< 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.

< Back Good Without God David Cowles Oct 20, 2025 “The Old Testament shows YHWH in perpetual moral crisis… The New Testament introduces all-loving Abba… One God, two faces!” 1,650 Words, 8 minute read. My next door neighbor is a bit of a superhero on our street. Last year, he was out on a jog when we saw a man abusing his dog. He stopped and confronted the man who shouted, “You want this f***in’ dog? He’s yours!” A thousand dollar vet bill later, Eureka has become a loved member of our little community, and my neighbor is the admiration of us all. An assistant professor at our local community college, Dom drives an OG EV with a bumper sticker that reads, “Science is my God.” Google him. He belongs to a number of ‘humanist’ organizations, and he is listed as an officer of Reason not Religion . In other words, he’s a ‘card carrying atheist’ - but that hasn’t stopped him from being a much better person than a certain pet free church going next-door neighbor ( ahem ). Whenever I hear some puffed up theist claim, “There is no Good without God!” I can’t help thinking of Dom. He is living proof that believing in God is not a prerequisite for doing good. But things are not quite that simple, are they? In academic theology, there is a division between those who believe that ‘Good makes God, God’ and those who believe that ‘God makes Good, Good’. Is God ‘God’ because he is Good or is Good ‘Good’ because God wills it? Those holding the later view understandably seek to defend God’s Sovereignty. Good on them, but IMO, their view is neither Biblically grounded nor philosophically cogent. On the contrary, the Old Testament shows YHWH in a perpetual state of moral crisis: “How do I feel about slavery? Why shouldn’t I wipe out this sinful human race? Did I treat Job unfairly? Should I spare a wicked city for the sake of a tiny minority of virtuous residents - I mean there’s such a thing as collateral damage, isn’t there?” The New Testament resolves these doubts and introduces us to all-loving Abba …one God, two faces ! The Book of Job is an elaborate symposium on the nature of Good generally and Justice specifically. The transcript features remarks from certain ‘wise guys’ from neighboring countries as well as graphic testimony from a victim of great human suffering, none other than Job himself. Finally, spoiler alert, El Shaddai , God himself, makes a cameo appearance…and there’s a whirlwind! (Andrew Lloyd Weber, eat your heart out.) This is ‘must see TV’! This ethical meditation undermines both standard theological theses (above): (1) If Good is nothing but God’s Will, then why agonize, why take advice? Just do and be done! But (2) if God is God because he is Good, in other words, if Good is essential to God’s nature (Sartre), then why agonize, why take advice? Just do and be done. If God were indifferent to Good, he’d just do what he felt like doing and, if challenged, shrug and say, “Six Seven!” He began following this strategy in Job …until he realized that his nature does not permit him to ignore Good. Clearly neither of the standard theses is up to the task of elucidating the nature of the Good as it is presented in scripture. So, is Good a subjective preference or an objective imperative? Is it the same for everyone in every circumstance or does it adapt and evolve? And how does good manifest in our world, i.e. in specific events? Historically speaking, the ‘earliest’ books of the Old Testament (Torah & the 3 J’s - Joshua , Judges , and Job ) provide a detailed record of Israel’s search for firm ethical principles on which to build a new society. While each book has its own special take on the subject, a consensus emerges: Good is not a matter of caprice…yours, mine, or God’s . The Good is manifest in our World as Beauty, Truth, and Justice. The individual actor is ultimately responsible for identifying and pursuing what is Good in the context of each specific event. In his process of decision making, God takes advice wherever he can get it, even from mere mortals like Abraham, Moses, and the Prophets. God is not deciding whether to be good ; God is deciding how best to do good . Something we should all be doing, BTW! No actual entity, divine or otherwise, can undertake to do anything that is not good . By definition, to act is to move toward a goal and a goal, to be a goal , must be good …as Good is conceived by that actor in that situation. Example : I let 100 people drown in order to save myself. What I did was good …in my eyes. I weighed the options and I made my choice. Now I just have to come up with some sort of justification for my actions. In this instance, I prioritized my interests over others’. Who knows? Maybe someday I’ll race into a burning building to rescue a baby. In both cases I will have done what was good in my eyes, then and there, even if I’m ashamed of the former and proud of the latter. Good per se is eternal and invariable but what is good is specific to each act. It can even evolve over the course of an act. Nevertheless, God’s actions in the World, and ours, are always undertaken in pursuit of transcendent, universal Value. We do not always agree about what is good . I’m sure there are people out there ready to take the side of Eureka ’s old owner. And they could be well intentioned and armed with cogent arguments. We don’t always agree about what is good , but we should agree that there is Good. We won’t necessarily agree which paintings in MOMA are most beautiful (or which version of history is most true, or which set of laws is