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< Back Masks Too David Cowles Aug 10, 2026 “Society is a non-virtual video game and we anonymously manipulate our avatars with joy sticks.” In an earlier article , we explored the idea of Masks – you know, those faces you prepare “for the faces that you meet.” (Eliot) We determined that our masks are Markov Blankets, i.e. that they follow The Boston Protocol (named in honor of the Lowels who talk only to Cabots and the Cabots who talk only to God); we summarized our conclusions in a meme: “I talk only to my masks and only my masks talk to you.” We imagine we are nobility attending a pre-Revolutionary masked ball. We don our masks only when we choose and we can drop them at any time to engage more authentically with our costumed interlocutors. But that’s not what we mean by masks ! In ordinary states of normal consciousness, we only interact with each other’s masks. Despite the vain but well-intentioned efforts of 10,000 published novelists , we have no more idea what’s behind those masks than Alice knew what was through her looking glass. Society is a ‘non-virtual’ video game, and we anonymously manipulate our avatars with joy sticks . IRL, you behave as you behave. Perhaps you intend your behavior to reveal aspects of your innermost self, but ultimately you have no control over what I see or even over what I’m shown. You communicate with your avatar; you hope for the best…but don’t expect it! In a lifetime, we will wear many masks; in fact, we wear multiple masks every day. I’m wearing several right now. Our masks are translucent (not transparent) so we can layer one atop another to create all sorts of special effects. Like children dressing up in old clothes found in an attic trunk, we never tire of being someone we’re not. Who would? (BTW, is that a uniquely human trait?) That I wear a mask is hard wired. There is no ‘social me’ without one; but the configuration of that mask, its layers and progressions, is constantly in flux. That I wear a mask is my uber-mask ; what mask I wear is situational…and ever shifting. Like Proteus, or a certain Heraclitean River, I am never the same…and never different. A 5 th century BCE Greek philosopher, Empedocles, nailed it: “In so far as they never stop interchanging, they are forever unchanged…running through each other they become different at different times and (so) are perpetually alike.” (Fragment 25) So did a 20 th century existentialist: “I am not what I am, and I am what I am not.” (Sartre) Absent the possibility of an altered state of consciousness, philosophy’s Other Minds problem is insoluble. Per Turning, there is no way of knowing if my interlocutor is conscious, and per Searle, there is no way of knowing if communication between avatars is intentional, i.e. meaningful, or algorithmic. Therefore, I cannot know what’s behind the faces that I meet. It’s possible that the answer is ‘nothing at all’; it’s possible that my uber-mask (my mask of masks) lives in a world of cardboard cutouts…but I choose to believe otherwise. Generous as I am, I am willing to grant you ‘personhood’. (You’re very welcome; I’m sure it means a lot.) Seriously though, it’s the ‘Occam’ thing to do: to suppose that all phenomenal masks conceal unique individuals, but unique individuals who share a common ontological status. In English? “You’re just like me only different.” Unfortunately, though, even that doesn’t help. I am perpetually projecting images onto my uber-mask’s reverse side. This is the me I want you to see. This is the me I see in my mind’s mirror. This is my ‘beloved son’ with whom I am well-pleased. But that’s not the ‘me’ you meet. What I am to you (obverse side of my mask) is different, often radically so, from who I am to myself (reverse side). Your mask (you) responds to whatever my mask happens to be projecting; my mask responds to yours in the same way. Neither of us has control over those projections. In fact, I learn what I’m projecting only by seeing your mask’s reaction. I see myself only as I am reflected and refracted in you. Because each of us is always alienated from our masks, we live in individual, solipsistic universes, hermetically sealed to ensure no cross contamination. We react ‘we know not how’ to projections that tell us ‘we know not what’ about ‘we know not whom’. We are who we are not, pretending to be who we are, interacting with folks who are pretending to be who they are not. “What we have here is a failure to communicate!” ( Cool Hand Luke ) A failure, literally, of cosmic proportions. No wonder we’re so messed up! I mentioned ‘ordinary states of normal consciousness’ as if I knew what that might mean. There may be ‘special’ states that do allow us to make unmediated contact with the man or woman behind a given mask. I’m speaking, of course, about Sex, Drugs & Rock and Roll . We sometimes refer to such states as ‘ecstatic’ – a good choice of words since it comes from the Greek ( ekstasis ) meaning to ‘stand outside of one’s self’. This is precisely what would be necessary if one were to have unmediated contact with another subject. The literature regarding such interpersonal encounters is vast. Sartre calls it Being for Others . Jesus et al. refer to ‘loving your neighbor as yourself’. Marxists call it solidarity . Tellingly, a party drug reputed to promote ‘intense feelings of inter-personality’ has the street name, Ecstasy . We may shed our masks during an AC/DC concert or at a performance of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto or in front to a Monet haystack, a Van Gogh wheatfield, or a Giotto landscape. And finally, we have the realm of religious/spiritual experience: the visions of saints, the enlightenment of Buddhas, the love of a Mother Theresa, prayer and/or meditation. It is not for us, now or ever, to comment on these testimonials; but the rest of us, we muggles, remain hunkered down in our WWI era trenches. For us, today is just another day behind the barricades, i.e. behind our masks. Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

Philosophy, theology, and science merge in Aletheia Today, the magazine for people who believe in God and science. Process philosophy, scripture study, and critical essays bring science and faith together with western philosophers like Alfred North Whitehead and Jean-Paul Sartre. Deep dives into the meaning of the Old Testamant, the New Testament, and where the Bible fits into modern-day society. Is God real? Does Heaven exist? Find your answers to life's questions at Aletheia Today. Cosmology Philosophy Philosophers Society Science Guests Theology The Bible Culture The Arts Archives Spirituality Subscribe today for FREE! Enter your email address here: Subscribe now! Thanks for submitting! We are happy to be able to provide Aletheia Today to all interested readers at no cost.

