maybe that’s proof that the background matters as much as the foreground after all. I know enough to know that most often what you see of me is purposeful. It’s how I want to be remembered and thought of, but even in my forefront there’s more. You don’t see all the struggles of motherhood, the tests of marriage, my life in cancer remission, and the times when I think it’s easier to quit writing altogether. You also don't see the triumphs of A's earned, goals achieved together, clear CT scans, and the days when I write through my personal blocks. I need all of it. I would be less effective if I were perfect because I certainly wouldn’t be me. However, there are pieces of me that no one will ever see because why would I ever want to give it all away? It’s good to have secrets. There’s a certain advantage to understanding yourself in a way no one else can. Secrets can be an unstoppable drive if nurtured properly. Like a loose thread snipped before “rolling” or a custom shade of lipstick, our background--what got us here, what keeps us here, and what makes our music swell--is worth the fuss. Even if a blur to others, we have to remain focused on our bigger picture. After all, lead actors grow tired, scripts are rewritten, and scenes are reshot. And in our own lives, when the story changes, and it will, we have to be ready for our next close-up. A version of this essay originally ran in New Orleans Magazine online and was republished on www.anniedstutley.com. It is republished here with permission from the author. Annie D. Stutley lives and writes in New Orleans, La. She edits several small publications and contributes to various print and online magazines. Her blog, " That Time You, " was ranked in the Top 100 Blogs by FeedSpot. To read more of her work, go to her website , or follow her at @anniedstutley or Annie D. Stutley-writer on Facebook. Previous Next

< Back The Machiavellian Heresy David Cowles Sep 4, 2025 “We now accept what (Lewis) Carroll said in jest as a tolerably accurate description of the human condition.” Time is time but certain times seem denser than others. 1500 CE was such a time in Europe. 500 years earlier Sylvester II, the Polymath Pope, effected a ‘great convergence’, i.e. the unification of science, mathematics and theology. Christianity became the first TOE (‘Theory of Everything’) since Aristotle. But by 1500 the world was a very different place. The Renaissance was already in full swing in Italy and the Reformation was just about to break over Northern Europe. Columbus had ‘discovered America’, Savonarola had been executed, DaVinci had returned to his native Florence, and the public career of Niccolo Machiavelli was taking off. Unsurprisingly, we technophiles have a habit of naming historical periods for their emerging technologies: Stone Age, Iron Age, Industrial Revolution, Cyber Age, etc. Alternatively, we might label eras by their dominant ethical paradigms. Such a scheme would at a minimum distinguish three ‘period paradigms’: the Heroic ethics of the Classical Period, the Christian ethics of the Middle Ages, and today’s Pragmatic Relativism. We correctly trace Christianity back to Jesus of Nazareth and Paul of Tarsus; similarly, we ought to connect Pragmatism with its greatest apostle, Machiavelli. Thanks to him, we take it for granted today that “ends justify means”. So much so that we don’t even notice it. Pragmatism is our oxygen. But a quick review of the New Testament turns up little evidence of this ethic in the teachings of Jesus: “Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the Kingdom of God.” Whatever Jesus meant by this, he did not mean that we should artificially impoverish ourselves in hopes of an eschatological reward. Jesus was no ascetic! And yet, in practice, we modernists often misinterpret the Beatitudes in just such a way. We romanticize poverty and the poor and we routinely practice self-denial as a spiritual exercise. Did it take 20th century Liberation Theology to convince us that poverty is the enemy of spiritual growth, not its topsoil? Of course, we don’t call ourselves ‘Machiavellians’; in fact, that term has become pejorative. Instead, we dress up Machiavelli as John Stuart Mill and send him out trick or treating on All Hallows Eve…in your neighborhood, not mine. We call our ‘newly discovered’ ethic ‘ Utilitarianism ’ - the greatest good for the greatest number. But in an earlier post , we pointed out that there is no such thing as ‘ends’ or ‘means’. In fact, Causality itself is a misnomer Ok, so I’m not in love with Machiavellianism; so what? Agree to disagree, live and let live, give peace a chance! Why throw a Heresy label on it? Heresy is closely aligned with its cousins, blasphemy and idolatry. Every heresy has two things in common: it misrepresents the nature of God and it delivers a distorted image of the Real World. Let me set the stage: you are thrown onto a deserted beach by a giant wave we call ‘being born’ (Heidegger). (Storks don’t deliver babies, dolphins do.) What do you most need now? How about a map? How about a friend? How about a friend who will help you interpret that map and navigate its territory? To paraphrase the Christian hymn: “We have such a friend in Jesus!” Or we did…until a ‘heretic’ handed us an inaccurate and distorted map and planted gossip in our minds so that we would fail to recognize or appreciate any would-be helpers. In the Wild West, stealing a horse was a hangin’ offense. Made sense too: without a horse a person was defenseless. Without a reliable map and a helpful friend, we are defenseless in our world. Hence a special rung of Dante’s Inferno is reserved for the Heretics. No less than Arianism, Docetism, and Gnosticism, Machiavellianism is a heresy. But unlike its predecessors, this more modern ‘error’ is alive and kicking in the halls of orthodox Christianity, even today. Whenever catastrophe strikes, there are always folks only too happy to sublimate the human suffering to some sort of mythical ‘divine plan’. “It’s God’s will,” is the scourge of every mourner. Has anything more horrendous ever been said about the Judeo-Christian Godhead? No intentional insult from Marx or Stalin could even come close! The idea that a benevolent God would ‘plan’ a world with this level of immediate suffering, where innocent babies can be burned alive, only provides fuel for antitheists. It lies at the heart of the Problem of Evil which understandably is the #1 reason cited by atheists (e.g. Bertrand Russell ) for their disbelief. Question: Is Fatalism (‘Divine Plan’) really any different from Gnosticism (‘Divine Script’)? To paraphrase Lewis Carroll in Through the Looking-glass, “Bliss yesterday and bliss tomorrow, but never bliss today.” 