< Back Varieties of Social Organization David Cowles Oct 31, 2024 “Am I the stuff my social networks are made of…or am I merely the intersection of the various networks in which I participate?” When we are born, our first consistent discrimination is probably ‘me/not-me’. My survival depends on understanding myself in relation to my environment. Gradually, I realize that that environment is not monochromatic. My mother relates to me differently from my stuffed animals…or the cat. Most importantly, I come to distinguish a loosely structured group of ‘big people’ who interact with me on a more or less regular basis. I will learn to think of those people as family . Et Voila , I have already begun drawing my social map of the world; I will continue to fill it in over the course of a lifetime. Later, I’ll learn that I am also part of a clan, a neighborhood, a school, a parish, a nation, a species, and ultimately, a biosphere. Later still, I’m told that my precious, autonomous body is itself made up of only slightly less autonomous bodies called cells . And these cells themselves house other semi-autonomous life forms (nuclei & mitochondria). It’s bewildering. There are currently 8 billion pseudo-me living on Planet Earth but 30 trillion mini-me (cells) make up my body. Chances are, I’ll shuffle off this mortal coil still utterly unable to fully comprehend these basic realities. My species, homo sapiens , covers most of a planet with a circumference of about 26,000 miles, soon to be connected by ‘filaments’ to other regions of space. So the phenomenon colloquially known as ‘me’ is really a nesting of bio-social spheroids extending over more than 20 orders of magnitude (from the size of a mitochondrion to the circumference of Planet Earth). Across this scale, there are numerous styles of social organization. The components of a cell are symbionts while the cells themselves form tissues, organs, and ultimately the single macro-organism you affectionately know as ‘me’. I in turn belong to a hierarchy of variously ordered societies. My family, for example, is organized differently from my gang, my community, my country, my church. I once suggested to my father that we model our family on a parliamentary democracy but, strangely enough, he did not see wisdom in my idea. Animal cells are products of the merger of previously independent, prokaryotic (nuclear free) cells to form a single entity. These eukaryotic cells repeatedly reproduce until they provide the full complement and diversity needed to form the adult body of a macro-organism. The Plant Kingdom exhibits different models of organization. For example, while animal behavior is often controlled by a central nervous system, plant intelligence tends to be distributed throughout the organism. Think Blockchain! Bacteria, on the other hand, remain prokaryotic. They function and reproduce independently but they freely exchange DNA and often cooperate with members of the same or different species to pursue mutual objectives. Some organisms organize into colonies - groups of genetically identical or closely related organisms, called zooids, that live together in a tight knit society, called Zooidland in an upcoming Lego Movie. Zooids are individual animals but they are also part of the larger colonial organism. Each zooid is capable of some degree of independent function. If necessary, it can survive outside the colony, but it can also work cooperatively as part of a larger whole. Coral is a good example of a colonial organization. In many colonial species, different zooids specialize in specific functions like feeding, reproduction, or defense. This specialization allows for more efficient overall functioning of the colony. But then these same zooids work together, e.g. to create a colony-wide circulatory system. So, colonies resemble animal bodies, on one hand, and animal societies on the other. As individual humans, we participate at several levels of organization. On the one hand, our bodies are societies of cooperating cells; on another, we are ‘cells’ cooperating in the form and function of transpersonal organizations (above). But we are also members of a species ( homo sapiens ) and of a biosphere ( Gaia ). Question : Am I the stuff my social networks are made of…or am I merely the intersection of the various networks in which I participate? 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.