“Cosmologists cannot rely on science any more than astronomers can rely on religion. There can be no successful TOE (‘Theory of Everything’) without both. ….” < Back Is Christology a TOE David Cowles Sep 1, 2024 “Cosmologists cannot rely on science any more than astronomers can rely on religion. There can be no successful TOE (‘Theory of Everything’) without both. ….” “It doesn’t matter what you believe as long as you’re ‘a good person, kind to others and respectful of the environment’. At the end of the day, that’s all any religion can ask, and you don’t need religion for that .” I’m guessing that the majority of Europeans and North Americans agree with this proposition, even if they don’t say so publicly. But we ask a lot more of our religion than that! While we ‘trust’ science to tell us how the Universe came to be as it is, we rely on religion to tell us why . For 300+ years, we have imagined that science and religion were enemies, that their models of reality were incompatible. Nothing could be farther from the truth. They address completely different questions, and they desperately need one another to fill each other’s gaps. In the words of Ezra Pound, “The grove needs an altar.” Cosmologists cannot rely on science any more than astronomers can rely on religion. There can be no successful TOE (‘Theory of Everything’) without both. The specific ‘facts’ uncovered ( aletheia ) by science need to be positioned in an overall conceptual framework ( logos ) that science alone cannot provide. Phrases like ‘Big Bang’ and ‘Negative Vacuum Pressure’ cannot satisfy our deepest longings. If the question, why is there something rather than nothing? has meaning…and an answer…that answer can only be found in Metaphysics, religion’s first cousin once removed. Science tells us that we , I mean our ‘bodies’, each consist of 30 trillion independent life forms called cells . By comparison, only 8 billion human beings are alive today. Likewise, a total of 100 billion human beings have lived since homo sapiens evolved. By normal life expectancy, 100 trillion cells will have participated in forming your ‘body’. These cells are the direct descendants of a single unicellular life form (bacterium), powered by a single DNA molecule that evolved on Earth some 4 billion years ago, shortly after the planet was formed. As far as we know, life evolved on earth only once…once! Why then? Why there? Why? Are we alone? Or has life also evolved in other places in the Universe? If not, might it still? If not, why not? The Universe is 14 billion years old and encompasses at least a trillion galaxies. Our sun is just one of 100 billion stars in just one such galaxy, the Milky Way. The notion that this is all just an accidental ‘one off’ will never satisfy us…even if it turns out to be true. As Carl Jung said, “Man (sic) cannot stand a meaningless life.” We are aware of ourselves, and we are aware of the world around us, and we are aware of ourselves being aware of the world, all at the same time. We call this a unit of consciousness. Uncannily, it follows the contours of dialectics: Thesis – Antithesis – Synthesis , all at once! Science is attempting to work out how this works and in recent years great progress has been made toward that goal. Human beings have a complex nervous system, including the cerebral cortex and extending throughout the body. These ‘brain cells’ express your unique DNA in a particular way that is specifically suited to their function. So far so good! Except, it seems as though all (or most) life forms are conscious, right down to unicellular bacteria and including each of the 30 trillion cells that make up our bodies. Yet most of these life forms lack any sort of physiology that we’d recognize as a brain. So efforts to reduce consciousness to a particular physiology seem doomed from the outset. You are conscious at the level of the organism. The 30 trillion cells that make up your body cooperate to generate that single fact of self-awareness lovingly known as ‘you’. Yet each of these constituent cells is also conscious. Is there any overlap between consciousness at the cellular level and consciousness at the level of the organism? In other words, is the content of consciousness at the level of the organism in any way dependent on or reflective of the content of consciousness at the level of the cells? There is no reason to believe so but, frankly, who knows? And that’s not all. Could there be intermediate levels of consciousness? For example, is the heart conscious? My poor, abused liver? If so, do the contents of such consciousness relate in any traceable way either to consciousness at the level of the cell or to consciousness at the level of the organism? On the other end of the scale, are there conscious entities that include the human organism in the same way that the human organism includes the cell? Might consciousness emerge on the level of social groupings? Families, communities, nations? How about the species level? The level of the biosphere? The planet (Gaia)? The galaxy? The cosmos? Again, we currently have no way of making such determinations. Finally, if the Universe as a whole is conscious, is that a manifestation of what we call ‘God’? Here materialism, realism, and empiricism must give way. We need to situate mundane phenomena in the context of a more general model of reality. Such an uber-model is the subject of Religion (formerly known as Mythology, currently known as Metaphysics). A complete understanding of Universe requires an all-encompassing conceptual framework (religion) and a swarm of verifiable data points (science). St. Paul's Letter to the Colossians (the congregation at Colossae, east of Ephesus in Asia Minor) includes a very old Christological Hymn (1: 15-20), possibly the earliest liturgical Christology extant. Perhaps it offers the conceptual framework we need to understand Universe as a whole. Check it out: "He (Christ) is the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation , for in him all things were created… “All things were created through him and for him. He is before all things and in him all things hold together … “He is the beginning, the first-born from the dead . For in him all the fullness was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile all things for him…" Can we peel back the leaves of this artichoke? First, God is insensible, but Christ is the sensible image of God. Creation (Genesis and/or Big Bang) is the moment of minimal entropy (maximal order) – it would be, wouldn’t it? Christ is maximal order, the ordering principle in fact, as well as order itself ( logos ). Christ is universal and eternal. Therefore, Christ conditions everything that comes to be. Christ is the locus of whatever is (was or will be). He is the origin of whatever is (efficient cause) and its destiny (final cause). Because all things (events) share a common origin (Christ) and a common destiny (Christ), all things hold together; but because Christ is also the locus of all events (above), all things hold together in him. Death is the moment of maximal entropy, minimal order; it would be wouldn’t it? You can’t be any deader than dead! Whatever emerges from maximal entropy must (by definition) manifest an incremental increase in order , so whatever emerges from a state of maximal entropy (death) manifests Christ resurrected. Christ is not just the sensible image of an insensible God; Christ is God. ("In him all the fulness was pleased to dwell.") Entropy in the spatiotemporal world steadily increases due to conflict. Outside of spacetime (i.e. in Christ), reconciliation (through Christ) transmutes (for Christ) order-eroding conflicts into order-enhancing contrasts and ultimately into cosmic harmonies. Christ is not just the sensible image of an insensible God; Christ is God. ("In him all the fulness was pleased to dwell.") Entropy in the spatiotemporal world steadily increases due to conflict. Outside of spacetime (i.e. in Christ), reconciliation (through Christ) transmutes (for Christ) order-eroding conflicts into order-enhancing contrasts and ultimately into cosmic harmonies. David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at dtc@gc3incorporated.com Return to Table of Contents Share Previous Next Click here. Do you like what you just read? 