most just), but we should agree that Beauty (or Truth or Justice), however defined, is the proper criterion for judging. My neighbor is a good person; he appreciates Beauty, he seeks Truth for a living, and he is obsessed with Justice. The fact that he does not believe in the existence of God is irrelevant. Logical Positivist A. J. Ayer did not believe in the existence of God either. Contrary to Nietzsche , however, he believed that he could give his life meaning by choosing to live according to a self-selected set of values. Ayer’s preferred categorical imperative was kindness . Now in our circles today, this would seem to be a pretty safe bet. I’m not sure I know anyone who would argue that kindness is incompatible with Good. On the other hand, such an ethical choice would have made Nietzsche sick. In fact, I am not at all sure that the majority of the 100 billion human beings who have ever lived on Earth would have agreed with Ayer, or me, that kindness is an ethical imperative. Ayer chose to make kindness his moral imperative, but he might have chosen inflexibility or indifference and who would we be to disagree. As moral relativists, we are forced to concede that all ethical systems are equally valid and normative…for those who adopt them. “Everyone does what is right…in their own eyes.” (Judges 21: 25) In this age of moral relativism, when ‘everything is permitted’ (Dostoevsky), it is up to us to define what we consider good . Ayer’s choice of ‘kindness’ barely raises an eyebrow. But what of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s anti-hero, the great Gatsby? He chooses living well as his ethos. Gatsby too is a man of Faith. The object of his faith is his Ultimate Concern, but he is ultimately concerned with sensual gratification, conspicuous consumption, and social status. His ‘faith’ is idolatry. So Good is an invariable universal standard while good is determined by each actor in each circumstance using the concept of Good as a guide. This is an inescapable element in the human condition ; it is an inescapable element in the cosmic condition as well. Good is a guide, not just to human beings but to every entity capable of conscious self-determination, including God himself. So no, we don’t need God in order to be good ; my neighbor proved that. But we still need God to objectify (i.e. model) Value in and for our World. Good is not just a pile of specific goods . Good is an organism consisting of specific goods and functioning harmoniously in service to the whole (which is God). Part of what makes goods good is their limitless ability to work in harmony with all other goods in a single organism, the Good. God constitutes the arena that makes it possible for innumerable specific goods to work together to manifest a single Good; but it is the mutual compatibility inherent in all goods that makes it possible that God exists. God and Good are symbionts. Again, Nietzsche nailed it: “One is necessary, one is a piece of fate, one belongs to the whole, one is in the whole – there exists nothing which could judge, measure, compare, condemn our being, for that would be to judge, measure, compare, condemn the whole… But nothing exists apart from the whole!” ( Twilight of the Idols ) If nothing transcends the immediate and the immanent, the concept of Value per se is meaningless. Value must transcend what is being valued. We must be able to differentiate objectively and normatively between the ethics of St. Francis and Mother Theresa and those of Mussolini and Stalin. We can only tolerate so much subjectivism, humanism, and relativism. Any philosophy that fails to satisfy this moral imperative is bankrupt and for that we still need God. *** Image: The Paralytic Man Helped by His Children by Jean-Baptiste Greuze is an 18th-century painting that portrays a touching domestic scene where a paralyzed father is tenderly cared for by his devoted children. With its emotional depth and realistic detail, the work exemplifies Greuze’s focus on moral virtue, family duty, and sentimentality, central themes of the Enlightenment. The painting highlights the nobility of everyday life, emphasizing compassion and filial piety over grand historical or mythological subjects. 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 Could You Pass a Turing Test? David Cowles Mar 16, 2023 “As far back as I can remember, I’ve known that ‘something’s wrong’. No matter 'whom' (sic) I’ve seemed to be, I have not been.” In 1950, mathematician Alan Turing of WWII Enigma fame, proposed a test (‘Turing Test’) to determine whether a participant in an exchange of text messages was ‘mind’ or ‘machine’. Turing’s test: structure a conversation between two entities, one organic, the other mechanical. If after a reasonable period of time, an independent observer (‘mind’) cannot determine which is which, then the machine may be said to have passed The Turing Test . It’s earned mind-status . Of course, there are hidden assumptions here. First, we are assuming that both interlocutors are trying to pass the test: Duck, duck… But suppose that’s not true! Suppose only the machine is trying to pass the test. What would happen if the ‘organic’ (i.e., human) interlocutor decided to pretend to be a machine? Goose! In that case, it’s entirely possible that the independent observer would award the ‘human’ moniker to the machine and the ‘mechanical’ moniker to the human. But not necessarily! Perhaps our observer smells the rat, decides to drill deeper, and skillfully asks questions that allow him to discover the deception and identify the deceiver. Assuming