“This is the first time I’ve seen AI presented with all the trappings of a new Aquarian theology.” < Back Is Techno-Optimism a New Religion? David Cowles Mar 1, 2024 “This is the first time I’ve seen AI presented with all the trappings of a new Aquarian theology.” I consider myself, on the whole, a techno-optimist. Of course I have concerns, but they are not the concerns of a techno-pessimist…or a techno-nihilist. Recently, however, I came across an intriguing but disturbing document from a16z (Marc Andreessen). The Techno-Optimist Manifesto reads for all the world like the foundational document for a new religion. Think Torah , the Gospel of Mark , the Book of Mormon … or even the Communist Manifesto ! Much has been written about AI, pro and con, some of it right here on Aletheia Today , but this is the first time I’ve seen AI presented with all the trappings of a new Aquarian theology. The human proclivity to idolize, fetishize, and demonize is seemingly boundless. Let’s help ourselves to a few ‘free samples’ from this ideological banquet: “We are being lied to. We are told that technology takes our jobs, reduces our wages, increases inequality, threatens our health, ruins the environment, degrades our society, corrupts our children, impairs our humanity, threatens our future, and is ever on the verge of ruining everything. We are told to be angry, bitter, and resentful about technology. We are told to be pessimistic…We are told to be miserable about the future.” This is a stinging, and for the most part accurate, indictment of contemporary techno-nihilism, wrapped as it often is in the language of humanism and social justice. But then begins the New Catechism : “ We believe everything good is downstream of growth. And so the only perpetual source of growth is technology…We believe technology is a lever on the world – the way to make more with less…We believe free markets are the most effective way to organize a technological economy. “We believe the market economy is a discovery machine, a form of intelligence – an exploratory, evolutionary, adaptive system.” So, the economy is a biological organism. It evolves, it adapts to its environment, and it adapts its environment to itself. It functions intelligently; it’s mind, it’s a kind of brain. “We believe markets, to quote Nicholas Stern, are how we take care of people we don’t know…” Is this Techno-Optimism’s answer to the Great Commandment and the Parable of the Good Samaritan? “We believe Artificial Intelligence is our alchemy, our Philosopher’s Stone – we are literally making sand (silicon) think.” Are we? Did someone make ‘ash (carbon) think’? Neural networks think. Perhaps even individual cells within those networks. (BTW, if silicon is AI’s carbon correlate, what is the AI correlate of the biological cell?) But the individual C or Si atoms by themselves? That’s more of a stretch. “We believe technology is the solution to environmental degradation and crisis. A technologically advanced society improves the natural environment, a technologically stagnant society ruins it. If you want to see environmental devastation, visit a former Communist country. “We believe that technology ultimately drives…what Buckminster Fuller called ephemeralization : ‘Technology lets you do more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing’.” Hmm, maybe that’s how God made the Universe! Something from nothing . Anyhow, this new religion is sounding better, isn’t it? “We believe the measure of abundance is falling prices. Every time a price falls, the universe of people who buy it, get a raise in buying power, which is the same as a raise in income…We believe we should push to drop prices across the economy through the application of technology until as many prices are effectively zero as possible, driving income levels and quality of life into the stratosphere.” I’m naïve, and proud of it, but even I can’t swallow this . Unfortunately, our ability to manufacture new ‘must-haves’ and to restrict the flow of capital and goods to preserve social hierarchy is boundless. I don’t care what I have as long as I have more than the Joneses. I must have someone to look down my nose at or what’s living for? (Ok, maybe we do need a new religion after all!) “We believe that advancing technology is one of the most virtuous things that we can do…We believe in deliberately and systematically transforming ourselves into the kind of people who can advance technology. We believe in adventure . Undertaking the Hero’s Journey, rebelling against the status quo, mapping uncharted territory, conquering dragons, and bringing home the spoils for our community…” What good is any new creed without ethics? The Manifesto goes on to provide a litany of moral qualities that the new faith extols. It reads like something out of Nietzsche. For brevity’s sake, I’ll just list them in the order in which they appear: ambition, aggression, persistence, relentlessness, strength; merit and achievement, bravery, courage, pride, confidence, earned self-respect. The Manifesto goes on to extol certain values: local