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< Back Moore's Nativity David Cowles “No need to study theology at university… (or) go to Sunday school. It’s all right there in front of us…and Henry Moore helps us see it: Christianity!” If you want to understand what’s special about the Christian world view, jet to London and visit St. Paul’s Cathedral. Just to the left of the high altar stands one of Henry Moore’s final works, Mother and Child . One of the 20th century’s greatest sculptors and a self-professed non-believer , Moore has nonetheless delivered a statement of Christian theology every bit as powerful and unambiguous as the foundational Nicene Creed . In Moore’s work, mother and child emerge together from an undifferentiated block of marble. It is the emergence of the child who reveals the mother, and it is the emergence of the mother who reveals the child. Neither emerges from the block untethered, solo, without the other. No mother, no child, no child, no mother. The Incarnation is a ‘joint effort’ involving both the human and the divine. Mary’s famous Magnificat (Luke 1: 46 - 55) assumes a critical role in Moore’s concept of Nativity. Mother and Child is not your everyday ‘Madonna of the Oxen and the Sheep’. Moore’s marble presents the virgin birth of the Son of God as a violent process in which the pure potentiality of the undifferentiated mass unwinds, albeit stubbornly, to reveal the form hidden within. Implicit in Moore’s version of the Nativity celebrates the interdependence of the celestial and the terrestrial, the divine and the human, the transcendent and the immanent. Only God, who is Courage per se , would dare to create a truly independent universe, guided by its own ‘free will’ - a universe with a ‘mind of its own’. With the Incarnation, God puts himself in play to an extent not seen before, even in the Torah (the first five books of the Old Testament, traditionally ascribed to Moses). The parents among us know how difficult it can be to give our children the autonomy they need to grow. Not so God: Fiat lux! There…it’s done! We’re emancipated…and we didn’t even have to go to court, much less fight a civil war, to get there. Nor did God have any second thoughts about what he’d done: “He saw that it was good.” The Book of Job makes it clear that God regretted nothing in his creation, not even Behemoth and Leviathan, the mythical monsters of the Old Testament. Nor did it take long for God to reap the harvest of his ‘naïve’ generosity. Lucifer rebelled against him ‘right out of the chute’ and ‘six days later,’ Adam followed suit. God made the world, but we make our own beds in that world, and for the most part at least, God lets us lie in those beds, undisturbed. God’s game plan lets us suffer the consequences of our actions (or inaction). That’s the price we pay for freedom. In physics, we speak of efficient causation : one billiard ball strikes another, causing the second ball to move in a particular direction with a particular velocity. In metaphysics, we speak of final causation : Amy studied hard so that she would pass the test. In theology, we speak of another type of causation, causa sui (self-causation): God is presumed to be the cause of his own being. But in ontology, on the other hand, we speak of mutual causation , aka ‘bootstrapping’, so evident in Moore’s sculpture. But our modern, Indo-European languages lack the vocabulary and, especially, the syntax needed to facilitate such a conversation. Triune God functions like the three legs of a tripod, working together to ensure the stability of the platform. Vertical ‘transcendence’ supports horizontal ‘immanence’ and vice versa. This is precisely the bee that got into Nietzsche’s bonnet: for him, there is nothing other than the whole (the so-called ‘platform’): nothing outside the whole, nothing beyond the whole and no hierarchy within the whole. Nietzsche was a true ‘ontological democrat’. His world was really and truly flat. This tripod model supports earlier ontological formulations as well: Aletheia supports Doxa (Parmenides), Noumena supports Phenomena (Kant), etc. Earlier versions of today’s Indo-European languages often included a true ‘second person’ (pronouns) and a true ‘middle voice’ (verbs). A true second-person pronoun, Martin Buber’s “Du” for example, suggests intimate mutuality. This is the syntax of love. There is no subjectivity or objectivity, only reciprocity. This is the relationship between mother and child that Moore captures. Diagramming a sentence that includes true second-person pronouns and a middle voice verb is challenging. Second person, middle voice relationships cannot be represented using two arrows pointing in opposite directions. A proper diagram in the context of Christian syntax would consist of a single arrow with two heads, pointing in opposite directions, suggesting that the relationship itself that has ontological priority over the related entities. “At the foundation is relationship” – Martin Buber, I and Thou . The middle voice expresses this same reality on the predicate side. A middle voice verb suggests two “subjects” (or you might just as well say two objects) engaged in a continuous process of mutual modification. There is no modifier, no modified, just mutual modification. Lovers are always ‘second persons’, and the process of love itself is ‘middle voice’. Christianity, as I understand it, is entirely concerned with middle voice relationships: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Love is the two-headed arrow pointing simultaneously toward self (you) and other (your neighbor). The second person and the middle voice need to be at the foundation of any language capable of carrying the Christian message. In the context of Christian theology, the first and third persons and the active/passive voices are ‘degenerate’ cases. The lover and the loved are one. The lover sees himself in his neighbor. Lover and neighbor form an insoluble dyad. There is no lover without neighbor; there is no neighbor without lover. Lover and neighbor are second-person subjects (co-subjects: du-du ) of middle voice, verbs. In the words of the pre-Socratic philosopher Anaximander “they give each other reck,” and, therefore, have ‘being’, just like the mother and child in Moore’s masterpiece. Perhaps the reason that Christianity has fallen out of favor in our era is that Christianity’s second person/middle voice ontology cannot be adequately expressed in any contemporary Indo-European language. It’s easy to see the world in subject/object, active/passive terms. This is the syntax of production, construction, manufacture, etc. We have turned our wise and expressive ancient languages into tools to help us organize collective action, develop and deploy technology, and erect structures (“Tower of Babel”). Our language has lost its ability to talk about ultimate things in a way that resonates with our deepest experiences. We have surrendered the ‘love franchise’ to Hallmark, and so, we turn now to painting, sculpture, and musical composition to express our spiritual intuitions. Henry Moore’s Mother and Child does just that! Moore represents Mary in her “Mother of God” avatar. We have heard this epithet so often that we may fail to grasp the incredible import of these simple words: Mother of God! ( Mater Dei in Latin.) If God is the “maker of…all things visible and invisible” ( Nicene Creed ), then how could God have a mother? Clearly Mary, the mother of Jesus, is a product of God’s created world (and a rather recent product at that); how could she also be God’s mother? In the language of first and third-person pronouns, subjective and objective cases, active and passive voices, efficient and final causes, she could not! But that is not the syntax of Christianity and, in my opinion at least, it is not how the world works. In the Christian-world view, God encompasses spacetime. Eternal, God is both the origin of all that will ever be (“Alpha”) and the summation of all that will ever have been (“Omega”). But even more astoundingly, God is also an element, a quantum, in the world itself: W ɛ G ɛ W. God, who made the world, is also ‘made’ by the world via Mary. By the power of the Holy Spirit, God is incarnate in spacetime, the historical universe. He enters the world between the Alpha and the Omega…even though he already includes both the Alpha and the Omega. In Christian topology, it is just as true to say that the part (Christ) contains the whole as it is to say that the whole contains the part (Jesus). Metaphorically, Jesus compares the Kingdom of Heaven to a mustard seed (the smallest of all seeds known at that time); historically, Jesus enters the world as a fertilized cell, an embryo, a fetus, a baby, the poor child of dispossessed parents. At the time of his birth, Jesus was literally homeless, a refugee, a most unlikely candidate for secular kingship, much less cosmic sovereignty. But just as the mustard seed grows into a tree that shelters all birds, so the baby Jesus “grows” into the parousia which is the ultimate unification of everything that is. Mary’s ‘Mother of God’ epithet beautifully exemplifies the cosmic process of mutual reck. It is nothing less than this that Henry Moore captures. One good glacé, and you’ve got it! No need to study theology at university; no need to go to Sunday school. It’s all right there in front of us…and Henry Moore helps us see it: Christianity! Image: Sculpture by Henry Moore (LH 851, St. Paul's Cathedral, London) David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com . Share Previous Next