that only a human could even attempt such a ruse, our observer could now identify the machine. Game over! Or is it? What if the machine can also mask its identity and assume an alternate persona ? (We see that today in some recent versions of AI.) What if both parties are capable of feigning machine-like qualities? There is another, even deeper assumption. We are assuming that the human side of our test pair could herself pass a Turing Test. Suppose that’s not true? But what if many or most human beings can’t pass the test? Then what? So I decided to conduct my own Turing Test. I put one ‘person’ after another in the box and asked questions designed to allow me to discriminate mind from machine. But Houston, we have a problem. No one is passing! Everyone is coming up machine . So now what? Let’s check my methodology. Everything I think I know about ‘being mind’ is based on my own subjective experience. Is there one thing I can say about myself that is always true and that cannot be challenged by any so-called ‘evidence’? Yes, there is one thing, just one thing: I know that I am not me . (Sorry for the mangled syntax.) Who is me ? A helpless infant, a tottering toddler, a growing boy, an angry adolescent, a young adult, a responsible adult, a senior citizen. Those are classifications; let’s drill down: a rug rat, a playmate, a student, an athlete, a politician, an employee, a spouse, a parent, an employer, and now apparently, a writer. My personae have one thing in common: I am none of them. No matter what I do, no matter what role I assume, I am not that person. As far back as I can remember, I’ve known that ‘something’s wrong’. No matter whom I’ve seemed to be, I have not been. “All the world’s a stage,” but unlike Shakespeare’s actors, I have been given no script, not even stage directions. Add to that the fact that I’ve never seen a play before; heck, I’ve never even been to a theater. I was born onto the set of an improv company with no explanation or training. “You’re here – now act!” My mission, apparently, is to figure out where I am, what’s going on, and act accordingly. “Act your age” and “Be on your best behavior” are life’s fundamental memes. In other words, method act . Put yourself into your character, no matter who that character is and no matter what’s going on, on stage. And never, ever, step out of character! My father had his own favorite meme for me, “Have the courage of your convictions!” How can I when my convictions are not mine, but my character’s? I think I had thought this through by the age of eight. I am no newcomer to identity crisis . Growing up, having your own convictions was a punishable offense; having other people’s convictions was generously rewarded. So here I am, a scrawny eight-year-old, facing a six-foot father, wagging his finger at me and shouting, “Have the courage of your convictions,” when I know that is the one thing explicitly forbidden by the rules of the game I am trying so hard to learn to play. No wonder I have issues! No matter how well I play my parts, I am out of character all the time. Sometimes I can fake it, but I never seem to make it. My life is a total lie but, then again, any life I might have led would have been a lie too. After all, I am a professional actor; I only assume the personae of the various characters handed to me. Type casting notwithstanding, I may be called upon to play any role at any time. I am my own Six (or six hundred) Characters in Search of an Author (Pirandello). I am the star of my own personal cinéma vérité . But for better or for worse, I cannot shake this pesky I . Oh, how I’ve tried; how I’ve wished I could be one or another of the characters I’ve played; but no dice! So back to Turing. I know who I am, and I know that I am not whom I am. I probe everyone I meet to see if they know who they are, to see if they know that they are not whom they are. So far, no one has passed my Turing Test. Everyone tells me they are who they are. Are they? Or, are they deceiving themselves? Or are they lying to me? Could you pass my Turing Test? 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.

Get paid to write. Calling all writers with critical thoughts and ideas about theology, science, philosophy, Christian educacation, culture, and prayer. Aletheia Today is online magazine where science, theology, and philosophy converge. Submission Guidelines Write for us! As we step into a new year, Aletheia Today is thrilled to announce our refreshed publication schedule for 2025! Our new approach allows us to better align our content with the ancient seasonal celebrations we honor. Here’s what’s coming up: February 1 – “Groundhog Day”: Revisit overlooked “Hidden Gems” from AT’s archives. April 1 – “Resurrection” - Life…it’s what’s happening! June 1 – “Summer” - The seeds are sown; we await the harvest. August 1 – “Lammas” - First harvest, first fruits, Transubstantiation, Eucharist. October 1 – “Harvest” - Second harvest, The Kingdom of God. Football. December 1 – “Yule” - Celebrate the triumph of light over darkness. We’re excited about the opportunities this schedule creates for deeper collaboration with independent contributors and more focused content for our readers. Thank you for being part of this journey as we continue to explore the intersection philosophy, theology and science. Specs for All Submissions: All completed work must be submitted through the online submissions form. (See link below.) All submissions must include a title and credited image. All submissions must include a headshot and a short (100 words or