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< Back “ It was God who made Pharaoh obstinate." (Ex-9:12) What is our excuse? Deborah Kornfeld Apr 4, 2023 "...despite the few drops of wine, what do the plagues have to teach us?" I always look forward to the plagues. That part of the Haggadah recited in a singsong ritualistic manner is accompanied by the small thrill of putting my finger into the wine cup and marking my plate. It carries with it a memory that despite the power and might and Technicolor special effects accompanying our redemption, we need to be mindful that the Egyptians suffered. In the exquisite theatre of the Seder, every participant has an active role in this custom. To make out seders lively and fun for the children, we often decorate our table with frogs and beasts and lice- a real table-top menagerie. Yet despite the few drops of wine, what do the plagues have to teach us? Consider the first plague- “blood”. The Torah reads: “God said to Moses,” Tell Aaron to take his staff and extend his hand over the waters of Egypt- over their rivers, their canals, their reservoirs, and every place where water is kept- and the water shall turn into blood. There will be blood throughout all Egypt, even in wooden barrels and stone jars. Moses and Aaron did exactly as God had instructed, and Aaron held the staff up and then struck the Nile’s water in the presence of Pharaoh and his officials. The Nile’s water was transformed into blood. The fish in the Nile died, and the river became so polluted that the Egyptians were no longer able to drink the Nile’s water. There was blood everywhere in Egypt…. The Egyptians dug around the Nile for drinking water, since they could not drink any water from the river. After God struck the Nile, it remained that way for seven full days (Ex 7:19-231). They could have certainly applied for extra aid and qualified as a national disaster. It must have been horrific. People and wild life must have died. How could Pharaoh have been so stubborn and entrenched in his way of thinking? How could he have ignored this beginning of such a great wave of suffering? Now the answer regarding Pharaoh is found in Exodus 9:12-“It was God who made Pharaoh obstinate." There are many explanations and interpretations concerning the plagues. A midrash suggests that the Egyptians were punished measure for measure for the cruelty and indifference to the suffering of their Israelite slaves. Rav Kook explained that God brought the plagues upon the Egyptians in order that they should understand the essence of God’s presence in the world. His influence over everything. His intimate relationship with His world and His ability to do anything.” Another modern scholar explains the plagues as emblematic of our greatest fears. Shai Zarhi, an Israeli Educator, writes: “The plagues Gode visited on the Egyptians in Egypt seem to be a parade of people’s greatest fears. They are a mythological show of the power of the living vs. primal fear. Starting from the blood of birth and of death, through primal human fears of small creatures (lice) and large ones (wild beasts), fear of financial ruin (locusts), fear of the dark (losing direction and meaning), we face the greatest fear, the fear for our children’s lives-loss of the future. Tonight, a night to commemorate the past, we see the mercy of God’s protections, look out from our places at a world full of fears and dangers and pray for another quiet year.” The term used to describe Pharaoh’s indifference in the face of these disasters is “Kaved Lev “which is translated as meaning obstinate, stubbornly refusing to change his opinion or course of action despite the attempts to persuade him to do so. We are told in the Torah that God made Pharaoh obstinate so that this redemption would be spectacular with an abundance of special effects and everyone involved would know that it was God himself who orchestrated this redemption. In the time of the Egyptians, many of the plagues were reversible. The bloody Nile was returned to clear potable water, the boils disappeared, and the frogs went away. We are not so lucky with our man-made plagues. When we pollute the waterways or impact on our climate or waste precious resources simply because of greed and/or indifference, we cannot always reverse the consequences of our actions and the consequences might endanger our most precious commodity, that being our future. This year when I dip my finger into my wine cup as we recite the names of the Biblical plagues, I will remember that these plagues did have grave consequences on the Egyptians, but I will also see each stain on my plate as a promise of action to protect the next generations. Unlike Pharaoh, I can’t blame God, this time it is in our hands. This is a republication with permission from The Jewish Pluralist . The author of this essay, Deborah Kornfeld, is a retired pediatric occupational therapist, aspiring climate and social justice activist, occasional essayist, shul chesed coordinator, loving mother, and safta. Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

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

< Back Existential Threats David Cowles Oct 8, 2024 “The risk of all-out war is greater today than at any time in the past 50 years, and it is reasonable to imagine that such a war might amount to ‘game over’.” Nobody wants to focus on the downside, certainly not Aletheia Today! We are committed to a vision of the future that includes global peace, space exploration, galactic colonization, the eradication of poverty, and the exponential expansion of economic and intellectual opportunities worldwide. Technological progress over the next 100 years could easily dwarf the accomplishments of the previous 10,000…or it could destroy Planet Earth and/or Homo Sapiens as we know them. While continuing to focus on the positive, it would be a mistake to ignore these risks. Among the existential threats we face, global war must rank #1 . The scope of the catastrophe, and the likely inability to course-correct once a tipping point is reached, place it at the top of our list. Plus, the risk of all-out war is greater today than at any time in the past 50 years and it is reasonable to imagine that such a war might amount to ‘game over’. In a rare display of bipartisanship, a specially appointed Congressional Committee (Commission on National Defense Strategy) recently released a chilling report on the risks of global war; it would be irresponsible not to reprint its most important findings and conclusions: “The threats the United States faces are the most serious and most challenging the nation has encountered since 1945 and include the potential for near-term major war. The United States…is not prepared today. China and Russia are major powers that seek to undermine U.S. influence. “The 2022 National Defense Strategy (NDS) recognizes these nations as the top threats to the United States and declares China to be the ‘pacing challenge’, based on the strength of its military and economy and its intent to exert dominance regionally and globally. “The Commission finds that, in many ways, China is outpacing the United States and has largely negated the U.S. military advantage in the Western Pacific through two decades of focused military investment. Without significant change by the United States, the balance of power will continue to shift in China’s favor…Russia possesses considerable strategic, space, and cyber capabilities and under Vladimir Putin seeks a return to its global leadership role… “China and Russia’s ‘no-limits’ partnership, formed in February 2022 just days before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, has only deepened and broadened to include a military and economic partnership with Iran and North Korea, each of which presents its own significant threat to U.S. interests. “This new alignment of nations opposed to U.S. interests creates a real risk, if not likelihood, that conflict anywhere could become a multi-theater or global war. China (and, to a lesser extent, Russia) is fusing military, diplomatic, and industrial strength to expand power worldwide…. “An effective approach…relies on a coordinated effort to bring together diplomacy, economic investment, cybersecurity, trade, education, industrial capacity, technical innovation, civic engagement, and international cooperation… “The Commission finds that the U.S. military lacks both the capabilities and the capacity required to be confident it can deter and prevail in combat. It needs to do a better job of incorporating new technology at scale; field more and higher-capability platforms, software, and munitions; and deploy innovative operational concepts to employ them together better… “The Commission finds that the U.S. defense industrial base (DIB) is unable to meet the critical minerals and goods needed to run the U.S. economy and build weapon systems. They could also hold at risk U.S. space assets, which underpin much of our daily lives… “The U.S. public is largely unaware of the dangers the United States faces or the costs (financial and otherwise) required to adequately prepare. They do not appreciate the strength of China and its partnerships or the ramifications to daily life if a conflict were to erupt. They are not anticipating disruptions to their power, water, or access to all the goods on which they rely… “The consequences of an all-out war with a peer or near peer would be devastating. Such a war would not only yield massive personnel and military costs but would also likely feature cyberattacks on U.S. critical infrastructure and a global economic recession…” While we’ve chosen to focus on the threat of global war, it is certainly not the only existential threat we face. Climate change, rogue AI, and genetic engineering cannot be ignored. The biggest risk of all, however, is collective myopia. If we refuse to face these threats as real, we make them more likely to occur and the consequences more catastrophic. People like you and me, people who seek peace, are particularly dangerous at times like this. Confirmation bias keeps us from seeing that not everyone in this world shares our values or our sensitivity to the consequences of bad policy. Remember 1930’s England? The leaders could not imagine World War II…until they were in it. We are tempted to think, “Who would launch the world on such a trajectory!” And when we think that, we make it more likely that we will find out. Keep the conversation going. 1. Click here to contact us on any matter. How did you like the post? How could we do better in the future? Suggestions welcome. 2. To subscribe (at no cost) to TWS and ATM, follow this link . 3. We encourage new articles and reprints from freelance writers ; click here to view out Writers’ Specs Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