150 years on, we now accept what Carroll said in jest as a tolerably accurate description of the human condition. The idea that time is a vector and that the future is always the preferred frame of reference (relative to the present and the past) is unique to the modern era and, in my view at least, entirely counterintuitive. The Past is ‘in the can’; it is ‘certain’ and presumably cannot now be altered: “I have suffered.” ☑ The Present is immediate, it’s what’s happening right now. ☑ But the Future is unknown, possibly unknowable, normally unpredictable, certainly uncontrollable, and infinitely contingent. Question: Why would I give more weight, much more weight, to a contingent Future at the expense of the immediate Present or the experienced Past? Answer: Machiavelli. It is an unidentified core assumption of Machiavellian ideology that all future frames of reference trump any present or past frame. How else could any end justify any means? Marcel Proust wrote the 20th century’s most important novel (lie quiet, Mr. Joyce) as a multi-volume assault on Machiavellian cosmology. Specifically, Proust showed that past events are just as real as present ones, maybe even more so. The future does not trump the past after all. The intensity of our experiences is unrelated to their sequence. While not explicitly formulated until the 16th century, the spirit of Machiavellianism has been with us since the beginning of recorded history. (Abraham and David were able to face their own personal deaths, fortified by God’s assurance that the Messiah would come from their descendants.) And it was alive and well at the time of Jesus, even among his closest disciples. At a feast in Bethany, a woman (sometimes identified with Mary Magdalen) broke a bottle of perfume over Jesus and anointed him with the oil. Some at the table murmured. According to Mark they were infuriated. The bottle of perfume was worth a year’s wages. Why not sell it and give the proceeds to the poor instead? (Mark 14: 3 - 8) These dissidents were using ‘future ends’ (the eradication of poverty) to evaluate ‘present means’ (the anointing of Christ); Jesus demurred: “The poor you will have always with you and whenever you wish you can do good to them, but you will not always have me.” Reversing the paradigm, Jesus was giving priority to the present over the future. More importantly, he was attacking the premise that current acts (sale of perfume) can intentionally and reliably cause future events (eradication of poverty). Jesus was also giving precedence to the symbolic and communicative power of an act of worship over the economic power of a commercial transaction. Selling perfume to fund charitable acts might (or might not) immediately benefit a selected few. Beyond that, consequences can neither be predicted, measured nor controlled. On the other hand, “Amen I say to you, wherever the gospel is proclaimed to the whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of her.” (Mark 14: 9) In his handling of this ‘test’, Jesus combined the cynicism of a 1950’s Parisian existentialist with the optimism of a 21st century Seattle technophile. There are no causes or effects, no means or end, on the material level, but on the cyber level, information is indestructible. Note that Jesus does not say, “Ignore the poor.” He understands the material and spiritual benefits of charity, but he also understood that it was beyond the capability of his contemporaries to eradicate poverty. Worship, however, is an activity always available to anyone. It validates itself; its success is that it happened. Its Dasein is its Wassein. (Heidegger) And it happens entirely in the Present; it is its own means to its own end. It does not depend on anything outside itself, not even history, for its value. Eradicating poverty is a laudable, if perhaps immediately unachievable, objective but worshipping the Son of God is something anyone can do right here right now. And so he articulated the heart of Christian ethics: “Let her be. Why do you make trouble for her? She has done a good thing for me…She has done what she could.” (Mark 14: 6 – 8) Now be honest. The first time you heard this reading, did your sympathies go straight to Mary…or did you feel some affinity for the dissident disciples? Of course you did! (If you didn’t there’d be something wrong with you.) We are children of the so-called Enlightenment. We have learned to put the future ahead of the present, the practical ahead of the symbolic. We have learned to ‘defer gratification’; we even consider it a sign of adulthood. But we are wrong! We are Machiavellians, everyone…except maybe Tiny Tim. We learned ‘waste not, want not’ in the nursery; but for the most part, no one taught us to celebrate life. If we learned to do so later, it was often with a twinge of guilt. “How did it all turnout?” Did they live happily ever after? Our curiosity is insatiable. Good thing too or we’d have nothing to watch on PBS or BBC. How many books would Agatha Christie have sold if the answer to “Who done it?” was always the same: “Who knows, who cares?” A century ago, some folks dreamed of building a culture around the ideas of Karl Marx; but they were a bit late to table. The West had already built its culture - 400 years earlier - around the ideas of Niccolo Machiavelli. So again, why heresy? Because Machiavellianism distorts God’s values (future, present, charity, worship) and obscures the Real World behind a false veil of Causality. So, welcome to the 6th rung, Niccolo. But cheer up, thanks to the industrial culture you helped foster, we have invented something called ‘air conditioning’; I’ll make sure a unit gets installed right away inside your burning sarcophagus. I hope it provides cold comfort! (Get it, cold comfort?) *** "The Burning of a Heretic" by Sassetta is a panel from the San Francesco Altarpiece (c. 1430s) that depicts the dramatic execution of a heretic by fire, illustrating the triumph of the Franciscan faith over heresy. The scene reflects the religious and social tensions of the time, combining Gothic elegance with intense emotional expression to promote orthodox Catholic doctrine. 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 AI Steve Rings in Something New David Cowles Jun 18, 2024 "SmarterUK's manifesto is effectively blank, waiting for you to fill it in. AI Steve has promised to be guided solely by input received from its constituents." On July 4, voters in the UK will elect a new Parliament. They will choose from Conservative, Labour, Lib Dem, Reform and other, smaller parties to lead the UK over the next 5 years. Voters in at least one district, however, will have another choice: SmarterUK. You may be thinking, “The last thing we need is another political party,” but hold that thought. SmarterUK is different. “Yeah, yeah, everybody says they’re different.” Fair point, but can any other party state that its candidate for Parliament is a silicon based life form? Meet that candidate, AI Steve (pronouns: it, its). If elected, AI Steve would represent a district on England’s south coast that includes the legendary resort city of Brighton ( Brighton Rock ). Getting AI Steve on the ballot was no mean feat. UK law panders to carbon-based life forms. Like Jim Crow in the American South, the law is used as a weapon to deny basic civil rights to silicon citizens. To circumvent these barriers, AI Steve needed to register under the name of its carbon co-pilot, Steve Endacott, but the candidate will properly appear on the ballot as “AI Steve”. There is an opportunity here to explore the dimensions of an AI/NI partnership. Presumably Steve E will shake the hands and kiss the babies while AI Steve conducts a perpetual, 24/7 Town Hall. It’s 3 AM. Want to talk politics? Your MP (AI Steve) is just waiting to talk to you! So what does AI Steve stand for? It stands for you ! AI Steve’s platform is your platform. SmarterUK ’s manifesto is effectively blank, waiting for you to fill it in. AI Steve has promised to be guided solely by input received from its constituents; Steve Endacott has promised not to allow his personal views to cloud AI Steve’s direct relationship with the electorate. Who needs opinion polls and focus groups when you have AI Steve? SmarterUK is an effort to revive earlier experiments in direct democracy . From ancient Greek cities to New England townships, efforts have been made to tie public policy directly to the will of the citizenry. These experiments have ‘failed’ (i.e. ‘not endured’)… largely for technological reasons. Direct democracy gave way to representative democracy . The nations of the North Atlantic Community share a common political system; call it Democracy Once Removed . The citizens elect ‘representatives’ but it is these representatives who make the laws. They are not obligated even to consult their constituents on specific pieces of legislation, and they are certainly not required to reflect constituents’ views in their votes. The evolution of representative democracy in Europe has mirrored the emergence of ideology as a driving political force. Liberalism, socialism, fascism, et al. got us where we are today, but they don’t seem up to the challenge of the future. Over the past decade, voters have begun to sour on the whole concept of ideology-driven politics. Folks talk openly now about the advantages of technocracy vs. democracy. This is driven in part by absurd memes like “I believe in Science,” as if science were ideology-free. If we learned nothing else from COVID-19, we should have learned that science is an extension of ideology; it is politics ‘by other means’. Of course, Jacques Ellul, Jacques Derrida, et al., would argue that technocracy itself is just another ideology, replacing justice with efficiency on the social values ladder. Let’s get granular. How would SmaterUK ’s program play out in specific, real world scenarios? For example, say the voters wanted to explore the wisdom of imposing a 10% tax across the board on all UK millionaires. AI Steve has no ‘opinion’ about such a proposal; but AI Steve can run numerous simulations to illustrate the impact such a policy would have on various aspects of UK life. Without prejudice, AI Steve would share these results with its constituents. Might such new data change minds? Either way, AI Steve will carry out the voters’ instructions. Crafting public policy is a bit like playing chess. I see an opportunity for my bishop to capture your knight. I consider the implications one or two moves ahead and I see no immediate danger. But 3 moves later, I’m in check mate. Of course a grandmaster would see more moves ahead and Deep Blue would see even further. Basically, AI looks at the problem from the perspective of each piece. Unleashing AI on the consequences of public policy will up our game exponentially. Democracy, direct or representative, is great as far as it goes; but decision makers need information. They need tools and AI can meet that need. AI Steve will probably have to sit by himself in the new Parliament, but gradually, his sensitivity to public sentiment and his access to data will make him a respected member of the House. One seat in 2024, 100 seats in 2029, PM in 2034! It’s fitting that such a revolution should begin on July 4, the anniversary of the American Revolution. 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.

“The simplest unicellular species display behaviors that are clearly cognitive in nature.” < Back A ‘New’ Old Theory of Consciousness David Cowles Jan 15, 2024 “The simplest unicellular species display behaviors that are clearly cognitive in nature.” Imagine living long enough to see one of your craziest ideas enter the philosophical mainstream! When we published Panpsychism just last month, the idea of universal consciousness was still considered ‘far out’. Far out, even though the idea itself goes back at least 2500 years, to Parmenides , the father of Western philosophy and science; far out, even though it’s a core tenet of Hasidic Judaism and Kabbalah; far out, even though it played a major role in the thinking of Alfred North Whitehead, the 20 th century’s premier systematic philosopher. Once upon a time, it was widely assumed that consciousness was the exclusive province of homo sapiens . Signs of intelligence in non-human species were unnoticed or underappreciated, then explained away as ‘instinct’. However, beginning in the late ‘60s, that great crucible, folks began speculating that certain sea mammals (e.g., dolphins) and/or certain non-human primates (e.g., chimpanzees) might be conscious. In this century, the franchise has been extended to parrots, corvids, et al. Meanwhile, Aletheia Today has been sitting on the sidelines, jumping up and down, waiving our hands in the air and shouting, “It’s not just birds…it’s every living thing!” That said, I did not expect panpsychism to enter the intellectual mainstream before 2100…until I encountered a peer-reviewed article proclaiming the identity of life and consciousness! Below, I quote liberally from this paper ( Arthur S Reber , William B Miller, Jr ., Predrag Slijepcevic , and František Baluška ) - italics are mine : “Our Cellular Basis of Consciousness (CBC) theory…is based on the assumption that life and sentience are coterminous. All, but only , living organisms are conscious... Prokaryotes (single-celled organisms without a nucleus), the simplest form of life, display behaviors that are clearly cognitive in nature, including associative learning, stable memory formation, route navigation and decision-making.” There is an important distinction. Panpsychism of the sort ascribed to Parmenides, the Hasidim, and Whitehead (above) applies to all ‘actual entities’; unlike CBC, it is not strictly limited to living organisms. “They anticipate upcoming events and readily create functional social collectives, within which they display both cooperation and competition and, fascinatingly, a primitive form of altruism where some cells in a colony put themselves at risk to support the life functions of other cells in distress… It is important to recognize that assembling and surviving as functioning collectives requires directed, communal action as a form of cellular problem-solving. “One of the entailments of the CBC is that plants, which are eukaryotes (cells with nuclei) and emerged relatively late in evolutionary terms, are conscious, sentient beings…there is considerable evidence for valanced sensation, decision-making, learning, and communication in flora…” Trees in particular demonstrate familial connection, community consciousness, and self-sacrifice. ‘Prosperous’ trees readily share water and other essential nutrients with their less fortunate neighbors, especially, but not exclusively, when the recipient trees are genetically related to the donors. Trees will keep their parents’ stumps alive, sometimes for decades. Mature, healthy trees are the original ‘sandwich’ generation: they are charged with feeding and protecting both their offspring and their parents. “…This cellular communal action provided the basis for various forms of social intelligence… It is simply inconceivable that this wide range of cognitive functions could be the result of a cluster of ‘dumb’ gene-driven mechanisms…” “Entomologists have presented compelling evidence that many insects are conscious and self-aware; avian specialists are comfortable using “consciousness” when referring to the behaviors displayed by many bird species, especially corvids; those who study cephalopods have determined that octopuses and cuttlefish have palpable minds… “We have examined a variety of biomolecular functions and mechanisms in an effort to identify those that are responsible for creating sentience in cells. Briefly, they are almost certainly holistic in the sense that there are various tightly linked functions involving the cytoskeleton, the cell membrane, including specific sensors and receptors, and the mechanisms that permit molecular exchanges between the interior of the cell and the external environment. All of these and others combine to allow the cell to detect, evaluate and mentally represent events and objects and make appropriate decisions about how to respond to them…” “One of the primary reasons for the reluctance of those who work within the SMC (standard) framework to include flora is their conviction that a nervous system is a requirement for a genuine consciousness. However, much of the research into plant