less) author bio with social handles. All work must be original. We will republish the author's previously published essays with credit to and permission from the original publication only. We will not use any images without a credit. Submission Due Dates: We accept unsolicited submissions throughout the year. Writers’ Comp (paid for original work only, not republications): For feature length articles and short stories, $250 per published article or short story plus a $100 bonus once the author’s work has reached 100 unique views. For original prayers and poems, $100 per published piece plus a $50 bonus once the author’s work has reached 100 unique views. For questions about submissions, email editor@aletheiatoday.com . Feel free, but not required, to email us a proposal, pitch, or query to the email address above prior to submitting your completed work. To becomes an AT Contributor, submit your work online; click here .

< Back Chicken or Egg? David Cowles Jan 30, 2025 So the answer to “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” is neither. You’ve been around long enough to have confronted the ‘Chicken or Egg’ paradox countless times. We know, or think we know, that you can’t have an egg without a chicken to lay it; likewise you can’t have a chicken without an egg for it to hatch from. So what’s the solution? Thanks to modern biology, we now know that the chicken and the egg are one organism, like a caterpillar/butterfly, at different stages of development. That organism is the result of a single cell reproducing and differentiating. That single celled organism (call it chicken or egg) evolved from a cell of a different, but related, species that accumulated enough ‘damage’ to its code to become a new species. So the answer to “What came first, the chicken or the egg?” is neither ; what came first was a cell of another species, modified until it came to head a new species (chicken/egg). Of course, this process of evolution will give rise to numerous other species that will have gone extinct in the interim. But this explanation actually resolves nothing; it merely pushes the problem back from the origin of chicken to the origin of living organisms on Earth. Furthermore, we are only able to solve this riddle by adopting a ‘God’s eye’ view of the entire process: we presumably have all the relevant facts, we are unencumbered by any preconception or prejudice, and we are fundamentally unaffected by the outcome. This is not necessarily the Judeo-Christian model of God but it is familiar nonetheless. How about the other organisms involved in this process? There is no prima facie reason to assume that these organisms either have or lack the ability to step outside the immediate problematic and view the entire process from end to end (God’s eye). In If Nietzsche were a Narwhal , author Justine Gregg argues for a new version of human exceptionalism: human beings have this ability to abstract, other life forms do not. I will grant you, it takes a lot to imagine a bacterium or a fern ruminating on the matter of its own mortality, or about the fate of the universe. And yet… On the other hand, plants especially exhibit behavior that we recognize as highly ‘moral’; does that mean that non-human life forms have an ethics, if not a cosmology? Let’s apply this to the chicken-egg problem. According to Gregg, the adult chicken has no sense that it began life as an egg, no more than a human baby knows it was once a fetus. However, it presumably lacks the human’s ability to deduce its ontology. To Gregg’s chicken, its time as an egg is the unknown, undifferentiated ‘past’ out of which all things come to be. Many modern philosophers would challenge Gregg’s model of non-human intelligence; they would not accept Gregg’s proposed limitations without more evidence. But what if the difference between human and non-human intelligence is merely one of degree rather than kind? We have only recently discovered our ontological past in fetal tissue. Before then, we had little more sense than animals do re our origins. What if we have a pre-fetal backstory that functions as an undifferentiated past for us in the same way that the fetal past is a black box to a chicken? What if the universe is ultimately just as unknowable by human intelligence as it is by a lowly sponge? Imagine how a chicken understands its place in the great chain of being; now imagine that that’s functionally equivalent to how you understand your place in that same totality. Dogs and cats know the score. They are part of the family. To hear them tell it, they head their families. Every day, they go for a walk in the morning, then enjoy breakfast with the other family members. Then they go off to work or school, wherever it is they go; but no worries because they almost always return, in order, after a roughly uniform period of time. Life is good, and we get it…most of the time. But what does your pet make of a 2 week stay in a kennel while the rest of the family is skiing in Switzerland? Or your recent move from Maine to Arizona? Or the sudden, unexplained absence of a beloved family member? Other than as a vague, emotive background, it is hard to see how they fit these ‘catastrophes’ into their world view. And yet, I don’t see dogs leaping off rooftops or attending prayer services. I never met a dog wearing a sign that read, “Life’s Absurd!” To be, in any capacity, is to tolerate a massive amount of cognitive dissonance. ‘Consciousness philosophers’ talk of a Global Workspace where spacetime is suspended and all data points are simultaneously accessible (like RAM in your computer). It is reasonable to assume that all conscious entities, like dogs, cats, and people, have a Global Workspace, the details of which are species specific. Same goes for ravens, octopus, bonobos and bacteria, if these are indeed conscious. Bottom line, all conscious entities are aware, to some extent, of their ontogenesis, but none is aware in its entirety. The limits of that awareness constitute ‘cognitive dissonance’ (original sin?) for each particular species. In the end, all conscious entities exist in the perpetual superposition of egg and chicken. 