knowledge, information, variance, interestingness, risk-taking, individualism, radical competence, competition, evolution, life, truth. This new religion is not shy; it is not afraid to take on the big issue: The Meaning of Life . But for my money, here it comes up short: “Material abundance from markets and technology opens the space for religion, for politics, and for choices of how to live, socially and individually. We believe technology is liberatory. Liberatory of human potential. Liberatory of the human soul, the human spirit. Expanding what it can mean to be free, to be fulfilled, to be alive. We believe technology opens the space of what it can mean to be human.” There’s nothing wrong with this vision per se , but is it alone ‘the meaning of life’? I don’t think so. Maybe we need to keep our traditional religions around a while longer after all. As in Torah , no list of blessings is complete until it has been paired with a like list of curses: “We have enemies…Our enemies are not bad people – but rather bad ideas. Our present society has been subjected to a mass demoralization campaign for six decades…under varying names like ‘existential risk, sustainability... (and) social responsibility’. This demoralization campaign is based on bad ideas of the past – zombie ideas…that have refused to die.” To name just a few of those ‘bad ideas’: stagnation, authoritarianism, socialism, bureaucracy, corruption, monopolies, the ivory tower. The Manifesto closes, fittingly, with Friedrich Nietzsche’s ‘Last Man’: “ I tell you: one must still have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star. I tell you: you have still chaos in yourselves. Alas! There comes the time when man will no longer give birth to any star. Alas! There comes the time of the most despicable man, who can no longer despise himself…’What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?’ — so asks the Last Man, and blinks…’We have discovered happiness’, — say the Last Men, and they blink... “Our enemy is… that.” AI raises many important questions – but neither demonization nor beatification offer constructive answers. Still, the Manifesto, minus its theological pretensions, offers a powerful argument for AI Optimism . The new tech will undoubtedly generate gobs of new wealth, and, by itself, that’s a good thing. Any critique of AI that does not immediately acknowledge the enormous potential for good created by this new wealth is off to a very bad start. Job One is to ‘stand back, get out of the way, let it happen’. Job Two is much more challenging. It concerns the distribution of this new wealth. Should we allow this wealth to flow and accumulate as it will, or should we regulate its distribution (the process and/or the end result) in some way? If so, how and to what extent? How should we balance the social value of a more democratic distribution scheme against the dampening effect such a scheme might have on overall production? Ok, thanks for stopping by, see ya soon…oh, wait, were you expecting us to answer these questions? Sorry about that! David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com . Click the image to return to Spring 2024. 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. 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 the Table of Contents, June Issue

< Back Number 9 David Cowles Feb 22, 2026 “Aletheia Today decoded the Beatles’ Revolution 9… (and) we speculated on the Beatles’ choice of #9 to symbolize their revolutionary ideology. Why 9?” 1,500 words; 7 minute read In an earlier post, Aletheia Today decoded the Beatles’ Revolution 9 from their White Album (1968). At the end of that article we speculated on the Beatles’ choice of #9 to symbolize their revolutionary ideology. Why 9 and not 42…or 67? We noted that 9 is 3², the third member of the sequence 3^n, where n is a positive whole number. We also noted that the universe seems to be organized as a fractal , i.e. self-similar at all scales. If you accept that the universe is organized around the number 3 (e.g. Triangles in Plato’s Timaeus, Trinity in the Gospel of John ), then the idea that other orders of reality might be described using exponents of 3 (e.g. 3²) makes perfect sense. Sidebar : The best known 20 th century advocate of this ‘triangles all the way down’ theory, Buckminster Fuller, famously wrote: “Universe is plural and at minimum two.” He was wrong! Every 2 (x, y) is implicitly 3: (x, y, and xRy - the relationship between x and y, provided x ≠ y.) A universe consisting of two inert terms (x, y) is somewhere between impossible and meaningless. If x and y are part of the same universe, and not identical, then that universe must also include xRy which by definition cannot be reduced to either x or y (since x ≠ y); so Universe is plural and