< Back Prayer For Resting in God's Timing, Ways, and Rhythm Deborah Rutherford My timing can lead to stress and striving, but God says not so fast, my daughter. Am I striving, then causing friction and confusion? This is when I slow down to rest in God's timing, ways, and rhythms -- to repent and return to Jesus, the One who carries. His will, not mine. Dear Abba, oh Father, thank you for your tender-loving kindness and mercy. Forgive me when I rush ahead of you, when I strive, push, and wander away. Oh, let me rest in you, your timing and ways, and slow down to stillness with you, where I hear your lovely voice. My day is yours as you lead me through the most beautiful dance of life. My road is your beautiful, peaceful one. Please, help me stay on your narrow road of joy and peace, love and light, heading to the forever of ever with you, our love eternal. Thank you, I am humbled by your love, in Jesus's name. Amen. Slow down to the incredible life God has planned for you by resting in His timing, ways, and rhythm, the endearing moment by moment of God's love. I have to remind myself to slow down often, that God is growing me in His timing, not mine. My timing can lead to stress and striving, but God says not so fast, my daughter. Rest in His timing, ways, and rhythms. Hi. I am Deborah Rutherford, a Christian wife, passionate about Jesus and her family. I am currently a writer, makeup artist, and sometimes singer. You can find me on my blog at www.deborahrutherford.com. Previous Next

< Back Life is GPS David Cowles Aug 31, 2025 “GPS will point out the optimal route…and keep pointing it out, even as that route changes along the way.” I am heading out this morning for my first face-to-face meeting with Robert, a long time internet interlocutor. His home town is what passes for ‘rural’ in Massachusetts. I expect to see lots of stone walls and wooden fences, perhaps some family farms, and more than a few roadside produce stands. Covered bridges, dirt roads, cows and horses, lions, tigers, and bears – not so much! I need to travel about 50 miles Northwest of my Boston suburb and there are a myriad of routes I could follow. But I’m unfamiliar with the roads in Robert’s neighborhood, so the first thing I do, of course, is enter his address in my GPS. For the next 90 minutes, every move I make, every turn I take, will be scripted. All I need to do is sit back and follow instructions. But sometimes that’s easier said than done. I miss a turn, then there’s road work ahead that my GPS doesn’t know about and then several temporary detours. (Highway reconstruction is 24/365 in MA.) But all is not lost. Each time I fail to execute a directive, for whatever reason, GPS calculates a revised optimal route based on my new ‘current location’. A new set of instructions follows. The ideal continually adjusts to the actual. Who could ask for anything more? Whether you believe in God or Gaia , Fate, Destiny, or Chance, ‘we though many throughout the earth’ and possibly ‘across the universe’, all have a common destination and there exists a unique, optimal route for each of us to reach that destination from our disparate present locations. Of course, we are free to follow that route…or not. We think we know better: “We’ll follow our own path, thank you…and make a few unscheduled stops along the way.” No problem! Or we try to follow the instructions to the letter but ‘error and infrastructure’ continually force us off route. Western philosophy has been dominated by the free will/determinism dichotomy. We’re so used to this debate that we find it hard to imagine that other models might be possible. For example, few would argue that events occur randomly. A periodically persistent alternative, on the other hand, holds that there are a variety of pre-set paths available to us and that we are totally free to choose among them. This idea shows up in strange places; to name just a few: Parmenides of Elea ( On Nature ) - the father of Western phil. Paul of Tarsus ( Ephesians ) – much of Pauline and Johannine literature harks back to the ideas of the pre-Socratics. Robert Frost ( The Road not Taken ) Jean-Paul Sartre ( Being and Nothingness ) – We are 100% free; freedom is our essence, but it can only be exercised within limits established by the material world. Hugh Everett ( Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics ) – Every ‘possible’ road is not only permitted…but taken! Robert Frost, meet Jean-Paul Sartre. In On Nature , Parmenides (5th century BCE) wrote about “the much speaking path of the goddess that carries everywhere unscathed the man who knows.” Much speaking ? Parmenides is anticipating James Joyce ( Ulysses ): “signatures of all things I am here to read.” Paul extends Parmenides’ concept of one optimal path to include multiple acceptable paths, “prepared by God so that we may step into them.” Frost follows Paul. Sartre goes further. We create our own paths, and everything is available to us, subject to the restrictions imposed by the material world. Finally, Everett brings the snake full circle. He is the head of the ouroboros . According to Everett everything is not only permitted but realized: the universe follows all possible paths in parallel. Hence, his ‘many, many, many worlds’ - too many for many tastes. “Along this route there are many signs that what-is (e.g. YHWH, Exodus 3: 14) is ungenerated and non-perishable.” The grid, aka the logos , is eternal. “Nor was it once, nor will it be, since it is, now, altogether, one, continuous.” (Parmenides) These cosmologies intersect in the technology of GPS. A web of highways and byways constitute our available paths and we build more as needed. We are totally free to pursue any route, but GPS will point out the optimal route…and keep pointing it out, even as that route changes along the way. The opening line of the Gospel of John nails it: “In the beginning (or at the foundation) is the logos .” The ‘grids’ of Parmenides, Paul, Frost, Sartre and Everett are all built on the pre-existent order of things, the logos that makes GPS possible. So welcome to the newest version of the world’s oldest technology! *** Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Allegory of Good Government (1338–39) spreads across Siena’s city walls as a web of ordered streets and winding roads, an early vision of the civic ‘grid’ that anticipates how GPS embodies the eternal logos guiding us through chaos. Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

< Back The Lego Movie and John Stewart Bell David Cowles “This movie includes a huge twist with cosmological implications.” It begins as a typical children’s movie: a struggle between good and evil with characters trying to overcome personal insecurities to ‘be all that they can be’; there’s a love triangle of course, some witty, adult-oriented repartee, and lots and lots of action. But The Lego Movie is much more than this! This movie includes a huge twist with cosmological implications. But first, the story: As the film opens, we see characters existing in a world built entirely out of Legos; they are Lego pieces themselves and everything they do is done with Legos. There is every reason to believe that this World is entirely self-contained, that it is a universe . As the film progresses, we learn that Lego World has many realms, including Old West, Viking’s Landing, Pirates’ Cove, Middle Zealand and Cloud Cuckoo Land; but most of the action takes place in Bricksburg, a thriving metropolis dominated by a spirit-crushing culture of conformity. The dominant ethic of Bricksburg could be summed up on a bumper sticker: “Follow instructions!” Under the influence of ‘Lord Business’, construction workers, micromanagers, robots, and cops work together to nurture and enforce the conformist ethic. Yes, cops! The Lego Movie follows the classic Marxist line: police are an extension and a tool of the ruling class. But under the radar, a tiny group of Master Builders harks back to a time before Lord Business when Lego World was free and full of possibility. In Bricksburg, almost everyone builds according to plans, blueprints, etc., but not the Master Builders! They build free form. Even better, they build their creations quickly and in real time to confront immediate, real life challenges. They are society’s artists and magicians. Only Master Builders can introduce true novelty into the world, thereby impacting the course of events. It is the existence of Master Builders that protects ‘the free world’ from mindless determinism. Lord Business ( aka President Business) has diabolical plans for Bricksburg. Lord Business plans to unleash a fully weaponized Kragle on Taco Tuesday to end the world as we know it. ‘Taco Tuesday’, a typical government program of bread and circuses designed to co-opt and distract the populace, is cover for President Business’ plan to activate the super weapon (Kragle), which will freeze Bricksburg, effectively destroying it. The central theme of the movie is the Master Builders’ struggle to derail Lord Business’ scheme. Because of a prophecy from the blind wizard Vitruvius (Homer’s Teiresias? ), they believe that their success depends on finding the “Special”, a savior foretold by Vitruvius who will locate the “Piece of Resistance” ( pièce de résistance ), the one ‘piece’ that can disable the Kragle and use that piece to thwart Lord Business’ plans. When we are introduced to the Piece of Resistance, it is quite unassuming. An elongated cube, open at one end, it looks slightly out of place in Lego World…and it is (but more on that later). The Special is simply the most important, most talented, most brilliant, most interesting, most extraordinary person in the universe…at least according to the prophecy. But surprisingly, the Piece of Resistance is found accidentally by a construction worker named Emmet, a paradigm of the mindless conformity that dominates Bricksburg. As the Master Builders learn more and more about Emmet, they trust him less and less. Even if he is the Special, he lacks the skills necessary to complete the mission. He is not even a Master Builder, and he shows no hint of creativity. Something is terribly wrong, but what? Emmet gets a chance to plead his case at a gathering of Master Builders “in the secret realm of Cloud Cuckoo Land.” Princess UniKitty welcomes the Master Builders to Cloud Cuckoo Land and explains its unique social order to Emmet: “We have no signs here, no rules, no government, no bedtimes, no babysitters…And there’s also no consistency.” Emmet introduces himself to the august assembly: “…I may not be a Master Builder…I’m not all that smart. And I’m not what you’d call a creative type. Plus, I’m generally unskilled. I know what you’re thinking. He’s the least qualified person in the world to lead us. And you are right.” “What is the last thing Lord Business expects Master Builders to do? Follow the instructions! You’re all so imaginative and talented. You can build things out of thin air. But you can’t work together as a team. Just imagine what could happen if you work together. You could save the universe!” And so Emmet proposes a ‘third way’. In contrast to mindless conformity or anarchic creativity, he suggests a middle course: conscious, intentional, voluntary cooperation. For the remainder of our adventure, this is the strategy that Emmet and the Master Builders adopt in their crusade to derail Lord Business’ diabolical schemes. To make matters worse, we learn that Vitruvius made up the prophecy in the first place “because I knew that whoever found the piece could become the Special because the only thing anyone needs to be special is to believe that you can be.” Sap! But