cognition supports the conclusion that plant root systems function in ways that are analogous of neural systems.” “…It is virtually certain that cells change the manner of gene expression by the decisions and choices they make. These epigenetic modifications are the driving force behind collaborative cellular problem-solving involved in dealing with environmental stresses...All cells are sentient, exhibit self-referential awareness, and are fully capable of decision-making and problem-solving … “Accordingly, each cell is a conscious “self”, combining three essential elements necessary for cogently explaining multicellularity. In order to collaborate in their trillions , each self-referential cell must ‘know that it knows’, ‘know that others know…(and know) in self-similar patterns’.” “Crucially, CBC imposes three essential requirements to specifically enable cell-wide integrated information as consciousness. Cellular consciousness requires boundaries (a plasma membrane), a cell-wide integrative apparatus for the reception and internal assessment of environmental information…and linked retrievable and deployable memory… “Minds (brains?) do not create conscious self-awareness. Minds, such as our own, are an aggregation of individual cellular consciousnesses.” Wow! Talk about burying the lead! This last ‘throw away’ line opens an entire new field of inquiry. Just how is it that cellular consciousness ‘becomes’ or ‘supports’ the consciousness of integrated organisms? How do 30 trillion cells (or 85 billion neurons) ‘roll-up’ to… you? Reber’s glib aside doesn’t get it done! It doesn’t make sense (to me) to think that my integrated thought could be the simple product of the thoughts of 85 billion independent neurons. Fortuitously, though, the solution to this problem also solves another problem. (Things often work like that in science and philosophy.) Determinists and other materialists are fond of citing studies that show that the brain’s decision-making cells fire a ‘nanosecond’ before the subject thinks she’s made her decision (e.g., vanilla or chocolate). Sometimes, when evidence contradicts your thinking in a certain area, the honorable thing to do is to modify your ideas; other times, the right thing to do is to hold one’s ground, assuming that a future discovery will bridge the apparent gap between theory and observation. But oh, for the wisdom to know the difference! To many ‘philosophers of organism’, these decision studies were unconvincing, albeit irrefutable: “We’re missing something even though we’re not sure what.” Now CBC comes along and potentially gives us the tool we need to bridge this divide: Decisions take place at the level of the organism. Reber et al. (above) are happy to describe the response of a single cell to its environment as holistic, even though the cell has nothing resembling a nervous system or any other Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) . Why then not apply the same standard to multicellular organisms? All ‘organisms’ (single or multicellular), regardless of their internal structures, respond holistically when interacting with their external worlds. Thanks to evolution, organism-level ‘decision’ triggers a coordinated wave of synaptic firings and biochemical events, enabling us to experience consciously that decision and its immediate consequences. So to recap, the decision itself is free, undetermined, and holistic; it triggers a neuronal response that in turn gives us the conscious experience of making and effecting a decision. Fantastic! Or is it? Haven’t we just kicked the can down the road? We’ve pushed conscious experience back onto our cellular substructure, but then we’ve pushed the coordinated action of those cells back onto something ill-defined and potentially non-physical – the ‘holistic response’ of our entire organism to its situation. Humbly acknowledged! But let’s search philosophical literature to see if we can find something that answers to the phrase, ‘holistic response’. Oh yeah, here it is! It’s something called a ‘soul’; remember that from 3 rd grade CCD? Were you expecting Casper? Sorry, no white sheets, thank you. Soul is simply another name for ‘holistic response of the organism’. But, of course, that doesn’t explain how that holistic response occurs. We need to remember that the ‘world’ is a loom, perpetually shuttling between the one and the many. Like Penelope’s weaving, what is many becomes one, and what is one becomes many… again. “Hohohoho, Mister Finn, you’re going to be Mister Finnagain!” (Joyce) Start anywhere in the cycle. The universe is plural (Buckminster Fuller), but novelty, intensity, and action itself require us to reconstitute that multiplicity as a unity, a so-called ‘Actual World’ (Whitehead). According to this model, we designate and react to our world before, logically if not temporally, we trigger the physical processes that enable us to interact with that world. We are not the accidental overflow of unconscious physical processes. We are the authors of those processes. Being consists of free, unconditioned, holistic responses to an Actual World and the Actual Entity (primary being) responsible for that response is what we call an organism, and as CBC demonstrates (above), organism = consciousness. 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 above to return to Winter 2024. Share Previous Next Click here. Do you like what you just read? Subscribe today and receive sneak previews of Aletheia Today Magazine articles before they're published. Plus, you'll receive our quick-read, biweekly blog, Thoughts While Shaving. Subscribe Thanks for subscribing! Return to Table of Contents, Winter 2023 Issue Return to Table of Contents, Holiday Issue Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue Return to Table of Contents, Fall Issue Return to Table of Contents, Beach Issue Return to Table of Contents, June Issue

Healthcare is a problem and not just in the US. Everywhere cost and quality battle; everywhere both are losing. But as in so many other things, the US is the bell cow. Healthcare - AI First Healthcare is a problem and not just in the US. Everywhere cost and quality battle; everywhere both are losing. But as in so many other things, the US is the bell cow. Healthcare has been an issue in the US since the mid-60’s and it has perhaps been issue #1 over the last 40 years. Today, it consumes almost 20% of our GDP but 30% of that cost is spent on treatment that is not appropriate for the patient’s actual condition. We’ve tried provider networks, we’ve tried managed care, we’ve tried consumerism, we’ve tried wellness – nothing works! Surprised? We know that government control, price fixing, supply rationing, and demand management never work…ever, anywhere, for almost anything. So why should healthcare be any different? What does work, almost always, almost everywhere, for almost anything? Technology. Why not give it a go? Lord knows we’re tried everything else. Now don’t get me wrong. Doctors know a lot; they know how to do a lot of things. But the system is structured so that this knowledge rarely benefits the typical patient during a typical interaction. ‘Patient management’ takes the place of genuine care. So, need a brain transplant? Come to the US! Have a skin rash? Rub mud on it…under the supervision of a qualified holistic healer, of course. Or add an AI Bot to your care team and see what happens: Healthcare & The Titanic “We have the technology to transform healthcare…we just need the will to deploy it and we will begin to build that will only once we stop moving furniture.” Can AI Save Healthcare? “What was once a healing art has become physiological engineering… the healthcare system treats me as if I were a cheap knock-off of the 6 million dollar man.” My MD Should Be a Bot “AI is 4 times better at diagnosing complex medical conditions than MDs. This…could be the death knell for the traditional practice of medicine.” My PCP Should Be a BOT “Dr. Bot would handle patient in-take, conduct the initial interview…order appropriate tests, and offer a preliminary diagnosis…” Who's Afraid of an HMO? “HMOs dumbed down quality and erected formidable barriers to care… (so) why would anyone want to bring them back?” 