at minimum 3 (Council of Nicaea, 325 CE): Speaking of Nicaea, in Trinitarian theology, the Relationship between the Father and the Son is the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit is one of God’s three ‘persons’, along with the Father and the Son. In Marxist ontology, every thesis (x) is accompanied by an antithesis (y) and a synthesis (xRy). In Jewish spirituality, Kabbalah consists of 9 sefirot or aspects of Being, plus Keter (crown), the ineffable Godhead encompassing and grounding the 9 sefirot. The paradigm of Christian spirituality, the Lord’s Prayer , consists of three stanzas of three verses each: 3 x 3 = 9. Finally, the Christian spiritual practice known as Enneagram ( ennea = nine), outlined by Evagrius the Solitary toward the end of the 4 th century CE and refined by Jesuits in the latter half of the 20 th century, is based on an inner triangle (3,6,9) and an outer hexagon (1,4,2,8,5,7). Each of its 9 ‘sefirot’ corresponds to a different human personality type. Intriguingly, the repeating decimal 0.142857… is precisely equal to 1/7. However, the high priest of the Number 9 is a virtually unknown philosopher/theologian (c. 1300 CE), Ramon Lull. As above, Lull’s ontology is fractal, but his underlying pattern is 9-fold. His life’s work is a detailed and complex ‘map’ of the universe with the number 9 as its unifying concept. Lull begins with 9 letters of the alphabet (B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, K) arranged as nodes of a 9-gram. ‘A’ is the center of the circle, the ineffable El , Keter in Kabbalah (and there is no ‘J’ in the Roman alphabet). According to Lull’s scheme, A unfolds into 9 Avatars, each corresponding to one of nine core ‘subjects’ (substance), one of nine core ‘predicates’ (quality), and one of nine core ‘modifiers’ (adverb): A A A B God Goodness Whether C Angel Greatness What D Heaven Eternity Which E Human Power Why F Imaginative Wisdom How Much/Many G Sensitive Will What H Vegetative Virtue When I Elemental Truth Where K Instrumental Glory (Efficacy) How/With What Some of these associations are self-explanatory. For example, Human/Power/Why seems obvious. Likewise, Instrumental/Efficacious/How. Others are a stretch, but I think we can get there: God/Goodness/Whether (Cosmogenesis), Heaven/Eternity/Which (Judgment). And still others, to this head at least, seem impenetrable: Vegetative/Virtue/When. Lull’s Map of Nines expands, presumably indefinitely. Initially, each of his 9 core Subjects (above) expands into its own 9 pointed map, recapitulating the original map but at scale . For example, C, Angel, expands to the 9 Angelic orders; and E, Human, expands to the 9 classes/castes in the social hierarchy: God Angel Heaven Human B Mind Seraphim Premum Mobile Priests C Intellect Cherubim Stars Princes D Love Thrones Saturn Magistrates E Competence Powers Jupiter Doctors F Presence Virtues Mars Soldiers G Knowledge Dominions Sun Merchants H Providence Principalities Venus Craftsmen I Judgment Archangels Mercury Farmers K Justice Angels Moon Servants Imaginative Sensitive Vegetative B Reminiscence Memory Procreation C Argument Forethought Growth D Natural Arts Imagination Elimination E Proportionality Sense (Common) Digestion F Locality Sight Attraction G Caution Hearing Drive H Sexuality Smell Appetite I Acculturation Taste Knowing K Education Touch Life Elemental Instrumental B Orientation Pride/ Humility /Contempt C Generation Lust/ Chastity /Frigidity D Alteration Gluttony/ Sobriety /Asceticism E Generalizable Lying/ Honesty /Vain Speech F Alterable Obstinacy/ Constancy /Fickleness G Divisible Nosiness/ Caring /Sloth H Differentiable Envy/ Satisfaction /Emulation I Potential Wrath/ Forbearance /Obliviousness K Existential Frugality/ Generosity /Avarice The ‘Instrumental’ is the realm of the accidental continuum (Parmenides’ Doxa ). Therefore, it is not only necessary to designate the core Virtue in each category but also to mention the negative consequences of deviation, in either direction, from that ideal. Importantly, Lull rejects the Good vs. Evil paradigm of Gnosticism. Instead he follows the Augustinian tradition of Degrees of Goodness. Imperfection is a privation of perfection; evil is a privation of Good. The ineffable (A) manifests as 9 ‘core subjects’ etc. Each of these core subjects in turn unfolds in 9 different ways (e.g. angels as their ranks, society as its classes). Presumably, this process of 9-fold elaboration continues all up and down the ontological ladder. Lull’s universe may be best described in terms of origami, the folding and unfolding of paper, creating worlds. He is in good company. Parmenides , the father of Western philosophy, grounded his cosmology on Aletheia , the uncovering or unfolding of Truth. We