< Back Dr. Stuti Pardhe Contributor Dr. Stuti Pardhe is a dedicated professional with a broad spectrum of experience spanning social work, clinical therapy, and alternative modalities. With a profound commitment to mental and public health, she aspires to be a global Brand Ambassador and Role Model, leaving a positive impact on humanity. The Science Behind the 7-Second Rule

< Back Leaving the World a Better Place David Cowles Feb 22, 2024 “Wanting to leave the world a better place testifies to good intentions, but…it doesn’t cover the cost of a latte at Starbucks.” Once upon a time, everyone knew exactly what to do. It was written out for you: in the Bible, on your family’s refrigerator door, and on the blackboard at school. Doing these things was good; not doing them was bad. Life was simple. Then God died. (Or, same, same, you went off to college.) Suddenly, rules became suggestions and behavior became arbitrary. Without God, or an acceptable substitute, the world seems devoid of meaning, and actions apparently lack purpose. In haste to free ourselves from rigid, rule-based morality and, of course, from God, we have painted ourselves into a bit of a corner: If nothing has any meaning, why do anything at all? Or, if we can’t ‘not do’ something , why choose to do one thing instead of another? Purposeful action is intentional . Intention intends, selectively. The formation of intentions presupposes relevant values . Every intention, often unknowingly, embodies a complex of values. Intent begins with an assessment of ‘what is’ from the vantage point of ‘what ought’ to be (value); action is an attempt to move the ‘is’ closer to the ‘ought’ – i.e., to make the world a ‘better’ place (value). But there is no more ‘ought’! If I choose to do X, knowing I could have done Y, I have made a decision. That decision could be unconscious and random, or conscious but random, or conscious and intentional. Intent implies goal, and goal implies value. Nietzsche laid the ground rules: No values, no right actions! Caught out, world-class philosophers began tripping over themselves to manufacture a secular ethics to deal with this hole in the soul of philosophy. How can I resolve the ‘value paradox’ (above) without letting anything transcendental , or ‘God’ forbid, supernatural into the tent? To replace the ancient trifecta of divine values (Beauty, Truth & Justice), A.J. Ayer proposed kindness , Camus - variety , Marx - equality . All fail, not because there is anything wrong with these ‘values’ per se , but because they are in fact values and a ‘value’ can only be a normative if it is transcendent. But per Nietzsche, nothing transcends the world; therefore, there can be no ‘values’ worthy of the concept. The moral rigor of Nietzsche devolved into a century of ‘bad faith’ – a proliferation of subjective tastes intended to take the place of now forbidden, objective values . To state the challenge simply, now that there’s no God, and therefore no duty, how do I get myself out of bed in the morning? Perhaps because “I want to leave the world better than I found it?” How laudable! And innocuous. Who could disagree? Who wouldn’t want a better world? But for that very reason, it’s a tautology. Wanting X and X being ‘better’ are synonymous. I designate X as ‘better’ by wanting it. No one wants ‘what’s worse’. Worse, perhaps in some aspect or for some period of time, but not ‘net worse’ overall? No way! So ‘wanting to leave the world better than I found it’ is denotatively identical to ‘wanting to live in the world as long as possible’. But even so, there are problems: How do we define ‘better’? What makes one world better than another? Will everyone agree that World A is ‘better’ than World B? Is 2024 ‘better’ than 1924? How do we measure ‘better’? Immediately better or better long term? How long-term? A day, a decade, a millennium, the cosmic lifespan? And how would we measure that ? And who qualifies as ‘everyone’? – white males, living in the US and owning real property there? Or every human being on the face of the earth? Or every human being who will ever live on Earth? All primates? All mammals? All organisms? What about ET, inorganic matter, and our silicon-based cousins, our Bots? Not enough for you? Ok, then try this: how do you connect any given action with any desired result? I’d like to reduce my carbon footprint, so I facilitate the development of alternative energy sources, only to find out years later that these alternatives have consequences much more harmful than the greenhouse gasses they were intended to reduce. Kierkegaard was right: every action is a leap in the dark! The world being how it is, and inertia being inertia, results often do seem to mirror intentions, even if imperfectly. But does this mean that the intentional acts caused those results? Correlation is not necessarily causation (Hume). In an earlier age, ‘doing the right thing’ was often incompatible with ‘living a long life’: Only the good die young . Consider the martyrs and the heroes. Consider those who ‘laid down their lives for a friend’. In that world, value might find itself in conflict with life itself, and sometimes value wins out. Less so today! Without a robust notion of ‘value’, we are less inclined to self-sacrifice. The quantity of my life (longevity) has replaced the quality of all life (virtue) as the preferred measure of any action. ‘Wanting to leave the world a better place’ testifies to good intentions, but only ‘good intentions’; it doesn’t cover the cost of a latte at Starbucks. It’s no guide to ‘right action’. Virtue may be found only in the act itself, including just its immediate, hardwired consequences – what Alfred North Whitehead called the event’s satisfaction , which in turn functions as the event’s objective immortality in the world. And beyond the event itself? “Here there be monsters!” 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? 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< Back To Be…or Never to have Been David Cowles Jan 25, 2026 “I may be readily willing to sacrifice my own life experience, but I am much less ready to sacrifice yours. And so we continue on…” 2000 words, 8 minute read Hamlet only scratched the surface. He imagined that he had influence over life and death. Too late, sweet prince; that ship had sailed. Hamlet was already born, and there’s no erasing that…is there? Still, he asks good questions: should we nobly “suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune?” Is that a fair price to pay for long life? Or should we “take arms against a sea of troubles,” thereby placing our lives at heightened risk? Troubles only cease when we ‘sleep’, so our campaign against them can only end in death. “’Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep…” “To sleep, perchance to dream – aye, there’s the rub.” Hamlet weighs the possibility that consciousness might survive the death of the material body. A decision to eschew the lure of long life opens up a range of behavioral options ranging from crusades against injustice, to risky personal behavior, to outright self-harm. Each of these lifestyle choices carries an enhanced risk of premature death but none of them has the power to annul our birth. A friend recently told me, “I don’t know if there is any continuation of consciousness after death, but if there is, I am sure that what happens in our current life influences whatever comes next.” On the one hand, my friend was proposing an outlandish theory for which there could be scant empirical evidence. On the other hand, he was expressing what turns out to be an almost baseline human belief. In our Western religious tradition, we call it Heaven and Hell. In the Eastern tradition, karma, reincarnation and Nirvana. Other traditions (Confucian, Abrahamic) imagine that we live on through our descendants and, perhaps, that the consequences of our vices and virtues are somehow visited on those latter