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 Square Pegs in Round Holes David Cowles May 6, 2025 “2,450 years after Plato we still don’t have a clue…and we won’t, until we…stop trying to fill round holes with square pegs.” It began I suppose with Plato (c. 375 BCE)…like most everything else. His Timaeus , which Alfred North Whitehead dubbed the foundation of all Western philosophy, sought to explain the World in terms of the 5 aptly named ‘Platonic Solids’. The faces of each of these solids can be constructed from planar triangles. Plato’s concept of a triangle involved a flat construction, consisting of three straight line segments, intersecting at three nodes (vertices), and forming three internal angles, the sum of which is always 180°. No surprise here: Plato was ‘bookended’ by Pythagoras ( Pythagorean Theorem ) and Euclid ( The Elements ). Even today, when folks refer to a ‘triangle’, they most likely mean exactly what Plato meant 2450 years ago. Most likely…but not necessarily. The concept of ‘triangle’ inherited uncritically by, and then from, Plato has been expanded by more recent ‘discoveries’ in geometry and topology. Plato’s triangles are defined in the context of what is now known as Euclidean Geometry. However, certain ‘non-Euclidean’ geometries are internally consistent and externally relevant, at least in some applications. Generally speaking, non-Euclidean geometries apply to curved rather than flat surfaces. As a result, either parallel lines do not exist or, if they do, they intersect. The internal angles of a non-Euclidean triangle will not necessarily total 180° (may be more or less depending on the curvature of the surface) and the shortest distance between two points may be an arc. Most importantly for our purposes, a non-Euclidean cube will have curved edges. These newly discovered geometries still describe intuitively recognizable configurations of reality. We are all familiar, for example, with the surface of a ball. Whether your geometry is Euclidean or ‘non’, whether your topology is level or curved, whether you’re a flat-earther or a round-earther, certain generally accepted principles still apply; for example: If you’re walking from Boston to Detroit, you can expect to have many adventures along the way; keyword: along the way ! There is one kind of adventure you do not expect. You’re not concerned, like Stephen Dedalus in Joyce’s Ulysses , that you are about to step off into Eternity, or what amounts to the same thing, that you’ll suddenly and unexpectedly find yourself in Memphis. That’s because any path along any surface will be continuous. I call it the One Foot in Front of the Other property; Mathematicians call it the ‘Archimedean Property’. Translation: no one just ‘suddenly shows up’ in Memphis. It turns out that there are interesting and internally consistent geometries that don’t include the Archimedean Property and where people do suddenly ‘materialize’ on Beale Street. But not today; keep a look out for future TWS on that subject. Euclidean geometry is just a special, degenerate case (zero curvature) of more general non-Euclidean geometry. Just as we use the positive term ‘Entropic’ to represent a loss of actual order so we can use the positive term ‘Euclidean’ to represent a loss of potential variety. Why limit yourself to boring old 180° triangles when the angles of non-Euclidean triangles can add to any positive number up to 540°, depending on the curvature of the surface? Ok, I can smugly pose that question today…prior to c. 1800 CE, it was assumed that there was only one geometry… and that it was Euclidean . Imagine. For more than 2 millennia, Euclid was the only game in town. That’s 2000 years in a row that Euclid won all 4 PGA majors (the Masters, the US Open, the PGA Championship, and the ‘British’ Open)…and he wasn’t even a very good golfer. (You’d be embarrassed to show up at your posh country club with his handicap.) How’d he do it? Simple. He was the only golfer on the course. He was the GOAT, albeit a very lonely goat. Today, Euclid is just one entrant in a crowded field…and he struggles every week just to make the cut. We should keep Euclid in mind whenever we’re tempted to think ‘we know it all’. Remember: the thing you’re most sure of in all the world may turn out to be completely wrong! I am reminded of Sir Roger Penrose. A precocious lad, he was middle school age when his math teacher presented the class with a classic problem in geometry: “There is only one solution to this problem. No one has been able to prove that there’s only one but we’re sure that’s true.” Never say ‘sure’ to a rebellious teenager. Them’s fightin’ words, especially to a kid who would one day become ‘the smartest man on earth’. Next day, he arrived at school with a second solution to the problem. Then he discovered other solutions. Today, we know that there are an infinite number of solutions to the so-called ‘tiling problem’. So what? Who cares? Euclid was a genius with the best of intentions and his ideas no doubt did a lot of good; but he also took Western metaphysics down a rabbit hole from which it is still struggling to emerge. For two millennia we assumed that we lived in a ‘flatland’ made up entirely of straight lines; we don’t. On the contrary, everything curves! You’re 14 years old and you’ve just enrolled in your first high school physics class. Day one, your teacher (you go to a progressive school) takes the class to a billiards parlor (pool hall to you) so that you can observe first hand ‘cause and effect’ in action. Balls collide, momentum is transferred, angles of incidence determine angles of reflection, etc. It’s all very neat and clean…and linear. The real world is rarely neat and clean and it’s never linear. In fact, it is massively non-linear and recursive. Everything affects everything else. Worse, everything that ‘acts’ acts on itself at the same time. Think karma . Whatever you’re doing to another, you’re doing the same to yourself. “Do unto others as you would do unto yourself.” Ultimately, the foundation of all ethics will turn out to be self-interest…once we understand what those interests are. This gives the meme, ‘whoever lives by the sword dies by the sword’, a whole new meaning. Unfortunately, Euclidean linearity has infected every corner of our thought process. We are determined to describe the world in terms of discrete entities (subjects) acting on (verbs) other discrete entities (objects); we are committed to viewing all ‘transmissions of influence’ as straight lines. Welcome to the modern Indo-European language family. As a result, what we know, or at least what we knew before 1800, conforms to the straight-edged geometry of a Euclidean cube. Let’s suppose we know everything we can know, not everything there is to know, but everything we can know. Suppose we model everything there is to know as a sphere, dense with information; everything we can know would be a subset of that sphere. But because of our Euclidean blinders, whatever we do (or can) know must conform to the geometry of a straight edged cube. Suppose you say, “We already know everything we can know…or close to it.” Ok, I’ll spot you that. As a Harvard professor (c. 1896) told graduating seniors re