perhaps Vitruvius was right after all. In the course of leading the Master Builders against Lord Business, Emmet does indeed become a Master Builder himself. A Master Builder “sees everything”; he understands that every piece has the potential (actually, is the potential) to participate in the creation of more complex structures. Master Builders share the vision of Aristotle (matter is pure potentiality) and Alfred North Whitehead (every being is potential for a new becoming). So far, we have a good story with some interesting philosophical and sociological insights but nothing more…yet. Then something amazing happens. Separated from the Special by Lord Business, the Piece of Resistance falls out of Lego World entirely. Who knew that was even a possibility? Who knew Lego World had borders or that there was anything beyond it? The Piece of Resistance is gone…and now all is certainly lost! But Emmet refuses to give up. He follows the Piece of Resistance right out of Lego World. He allows himself to free fall toward all but certain annihilation; but amazingly, he lands instead in another world , a world far, far removed from any of the many realms of Lego World. He finds himself in the basement of a house where a boy named Finn is playing with a gigantic Lego set that nearly fills the room. Then we hear Finn’s father’s footsteps ominously descending the cellar stairs. Finn’s father is “the man upstairs” we’ve heard references to throughout the movie; we discover that he is using these Legos to create a model for a major real estate development project. He has repeatedly instructed his son not to play with these Legos…but with no effect. At the beginning of the movie, perhaps before Finn was even born, Vitruvius issued another prophesy, “He is coming. Cover your butt.” It seems likely that ‘ancient’ prophesy referred precisely to just this moment. A confrontation between the boy and his father ensues, and in the process, the movie is decoded. It’s Tuesday night and Tuesday night is Taco night in Finn’s family (‘Taco Tuesday’). But Dad ( aka Lord Business) has a tube of Krazy Glue (Kra-Gl-e, i.e., Kragle) and tonight is the night when he plans to superglue all the Lego pieces together. Once the superglue takes hold, Lego World will be frozen solid forever. Throughout the movie, we are told that Lord Business plans to “end the world”. Now we understand what that means. What is a Lego piece but the potentiality to participate in the formation of novel, complex structures? But once Lord Business ‘freezes’ Lego World with his weapon of mass destruction (Krazy Glue), all potentiality will vanish. The Lego pieces will no longer be actual entities (beings) and Lego World will effectively cease to exist. We’re talking Heat Death here, folks! The temperature of Bricksville is about to drop…all the way to zero (zero degrees Kelvin, that is). We assumed that the Special would need to overcome Lord Business by force and use the Piece of Resistance to destroy the Kragle. Now we realize that we have misunderstood the true mission of the Special. It is not to overcome Lord Business by force of arms; it is to persuade him by force of argument to abandon his plans to destroy the world by freezing it. The Piece of Resistance turns out to be the cap to the Krazy Glue tube, and it must be voluntarily re-attached by Lord Business himself if Lego World is to be saved. Finn argues that it is totally unreasonable to expect a boy his age not to play with a huge Lego set in his basement. “We bought it at a toy store,” and he points out that the instructions on the box read, “Ages 8 to 14”. Through Emmet, his less vulnerable intermediary, Finn is empowered to say: “You don’t have to be the bad guy. You are the most talented, intelligent, extraordinary person, capable of amazing things. You are the Special…and so am I. The prophecy was made up…but it’s still true. You still can change everything.” At that moment Lord Business walks toward Emmet and gives him a hug…just as Dad walks toward Finn and hugs him. Finn/Emmet succeed; Dad/Lord Business decides to use the Piece of Resistance for its intended function, to cap the tube of superglue. Lego World is saved. Thanks to this surprise ending, a good story becomes great. But how are we to understand the ontology that makes this outcome possible? What is the relationship between Finn’s World and Lego World? One is tempted to say, “Simple! There is no ‘Lego World’ per se. It is just a part of Finn’s world. Lego World has no independent reality. Thoughts, words, actions ascribed to the Lego characters are really just Finn’s thoughts, words, actions.” This is certainly the Classical view…but it is not the position of the film itself! According to the Classical view, events in Lego World are entirely dependent on events in Finn’s world. There can be no conflict between the worlds because there really is only one world, Finn’s world, and Lego World is just part of it. In the language of pre-20th century philosophy, we would say that events in Lego World are completely determined by events in Finn’s World. In the language of mathematics, we would say that Lego World is a proper subset of Finn’s World. All consciousness, all awareness resides in Finn (and his dad). The Lego characters have no independent mental activity. Therefore, there can be no displacement between Finn’s consciousness and the consciousness of the characters he creates and directs. For the most part, the movie does not contradict this view. In most scenes, the apparent consciousness of the Lego characters can easily be understood as a mere projection of Finn’s consciousness. But unfortunately for the Classical view, there are exceptions to this generalization…more than enough exceptions to invalidate the hypothesis. For example, looking back through the movie, we see that there were several early clues that Lego World might be embedded in some larger reality. But because these clues pointed to things far beyond the experience of the Lego characters, and because at that point we were experiencing events solely through the eyes and ears of those Lego characters, we missed those clues. There was Vitruvius’ initial prophesy: “He is coming, cover your butt!” A warning undoubtedly intended for the future Finn but the Lego character who overhears the warning, a guard, merely says, “Cover what?”…and looks around, confused. The warning has no meaning in the context of the guard’s own experience. (Lego characters apparently don’t get spanked.) At various times in the movie, President Business (Finn’s dad) speaks in a manner that seems intended to resonate across worlds…but with slight differences of meaning for each. For example, he says, “Let’s take extra care to follow the (my?) instructions, or you’ll be put to sleep (bed?).” Emmet hears (or mishears) the warning and reacts: “Wait, did he say ‘put to sleep’?” But he gives it no further thought; the warning makes no sense in Emmet’s world. (Lego characters apparently don’t get sent to bed early, either.) According to the Classical model, warnings directed at Finn would be perceived by Finn and only by Finn, and only he would have understood them. But that is not what happens. Instead, we see that the information is spread between Finn’s World and Lego World and is understood differently, and incompletely, in each world. The two worlds share information but in the process of sharing, meaning is diluted. A new ‘uncertainty relation’? Bricksburg includes a collection of odd items that belong to Lord Business, items that seem out of place in Lego World. The Lego characters understand them as purposeless ‘relics’ of some unknowable ancient era, but we later come to understand that they are human artifacts, detritus of the organic world (Band-Aids, golf balls, etc.), that have somehow made their way into the Lego complex. The ultimate relic is the Piece of Resistance itself, a superglue cap that is certainly out of place in Lego World (as we noted earlier); but the anomaly is unappreciated by the Lego characters. The Lego characters have an awareness of these relics but because the relics are completely foreign to their experience, they cannot appreciate their significance or understand their purpose or their origin. For example, they mistake the Krazy Glue cap for some kind of WMD. Toward the end of the movie, when he falls out of Lego World into Finn’s cellar, Emmet is genuinely startled. He sees Finn but does not understand his relationship to the boy: “What in the world is that? It’s adorable.” Later, Emmet refers to Finn (in contrast to his dad) as “smaller creature”. Finn, of course, recognizes Emmet immediately and welcomes him by name, completely bewildering Emmet. There is an imbalance in their relationship caused by an asymmetrical distribution of information. Most convincingly, Emmet remains completely conscious even though he is outside Lego World and, initially at least, even outside of Finn’s awareness. In fact, Finn is so totally unaware of Emmet’s presence in his basement that he actually steps on him. There is no way to account for this if Lego World is merely a proper subset of Finn’s World. Emmet’s consciousness is clearly independent of Finn’s. He has a life of his own. In fact, it is now Emmet who takes control of events in Finn’s world. Emmet endeavors to get Finn’s attention and direct that attention toward the Piece of Resistance that is lying, previously unnoticed, on the basement floor. The asymmetrical distribution of information between the two heroes now favors Emmet. There is no way to account for this if Lego World is merely a projection of Finn’s consciousness. Finn notices Emmet’s gesture, reunites Emmet with the Piece of Resistance, and inserts Emmet back into Lego World: “It’s up to you now, Emmet.” So we have two worlds, related to one another yet independent of one another. Clearly, some information is shared by both worlds; just as clearly, each world has information that the other world lacks. Yet in the end, when the story line demands a single result, they both arrive at exactly the same conclusion at exactly the same moment in time. (Like Robert Frost’s ‘two paths’?) What kind of universe can account for these strange features? This one! In 1964, the great Irish mathematician, John Bell, asked about the information content of a simple system consisting of 2 ‘entangled’ quantum particles (e.g. two quantum particles with a common origin). He knew that measuring the state of one entangled quantum would give us reliable information about the state of the other quantum. But if the particles are distinct and independent, why should this be, and how could it be? Bell considered various classical explanations for this phenomenon but found that they did not precisely account for the phenomena he sought to model. He then developed an alternative, non-classical theory that did account for the phenomena in question. He reasoned that a pair of entangled particles must possess a finite amount of information. While that could be any amount, for our purposes, let’s ‘normalize’ the quantity and call it 1. So let “1” be the total information content of the system, denoted as “T” in the equation below: T = A + B (where A and B represent two quanta -Finn & Emmet) Now, if T = 1, then A and B must add up to 1. So, for example, A could equal 0.5 and B could equal 0.5, and that would be a perfectly valid model so long as A and B are entirely independent of one another. But that model doesn’t fit the data for entangled particles…or Lego movies. The model allows for no sharing of information and therefore there should be no significant correlation between measurements on A and measurements on B. But in fact such a correlation exists, so this model contradicts the demonstrated facts of Quantum Mechanics. So Bell constructed an alternative model (Bell’s Theorem) that he believed would better model the experimental results. For that model, he turned to a very simple formula called the “Sum of Squares”. (Most of us first encountered the Sum of Squares as the “Pythagorean Theorem”.) T² = A² + B² Now if T = 1, T² = 1 as well. Then A² + B² must also equal 1. Suppose A² = 0.5 and B² = 0.5. What does that mean for A and B? A = .7 and B = .7 (approximately). Now if we add A + B we find a combined information content of 1.4 (which also happens to be the square root of 2). But that’s also a problem because how can the information content of the parts exceed the information content of the whole? That would contradict the assumption that information is always conserved. So Bell came to the only possible conclusion. The extra 0.4 quantity of information is actually shared by the two particles; it exists in two places at once. So A has its own information content equal to 0.3 and B has its own information content equal to 0.3 and A and B share information content equal to 0.4. 