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. 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< Back Chaos and Causality David Cowles Sep 14, 2025 “Accomplish as much as possible, experience as intensely as possible, but change as little as possible!” According to the theory of Cause & Effect , the occurrence ( Dasein , that it is) and the character ( Wassein , what it is) of an event are the product of past events. This is Determinism . A defining characteristic of Determinism is the system’s radical sensitivity to the smallest micro-perturbations . Because all fuzziness has been removed, minor fluctuations can cascade through the system resulting in major, often catastrophic, macro-differences . At the other end of the spectrum, it is conceivable that events occur randomly and have no relationship whatsoever to one another. This is what we normally think of as Chaos . While Chaos and Determinism are connotatively opposite, they are denotatively synonymous, i.e. there is no way to distinguish one from the other experimentally. While A may or may not ‘determine’ B, there is no way of predicting B by observing A because variations in A, even those below detectable levels (hidden variables), can wreck huge, macro-phenomenal changes in B. In the words of ‘60s Hippiedom, “Whatever happens, happens!” But in spite of our nostalgia for the Summer of Love, few of us live our lives today according to the Hippie creed. Between Determinism and Chaos , there are a variety of possible ways to account for perceived relationships between events; some of these alternatives even support some species of predictability. For example, many would argue for a version of causality that stops short of absolute determinism. Prior events predispose future events, but do not guarantee them. Unaccounted variables, noise, or God forbid, ‘free will’ can always disrupt the apple cart. ‘The best laid plans of mice and men’ and all that…but most often events do flow from A to B more or less as expected: If A, then B…with a probability of X. However, such models are dangerously oversimplified. Life is not billiards; if anything it’s more like Craps. IRL, A and B are fields that fill spacetime; but both fields are often steeply focused into small regions of the Universe (e.g. inside the circumference of a sphere). Even then, however, perfect predictability is never achievable. But back to billiards. While the momentum of B at T₂ may be overwhelmingly influenced by the momentum of A at T₁, the relationship is never absolute. Other factors may and do interfere, e.g. slight irregularities in the felt, an unexpected puff of air, a so-called ‘act of God’, and/or the intervention of an ‘intentional agent’ (e.g. you). Furthermore, many As typically converge, and impinge, on B. Marx called this phenomenon, ‘Over-determinism’. These influences may be conflicting or reinforcing. In our earlier, primitive models, causality was all or nothing, depending simply on your point of view. Our later models are more intuitive…but still imperfect. In certain domains, the causal model of events works tolerably well. We’ve been to the Moon and back after all. But 500 years ago, the Ptolemaic model of the Universe was working…tolerably well. There’s a vague sense that a more aesthetically satisfying model of relationships among events might be possible but what might such a model look like? 100 years ago, British philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, faced the same dilemma. He developed an alternative model to account for the sense we have of continuity among events. Importantly, his model makes no room whatsoever for the classical notion of causality. According to Whitehead, every event is causa sui and sui generis . In the spirit of Sartre’s Neant , events are totally free; in a departure from classically Western versions of theism, events themselves are solely responsible both for their Dasein and for their Wassein (above). But while free, current events are totally immersed in a sea of prior events. (Each of Europe’s many wars occurs in the context of its prior wars and is, in a sense, merely an expression or an extension of that context.) Every event assembles itself but within guardrails that transcend it. Think of the Universe as a very large, very complex set of Legos . We’re talking 4 figures (dollars, pounds, or euros) for the Deluxe Edition. On the plus side, Junior will never tire of playing with this toy – no more than God tires of being ‘the maker of heaven and earth and of all things visible and invisible’. ( Nicene Creed ) On the flip side, he’ll still be playing with blocks and living over your garage…well into his 30s. In this admittedly imperfect analogy, each Lego corresponds to the ‘superject’ of a prior event, the ‘objective immortality’ of a ‘settled matter of fact’. It is a hallmark of the Deluxe Edition that no two Lego pieces are identical but can be put together in innumerable configurations. These are what muggles call causes . Junior