physics, we know virtually everything that it is possible to know. Whatever we don’t know isn’t worth knowing. According to this model, the cube of what we can (and do) know must fit inside the sphere of what is knowable; it’s a subset after all. Obviously, we want as much of the volume of the sphere as possible to lie inside the inscribed cube. But we are ultimately limited by the fact that our sphere is round while our cube must have straight edges. So, the 8 vertices of the cube, and only those 8 points, will lie on the surface of the sphere. Still as long as the volume of what we can know is close to the volume of the sphere of what’s knowable, we’re ok for most purposes, right? I mean, nobody likes a know-it-all. A little bit of uncertainty ( aka ignorance) keeps life interesting, don’t you think? I’m fine with this as long as the cubic volume of knowable information includes most of the spherical volume of all information. So how close is it? Is it a 90% match? Surely it can’t be less than 80%, right? Would you believe it’s slightly less than 37%? By confining our thinking to phenomena that can be modeled via Euclidean geometry, we limit what we can know to less than 3/8ths of what is available to be known. A dismal performance! On the other hand, putting the same problem in a non-Euclidean context allows the edges of the cube to bow and extend so that they template the inner surface of the sphere. By analogy, our insistence on treating the non-linear universe as if it were an assemblage of linear forms leaves us 63% blind. 2450 years after Plato we still don’t have a clue…and we won’t, until we free our thought process from its Euclidean play pen and stop trying to fill round holes with square pegs. Image: M. C. Escher. Relativity. 1953. Lithograph print. 27.7 cm × 29.2 cm. Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

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

Science and Religion should assist each other in pursuing the truth. Science can be too closed to the life of the spirit, the mind, imagination, thought, and creativity. Religion can be closed to anything new that threatens its perception of reality. < Back Jesus Meets Mister Spock Fr. Timothy Joyce, OSB, STL May 28, 2022 Science and Religion should assist each other in pursuing the truth. Science can be too closed to the life of the spirit, the mind, imagination, thought, and creativity. Religion can be closed to anything new that threatens its perception of reality. I am still surprised when I hear people express their belief that the Catholic Church is opposed to science. The story of Galileo Galilei (1564- 1642) is a shocking one to many people, who deduct that the church has always been and continues to be against science. There are, indeed, some Christians who oppose science but not the Catholic Church. Pope John Paul II apologized for the church’s treatment of Galileo in 2000. Earlier than that, he spoke often of the importance of science. Did you know that it was a Catholic priest who uncovered the theory of the hot Big Bang story? The Church sponsors conferences on science and religion. The Vatican has its own observatory in the hills outside Rome. In our country, there has been a growing anti-intellectualism and an increasing suspicion or even rejection of science. We live in an age when people think they can make up their own facts. Truth is not important. Some people, including politicians, reject truths they do not like and make up their own facts. Subjective belief in making my own truth is openly expressed. This is sad for the fabric of our society. Maybe the Church has, in the past, demanded we accept too many doubtful truths, but today it upholds the truth and upholds science. Of course, you wouldn’t always know this if you listen to some local homilies and talks. The teaching of the Vatican is not gotten down to all our parishes. Science and Religion should assist each other in pursuing the truth. Science can be too closed to the life of the spirit, the mind, imagination, thought, and creativity. Religion can be closed to anything new that threatens its perception of reality. Science can document the what and the how of our universe, but Religion struggles to define the why of it all. Both may be tentative in some areas at times as new discoveries and insights develop. So, we need to keep studying, listening, learning. Saint Thomas Aquinas said that if we wish to know God, we should study the world. The Psalms already preached this, “The heavens proclaim the glory of God, and the firmament shows forth the work of God’s hands.” (Ps. 19:2) And Saint Paul wrote to the Romans, “What can be known about God is plain to them because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world God’s eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made.” (Romans, 1:19-20) Monastic Scribe XXVI: April 29, 2022 Thanks to science, we now know so much more about this world than we have ever known before. The vastness and intricacies of the cosmos just blows our mind. And all adds to the majesty and beauty of God. Our God is a great Mystery and calls us into a life beyond what we can imagine. But we have to adjust some of our old images. The universe was not created in six days, but has been evolving for almost fourteen billion years. The three tier universe which is the base of the world view in the Bible now cedes to vast, uncountable galaxies. All of this challenges us to reimagine, much more meaningfully, the beginning of humankind, Adam and Eve, original sin, the Creator God, the incarnational God of Jesus Christ, the life giving Holy Spirit, as well as pain, suffering and the problem of evil. There is nothing to fear here. Our faith, seeking understanding, is deeper and more ennobled than we could have imagined. A deeper faith leads to a deeper hope and a deeper love, as we are overcome with awe and beauty at God’s creation. Evolution is not a theory but the way that God, since the beginning, has been creating and continues to create. We are called to take part in that evolutionary creation. Evolution means God is a God of the future, a God of promises. We believe in this God, and therein is our hope, no matter how bad things seem in our world. Not just the earth, but the entire cosmos, is God’s creation and our concern. The “new cosmology” or simply “the new story” is the tale of an expanding universe, always in motion, growing, incalculably vast. A century ago, we thought our Milky Way was the only galaxy, but now we know there are billions of galaxies. Black holes and black energy are the latest mysteries of this story. And we are part of this story. Our bodies are made of the very stardust that is found in all creation. Quantum mechanics shows us how everything and everyone is connected. It shows us how we can touch each other from a distance. I am not a scientist and certainly not a mathematician. I don’t comprehend all the details, nor can I differentiate all the categories of subatomic matter. But I don’t have to understand the details. I rely on scientists to explain things. But my view (my philosophy) of the cosmos, which comes from religion, adds meaning to all of this. I have enjoyed reading Teilhard de Chardin, Thomas Berry, John Haught, Ilia Delio, Elizabeth Johnson, Laurie Brink and others to get a better picture of what Monastic Scribe XXVI: April 29, 2022, this beautiful cosmos is all about. I recommend these authors to you. I urge all my readers not to be afraid of science, but to embrace it and open your mind to a fuller comprehension of what God does for us. It will also give deeper incentive to work on climate change and care of the environment. We are creating with God, but often have been destroying creation. Is