0.3 + 0.3 + 0.4 = 1 Between them, the particles alone account for 70% of the total information content of the system, but because 40% of the total information content of the system is shared information, the total information content of the system remains equal to 1. Because information is shared by two particles separated by an indefinite distance, the universe modeled by Bell’s Theorem is called non-local. Events in such a universe do not happen in one place at a time. Instead, events happen in at least two places at a time, and those two places can be as far apart in space as you wish. What does Bell’s Theorem have to do with The Lego Movie ? Just everything! The movie’s narrative assumes, illustrates, and instantiates Bell’s Theorem. It is built on a non-local ontology. Bell’s phenomenon is exactly what we experience when we watch the film. The total information content is distributed between Finn’s World and Lego World. But it is not neatly divided, like a candy bar. Instead, some resides in Finn’s World and some resides in Lego World, and some resides in both places at once. Here’s how it works in our example: of the total information content, 30% resides solely in Finn’s World and 30% resides solely in Lego World but 40% resides both in Finn’s World and in Lego World. It’s no wonder that both Finn and the Lego characters misunderstand so much of the information they are given; each sees only 70% of the total picture. Bell’s Theorem is the best approach to understanding The Lego Movie . This is confirmed at the end of the film. Both Finn and Emmet attempt to influence Dad/Lord Business. Initially, their efforts are independent and follow different tracks. Gradually, however, the two approaches converge and ultimately, they merge completely. There is no way to be certain what the outcome will be…but it is absolutely certain that it will be definite…and the same in both worlds. In Quantum Mechanics, when it is no longer possible to maintain several possible outcomes at the same time, we say that “the wave function collapses”. That is exactly what happens in The Lego Movie . Finn’s World and Lego World offer radically different accounts of the same events and, so long as that persists, the outcome is undetermined. But once an outcome is required (by measurement, i.e., by the story line), the wave function collapses, and the two worlds become one. The predictions made by Quantum Mechanics (QM) are more accurate than those of any other theory in the history of science. That QM works is virtually beyond dispute; but why and how QM works is still a bit of a mystery. As a result, there are many different “interpretations of Quantum Mechanics”; here, we will quickly deal with just three: Quantum Mechanics interprets data using probability theory. Just as there is a probability that a craps player will roll a 7 and a reciprocal probability that she will roll some other number, so there is a probability of finding an electron at point A and a reciprocal probability of finding it someplace else. This interpretation gave us the paradox of Schrödinger’s Cat. The cat is locked in a box inside a hermetically sealed room; no contact with the outside world is possible. The cat’s life (or death) is dependent on a subatomic event that has a finite probability. Is the cat alive or dead? We can’t know without opening the box and according to this interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, the cat is both alive and dead until such an observation is made. Hugh Everett took Schrödinger’s theory even further. His “Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics” suggested that the cat was alive in one world and dead in another. At every quantum junction, the world bifurcates into two (or more) worlds corresponding to different outcomes. Everett’s bumper sticker reads, “Whatever can happen does happen, somewhere!” The third interpretation comes from Richard Feynman’s Sum over Histories . Like Schrödinger and Everett, Feynman proposes that the electron does indeed exist in all possible states at all times but that the final result is the sum of all such paths weighted by the relative probability of each. With Feynman, we keep ‘one world’ but that one world reflects contributions from all possible paths or outcomes. Which of these interpretations underlies our film? In The Lego Movie , there were two possible outcomes, either one of which might have occurred, but only one of which actually did occur. Bricksburg could not be both glued and unglued. So Schrödinger’s model doesn’t work. Likewise, we have already seen that Lego World and Finn’s World, while different, and not totally independent; throughout the movie they influence one another, however subtly. Ultimately, the two worlds actually merge, so Everett’s interpretation doesn’t work either. Feynman’s Sum over Histories is the QM model that The Lego Movie relies on. Separate but related events occur in the two worlds, but the outcome is simply the sum of the histories of these two worlds. If there was only one world, Lego or Finn’s, the end result would almost certainly have been different than it was. Neither Emmet nor Finn could have swayed Lord Business/Dad alone. It is because the unique histories of both worlds converge that the movie gets its triumphant finale. Image: The Lego Movie (2014), Warner Bros. Pictures, and John Stewart Bell, CERN, 1973. 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 Spring 2023 Table of Contents Previous Next

Is the Sermon ‘in the can’ after all? < Back Serenity Prayer David Cowles Sep 1, 2022 Is the Sermon ‘in the can’ after all? The Serenity Prayer , regularly recited before meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and in many other venues around the world, has become part of our shared spiritual heritage. When I first heard it, I was appalled! I mean, check it out: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” To my tween ears, these words reeked of quietism : accepting things as they are, being grateful for what you have, honoring your parents (and others ‘in authority’), etc. This was everything I resented, everything I was beginning to rebel against. Who prays for this? As I grew older, I imagined (myself) that I was defying authority, battling evil against all odds, bravely ‘speaking truth to power.' I tilted at windmills, dreamed impossible dreams, and calmly prepared for inevitable martyrdom. But after years of ‘tilting’ (in more ways than one), I began to see the wisdom in what I had so viscerally rejected decades earlier. First, I had to come to terms with the fact that I was not the person I imagined myself to be: not now, not then, not ever, never! Then I began to recognize that the Serenity Prayer , so hated at first hearing, included insights I had already embraced from other sources. Eventually, I came to see that the Serenity Prayer is actually a riff on the Lord’s Prayer, especially its dramatic climax: “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from Evil.” Ask Christians what part of the ‘Our Father’ they find hardest to understand, and many will quickly cite this verse. But interpreted through the lens of the Serenity Prayer , the difficulty vanishes. What is temptation ? We are tempted when we consider using one part of the world, something good-in-itself, as something other than its ‘best self.' We are tempted to go ‘off label,' as they say in the pharmaceutical industry. Furthermore, we are tempted when we consider turning gasoline into Molotov cocktails, using drugs, not to cure diseases, but to get high, and using science, not to make life better for everyone, but to make implements of war. Less dramatically, food is good, gluttony is not; conviviality is good, drunkenness is not; sex is good, promiscuity (may not be) is not, etc. But really, what’s so bad about these things? Everyone has temptations, most of us give (into) in to them, but who cares really - for the most part no one gets hurt – and as my grandfather used (today) to say , “100 years from now no one will know the difference.” Or will they? Do our ‘venial sins,' our peccadillos , matter? Back to the text: “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from Evil.” What is this ‘Evil’ and why is it so uncomfortably juxtaposed next to ‘temptation’? Did Jesus make a mistake? Did he drop a line? Did he miss a cue off his teleprompter? Do need to reshoot the Sermon on the Mount? “Sermon, take 2.” Or did Jesus mean exactly what he said? Is the Sermon ‘in the can’ after all? Are Evil and Temptation really kissin’ cousins, as the Lord’s Prayer seems to suggest? They are…but not for the reasons we were told as kids! We ‘yield to temptation’ when we ‘misuse’ something, when we pull something out of the intricate tapestry we call ‘reality’ and give it outsized importance in our lives, i.e., when we put anything (even God) on a pedestal. When we are tempted, we begin to see the world as a collection of parts, not as an integrated whole. When we yield to temptation, we use one or more of those parts against the whole. “It’s not fair! I pulled just one little string out of this enormous fabric – I just wanted to admire its bright color and its sheen – et voilà , the entire tapestry has unraveled at my feet. And I wasn’t doing anything that bad!” You’re half right. Assigning something undue importance in the scheme of things, allowing it to determine your behavior, that is evil. It violates the First Commandment (no idols) and ‘both halves’ of the Great Commandment . When it comes to sins, this one scores the hat trick . But why? It doesn’t kill anyone, it doesn’t destroy the world; what it