generations. For the more material-minded among us (from Mill to Marx), we offer Utopia…your choice of a post-industrial techno-paradise or a return to the state of nature following a Dictatorship of the Proletariat. And for the rest of us, there’s Estate Planning. Like most, Hamlet is concerned (1) that personal consciousness might extend beyond death, (2) that the nature and quality of such post mortem (PM) experience is unknown, and (3) that the content/conduct of our current lives might influence that quality. Like many, Hamlet elects to ‘play it safe’; he will not tempt fate. He will accept life as it comes (or doesn’t) but he’ll do nothing to accelerate his demise (contrast Ophelia). Practically speaking, Hamlet has only two choices, and he decides that the devil he knows is better than the devil he doesn’t. But philosophically, there is a third option: What if Hamlet could choose never to have been at all? No risk of nightmares now! Job got there 2500 years earlier, in the opening lines of his eponymous epic: “Let the day disappear, the day I was born, and the night that announced, ‘A man has been conceived’. As for that day, let it be darkness…Let darkness, ‘dead-darkness’ expunge it.” (3: 1-5) Job understands, intuitively of course, that once an ovum is fertilized by a sperm…or very shortly thereafter, the die so to speak is cast. There is no going back…unless I can resolve the Grandfather Paradox and kill the old coot before he can reproduce. A silly thought? Not at all! In fact, there is a school of thought that suggests that all our lives will ultimately be expunged…at the heat death of the cosmos. What we call ‘being’ is really just the existential track of a virtual particle in a virtual universe. But that is not what Job (or Hamlet) had in mind. I like to bet on Pro Football. At the beginning of each NFL season, I pick a few ‘underrated’ teams that I think might have a chance to go all the way. If the teams I pick are bad enough (think Jets), I can get outrageous odds. Typically, I’ll bet a whopping $25 on each such team. If any of my teams win, I stand to gain at least $1,000 and in some cases much more: just how bad are these teams? (Think Jets.) But if I happen to land on a ‘hot property’, as I did this year, the wins pile up as the season progresses. Superbowl buzz makes my $25 bet look like a work of pure genius, reminiscent some would say of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerti. Suddenly, I am the hot property: “You stand to win $3,000 if your team goes the distance, but if they lose anywhere along the way, you get zero. I’ll give you $1,000, right now, no questions asked, for your betting slip.” Job has something even better in mind. He is proposing a type of poker where a player can fold at any time…and receive back 100% of what he’s bet so far on his hand. Extending the analogy, we can live our lives and then, at the end of it, decide whether to make it ‘real’ or not. But suppose Job has his way. Suppose God updates his design to allow creatures to retroactively erase their lives, their being, at any time. Gone is the accumulated suffering of the decades, gone is the prospect of an excruciating death, gone is the risk of nightmares. Of course, gone too are the pleasures and joys of life and their attendant memories, reveries, etc. We are conditioned to tell pollsters that the joys outweigh the sorrows. But do they really? Suppose you were born with a special button and told that you were free to push that button at any time but that pushing the button would not only result in immediate death but in retroactive death. It would be as if none of your life experiences had ever happened. Do you think you would have pushed that button by now? Would you ever push it? If so, when? Under what circumstances? To be clear, this is not suicide with its social stigma and its possibly adverse spiritual consequences. This is simply an ‘inalienable right’, conferred on every human being at conception (or shortly thereafter), either by God or by Thomas Jefferson – the right to retroactively opt out of existence at any time! After all, you did not ask to be born, you did not even consent to it. It only makes sense then that, upon attaining adulthood, you should have the right of self-determination, even retroactively. Nor is this ‘death’, this is simply ‘not-being’. To live, even for a short time, is to place oneself at almost unimaginable risk. Couple that with the periodic suffering visited on even the most charmed life and, honestly, it is hard to imagine anyone ever choosing life…for herself, or for anyone else. And yet, we’re constantly told that folks choose life every day: “I had good innings, what a gift, I wouldn’t trade it for the world,” etc. But is that really how we feel or is it just what we’re expected to feel…or say? After all, how bad would you feel about yourself if you came to the end of your natural life only to decide on reflection that your life had not been worth living? Imagine telling your loved ones on your death bed that you wish you’d never been born? Fortunately, the human psyche protects us from such pain. We buck up. We put on a face for the faces that we meet (Eliot)…we put on a face for ourselves . What if the last thing we say to ourselves and the World is a lie? But I digress. The point is, nobody wants a button. At least, no one is willing to own up to wanting a button. Are there defensible, rational reasons for this? A co-worker was fond of saying, “Better days are coming!” They didn’t; he died. But his slightly sarcastic meme put a spotlight on something important, Hope : “There just has to be a pony underneath this pile of excrement; all I have to do is keep digging.” Hope is virtually omnipotent. It truly does seem to conquer all. But can we really be so naïve as that? And what is it we’re hoping for anyway? A winning Powerball ticket? Another Superbowl for New England? A cure for cancer? (One of the 10 best movies ever made is Truffaut’s 400 Blows . Spoiler alert : in the end the tween aged hero fulfills his ‘lifelong’ dream, then asks, with his eyes alone, the fundamental existential question, “Now what?”) All these things (above) are good in themselves but are any of them enough to justify the high cost of the buy-in (i.e. life with all its inevitable suffering and unavoidable risks) when the only sure thing is New England? But there is another factor: the other ! Every day we’ve been alive, we’ve interacted with others and those interactions have shaped, trivially or massively, their life experiences, and in turn who they are for others, and so on. Now I am under no illusion that my presence in this world has net-benefited folks. Even I’m not that narcissistic! Perhaps I’ve benefited some but harmed others. Perhaps I set out to benefit Sally but harmed her in the end or perhaps I truly did help Sally but inadvertently hurt Joe. Actions and their alleged consequences are radically alienated from our intentions and regrets. Here’s where Hope becomes Faith . Do I trust the Universe enough to believe that if I intend to benefit others and act in accordance with that intention, my influence will somehow be ‘net positive’? I have no reason to suppose that to be true but to believe otherwise is nihilism which ultimately leads to skepticism and solipsism . If I don’t push my button, that’s why. Not because I think I’m ‘God’s gift’ but rather because I’m not God. Perhaps I do have the right to decide, unilaterally and retroactively, whether I will or will not have been in the World, but I do not thereby claim the right to inflict the consequences of my decision on others. Call it the Grandson Paradox . If I choose never to have lived, I condemn my biological offspring never to be born. Do I have the right to make that decision for them? And it’s not just about biology. Every living organism that I encounter, face-to-face or vicariously, will be impacted, accidentally or existentially, by my decision. Bottom line, if I have a button and do not elect to push it, I do so, not in consideration of myself but in consideration of ‘others’, including you, dear reader, and of course, including God. I may assert a right to self-determination but I do not therefore claim the right to make determinations for you. And speaking of grandfathers, this thought experiment demonstrates a thesis first advanced by Anaximander, the grandfather of Western philosophy, in the 6th century BCE: All being is mutual; I am only because you are and vice versa. And speaking of grandsons, this thought experiment blows up the dimensions of Schoedinger’s cat carrier until it templates the edge of the Universe. Now nothing is ‘real’ until it interacts with an observer (or experimental apparatus) external to itself. There is no ‘I’ in ‘It’. (sic) My life is not real until my existence has been felt by another. I may be readily willing to sacrifice my own life experience, but I am much less ready to sacrifice yours. “And so we continue on, going up to Jerusalem, filled with awe and dread, Jesus leading the way…” (Mark 10:32) *** The Play Scene in Hamlet (1842) by Irish artist Daniel Maclise is a large oil painting that vividly depicts the moment in Shakespeare’s Hamlet when the prince stages a “play within a play” to reveal King Claudius’s guilt for murdering his father. The work was shown at the Royal Academy in 1842 and is now in the Tate Britain collection, celebrated for its dramatic narrative and detailed portrayal of the characters watching the performance unfold. 