can only scratch the surface of Lull’s system in this article. Like the 4 bases that make up DNA, Lull’s 9 ‘bases’ can be combined in myriad ways (genes) with complex and unexpected results. Of course, Lull’s system is only one attempt to develop a simple but heuristic model of the World, based on fractals. One immediately thinks of I Ching, Kabballah, Totem, Tarot, and the Standard Model of Particle Physics. All of which provokes a fundamental question: Can the World be meaningfully modeled via a classification scheme based on qualia ? Estimates vary but there are about 8 billion human beings alive on Planet Earth today. Another 100 billion have lived and died. Now imagine a public opinion poll: Q: Can the world be modeled based on qualia ? A: (living souls) 72% say No A: (dearly departed) 84% say Yes We happen to live at a peculiar time in the Intellectual History of Planet Earth. Since 1600 CE, especially in the North Atlantic Community, causality has replaced correlation as the explanatory principle of choice. Prior to Newton and Leibniz, folks took it for granted that things that looked alike, sounded alike, smelled alike, and behaved alike were in fact alike. Now we take it for granted that we live in an alienated world: Paraphrasing St. Paul, ‘what I wish to do I do not do and what I wish not to do I do’. Machiavelli heralded this new age when he separated ends from means. Ends can justify means only if they are essentially alienated from those means. Otherwise, what’s to justify? Without alienation, there is no separation between ends and means. No one ever asked Mother Theresa to justify her means by their ends; her means were her ends. They were of one cloth. Justification is only meaningful in the context of alienation. Models based on causality have produced huge material advances. Pragmatically, they have succeeded in predicting and duplicating a wide range of physical phenomena, but at the cost of massive alienation. I leave it to you, my dear readers, to consider whether they have been equally successful in helping us find deeper meaning in our lives. Are there unique phenomena, one-offs that can’t be predicted or reproduced? Are such phenomena related to one another by pathways outside the realm of physical causality, e.g. via their qualia ? What role, if any, do such phenomena play in our lives? Imagine you are standing on the floor of a forest. Beneath all the flora is the Wood Wide Web of roots and fungi that supports them. But look up. Foliage, the canopy of the forest, also plays a critical role in the evolution of events on the floor. The roots are analogous to causality, the foliage to correlation. Perhaps we would do well to pay renewed attention to patterns in the qualia we experience; they may contain keys to the meaning we’ve been missing for 400 years. And where better to begin than with Ramon Lull, the Beatles, and the number nine. *** Gustav Klimt’s Birch Wood is a masterclass in sensory immersion , utilizing a flattened, tapestry-like perspective that pulls the viewer directly into the dense verticality of the forest floor. By cutting off the treetops and focusing on the rhythmic patterns of the bark and fallen autumn leaves, Klimt emphasizes the tactile and atmospheric qualia of the woods over a traditional landscape view. The painting’s shimmering, mosaic-like application of oil on canvas transforms a natural scene into a meditative, near-abstract study of color and light. 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 Jeremiah David Cowles “God places his words in Jeremiah’s mouth. How can this be consistent with Jeremiah’s status as a free and independent entity?” “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born, I dedicated you, a prophet to the nations I appointed you… See, I place my words in your mouth. Today I appoint you over nations and over kingdoms: to uproot and to tear down, to destroy and to demolish, to build and to plant.” (Jer 1:1 -10) “Before I formed you…I knew you.” Phrases like this have often been mistakenly understood to mean that God has blueprinted the world. Omnipotent, his will would progress from conception to execution instantaneously and without any assistance. But this is not our God! Ours is an historical and material God; he rolls up his sleeves and gets his hands dirty. But like a General Contractor, he also relies on loyal subcontractors, us, to realize the details of his grand vision. He calls us on each of us as needed, and we, sometimes unwittingly, help bring his designs to fruition. A different sort of god would have no need of others…but what a poor god this would be! I am reminded of Richie Rich, playing with his fancy toys, alone . But that is not what’s happening in Jeremiah. God addresses his