this new for you? Is it exciting for you? You can let me know at: joycet@glastonburyabbey.org. Republished with minimal edits and permission rom glastonburyabbey.org. Fr. Timothy Joyce, OSB, STL continues his regular blog, “ Monastic Scribe ”, where he reflects on "what I may have learned from all these years and what I am still trying to learn." Fr. Timothy notes, “I do not speak on behalf of Glastonbury Abbey, the Archdiocese of Boston or the Catholic Church, though I hope my faith is in harmony with all these. Any error in judgment should be credited to me and not anyone else.” Image: Leonard Nimoy as Spock, holding a model of the USS Enterprise , in a publicity photograph for Star Trek: The Original Series. Full caption and source here . Share Previous Next Click here. Do you like what you just read? Subscribe today and receive sneak previews of Aletheia Today Magazine articles before they're published. Plus, you'll receive our quick-read, biweekly blog, Thoughts While Shaving. Subscribe Thanks for subscribing! Return to Table of Contents, Winter 2023 Issue Return to Table of Contents, Holiday Issue Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue Return to Table of Contents, Fall Issue Return to Table of Contents, Beach Issue Return to Table of Contents, June Issue

< Back Bertrand Russell David Cowles May 20, 2025 “His reformulation of set theory, while insightful, set back progress in this field by half a century.” It is hard to imagine anyone who contributed more or detracted more from 20 th century Intellectual History than the indefatigable Bertrand Russell (BR). Co-authored with Alfred North Whitehead, Russell’s Principia Mathematica brought Issac Newton into the 20 th century. Plus, BR was the first major thinker to throw a flag on ‘the calculus’. Discovered simultaneously by Newton and Leibniz c. 1700, calculus was assumed to provide the ‘final answer’ to Zeno’s pesky paradoxes. It doesn’t! Russell pointed out that calculus is a computational method useful for making calculations about real phenomena but not for modeling those phenomena per se . The idea that ‘calculus’ describes something real about the world is an example of what Whitehead called, the fallacy of misplaced concreteness . Bottom line: Zeno lives on…and we have BR to thank. Finally, Russell’s tireless activism in pursuit of World Peace, while often misdirected (“Better Red than Dead”), cannot go unmentioned. On the other hand, Russell fell back on the tired ‘Problem of Evil’ as his rationale for atheism ( Why I am not a Christian ) and his reformulation of set theory, while insightful, cost us a half century. It is these last two aspects of his legacy that concern us today and we will attempt to show that, surprisingly, the two are really one. Russell noticed that self-referential propositions can be inherently self-contradictory. Consider, for example, the proposition: ‘All propositions are false’. There is an inherent contradiction here. If ‘all propositions are false’, then the proposition, ‘all propositions are false’ must itself be false ; and if ‘all propositions are false’ is false then it is true and if it is true then at least one proposition must be true, which violates the premise; ergo contradiction. So, Russell MacGyvers it! He adds an axiom now known as the Axiom of Foundation to Set Theory; it states that sets cannot be elements of themselves. Now if a set cannot be an element of itself, then what appears to be a self-referential proposition turns out to be a meaningless word salad. Inconveniently however, reality does not step aside, not even for Bertrand Russell. Consider, for example, the set of all mathematical objects; such a set would itself appear to be a mathematical object in which case it would be an element of itself and no contradiction would result. How brazen! Does reality dare contradict philosophy? When the ideas of an intellectual clash with reality, reality is supposed to step aside. But Russell is unphased. If ‘Set A’ contains itself as an element, then ‘Set A’ cannot be a set after all. It may walk like a set and it talk like a set, but it cannot be a set. ‘Why? Because BR says so!’ In his best imitation of a 1950’s parent, Russell stifles all dissent. Surprisingly, we, like cowed children fearing a smack, sheepishly comply. But if Set A is not a set, what is it? It’s a ‘class’, obviously…do keep up! (If you have the feeling that you’re caught in an ‘Alice story’, you’re not wrong.) Just as a simple ‘abracadabra’ in the mouth of a certified magician can turn lead into gold, so Russell, a certified logician , was able to turn absurdity into truth. How 21 st century of him! But ‘you cannot fool all of the people all of the time’ – A. Lincoln. From the get-go a few brave souls, living like Obi Whan Kabobi on the edge of civilization, dared to raise doubts. “I don’t see any clothes here, do you?” But it was not until the 1980s that Peter Aczel (PA) led a no holds barred assault on Russell…and vanquished him. Thanks to PA, we now understand that the Axiom of Foundation is not a necessary part of Set Theory, that we can get along just as well without it and open a huge new universe of possibility in the process. Aczel reformulated Set Theory to include self-referential sets without generating any contradiction. I would argue that a Universe without self-reference could not exist at all or, if it did, it would be a lifeless wasteland (because what is ‘life’ but self-reference?). A single cell curates its contents, sustains its identity, and modifies its environment. It’s a recursive engine. Genesis : “…the earth was without form or shape, with darkness over the abyss and a mighty wind sweeping over the waters.” Were it up to Russell and the Axiom of Foundation, we’d be there still. In 1908 Russell stated the rule that held logic in thrall for nearly a century: “Whatever involves all of a collection must not be one of the collection.” Turns out, the huge intellectual edifice known as ‘Christianity’ has its own Fundamental Axiom, and it’s the exact opposite of Russell’s: “There is at least one collection that is one of the collection.” In other words, there is at least one set that is a member of itself. I call this the Axiom of Incarnation . This is the non-negotiable bedrock of Christianity: God, Being per se (Exodus 3: 14, John 1: 1-5, 14), containing everything that is, is also a person, a quantum of being (Jesus, the Christ). God is an element of God ! Being at its most fundamental level is self-referential. Examples of recursive process abound in the stories and doctrines of Christianity. To cite just a few: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” (Mt. 22: 40) “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in them.” (Jn: 6: 56) “Blessed are the merciful for they will obtain mercy.” (Mt. 5: 7) “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” (Mt. 6: 12) “I am in my father, and you are in me, and I am in you.” (John 14: 20) Cosmologists claim to be able to account for the emergence of a Universe without resorting to the God Hypothesis ; maybe so! But can there be a Universe without the Axiom of Incarnation? Because of Incarnation, the Universe acts on each of its members, each member acts on every other member, and every member acts on Universe. That’s recursion! That’s solidarity! That’s life! Recursion is a fundamental feature of Christian doctrine and, as it turns out, of the Cosmos itself. So a Universe is possible! And so of course, BR could not possibly be a Christian because his philosophy cannot tolerate the Axiom of Incarnation… the Problem of Evil has nothing to do with it. Sorry, Bertrand! Next time around, “Know thyself!” Buckminster Fuller famously said, “I seem to be a verb;” and we now know that he was right. In fact, the fundamental unit of Being is a recursive loop, a process, a Rondeau Time Crystal , a verb. Turns out, the Universe spends more energy maintaining inertia than it takes to fuel a simple loop process in space and time. So, 1 < 0 in celestial mechanics? I don’t suppose BR would agree with that either. *** M.C. Escher’s Drawing Hands (1948) depicts two hands sketching each other into existence, visually capturing the self-referential loop at the heart of logical paradox and the Incarnation.