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 Putting Perspective in Perspective David Cowles Jul 11, 2024 “God did not discover ‘space’ at the moment of Big Bang. Space as we think we know it was ‘invented’ about 500 years ago…” When you remember something that happened in your life 10, 20, 40, 80 years ago, how does it seem to you now? Does it differ from the experiences you’re having at this moment, for example? From more recent memories? Do your memories become fainter, vaguer and sparser as you reach back through ‘the gossamer web of time’? Or like Proust, do you experience long ago events as though they were happening IRT? Contrary to public opinion, God did not discover ‘space’ at the moment of Big Bang. Space as we think we know it (inert, continuous, and distinct from the events that occur within it) was ‘invented’ about 500 years ago at the ‘dawn’ of the Renaissance. Beginning c. 1500 CE, we began to ‘put things in proper perspective’…so to speak. As a result, finite, concrete ‘things’ lost value and that value transferred to virtual entities - structures, networks, landscapes, and systems. X no longer means ‘X’; X means ‘X in the context of Y’. At about this same time, Machiavelli taught us that any means could be justified from the perspective of its intended end . We learned that continuous time (history), no longer a barrier but a river, acts like a superconductor, without friction, connecting 16th century Florence with 1st century Rome. Perspective enables us to aggrandize…and trivialize…persons, places, and things by placing them in their ‘proper contexts’. Value no longer resides in the thing-itself; now value is conferred on things by their contexts, their intentions, their ends. The same event can be important or unimportant, good or bad, depending on the context in which it occurs and the perspective from which it is viewed. It was 1500 after all; we had to put the new races Columbus was discovering in perspective . We had to contextualize them. For that we needed a new model for the assignment of value. I value X to the extent that X is near (in space and time) and alike (in qualities). Value varies according to the inverse square of physical, and cultural, distance. Or is it the other way around? Does distance (physical or cultural) vary according to the inverse square of Value? A lodge brother was killed on my street this morning – tragic! A child of illegal immigrants was struck down by a stray bullet in an LA bodega - unfortunate! An unnamed Japanese soldier was killed in Burma during WWII – so what? A good shepherd will lay down his life for his sheep…but when the dinner gong is struck, it’s the sheep who lays down its life for the shepherd. Believe me, there’ s nothing better than shepherd’s pie after a long day roaming the hillsides. It’s all about context! Question : did we invent continuous spacetime so that we’d have a convenient place to stick inconvenient people (like Uncle Louie)…or events (like slavery)? Seeing things in perspective was a breakthrough for Western society. As we encountered more and more folks who did not look just like us or act just like us, we were able to marginalize them by applying the inverse square law. Ultimately, seeing people in the context of their location and culture entitled us to infect them, despoil them, and enslave them - all part of the ‘Natural Order’ of things. Of course, we had to view our religious scruples in perspective as well. We needed to see Faith in proper ‘context’. Love your neighbor is ok on the Sabbath but for the rest of the week it’s just business . Charity is laudable, but ‘income equality’ would erode motivation, undermine productivity, and suborn the sort of idleness that can lead to ‘unchristian-like behavior’. Modern life is much too complex to be regulated by a bunch of outdated Biblical norms, isn’t it? We need to understand such norms in the context of their times…and then apply them in the context of our own. A neat trick, if you can do it. We know from the Bible, or was it Star Trek , that God wants us all to ‘live long and…prosper in the land’. And are we not commanded to be ‘fruitful and multiply’? But first, the World must be made safe for Capitalism (or Socialism, take your pick)! For 500 years, we have been living in Machiavellian spacetime, formally defined 400 years ago by Sir Isaac Newton. But c. 1870, our icy intellectual prison started to melt. A group of Parisian painters challenged the Newtonian idea of space as a sterile womb. They were derisively labeled Les Impressionists by their critics. The Impressionists transformed space from an inert container into a trestle strong enough to support the ‘hanging gardens of Montmartre’. After Monet, space would never again be a neutral element in art, or life. Cezanne took things a step further. He painted space itself, or rather, the manifestations of space, structures like houses and hillsides. He didn’t paint objects; he painted object-ness . And then, Picasso (like his brother from another mother, Einstein) blew Newton entirely out of the water. He brought Western civilization back to its glory days before the Machiavellian Captivity. Newtonian space, sterile, continuous, vanishing to a point, was banished. Space became an active, generative element in art. Space no longer contained figures; it emanated from figures. Each figure carried its own space (‘frame of reference’) – like Linus’ blanket or Peter Pan’s shadow. As Einstein had shown, figure (mass-energy) and ground (space-time) are just two poles of one phenomenon. Picasso, Matisse, et al. reconnected us to the artists of the Late Middle Ages (e.g. Giotto). Size, lighting, spacing, liberated from the tyranny of Machiavellian perspective, again became independent variables, each carrying discrete information from artist to audience. It’s time we put perspective in perspective – it’s not ‘a reflection of objective reality’; it’s a limiting and often unfortunate choice, aesthetically, ethically, and politically. 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. Keep the conversation going. 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 Accident Ahead, Seek Alternate Route David Cowles Jan 25, 2024 “All paths lead to Rome; what happens along the way is your life. Please don’t waste it on speculation or regret.” Ever encountered a sign like this flashing on the side of the road? Did you think, “If only the rest of life came with warning signs like this?” Did you follow the advice to ‘seek an alternate route’ or did you decide to stick with your original plan? Either way, how did it work out? Did you sail home with barely a tap on the brakes, or did you end up in a 2 hour traffic jam? Are you glad you did what you did, or do you wish you’d made a different decision? You have no idea! You have no idea what would have happened if you’d chosen a different option. Maybe you’d have gotten home an hour earlier…or maybe you would have been swallowed up by a sink hole. Every second you spend thinking “What if?” or “If only!” is a second of your life irretrievably wasted. Did you squander a couple of hours in unnecessary traffic? That’s nothing compared to the minutes you spent banging on your steering wheel, shouting, “If only!” On December 5, 2023, the NYT published an article by Matthew Futterman. Here it is in part: “Four years ago, David Lewis received a phone call from the coroner’s office in Washington, D.C. His oldest daughter, Carolina, a former college tennis player, had been found dead in a hotel room. She was 23… “Shortly after midnight, Carolina and her friends…headed to a nearby nightclub called Abigail . Carolina and Trujillo became separated inside the