does do is ‘put strange gods’ above YHWH, who is “all good and deserving of all our love." Today, I notice you brought pate en baguette for your lunch. I love pate; when your back is turned, I steal your sandwich (and eat it). A good thing-in-itself, I turn it into an idol. Even if only for a moment, I have put my love of inanimate pate ahead of my love of you and ahead of my love of God. In New Testament terminology, I have traded ‘the living bread’ (God) for ‘bread that does not satisfy’ ( pate en baguette ). (John 6: 51 – 58) I have sinned against God and against ‘my neighbor’ (you); but neither you nor God is the real victim here. After all, I can’t do anything to diminish God, and one pate sandwich won’t diminish you by very much. (In fact, just between us, a little ‘diminishment’ on your part might make a certain cardiologist I know very happy. No need to thank me!) No, the real victim of my crime…drum roll please…is me! Good is the essence of God. Values are refractions of God’s Goodness. The values we find in the spatio-temporal world are reflections of God’s values. I am made in God’s image and likeness, so my value is also a function of God’s value. When I yield to temptation and eat your pate sandwich, I am putting your sandwich ahead of YHWH in the ontological hierarchy of the universe. I have tried to diminish God, but God cannot be diminished. I only end up diminishing myself. “Pate is my shepherd; I shall not want.” (Psalm 23) I have a new god, and so I have made myself a reflection of that God. I am chopped liver! I am tempted to pull on just one string in the tapestry. When I do that, the tapestry may begin to unravel. That ‘unraveling’ is what Evil is! Scientists call this unraveling entropy. I ask God not to let the beauty of his world tempt me to turn its parts into idols. Then I ask God to “deliver us” from the ‘great unraveling’ which is Evil. Now back to the Serenity Prayer : “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” There are things about the world (which includes my own body) that I cannot change. For example, I cannot make myself taller than I am. My height (and other physical limitations) is something I need to accept; that’s Serenity! On the other hand, I can break open my piggy bank and use the proceeds to buy the best pair of ‘trainers’ I can afford; I can practice my vertical leap (and other skills) every day. Hardest of all, I can ignore the taunts of others (“look at the midget trying to play basketball”) and their ‘discouraging words.' That’s Courage! As if I were on a post-apocalyptic battlefield, I see wreckage strewn everywhere, wreckage wrought by folks trying to change things they can’t and wreckage of folks failing to change the things they can. I need to move through the skeletons of moral warfare without tipping to one side or the other; that’s Wisdom! David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com. Previous Next Share Do you like what you just read? 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“Turns out, I am the Worldwide Wrinkle…and so are you!” < Back Personae David Cowles Jul 15, 2023 “Turns out, I am the Worldwide Wrinkle…and so are you!” In our last issue of Aletheia Today Magazine (Summer 2023) we explored the ‘ role of roles ’ in the formation of the human ego. Searching for a core identity, we are stopped at the level of the Earth’s Mantle. We can go no further. We have reached the limits of spacetime. We can peer over the edge into an abyss and fantasize that there is a Pearl of Great Price at its center, but there isn’t! In this model, beyond the Mantle there is nothing ( Le Neant ), the Great Wall of Darkness. The Mantle is suspended between the spatio-temporal realm of experience and the atemporal realm of Le Neant . At this level, the innumerable unique experiences we call ‘life’ have been abstracted, sorted, and combined into a finite assortment of roles. A role is a set of personae , generalized to cover a range of contexts and a myriad of interlocutors. It is the calcification of habit. Due to the complexity of socio-economic relations, the average person plays a half-dozen different roles at any one time. Here are a few of the overlapping roles I got to ‘try out’ as a child: Cute Baby, Curious Toddler, Performer on-Demand, Friend, Student, Athlete. As I’ve aged, I’ve added new roles to my repertoire: Political Activist, Truth Seeker, Employee, Employer, Customer, Salesperson, Executive, Spouse, Parent, Homme d’affairs, Bon Vivant , Grandparent, Retiree, Writer. So yes, I need roles. We all do. Roles are levers: they allow me to navigate the world…and to manipulate it. They are octagonal keys that fit perfectly into octagonal locks. Roles are massive data compressors; they allow me to convert a welter of raw experience into small, repeatable, and scalable snippets of code. Just as importantly, if I’m honest, my roles allow me brief and shallow respites from the sheer terror of being alive. They give me an instant sense of Identity and Belonging . I have a place now in that giant Calder mobile that is the world. I make a difference in that world; I imagine it would be very different without me. Like Atlas, I have the weight of the world, quite literally, on my shoulders. I am one of the ‘charms’ that keeps the mobile du monde balanced. Whatever this is, we’re all in this together. That knowing I’m not alone gives me unwarranted but still very welcome relief from otherwise unremitting existential angst. I have an identity now, I belong. I am no longer a piece of beach litter, crumpled up and thrown away thoughtlessly on the sand. I am ‘someone’, i.e., a tapestry woven from my roles! Yet, at the end of the day, when the bedroom is darkened and the ceiling looms lid-like above me, I know I am lying to myself…and you. I am not ‘Cute Baby’, I am not ‘Student Athlete’, I am not ‘Writer.’ Of course, I do baby-like, student-like, and writer-like things, but I am none of these personae. Dilemma : I am pretending to be someone (i.e. a nexus of roles)…and I seem to be getting away with it. My act is convincing. The others recognize me as one of their own, and as someone with something unique to contribute. Accordingly, life is a little less terrifying now; in fact, it is sometimes even fun . So take the win? The flip side of security is complacency. The ‘win’ is bad faith . By taking it, I officially give up my quest to figure out ‘what the hell’s going on here’; but if I reject it, I am doomed to live out my life alone, as an ontological exile. Well, the choice is easy, isn’t it? “I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be; am an attendant lord, one who will do well to swell a progress…” (Eliot) I have to get by after all – pay the mortgage, pick up the kids from school, take the family to the Isle of Wight for a summer holiday. I don’t have time for nonsense. I’m ok being Atlas, holding up the world, but not Jesus, saving the world; I’m too frightened. But for a tortured few, the trade-off itself, the bad faith , is more than they can bear. I’m thinking Socrates, Nietzsche, and of course, Jesus himself…but not me. I put on my roles each day as a police officer puts on her uniform. We both know that we are not what our uniforms denote. But wearing those uniforms sure helps us get through our day. We are all of us in ‘the uniformed services’. Every role has a prescribed wardrobe, even if it's business casual…or overalls. Plus, if an identity isn’t working for me, no problem, I’ll just try on another one instead! I can keep trying on uniforms until I get it right. The process is what society calls, “Finding yourself.” The trouble is, it never comes right. It’s not that you’re not this role or that role, it is that you aren’t any role; you are not a role at all! Oh, life would be a heck of a lot easier if we could just be the people that we’re pretending to be. Imagine! We are like human babies raised by wolves. We don’t fully realize that we are not in fact wolves. It’s going to be a rude awakening when we find out…if we ever do. Caveat Lector : If you prefer to think of yourself as a full-fledged member of the wolf pack, then stop reading this article right now…and thanks for visiting. For the rest of you, personae and roles are props we adopt to get through life. Unfortunately, most of us come to believe that we are those props. My mask becomes my face. Even so, the reward for believing is just too great to pass up: ‘a temporary but pervasive sense of wellbeing’! Sound familiar? Perhaps it is Identity , not religion, not alcohol, that is the opiate of the masses. But again, I take the win! I trade truth for peace. I’m pretending to be some pretty interesting people, after all. If only I could actually be one of them! But I know I can’t. All the sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll in the world can’t make me forget for more than a few minutes at a time that I am not any of the people I pretend to be. Philosophers say that the purpose of life is personal happiness . I sure hope they’re wrong because I can never be ‘happy’! Not that I’m unhappy; I certainly am not! These ‘states of mind’ just aren’t in my repertoire. They’re not ontologically compatible with who I am. My avatars are happy, or not - but not me! I feel my avatar being happy, but I quickly catch myself. I remember that I am not the one who is happy. I realize that I am watching the equivalent of a ‘movie’ of myself being happy. Speaking of movies, I’m watching Gone with the Wind . I’m heavily invested in the characters. I let myself feel their joy and their pain. Then I recall that nothing’s actually happening…except me eating popcorn. I am watching images ‘painted’ on celluloid and then projected onto a giant screen in front of me. The images are of Civil War Tara . The story is drawn from history but the characters, the plot and the dialog are 100% invented by the author, Margaret Mitchell, who knew neither the Civil War…nor me. Nothing that’s happening on the screen has anything to do with me. The relationship we have with characters from fiction is very similar to the relationship we have with our avatars, ‘characters from our own fiction.’ We yearn to belong to a larger social group: family, community, country, congregation, union, pub darts team, Man U fan club, etc., and avatars get us in the door. They are like the fake ID I had in college. And we covet specific identities within those groups – not so much personally chosen identities, rather sub-roles we can comfortably step into to support in an identifiable way the overall ‘mission’ of the group. If I cannot invent my own identity, I am not above going with a store bought costume. Bottom line : everyone wants you to know their name! ( Cheers ) Nobody wants to be anonymous. When you call me by name, you testify to the fact that I have an identity, that I belong in this world. What a (superficial) relief! Of course, in truth, I have no name, no face, no identity, and I belong nowhere. My mother said it best, “Be somebody!” Worst advice anyone ever gave me! Sorry, Mom, somebody is precisely what I can never be. In the idiom of Jean-Paul Sartre, I am not who I am, and I am who I am not. This sense of disjunction accompanies every experience we have. You are none of the people you’re trying to be. You’ll never be a wolf, no matter how much you wish you were. You’ll never be your parents’ child, you’ll never be your spouse’s spouse, you’ll never be your children’s parent. I am sitting in a Paris café, sipping Beaujolais Nouveau, watching the world pass by. What could be better? Surely, now I am happy. Well, in fact, no! Not that wine sipping in Paris isn’t good; it’s the best! It’s just that I am not that café-sitting wine sipper. I am watching that café-sitter. He seems happy and I’m glad for him. I wish him well, but he’s not me. I am experiencing his wine-sipping through the prism of my thoughts: “How marvelous to be sipping wine in Paris! I must introduce X to this experience. If only it was a little less breezy! I wonder how this year’s vintage compares with last. I must make plans to come again next year at this same time. I wonder if they’ll come a time when I can’t get to Paris anymore. If only the waiter hadn’t put a pea underneath my seat cushion.” I don’t know who I am, but I do know I am not the one sipping wine…but I can’t let on. Sharing my angst would be like donning a dunce cap…or worse, like being an artist. So now I’ve discovered my ‘role of roles’, my uber-role : it’s reinforcing the roles of others. “Isn’t this marvelous?” I offer the table next to me, as I shoot a selfie to a few friends back in the States. Everybody needs to know, “This is a good as it gets!” And it is…for café-sitting wine-sippers. Now imagine yourself at the table next to mine. You hear me singing the praises of Paris wine sipping. Of course, you’re having your own disjunctive experience, which you dare not own up to either. Hearing me only alienates you further from your actuality. “What’s wrong with me,” you think, “that I cannot enjoy this experience the way the guy next to me is experiencing it?” (Pretending to experience it, that is.) We are all part of a global enterprise to build the Worldwide Wrinkle, a membrane that separates all of us from ourselves, a distortion on the edge of Being that prevents us from ever seeing what’s below the surface. No matter what experiences the universe cooks up for me, I won’t experience any of them directly. I will experience myself watching myself having those experiences. My avatar experiences; I just watch! I’m not unhappy; it’s just that I’m not the sort of thing that can be happy. I’m not the sort of thing that has experiences. I am the sort of thing that watches myself having experiences. I am not a noun; I am not a verb (apologies to Buckminster Fuller). Syntactically, I am some sort of ‘reflexive particle’, an indicator that the proposition in question is recursive. But in truth, I am not any ‘part of speech’; I am the phenomenon of recursion itself. “It recurs; therefore, I am.” Turns out, I am the Worldwide Wrinkle…and so are you! 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 Beach Read 2023 Table of Contents Share Previous Next Do you like what you just read? Subscribe today and receive sneak previews of Aletheia Today Magazine articles before they're published. Plus, you'll receive our quick-read, biweekly blog, Thoughts While Shaving. Subscribe Thanks for subscribing! Click here. Return to Table of Contents, Winter 2023 Issue Return to Table of Contents, Holiday Issue Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue Return to Table of Contents, September Issue Return to Table of Contents, Beach Issue Return to Table of Contents, June Issue

< Back The Nature of Time David Cowles Confining events within a single order of magnitude reinforces our tendency to categorize events as past, present, or future. After all, if a quantum of experience can be no more than one second long, almost everything must seem past or future from that perspective. At first glance, our lives seem to be strings of bead-like events. No sooner have we experienced one sensation, thought, feeling, or action than another takes its place. We have a vague sense that we can string these events along a timeline and group them as past , present , or future . But on further reflection, it is clear that this idea is absurd. Events don’t succeed one another like conscripts boarding a warship; they overlap. I am all at once aware of many sensations, thoughts, feelings, and acts; it’s hardly ever clear when one stops, and another begins. Events are not points…or beads. Events have duration and different events have different durations, and the duration of one event necessarily overlaps with the duration of at least one other event. The human nervous system is attuned to events that fall within a certain range, i.e., events with a duration of somewhere between one second and one-tenth of one second. If an event has a duration of less than one-tenth of a second, we normally don’t register it at all, unless perhaps as undifferentiated background. If an event has duration of more than a second, we normally try to break it up into multiple, sequential events. Our naïve sense that events normally last a second or less has everything to do with our perceptual & cognitive apparatus and absolutely nothing to do with the nature of events themselves. Whatever the world may be, we experience it in one second bursts . There is absolutely no theoretical reason why event duration should be confined within a single order of magnitude. On the contrary, we know that there are events with durations orders of magnitude shorter than a second and there is no reason not to assume that there are other events with durations orders of magnitude longer than a second. Confining events within a single order of magnitude reinforces our tendency to categorize events as past, present, or future. After all, if a quantum of experience can be no more than one second long, almost everything must seem past or future from that perspective. We need to ask a different question: How do the myriad events that constitute our lives relate to one another? Are they always laid out more or less neatly along a timeline, like clothes drying in the sun, or are more complex species of ordering possible? It turns out that any two events may relate to one another in 6 different ways: (1) They may be tangent (i.e., sequential) (2) They may overlap . (3) One may be embedded in the other. A model universe that is connected in these three ways and only these three ways does not fully account for the phenomena of connectedness (solidarity) that we experience in everyday life, or in the laboratory, so we so must continue. In these first three modes, connectivity is a function of overlap: at a point, across a region, or in the entirety. Therefore, in these modes, connected entities do not require space or time to operate, and we do not need a concept of space or time to understand them. On the other hand, the connectivity delivered by these three modes, even working together, is fragile, and in my view, too fragile to account for the persistent and enduring universe we experience. This level of connectivity lacks redundancy (and therefore it lacks resiliency.) It can neither correct itself nor reinforce itself. The entire House of Cards is always ‘just one false negative’ away from total collapse. From here on, though, things get more interesting. The final three modes of connectivity provide the glue needed to hold our world together and allow it to function as an organism: (4) Two events (A and B) may be disjoint, but both events may overlap a common third event (C). This is the special case of relatedness that single-handedly leads to the popular notion of “past, present, future”: when three events are connected in this way, one is commonly, if arbitrarily, thought to be in the past and one in the future of the third event (the so-called present). In this mode, A and B do not overlap. Therefore, A and B do not directly influence one another. A and B both overlap C. Each potentially influences C and both are potentially influenced by C. Therefore, indirectly, A and B may influence one another after all, through the mediation of C. Let’s do a deeper dive! The phenomenon of time ‘happens’ when and only when A influences B and B influences C and no other ‘influential pathways’ are operative. No reflection, no recursion, and no reciprocity; no 3 R’s. But there is no a priori reason to assume that influences are linear. For example, influences couldrecur (as in a loop ) . A could influence B and B could influence C and C could influence A. “Karma is a b*tch!” In this model, A, B, C together constitute a self-organized unity, a triangle, an uber-event snatched from the ‘flow’ of linear time. Perhaps this is the origin of ‘societies,’ groupings of events (or entities) that function, at least sometimes, as one single coordinated entity. So-called societies include the persistent and enduring groupings we know as objects . This phenomenon is what we call recursion ; it lies at the heart of what we call identity . Or perhaps, while A is influencing B, B is busy influencing A. This phenomenon is what we call reciprocation , and it lies at the heart of what we call relationship . Finally, as A is influencing B, A may be influencing itself in the exact same way. “What I do unto others, I do unto myself.” This phenomenon is what we call reflection ; it lies at the heart of what we call growth . In this last case, A’s relation to B is also A’s relation to itself. It is the contention of this essay that events are ultimately connected like the vertices of a Platonic solid (e.g., a tetrahedron), not like points on a line. Every event (node) connects with every other event, exhibiting multiple forms of connectivity in the process. Our naïve concept of linear connectedness is valid only when confined to each individual edge of the Platonic solid, and then only when the connecting line segment is viewed as a vector. Linear connectedness, if it’s even a thing, is a very special and limiting case of the broader, more inclusive, reality. Imagine a child sketching a Tetrahedron on a piece of paper. She starts at a point (call it A) and draws a line segment (vector) from point A to point B. Then she draws another vector from point B to point C and so on until all 4 vertices are connected with each other by these vectors. So, what’s wrong with this? Well, first, does anyone really think this is how Tetrahedra come to be in nature ? Second, note that she cannot complete the Tetrahedron without (1) lifting her pencil off the page or (2) retracing (and reversing) a step. This should set off alarm bells everywhere. Nature does not lift its pencil off the page, nature does not retrace its steps, and nature does not reverse itself. (5) #5 is a more generalized version of #4. We're just extending the notions of #4 to physical fields. Now we’re talking connected and disjoint light cones instead of mere regions. If there is no single event or string of events (C) that connects the fields associated with two disjoint events (A, B), then A and B are said to be simultaneous : in the language of physics, they “lie outside each other’s light cone.” But even simultaneous events may enjoy a species of connectedness. Two events (A, B) may lie outside each other’s light cones, but both may lie in the light cone of a common third event (C). In this case, we can say that A and B are simultaneous with respect to each other but not with respect to C. (6) Finally, two events that lie outside each other’s light cones, which in turn are not mediated by any third light cone, may nonetheless constitute a single event. The two events are said to be entangled . The existence of this mode of connectivity (‘spooky action at a distance’) was a matter of conjecture until John Bell proved it in 1964. “Bell’s Theorem,” as it’s called, has since been verified experimentally by Alan Aspect (1971) and many others. Is this list of possible modes of connection exhaustive? Suppose there are two events that do not enjoy any of these modes of connectedness. What can we say about such an event pair? One thing only: we must say that no such event pair exists ! A and B do not exist for one another. Looking more closely at these modes of relatedness, we can see that they fundamentally resolve into just two modes: Serial Connectedness (#1) and Embedded Connectedness (#3). The remaining modes are hybrids of #1 and #3. This prompts further reflection. Is one mode of connectedness more fundamental, more substructural than the other? Is one a special case of the other? Does one ‘emerge’ from the other? If we could find a phenomenon that exhibited one mode of connectivity and excluded the other mode, that would go a long way toward establishing one mode as the more general, more substructural mode. I believe we can do just that: The 6th mode of connectedness allows two disjoint events (A and B) to function as a single event (C). The phenomenon of quantum entanglement described here requires as an absolute condition that the two disjoint events not connect (serially) with any other events. Any sort of serial connectedness would abort the embedding event, but without an embedding event, the two embedded events would not exist in a common universe (since they would lack any connection to one another). Therefore, without quantum entanglement, Universe as we know it would not exist. Which is what John Bell proved, QED . While we can observe the effects of quantum entanglement only under very specialized laboratory conditions, we should not conclude from that, that such events are rare. I would speculate that the Universe consists of more event pairs with “entangled connectedness” than with any other form of serial or embedded connectedness; but that is mere conjecture. In any case, the existence of entangled connectedness is sufficient to prove that serial connectivity is not a universal characteristic of all events in the Universe. Embedded connectivity, therefore, must be the more general case of connectivity, and, therefore, the sub-structural mode! Imagine that! A mode of connectedness not thought of before 1900 and unproven before 1964, turns out to be the primordial mode of connectedness across the universe. Where does this leave time ? It is a particular manifestation, linear and serial, of a much more varied concept of connectedness. That is the nature of time! David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com. Previous Next

This excerpt from the writings of St. Paul is among the best-known passages in Judeo-Christian scripture. But what does it really mean? < Back Faith, Hope, and Love David Cowles Oct 15, 2022 This excerpt from the writings of St. Paul is among the best-known passages in Judeo-Christian scripture. But what does it really mean? “Love is patient, love is kind…It does not seek its own interests… It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails. If there are prophesies, they will be brought to nothing; if tongues, they will cease; if knowledge, it will be brought to nothing…So, faith, hope, love remain, these three; but the greatest of these is love.” (I Cor. 13: 4 – 13) When we think of faith, we think of belief in the existence of a benevolent God; but if we reduce faith to belief in God, we are putting the cart way in front of the horse. First and foremost, faith is the belief that there are objective values, transcendent but nonetheless operative in the world: beauty, truth, justice, et al., values that roll up into our concept of ‘good.’ Faith is the belief that these values are universally normative. They would apply in any possible situation in any possible universe, no matter how alien from our own. Faith is the belief that Being is rooted in value. These values are valid for our spatio-temporal world, but they transcend that world; they are eternal. They are the ‘non-negotiable demands’ of Being. Bumper sticker: “No Values, No Being.” Second, faith is the belief that every actual entity that comprises our world exhibits these values, albeit in widely varying ways and to vastly different degrees. To be is to appropriate and reflect universal values. This aspect of faith underpins the allied virtues of hope and love. Third, faith is much more than mere belief. To have faith is not just to give passive intellectual assent to a series of propositions, but rather, it is to live our lives as though these propositions were true. Faith, then, provides the measure by which we may, nay, must judge our own lives. (Sidebar: This paragraph underscores the enormous chasm that exists between faith and belief. In our culture, I think it is quite common for someone’s faith and beliefs to be polar opposites.) Faith is not contrary to doubt; it assumes it. We will always question our beliefs. After all, we are human. It is the nature of the human condition that we can never know with absolute certainty our existential fate, but from “the crucible of doubt” (Dostoevsky), we constantly recover and reaffirm our core beliefs (faith). Faith does put us at odds with a host of modern thinkers – existentialists like Nietzsche, Camus, and Sartre and analytics like Ayer and Wittgenstein. These thinkers directly challenge the core proposition itself. They deny the possibility of objective, transcendent values. What you see is what you get! Whatever exists, exists entirely in the actual entities and events that make up our world; there is no beyond! No matter how much they may sugarcoat it, these thinkers place us firmly on the tongue of the abyss. A 20/21st century version of human sacrifice? It is hope that confronts this terrible abyss – the abyss of nothingness. We are born; we live our lives; we have experiences; we acquire knowledge; we make decisions; and then we die. Everything is wiped away, as if by a giant cosmic eraser. It is as if we had never been born. Whatever meaning we thought our lives might have had is gone. Your life is like a pattern drawn on an Etch-a-Sketch. One good shake and it’s gone…forever. That’s life without hope. We are like characters in Shakespeare’s Tempest: “These our actors, as I foretold you, were all spirits and are melted into air, into thin air; and—like the baseless fabric of this vision— the cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself, yea, all which it inherits, shall dissolve, and like this insubstantial pageant faded, leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.” Marxists, positivists (logical or otherwise) and pragmatists find hope in the idea that our lives contribute to the up building of social structures, to the welfare of future generations, to ‘progress’ generally. Well and good, but science has shown that all social structures, every human generation, and even the cosmos itself will one day pass away. So, this sort of collective hope is ultimately just ‘bad faith,’ a futile attempt to find solace in what is merely a stay of execution. Still others are content to say that we create our own meaning. Sounds cool, but what does it mean? ‘To mean,’ by definition, is to refer to something outside, something beyond. I write, “The asparagus was delicious.” I don’t mean that the nine letters from A to S were delicious. I am using asparagus to refer to something outside the elements of the sentence itself. On the other hand, if there is nothing outside, nothing beyond this “mortal coil,” then our so-called ‘meaning’ can be nothing but make-believe. We can’t create meaning if meaning is not intrinsic to who we are. Real hope accepts the truth of personal and cosmic mortality but does not despair. Hope resides in the conviction that there is something about this world that does not pass away. Hope asserts that there is an atemporal (eternal), negentropic dimension to Being. Finally, we come to the ‘greatest’ of these virtues, love. Love stares into the most terrible abyss of all, the abyss of isolation. What if there is just me…and none beside me? What if I am the whole world…or worse, what if I am utterly alone in the world? Love stares into the abyss of isolation…and finds ‘the other.’ The virtue of love affirms that there is at least one being other than me who is independent of me and who enjoys the same ontological status as I do. Love solves philosophy’s “other mind's problem.” Who in love doubts the reality of his lover? In love, my recognition of ‘the Other’ as ‘real’ is at least as strong as my recognition of myself. Cogito ergo sum becomes Amo ergo est. But love comes with a terrible price tag. If I love, I must love my neighbor as myself. Not like myself, but as myself! I can have no ontological priority over the other. I should even be prepared to lay down my life for the other if need be. Suppose I’m not prepared to grant ontological equality to another. No problem! I just consign myself to live alone…for eternity. (So, that’s what they mean by Hell!) Note that my insistent hubris does not ‘kill’ the other; it just takes away its otherness for me. Fortunately, the economy of Being allows us to revisit this decision at any time. We may endure solitary confinement for a period (‘time-out’); then, like a naughty child, we may rejoin the society of others when we’re ready. Love is the greatest of these virtues because it puts faith and hope into action. Jesus said, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” (John 14: 15) And what are those commandments: “Love one another.” (John 13: 34) It is love that lifts faith and hope out of the realm of the merely conceptual and gives them physical reality. There is no true faith or hope without love. In fact, love is the test of whether my faith is real. Love enjoins us to act out the values that faith affirms; it is the realization of that which hope anticipates. If we love another, we must behave toward that other in accordance with the values we discover and adopt through faith. Likewise, the eternity that we discover in hope enjoins us to care for others with a full realization that what we do here now, we do everywhere and forever (Kant). Faith allows us to know the Kingdom, hope allows us to anticipate its realization, but love empowers us to instantiate the Kingdom in our patch right now. In Greek mythology, Cerebos, a three-headed dog, guards the gates of hell (Hades). For me, those ‘heads’ symbolize an unholy trinity: radical skepticism (vs. faith), nihilism (vs. hope) and solipsism (vs. love). So, the spatio-temporal world is passing away. All that remains for us is our understanding of the Kingdom (faith), our expectation of the Kingdom (hope), and our realization of the Kingdom (love). When we truly love, the Kingdom has already “come.” Love is the in-breaking of the eternal into the spatio-temporal. Faith, hope, and love are called the three ‘theological virtues,’ but so far, we have made no mention of God. How come? In theory at least, one can believe in objective values without believing in God; one can believe that Being has an eternal dimension without believing in God; and one can love and be loved without believing in God. In theory! Practice makes this a bit more difficult. We said earlier that every actual entity in our world exhibits objective values. According to British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, our world consists solely of ‘actual entities,’ including the qualities (values) they display and the relations (prehensions) that connect them. For Whitehead, the universal objective values logically precede our actual world (and every possible world). However, these values cannot enter into an actual world and be operative there unless they are realized or reflected in an actual entity. Of course, an entity whose essence consists wholly and precisely of all the objective, transcendent values (‘eternal objects’) is what we call “God.” Therefore, for Whitehead, God is ‘necessary.’ But he does not start off with ‘God’ as a premise. He deduces the existence of God from three more primordial notions: one, many, and creativity. Whitehead invented TikTok. He throws down a challenge. Grant me just these three things (above), and I’ll show you that God is necessary. For Whitehead, “God exists” is a synthetic proposition that is necessarily true, given minimal assumptions. The atemporal, eternal dimension of life, where we find the meaning of our lives, amounts to nothing more, or less, than an infinite present. According to the standard model of time, the present is an infinitesimal point. Actual entities, however, exist only in the present and their ‘presents’ must have real duration; they transcend the timeline and disprove the standard model. Interestingly, no one is more closely associated with the standard model of time than Sir Isaac Newton. Few realize, however, that he fully understood the absurdity of his own model, extrapolated beyond its proper universe of discourse. Ultimately, Newton invoked God: “He is Eternal and Infinite, Omnipotent and Omniscient; that is, his duration reaches from Eternity to Eternity; his presence from Infinity to Infinity… He is not Eternity and Infinity, but Eternal and Infinite; he is not Duration and Space, but he endures and is present. He endures forever, and is everywhere present; and, by existing always and everywhere, he constitutes Duration and Space.” Likewise, according to Whitehead, an eternal present can only ‘be a thing’ if there is an actual entity that is ‘present’ to all other entities and for which all other actual entities are present. This, of course, is what we call “God.” Finally, when we love, we discover the ‘other’ in our fellow human beings. Every human being is different but the ‘other’ we discover in each human being is always the same. Every other is other to us in exactly the same way! In fact, the other is a reflection of the self…but NOT in the sense of Narcissus’s superficial reflection in the lake. What we see in others is a reflection of our ontological core. It was as if the surface of the lake revealed to Narcissus his own interior reality. Love confirms for us that the other we see in our fellows is just as real as we are and totally independent of us. What is the origin of the ‘other?’ Judeo-Christian theology gives us a ready-made explanation. There is an archetypical Other whose “image and likeness” is found in every human being (and perhaps elsewhere as well), and that archetypical other is, once again, what we call ‘God.’ Now at last we can understand the deep meaning of the Great Commandment: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it. Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” (Matt. 22: 35 – 40) “Like unto it…” Exactly! They are one and the same commandment, expressed differently. We do not refer to the ‘Great Commandments’ but to the Great Commandment. So, faith, hope, and love do not begin with a belief in God, nor do they require it, but they may lead to it. If so, they become the ways we experience God in the world. God is essentially good, and the objective values are how good manifests in our world. God is the eternal present and the source of all meaning. To the extent that we experience the present and feel our lives have meaning, we experience the other, and God is the archetypical Other. When we encounter the other in fellow human beings, we encounter the image and likeness of God; and when we love the other in fellow human beings, we encounter God. For God is Love. David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com. Previous Next Share Do you like what you just read? Subscribe today and receive sneak previews of Aletheia Today Magazine articles before they're published. Plus, you'll receive our quick-read, biweekly blog, Thoughts While Shaving. Subscribe Thanks for subscribing! Click here. 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< Back AI, Justice, and Job David Cowles Sep 7, 2023 “Can a Bot go beyond its programming and our inputs to devise unique solutions to novel problems - solutions that exhibit Justice as their determinative Value?” Our Fall Issue of Aletheia Today Magazine , our ‘AI Issue’ released 9/1/23, included an article titled, “ Do Bots Know Beauty? ” In that essay, we proposed that there are (at least) three transcendent values: Beauty, Truth, and Justice. We delt, hopefully to your satisfaction, with Beauty and Truth but we deliberately left Justice for another day (and that day is today ). Can a Bot be just? This question has two parts: Can what we mean by ‘justice’ be reduced to an algorithm? Or if not, can a Bot go beyond its programming, and our inputs, to devise unique solutions to novel problems - solutions that exhibit Justice as their determinative value? More so than Beauty, less so than Truth, Justice can be reduced to an algorithm. We call that algorithm ‘Law’; but then we criticize anyone who blindly follows it. We say they’re being overly legalistic . Like Solomon, we instinctively know that Justice is more than a legal code, no matter how well intentioned or expertly drawn. Thomas Aquinas, for example, says that secular law is normative… but only to the extent that it is consistent with a higher law, i.e., God’s law. Dial 611. Call up these specific mitzvot (from Torah); they represent an early effort to codify – or program – Justice. Now add-in the 2 general mitzvot, aka the Great Commandment, a recognition that the law must always be interpreted and applied in the broader context of Justice per se . Torah requires interpretation and application, by a competent Rabbi and by you! During the period of Judges , when God ruled Israel directly (through Torah), “everyone did what was right in their own eyes”. (Judges 21: 25) Conscience is a reflection of Justice. Justice as Law is always subject to Justice as Value. Law is always subject to judicial review…and that review is carried out by Justice as Value. Justice is recursive! It is a 2nd order reflection on a 1st order algorithm (the law). The history of Judeo-Christianity can be viewed as a dialectic of law and value. As Jewish theology evolved during the first millennium BCE, the migration of Torah from ‘tablets of stone’ to ‘hearts of flesh’ was a recurrent theme. When Christianity burst onto the scene (c. 30 CE) this dichotomy was further sharpened. Jesus said, “…Not an iota, not a jot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished.” (Matthew 5: 18); but Paul wrote, “Now that faith (value) has come, we are no longer under the law.” (Galatians 3: 25) Of course, both are correct. The Christian project is the merger of Justice as Law with Justice as Value. But the dichotomy of Justice as Value vs. Justice as Law goes back much further than Jesus and Paul; it’s older than the Judges and it’s even older than Moses. It goes all the way back to the story of Job , one of Western civilization’s oldest narratives. The version memorialized in the Biblical Book of Job could be aptly subtitled, Justice: Algorithm or Value? Refresher : Job, a just and prosperous man, suddenly hits a streak of ‘bad luck’ (to say the least): his family is wiped out, his wealth lost, his health destroyed. It is assumed, not without reason, that God is responsible for Job’s misfortunes. Unfortunately, Job is joined on his ‘dung hill’ by three so-called comforters, men of high standing who have traveled a great distance to commiserate with their colleague. These self-appointed divine surrogates defend the notion of Justice as Algorithm: they try to persuade Job that his ‘sins’ that have triggered this dreadful series of events. Because they view Justice as an algorithm, they feel justified in assuming that Job’s misfortunes must be wages of his sin. Job will have none of it! He insists that he has committed no sin that remotely justifies his sufferings. He demands that God subject himself to the value of Justice. Job’s concept of Justice is more than tit-for-tat: a valid judgement must be based on the totality of circumstances, including subjective intent, not just on naked acts taken out-of-context. Our hero is so confident of his concept of Justice that he uses it to ‘call God out’ and what ensues is one of the fiercest rhetorical battles in the history of urban playgrounds. Remember Ali-Forman, the Rumble in the Jungle ? A Forman win was considered so certain that some of Ali’s handlers wanted the fight cancelled. Instead, Ali sat on the ropes for 7 rounds and then in the 8th stepped out from the shadows and knocked Forman out with a single 5 punch volley. Clearly, Ali knew his Job. Bookmakers at the trial of Job v. God are offering 100-to-1 odds and still the ‘Job line’ has no takers. Predictably, God shows up in a whirlwind calculated to terrify his accuser. For several chapters, God rants while Job whispers. God taunts Job for his comparative lack of accomplishments. He threatens him with monsters (Behemoth and Leviathan); he compares him to ‘uninhabited grassland’. Job is cowed but not crushed; he stands his ground. In the end, seeing that he can’t intimidate Job and that Job has right on his side, God gives up . He admits that Job has been treated unfairly and he takes action designed to remedy the injustice: Justice is a Value, not an Algorithm! So back to Bots. As with Beauty, if a Bot can reach this same conclusion (God’s) on its own, not relying solely on its programming or on our inputs, then that Bot may claim to be conscious...and I’ll support that claim. And if not…well, then it is just a very expensive, albeit very useful, hunk of inanimate, unconscious silicon. Stay tuned! 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. 4. Aletheia Today Magazine (ATM) will be devoting its entire fall issue (released 9/1/23) to artificial intelligence (AI). What are the philosophical, theological, cultural and even spiritual implications of AI powered world? If you’d like to contribute to the AI Issue, click here . 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.