builds civilizations with these blocks, limited only by his imagination and by the available assemblies. Each block has multiple ports for other blocks to plug into and multiple ‘arms’ it can use to latch onto other blocks. A set of IKEA-like schematics accompanies the set and illustrates just a few of the various ways blocks may be put together to build coherent structures. Perfectly free and unconditioned, every event occurs in the context of a specific configuration of prior events, i.e. its own unique Actual World: “What is actual is actual only for one time and only for one place.” (Eliot, Ash Wednesday ) The schematics lay out all the ways blocks may be put together. In our analogy, the schematics assume the role of Eternal Objects (or Values) in Whitehead’s system. These transcendent values include Beauty, Truth, and Justice. Every event is a reaction of the Whole to the Whole, driven by a primordial appetition for the Good, i.e. for Beauty, Truth, and Justice. But without Causality , how do we account for the remarkable uniformity we find in nature? I mean, a proton is a proton is a proton…for 10^32 years! Our overwhelming sense of continuity has several independent sources, none of them related to Causality. First , all events are motivated by the bundle of shared values (above) that lead naturally toward a convergent future. Second , while the content of all future events is entirely undetermined, the qualities of the Omega event are certain, i.e. the material realization of the conceptual Values. Solidarity does not compromise Creativity; it empowers it. Beauty, Truth, and Justice are served by continuity and the intensity of experience is massively enhanced by stability. Imagine Beauty without harmony (order), Truth without knowledge (wisdom), Justice without precedent (law)! The creative urge characteristic of the Universe as a whole seeks to realize Eternal Values (objective reward) while maximizing intensity of experience (subjective reward). God regularly attends motivational workshops. One of the best is co-hosted by Abraham and Job . God knows all about ‘doing well by doing good’. Each event serves its own subjective interests (intensity of experience) as it meets the objective interests (realization of value) of the Wide World Web. The interests are not necessarily in conflict, but they are distinct. They both depend on stability. You can’t high-jump if you’re standing in quick sand. Therefore we assert the following proposition: “All events conserve as much of their inherited Actual Worlds as possible consistent with their overriding objectives of realizing Eternal Values and maximizing Intensity of Experience.” The Federal Reserve famously answers to a ‘Dual Mandate’ (jobs, inflation) but Gaia answers to a ‘Triple Mandate’ (intensity, value, solidarity). Events are not caused, they are motivated and curated - motivated by appetition for the Eternal Values and curated by the hierarchy of ontological imperatives (above). What we experience as Causality is simply the Curation of Novelty. Therefore there is a Prime Directive, a meta-ethic: “Accomplish as much as possible, experience as intensely as possible, but change as little as possible!” In this model, qualia are conserved without the phantasm of causality…and Occam’s Razor is respected in the process. Fourth , we treat events as though they were points in spacetime; they are not. They occupy regions of space and periods of time. (Note: Every event is a World Wide Wave but that wave is concentrated in a defined region of spacetime known as its ‘location’). At that location each event is holistic. If A is normally followed by B, then A and B are simply aspects of a single event. ( Normal = always, absent external interference.) But we don’t see things that way! We turn events into movie reels. We break them up into static frames scaled to the perceptual requirements of our human anatomy (frames are projected at a maximum speed of 10 frames per second). We practice ‘ontological vivisection’. Sometimes we affix labels like intention or tone , or cause and effect to various sequences. But these are all just facets of a unitary phenomenon, i.e. the event per se . Finally , we are mesmerized by the concept of Causality itself. Events transform their worlds. It is possible to track the unfolding of events by following the trail of transformations, the gradual flow from lower levels of entropy to higher levels. There’s nothing wrong with this, as long as we don’t confuse ‘flow’ (Heraclitus) with ‘cause’ (Laplace). It is also possible to walk the process back, to focus on what is now and track through an imagined sequence of quantum changes, one following another, until you’re willing to say you’ve reached their ‘origin’. There’s nothing wrong with this either, again just as long as we don’t confuse ‘sequential’ with ‘causal’. Bottom line, we don’t need Causality to account for Solidarity. In fact, the notion just gets in the way. The ‘triple mandate model’ set forth here, and ultimately derived from Whitehead, provides an account that is a better fit, both aesthetically and empirically, than the clunky mechanics of cause and effect. *** William Blake’s The Ancient of Days (1794) shows a radiant, bearded figure—Urizen, Blake’s embodiment of reason—leaning from a glowing sunburst and stretching a giant compass to measure the dark void. The image blends biblical creation with cosmic geometry, portraying the act of shaping the universe as both a divine and a mathematical event. 