club, and just after 1:30, Trujillo left….If there were one thing Trujillo could change in her life, she said in an interview, she would go back in time and drag her friend out of the club. “It’s like the person who has the terrible car accident wishing he had taken a different route,’ Lewis said. Tennis was everything for a time for the family…Now it’s…a road they wish they had never taken.” What if? If only! How could David Lewis not regret moving his happy family from New Zealand to Hilton Head? How could Trujillo not regret leaving the club without her friend? And yet… there is no straight line between what happened to Carolina and the decisions taken by Lewis and Trujillo. ‘A million little things’ intervened to connect two well intentioned decisions with one horrific outcome. Post hoc ergo propter hoc . Both a truism…and a fallacy. Obviously, it’s true. To the extent that anything is ever caused by anything else, we can say that whatever is now must have been caused by something that went before it. We invest the sequence of actual events with a royal title, Causality ; but we do so retrospectively. When we project the same algorithm into the future, the best we can hope for are predictions based on probabilities. Do you watch football? The latest ‘thing’ is Analytics . It’s 4 th and 4. Should I go for the first down or punt. Analytics aggregates hundreds of ‘4 th and 4’s’. Based on those results and adjusting for a finite number of situational variables, the Oracle says, “Go for it!” (Or not) But this is a poor predictor of whether this offense will get this first down on this day against this opponent under these conditions. Football is chaotic! Each event (play) is unique and sui generis ; but that is not to say that Analytics are useless. Sometimes, a well-worn path is a worthwhile factor to consider, among many others. This is entirely different from saying that current event A was ‘caused’ by past event B. The drawing of a causal line between a particular ‘outcome’ and a particular ‘antecedent’ is always fallacious. Causality , to the extent that it is ‘a thing’ at all, is not a linear phenomenon; it is a way of describing the evolution of a ‘field’. So, two things are simultaneously and universally true: (1) every event causes every other event; (2) no event causes any other event. So, where does this leave David Lewis and Trujillo? They made decisions, a butterfly flapped its wings and ‘ bad things ’ happened. Do you blame the butterfly for Carolina’s death? Then neither should you blame David or Trujillo. To decide is to cut (Latin). Every time a decision is made, the ‘world line’ woven by the Norns of Norse mythology (and Macbeth ), is cut, allowing new threads to ‘bud off’. We cut (decide); that is our role as conscious agents, as human beings. David Lewis made a decision to move his family to Hilton Head. He meant no harm. Trujillo left Abagail alone at 1:30 AM because she had to work the next morning. Each made a well-intentioned decision that apparently contributed to a tragedy. But we really don’t know that! We can’t view the alternative threads. What would have happened if Mr. Lewis had not left New Zealand? What would have happened if Trujillo had not left the club without Carolina? There’s simply no way of knowing! Because good things happen more frequently than bad, we assume that ‘no action’ would lead to a ‘better result’ when ‘action’ led to tragedy…but we don’t know that. It is a convenient surmise invented by our Superego to chastise our Id. The Book of Job made it clear 3000 years ago: There is no correlation between virtue and fortune! Bad things happen to good people…and vice-versa. Robert Frost confronted this paradox in his poem, The Road Not Taken and Frost ultimately concluded that there was no objective reason to choose one path over another. All paths lead to Rome; what happens along the way is your life . Please don’t waste it on speculation or regret. Keep the conversation going. 1. Click here to comment on this TWS. 2. To subscribe (at no cost) to TWS and ATM, follow this link . 3. We encourage new articles and reprints from freelance writers ; click here to view out Writers’ Specs. Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

< Back Time Travel or Time Transfer? David Cowles Sep 1, 2025 “We now know that we can ‘transfer time’ among entangled entities…” In a previous post of this site , I proposed the following thought experiment: “Your life is near its natural end (you’re 80) when you are visited by an angel. Bear with me! You are given an option. You can ‘go gentle into that good night’ or you can relive your present life from the moment of your birth. However, there are some ground rules: You will not be aware that you have lived before; everything will seem brand new to you…although you may have déjà vu moments. While you will have the illusion of making free choices, in fact you will repeat every decision and relive every experience exactly as you did before. Sorry, it’s not a ‘do over’; it’s just a ‘be-over’…” Surprisingly, this is no longer merely a thought experiment. “Today this is fulfilled in your hearing!” (Luke 4:21) We now know that we can ‘transfer time’ among entangled entities. We can make your dream of eternal youth a reality. So does that mean time travel is finally a reality? Well, you decide: Let’s keep it simple: we have an experimental framework (A) that includes two entangled entities (B and C). If 5 seconds pass according to the clock on the laboratory wall, we would normally expect A, B, and C each to age 5 seconds. And normally we would be right. But physics is anything but normal! ‘Magical’ might come closer. We now know that we can configure A so that when A ages 5 seconds, B ages 10 and C does not age at all. Really? How? Let’s look at what we’ve done. Everything ‘in aggregate’ is unchanged; collectively, the system (A) ages 5 seconds, period. So B and C must age a total of 10 seconds (5 seconds each). Normally, we would just say that A, B, and C each aged 5 seconds. But that assumes that time is an independent entity, an objective standard of measurement, entirely divorced from the phenomena it is measuring, an idea held over from Euclid and Newton. At least since Einstein we’ve known that that’s not true. Every entity has its own time. So in the example above, T(A) = 5, T(B) = 10, and T (C) = 0. Entanglement allows A to distribute time unevenly among its constituent entities, e.g. 10 to B and 0 to C. Now let’s take this further. There’s no theoretical reason why A couldn’t distribute 10 seconds so that B ages 20 seconds and C grows younger by 10 seconds. A sends C into the past (-10) by allocating more of the collective age difference to B (+20). Mind bending? You bet! But we’re not done yet! An organization of scientists has committed to making safe and affordable time travel a reality in our lifetime. Maiden voyage: send 3 physicists back in time 30 years (each). First, we’ll need volunteers. But please, don’t send me your resume. While we know theoretically that time transfer is possible, we have some engineering problems to solve before we can actually start moving people around. We’re not yet able to place a body the size of an adult human in a coherent quantum state. We will be able to do so someday, but that day is not today. Plus, you might want to curb your enthusiasm. A volunteer would need to age 120 years for 3 physicists to travel 90 years (3 x -30) back in time. No one would survive and even if someone did, who would make such a sacrifice? But suppose our volunteer only had to agree to age one month. I could see myself agreeing to that…in the name of science! And that will work, provided 1091 likeminded people agree to join me, hold hands (i.e. be entangled), and age one ‘leap month’ each. Of course, now A contains B, C, and 1092 other independent entities. Our first mission was a resounding success. We sent a team of 3 scientists back 30 years, to the height of the dot com boom (1995). Fortunately, our scientists were all over 50 so none of them had to endure a second childhood. News travels fast, especially if it has a ‘new age’ vibe. Soon volunteers from all over the world were raising their hands, some to time travel, some to donate a few months of their life expectancy for the benefit of humanity. We now have more than enough volunteers for a more ambitious second trip. This time we will send 15 ‘mature’ chrononauts deep into childhood (average time transfer: 45 years) and another 15 back an average of just 15 years each. For this, we will need a total of 10812 eleemosynary ‘time donors’. No