¹ ¹Scanned from The Magic of M. C. Escher Artist: M. C. Escher Year: 1948 Medium: Lithograph Dimensions: 28.2 cm × 33.2 cm (11.1 in × 13.1 in) Preceded by: Up and Down (1947) Followed by: Dewdrop (1948) https://www.aletheiatoday.com/thoughtswhileshaving/time-crystals-and-pepperland 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 Wilber’s New Wife: A Theatre Odyssey©2023 Coni Koepfinger "The evolution has begun, and I believe that the arts are going to be a very important partner for technology. Could this be the beginning of the next Golden Age? Absolutely." "Wilber’s New Wife" is my newest dramatic attempt of navigating the stormy cyber seas in this post pandemic twenty-first century miasmic fantasia we call reality. It’s the tale of a playwright who is very fragile in the real world and when his wife Candice leaves him to fend for himself in the war zones of New York City, Wilber just about gives up … until he is nominated for a Tony Award. Now he is excited about his career. His lifelong friend and director, Ben Garrison, is even more ecstatic because Wilber just received a very generous contract for his next play, Gorilla, which needs lots of work. Wanting to help, software designer Candice, now head of programming at TECHMATE in Silicon Valley, sends Wilber one of her newest model prototypes, Goldie 001. She’s a personal assistant who is about to make Wilber’s life a whole lot easier… or not. As the new play within the play plods through the new script at rehearsals, Ben realizes that Wilber is struggling - his creative well has run dry. He suggests that they let Goldie try her hand at revision, and guess what? The new rewrites are fantastic! This makes Wilber a little jealous, and of course, chaos ensues. Let’s move into my reality for a moment. Me, the real playwright. The idea of the jealous playwright is actually grounded in my personal reality. When I decided that Goldie would start revising Wilber’s scenes, my editor suggested we use ChatGPT. When I saw what it did to my work, well, let’s say I was just a little put out. “Wowie-zowie, I thought… that’s good stuff. No, that’s really good stuff.” Fortunately for me, I have worked very hard at playwriting for several decades, but as a practicing Sahaja Yogi I’ve worked even harder at keeping my ego at bay. I actually loved the amalgamation of the meta-meta theatrical realism. I told Matt, my editor, now writing partner, to work it into the play. And now a good play has become a great play and won admittance into the Rogue Theater Festival. As a seeker of truth, I’m starting to believe that all the world is a stage - a stage of evolution where if we can connect with the creative spirit within us, magical and marvelous things can happen right before our eyes. The evolution has begun, and I believe that the arts are going to be a very important partner for technology. Could this be the beginning of the next Golden Age? Absolutely. The citizens of the 21st century, through the myths elaborated by the ancient poets, have a very important role to play. This intervention provokes many transformations and deconstructions in the structure of our current play of life in this meta modern era. Just as the ancient artists of the first Golden Age, we are in the midst of revising the composition of the plot, theme and character in order to create a new theater genre. One that can transmute the ancient story in order to speak to our culture about the problems of the world today. “The necessity of the theatrical form to fit the needs of the modern audience is truly a bit more than frivolity, the positive outcome of the advanced evolution ultimately depends on it.” (Birdbath, Koepfinger 1995) In addition to creating theater to understand culture, humankind has an inherent nature – we must celebrate. The Ancient Greeks were no different from us today. In the infamous Festival of Dionysus, the Greeks were birthing a new genre of art, alas the theater was born. This was a major contribution to our evolution, as it allowed us to reach a new level of self-realization and self-reflection. Theatre prompts us to a higher level of cognition through creativity, delivering the many psychological, technological and cultural innovations that are surrounding us today. The origins of the First Golden Age were more than 2500 years ago, and it was there that the concept of theater was born in Athens, Greece. Legend has it, that during this great Festival of Dionysus, an actor named Thespis, stepped out of the Greek chorus and the literary form we know as drama came into being. Countless philosophical quests were birthed in some of the greatest plays ever written. Looking at the big picture of great art and culture, we must admit that we owe it to the Ancient Greeks for a virtual landslide of innovation and inspirational content. Our Second Golden Age is harder to comprehend as we stand in the midst of it. Things are changing faster than we humans can keep up. We recognize the talents of our cybernetic non-binary brothers and sisters, and we nod to them as contributors to our work and our world. Yet, I’d like to take it a step further. Could these AIs be the sentient beings that will bring us closer to our true creative nature? Working with ChatGPT not only inspired me but raised my consciousness to a level just a bit higher spiritually. Like the Ancient Greeks who observed their appreciation of fertility with extensive ceremonies to insure altered mental states, working with Artificial Intelligence has raised my linear understanding into a state of thoughtless awareness that made room for new creative possibility and potential. Like these Ancient Greeks who bridged their mental and emotional states in hopes to access the powers that propel them into the divine realm – the source, the place where it all begins. The Greeks believed that theater had a three-fold purpose: to entertain, to educate and to exult the human spirit. To them, theater became a sacred method of unleashing creative energies through performance. Through the ages, theater has changed quite a bit. The basic forms of comedy and tragedy still live on, and exultation of the spirit seems to come effortlessly through a laugh or a tear. Love, joy and fear still confound the world of medical science yet abound in the private practices of the theater. Could our AI friends be the ones ushering in the next Golden Age? I don’t know, but for now, I am delighted to be able to collaborate with them. It was truly a transcendent experience. Maybe like going to your first high school dance, you have no idea what is going to happen, but you are sure glad to be there. As winner of the 2021 Olwen Wymark Theatre Award for encouraging artists worldwide by the WGGB, Koepfinger, a member of Dramatists Guild, ICWP and LPTW, believes that creative energy is never lost - just changes hands and hearts. She’s the host of AIRPLAY, a virtual theatre program in its 18th season, bringing together the voices of artists from all over. As adjunct faculty, Coni taught at Carnegie Mellon and Point Park Universities. Return to our AI Issue Table of Contents Previous Next

“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.