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 Messiah Redux David Cowles “Were Handel and Jennens dog whistle revolutionaries?... It is one thing to criticize the secular State, yet another to call for dashing it to pieces.” Aletheia Today Magazine (ATM) Issue #5, our Holiday Issue , included a performance of Handel’s most famous oratorio … minus the soloists, the chorus, and the orchestra, of course. Some performance! But the critics loved it. In this, our Holy Days Issue , we dig deeper into the political (vs. the theological) message of this masterpiece. To understand Messiah , it is helpful to view it in historical context. The House of Stuart ruled England, more or less continuously, from 1603 to 1714. The first two kings of this dynasty, James I and Charles I, were ideological royalists. They believed in the divine right of kings . Philosophical nominalists, they believed that God and his royal avatars were free to act however they wished. Le loi c’est moi! George Frideric Handel wrote his Messiah in 1741, and it was first performed in Dublin in 1742 during the Easter season. ( Messiah was intended, not to celebrate Christmas, but Easter.) Easter is resurrection, spring, the celebration of new life. But first, ‘the winter of our discontent’, leading to crucifixion and burial in an unmarked grave. Messiah ‘opens’ sometime between sundown on Good Friday and sunrise on Easter Sunday. Dante’s Divine Comedy does the same. This is the time, according to Roman Catholic theology, when Christ himself ‘descended into hell’ to liberate the souls trapped in Hades. In other words, Messiah begins in the ‘valley of the shadow of death’, but it begins with a whisper of hope : Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people, saith your God. Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her that her warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned. These verses from Isaiah meet all of us, from Jesus’ apostles to today’s ATMers, right where we stand, even if that’s in the pit of despair. For centuries it was believed that revolution took root in and sprung-up out of the depths of human misery. Not so! We learned in the 20 th century that revolution is ignited by ‘a spark of hope’, and it was just such a spark that Handel and his librettist, Jennens, hoped their Messiah might light. The libretto comes almost exclusively from Old and New Testament texts. The selection and arrangement of these texts rest squarely with the composer and his librettist. The oratorio consists of an interwoven series of flashbacks and flash-forwards. As you move through the narrative, notice how an 18th century political message has been woven into historical and spiritual details from the Bible. Building on the message of hope, Messiah proceeds to present its ‘revolutionary program’. It’s not a political platform (like the Communist Manifesto ). It’s not a utopian wish list. It’s a ‘How To’ manual, Jennens’ version of V.I. Lenin’s What is to be Done? (I am tempted to compare it to the famous Anarchists’ Cookbook from the 1960s – but that might be a stretch.) The voice of him who crieth in the wilderness: prepare ye the way of the Lord; make straight in the desert a highway to our God. What is revolution but turning society upside-down like an hourglass a nd inside-out, like a sock? What was peripheral becomes central, and vice versa. The stone rejected by the builders becomes the cornerstone. Ev'ry valley shall be exalted, and ev'ry mountain and hill made low, the crooked straight and the rough places plain. And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together. Thus, saith the Lord, the Lord of hosts: Yet once a little while and I will shake the heavens and the earth, the sea and the dry land. And I will shake all nations; and the desire of all nations shall come. The Lord shakes all nations? This is very different from the expectations of James and Charles. But more importantly, the result will satisfy the ‘desire of all nations’. This is a brand-new test of political legitimacy, and it presages the eruption of democratic movements later in the 18 th century. According to Locke, Rousseau, et al., secular government evolved to secure peace, justice, and prosperity for its people. According to Messiah , those values will only be fully realized once the Kingdom of God replaces the kingdoms of men (sic), but in the meantime they may be reflected to varying degrees in various secular states. The scene is set. Now…”Action!” (P.S. Please don’t shoot anyone.) Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call His name Emmanuel, God with us. If we didn’t already know the story by heart, this line would be a real ‘cart-tipper’: A virgin conceive? A baby be God? God be with us ? Say unto the cities of Judah: Behold your God! Arise, shine, for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee. The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light; and they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined. For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given, and the ‘government’ shall be upon his shoulders; and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace. Messiah makes it clear that the legitimacy and sovereignty of all government is rooted in Christ. Its sovereignty is just a reflection of his sovereignty. Christ is the foundation of all political authority, including that of the British monarchy.At this juncture, we can imagine the royal party being quite pleased with itself. I mean, who wouldn’t want to be God’s ‘avatar’ on Earth. But grounding temporal authority in Christology can lead to unintended consequences for secular rulers. Remember, we’re less than 50 years from the Bastille and the bloody guillotine. There were shepherds in the field keeping watch over their flocks by night… And the angel said unto them, “Fear not, for behold I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the City of David a Savior, which is Christ the Lord.” Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion; shout, O daughter of Jerusalem! Behold, thy King cometh unto thee; he is the righteous Savior, and he shall speak peace to the heathen. Then shall ‘the eyes of the blind be opened’ and ‘the ears of the deaf unstopped’. Then shall ‘the lame leap’ as a hart, and ’the tongue of the dumb shall sing’. These are the traditional marks of divine favor, an indication that God is ‘well pleased’ with his temporal rulers. End Part One, Begin Part Two . What an auspicious beginning! Shepherds were the first to acknowledge Christ’s kingship. Magi notwithstanding, this was to be a revolution led by the proletariat (shepherds and fishermen). Jesus welcomed support from elements of the elite ( fellow travelers like Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea) , but he never lost sight of his roots: he was the red-headed stepchild of a displaced carpenter, born in an ox’s stable and swaddled in its manger . And from there, it was all downhill. He was despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. He gave his back to the smiters, and his cheeks to them that plucked off his hair: he hid not His face from shame and spitting. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned everyone to his own way. Handel and Jennens are no anarchists. In a vague reference to the Book of Judges (21: 25), our ‘Sacco & Vanzetti’ make it clear that they are not prepared to entrust social order to the conscience of individuals. Authority is necessary, but that authority must reflect the sovereignty of Christ. The exercise of secular authority must reflect Jesus’ values (‘WWJD’). The final triumph of the Kingdom of God will not happen suddenly or spontaneously. We have a role to play as well, and that roll requires full-on effort on our part: The Lord gave the word; great was the company of the preachers. How beautiful are the feet of them that preach the gospel of peace and bring glad tidings of good things . Their sound is gone out into all lands, and their words unto the ends of the world. We are the preachers! How beautiful are our feet! We are charged to bring ‘glad tidings of good things…unto the ends of the world’. Now, appropriately, Handel and Jennens double back. We have our marching orders. Now we need to refocus on the task at hand: Why do the nations so furiously rage together, and why do the people imagine a vain thing? The kings of the earth rise-up, and the rulers take counsel together against the Lord and against his anointed. Let us break their bonds asunder and cast away their yokes from us… Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron; thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel. The oratorio has built to this moment: an overt call to revolution! Break bonds asunder, cast away yokes, break them with a rod of iron, dash them like so many shards of pottery. Not the language of constitutional debate.The message is clear: it is the kings of the earth who are responsible for these bonds and yokes, and it is we, the people, working with the Lord, who must break them. Thought experiment : it’s March 1752, and you have a small printing press in your basement. You’ve printed these very same words (above) onto flyers which you are now distributing outside London’s Covent Garden Theater, scene of the Messiah’s London debut. Would you escape imprisonment…or worse? But lifted from scripture and embedded in the middle of a musical masterwork, the political import of the Messiah’s message can escape notice. Is this an early version of subliminal messaging? Were Handel and Jennens dog whistle revolutionaries? All of which brings us to the famous Hallelujah Chorus , perhaps the best-known chorus in all of Western music, save only the Ode to Joy : Hallelujah: for the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth. ‘The kingdom of this world has become the kingdom of our Lord, and of his Christ’; and he shall reign for ever and ever. ‘King of kings’, and Lord of lords. Hallelujah: for the Lord God Omnipotent ‘reigneth’. If Handel had been playing in the NFL, he would have been called for a personal foul: “taunting.” It is one thing to criticize the secular State, yet another to call for dashing it to pieces. But it quite another thing altogether to celebrate prospectively the obliteration of the secular order. According to Handel and Jennens, the secular state (per Marx) has already withered away ! The essence of Christian social teaching is that that state withered away at the birth of Christ. (Is the Adoration of the Magi symbolic of this event?) Now we just have to wait for history to catch up to theology. End Part Two, Begin Part III, the Celebration. Here we can take off the training wheels. From here on, let Jennens’ libretto speak for itself. No more intrusions from the Peanut Gallery (you’re welcome): Worthy is the Lamb that was slain, and hath redeemed us to God by His blood, to receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honour, and glory, and blessing. Blessing and honour, glory and power, be unto Him that sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb, for ever and ever. Amen! 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 Holy Days 2023 Table of Contents, Share Previous Next