problem! Seems everybody wants to make history even if it’s at their own expense. But we are left with questions. What if someone wanted to go back to a time before they were born? Would they simply be annihilated? Would their life be expunged? In that case, our experiment could indeed change history. In fact, we could use this technology to ‘disappear’ our enemies. Or would events somehow conspire to ensure that our intrepid chrononaut would be born anyway? Our initial chrononauts had no interest in returning to A’s time frame; they had found the fountain of youth. But others might wish to return. Would they be able to let us know that they’d decided to come back (probably not) or would that need to be arranged in advance? Could we bring them back if they and we wanted to do so? Probably, yes. The time transfer steps should be reversible…provided we had enough volunteers to make it happen. Finally, is this ‘time travel’? Organisms B and C do return to an earlier internal and external state-of-affairs, so yes. But they won’t know they have traveled in time, so no. They’ll have no awareness of having already lived through events, except possibly for moments of deja vue . They will have learned nothing from their future life experiences, they will be unable to bring information back from the present…or to send information forward in time…except via the usual muggle routes. No one will know that they are a chrononaut and no one will know if there is a chrononaut in their midst. We know that someday folks will discover ‘time transference’; we just did. So we may assume that there will be chrononauts in the future; therefore, it is possible that each, or any, of us, dear reader, is already a chrononaut ‘back from the future’. We have no way to know. Still, this is a breakthrough. Sure, it is a poor version of Captain Picard’s universe, but it is available to us without warp drives, worm holes, etc., and the energy required is nearly zero. Plus, we can be assured that there will be no prematurely deceased grandfathers in our wake. So we’ll take what we can get, work with it, see if it may lead us to something a bit more useful . *** Marc Chagall’s Time is a River Without Banks (1930s) dissolves the boundaries between past, present, and memory, layering dream and reality into a single, fluid moment. The work mirrors the idea of time transference in physics, where seconds can be unevenly distributed and even reversed, creating the sensation of traveling through time while remaining within the same current of existence. 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 Accuracy or Fairness David Cowles Jun 6, 2024 “Imagine a world in which a viewer can effectively change history just by changing the channel.” Once in a while, a single sentence can turn your whole world upside down. Recently, I came across such a sentence online. I can’t attest to its veracity, but in a sense that doesn’t matter. What matters is that someone would actually write it, true or false. “Nvidia is trying to strike a balance between accuracy and fairness in AI.” In other words, it is now possible, excusable, even laudable to sacrifice a certain amount of truth (accuracy) in favor of ideology (fairness). Wow! We all know it’s happening, but to come right out and say it…that’s brazen! This now officially sanctioned practice of lying to ease our social consciences (e.g. regarding male privilege, slavery, and racism generally) has an unintended consequence: the end of ‘history’ per se! Not the end of ‘historical process’ (like quiet Fukuyama) but the end of ‘historical writing’. More precisely, it is the reclassification of all future histories as historical novels. As a boy, I remember our local library being divided into two ‘wings’: Fiction on one side, Non-Fiction on the other. In the library of tomorrow, if there are libraries, if there is a tomorrow, Non-Fiction may be confined to a single shelf. There is no doubt that the role of women, African Americans, and other ethnic minorities has been shamefully neglected by academic historians. Uncovering the true role of the marginalized in history is a worthy project. But we are at cross purposes. On the one hand, we want to expose the horrors of racism and misogyny. We can’t tell often enough our stories of the slave trade, ante-bellum plantation life, the holocaust, and the physical, sexual, social, and economic exploitation of women. On the other hand, these well intentioned narratives can have the unintended and undesired effect of making such horrors seem part of the natural order. Sensitive to this concern, the media has begun sanitizing history by portraying more women and minorities in positions of power than was actually the case. A social event that might have included only white males is ‘recast’ to include a healthy mix of women and people of color. Atlantic society post 1492 is ‘reimagined’ as something much closer to what could have been, should have been, and presumably would have been, absent racism and sexism. So what’s wrong with that? Well, AI’s efforts to ‘colorize our world’ do often go unnoticed…but not always. How about the time AI decided to inject racial diversity into a particular social situation…that turned out to be a KKK meeting! The BBC is shaking up their formula for historical mini-series to portray women and persons of color in anachronistic positions of influence. No doubt some were! But the essence of the postmodern social critique is the conviction that these marginalized groups did not always participate fully in the economic and social life of society. The BBC is portraying society the way it might have been rather than the way it was. Exposing viewers to a vision of society where race and gender do not condition one’s relations (access) to the ‘means of production’ may also have a positive consequence: it gets us used to, and comfortable with, diversity. But it may also be the ultimate expression of institutional racism. It undercuts the postmodernist critique by suggesting that ‘historical conditions were not really as bad as they have been portrayed’. This is just the sort of thing that can lead to ‘holocaust denial’. Plus, it underscores the fundamental tenet of racist/sexist ideology: “Women and minorities only appear to succeed because of affirmative action and/or statistical distortion.” The politically correct class needs to get its story straight. Were minorities prevented by various forms of dehumanizing discrimination from assuming the roles they might otherwise have played in history…or not? If so, portraying the past as ‘better than it was’ undercuts the fundamental premise of that social criticism. Should we focus our efforts on ensuring that previously marginalized constituencies have equal access to the levers of power? Or do we just need to uncover and recognize the previously neglected contributions these groups have already made? Or in the interests of broader social ‘good’, should we impute an historical role to minorities that they may not have played IRL? Allegedly, Nvidia runs two algorithms. One is intended to mimic the actual historical event as closely as possible; the other is designed to reimagine that same event assuming a society free of race or gender bias. A further algorithm then blends the two. One can imagine bizarre scenarios. “We’re doing this documentary for the BBC so dial-in a heavy dose of ‘fairness’; this other project is for Fox so tamp-down on the race and gender stuff.” It is bad enough that the content of today’s news is primarily a function of its source (media). Now imagine a world in which a viewer can effectively change history just by changing the channel. Of course, history has always been subjective, even biased. Interpretation and spin are one thing, but it’s quite another to change the circumstances of an event to suit a particular social agenda…and then to brag about it. “Job well done!” All society, as far as we know, is based on the premise that there is a certain level of objective reality that we all share. Brute fact, the human condition, facticity, etc. Now that premise is called into question. Nothing is ‘settled’; everything is subject to revision. In such a world why believe anything? Why not believe whatever I’m comfortable believing, however outrageous and anti-social it might be. If I want to believe that birds are really drones, there’s nothing you can say or do that would prove me wrong. “All your data is corrupt. I’ll believe what I want to believe…and you can’t stop me!” It really is a brave new world! 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.