prophet in the second person familiar ( du ). He does not talk about Jeremiah the way some Frankenstein might talk about his monster. He does not order Jeremiah about as if he were Alexa . God addresses Jeremiah as a true “Other” (Sartre), a genuine “Thou” (Martin Buber). To recognize Jeremiah in this way is to recognize him as an NFL free agent, a co-creator, not a slave, not a tool. (Unless we have ‘issues’, most of us do not make a habit of talking to our tools.) Yet God knew Jeremiah before he formed him and dedicated Jeremiah before he was even born. Further, God places his words in Jeremiah’s mouth. How can this be consistent with Jeremiah’s status as a free and independent entity? One key to unraveling this paradox lies in understanding Jeremiah’s mission: “to uproot, to tear down, to destroy, to demolish, to build, to plant.” God did not appoint Jeremiah to design the Kingdom of God; that’s God’s job. Jeremiah is not God’s architect; for that he has Sophia . And God is his own general ; Jeremiah is God’s sub . Jeremiah is God’s “change agent”. He is the one who raises the old structures, levels the ground, to make way for the new; he is God’s wrecking crew. Jeremiah tears down ‘Sin City’ so that God can build New Jerusalem in its place. Jeremiah does not impress God’s image upon the world. Rather he smashes the world’s icons and melts them back into raw material so that the evolutionary/historical process, God’s praxis , can make its mark. He was the Abbie Hoffman of his time. God knows the world’s origin: Logos ( Gospel of John ), the Word of God (God’s values). God’s Word (capital W) is reflected in the words (small w) that Jeremiah speaks. Jeremiah proclaims God’s values. Without God’s Word, God’s values, Jeremiah would have nothing to say. God being God is what makes it possible for Jeremiah to be Jeremiah…and, BTW, for you to be you. It is God’s words that Jeremiah speaks; what else? A similar ontological map can be found in the New Testament Letter to Ephesians (2:10): “ For we are…created in Christ Jesus for the good works that God has prepared in advance, that we should live in them. ” The works that are “prepared in advance” are the logical and practical consequence of God’s immutable values. But those works do not spring to life until we animate them. It is up to us to step into those works so that we might “live in them”. God knows the world’s destiny; but knowing is not controlling. God’s knowledge (Parmenides’ Aletheia ) is outside of time; it is the spaceless and timeless foundation through which the space-time universe (Parmenides’ Doxa ) comes to be, on which that universe rests and into which it ultimately resolves itself. God’s eternal knowledge in no way compromises the radical freedom of the intentional events that occur in our space-time universe. In the non-temporal sense (and only in that sense), we may say that God’s gnosis “precedes” (logically, not temporally) his praxis (the world): He thinks before we act! But make no mistake, it is we who act! We are all called to be Jeremiah…in our own time and on our own scale. That is the sense in which God knew Jeremiah before he was formed and dedicated him before he was born. The function of the free and independent Other in the space-time universe is to broadcast God’s Word and to remove impediments to the realization of his Kingdom in the material/historical world (“Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven”). Whether the Other accepts that function and performs it, and how the Other performs it, are matters entirely outside God’s control. That’s your free will . The only thing certain is that someone, someday will step up. (It was Jeremiah then; will it be you today?) The praxis that draws the world toward its destiny is ultimately God’s, but it calls on others to project (speak) God’s vision (words) and to remove the world’s barriers (sin). Destiny is a lure, not an engraver’s plate. It works like a vacuum, created by the anticipation of what is not yet and by the negation (Sartre) of what already is. As such, God’s praxis draws the process we call “World” gently, unevenly, often imperceptibly, always unpredictably, but inevitably and inexorably toward its goal. In the New Testament we encounter John the Baptist, in many ways a later day version of Jeremiah. It is clear from the texts that God also knew John before he was formed and dedicated him before he was born. God also put his words on John’s tongue. John’s mission: “Prepare the way of the Lord, make straight his paths.” (Mt. 3:3) In fact, the world is in perpetual need of Jeremiahs (and Johns). Like the Tower of Babel, the world’s hardened structures need to be uprooted so that God’s praxis can perfect or replace them. Our Jeremiahs are indeed “appointed over nations and kingdoms” because existing social structures must always give way so that something greater and better can take their place: i.e. the Kingdom of God. Sin then, is another name for ‘institutional inertia’. Every earthly kingdom must someday be laid low so that “God may be all in all” (1 Cor. 15: 28). In this context, we may recognize in Jeremiah the world’s first genuine “anarchist”, and Jeremiah may be a ‘first edition’ of The Anarchist’s Cookbook ? Jeremiah rests on the certain belief that the world is inevitably evolving in a positive direction and that our primary job as political actors is to tear down those anti-social social structures that prevent the world from following its natural course, its Tao . “Grace is flowing like a river”…steadily and at all times. But so-called ‘vested interests’ erect barriers, damns that restrict or, worse, redirect that flow. Prophets (like Jeremiah) are ice breakers, clearing the jam and allowing the flow to resume its natural course. However much we may deny and resist it, we are all in our own ways prophets. Intentionally or not, we all uproot the old and plant the new…which God will ultimately harvest. Therefore, we are all known before we are formed and dedicated before we are born. We are not God’s tools, nor his robots, nor his slaves. Individually and collectively, we are that Other (‘Thou’) into whose eyes God perpetually stares. As the true ontological Other , we are by nature iconoclasts; as such, we are all called to participate in God’s praxis …however much we may “know not what we do”. David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com . purpose and devotion. Return to our 2024 Beach Read Previous Next

< Back 1500 CE David Cowles Apr 3, 2025 “Machiavelli became the Godfather of a pretty unsavory crime family…to which we all now belong!” Historians love to shoehorn events into discrete periods of time they call ‘ages’: Classical, Medieval, Renaissance, Enlightenment, Modern, and of course, Post Modern, for example. As if everyone wakes up one morning and cries out in unison, “ Today a new age has dawned!” (Well, something like that did happen in my lifetime…if you’ll allow me to count as ‘one morning’ the decade between the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (8/10/64), which ended one era of American history, and the Fall of Saigon (4/30/75), which began another. But abrupt changes are exceptions to the norm.) More often, one day bleeds into another, and another. Sure, things change over time, but not in unison and not in ways that permit precise demarcation. Of course, we can invent demarcations to our hearts content. I’ve done it! Perhaps I just did (above). But that doesn’t make those lines real. The year 1500 CE might be another, much neater, exception. A strong case can be made that 1500, give or take, marked the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Renaissance. Most historians would set that date much earlier, as early as 1300. They are eager to document the first green shoots of the Renaissance while I am just as eager to preserve the last sere leaves of the Middle Ages. We’re both wrong, of course. We’ve allowed our conflicting ideologies to influence our critical judgment. In fact, the Middle Ages had no end and the Renaissance no beginning. It’s all just history ! Even so, 1500 was a watershed. In fact, the entire last half of the 15th century was an especially volatile time, politically, culturally, and philosophically, in the cradle of the Renaissance, Florence – from the deaths of Fra Angelico (1455), the last great painter of the Middle Ages, and Cosmo de Medici (1464) to the proclamation of a Theocratic Republic by Fra Savonarola (1494) and his subsequent execution (March 1498). Two months later, Machiavelli, the great prophet of the Renaissance, became Secretary of the now secularized Florentine Republic (May 1498). Two years later (1500) Leonardo returned to Florence, kicking off the visual eruption we now know as ‘Renaissance Art’. Da Vinci was quickly followed by Michelangelo, Titian, Tintoretto, Raphael, Correggio, et al. But the greatest achievements of this fraught half century were not in politics or art but in philosophy. The last three great Medieval philosophers wrote, taught, and generally dominated intellectual life in Florence up to 1499. Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, and Fra Savonarola were friends and sometimes allies and they shared some common philosophical perspectives. Consistent with the Middle Ages, their philosophies were theocentric; but steeped in Classical culture, they drew ideas and illustrative material from a much wider spectrum of periods and cultures than most of their predecessors. But now fast forward to 1498. In March of that year, Savonarola, the last great philosopher-stateman of the Middle Ages, was executed by the citizens of his city. In May of that same year, Machiavelli, the first ‘great’ philosopher-statesman of the Renaissance assumed the position of Secretary of the Republic. In a period of less than 60 days, the entire orientation of Western ethics was turned upside down. Savonarola’s career marked the last gasp of ‘right for right’s sake’ morality. Instead, Machiavelli introduced Europe to ‘the ethics of instrumentality’, encapsulated in his famous meme, “The ends justify the means.” It is the nature of the historical process to veer ‘from one extreme to another’. If Savonarola went too far, the ‘ethical wasteland’ of the past 500 years seems a tad of an overreaction. Somewhat surprisingly, Machiavelli seems to have admired ‘the great Savonarola’, as he called him. ‘Seems’ because Machiavelli’s writing is often ironic, and it is sometimes difficult to determine whether his expressions of exuberant praise for various cultural figures are sincere or facetious. His only issue with the friar seems to be the latter’s failure to build a military force capable of defending his cultural revolution. Machiavelli, the anti-Gandhi, thought of ‘non-violent revolution’ as an oxymoron. That said, Machiavelli supported militarism only as necessary and only as a means to a better end. In 1508 he wrote a hilarious epic poem describing the chaotic and violent fortunes of the Italian city states from 1494 - 1508. His flair for the absurd presaged the styles of some 20th century authors, e.g. Ionesco and Beckett. The same ethical ambiguity clouded his political views. He understood that a Republic was the best form of government for Florence, but he believed a Republic could only succeed if it followed a period of tyranny. Freedom and Democracy could only prosper if they were imposed, harshly if necessary: You will be free, you will self-govern, whether you like it or not! Buoyed by the prospect of a coercive modern state, Machiavelli willingly built his utopia on a most fragile foundation: “…the people are by nature variable; to convince them of something is easy; to hold them to that conviction is hard. Therefore, a prophet must be ready, when they no longer believe, to make them believe by force.” He cites the careers of Moses, Cyrus, Theseus, and Romulus in support of this thesis. We are a long way, historically and philosophically, from Locke, Mill and the founders of American democracy, but I am reminded of Benjamin Franklin's quip in response to a citizen asking, “What sort of government have you given us?” – A republic, if you can keep it! Wait, where have I heard that before? Oh yeah, at my Marxist-Leninist day camp. A dictatorship (of the proletariat) must precede the withering away of the state and the ultimate triumph of pure communism. Some Marxists even out did Karl. George Sorel, Franz Fannon, and Uncle Joe (Stalin), for example, like Machiavelli, believed that violence was a necessary spiritual purgative if a revolution was to have any hope of lasting success. And where did they hear that? From the pens of Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety ( aka the French Revolutionaries). However brilliant his mind and however benevolent his intent, Machiavelli became Godfather of a pretty unsavory crime family (not the Medici)…to which we all now belong! Image: Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Detail of Allegory of Good Government, 1338, fresco, Gothic art, Sienese School, Palazzo Pubblico, Siena. Fondazione Musei Senesi. 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 Renga Cycle 1 20th century Western literature familiarized us with a writing style known as ‘stream of consciousness.' In this genre, writers simply record their thoughts (or pretend to). Result: we read as if we were thinking. Seven centuries earlier, Japan began experimenting with a ‘call and response’ style of poetry, created and transcribed collectively by a group of poets. Typically, the Renga-Master kicks-off with a three-verse, 17-syllable Haiku. Then another poet adds either another Haiku or, more traditionally, a Tsukeku (two verses, seven syllables each), as a response. If we credit the 20th century with the ‘stream of consciousness’ (Freud influenced) writing style, we must credit 14th century with a ‘stream of collective consciousness’ writing style (anticipating Jung). The Renga format is not rigid. For example, a second Haiku could occur before the first response. This is what’s happening in the Renga below, kicking off ATM’s Japanese Poetry Slam . Renga Cycle #1 Drip, drip goes the water How I wish I could use it To wash the world away. (Basho) One caw of a crow Turns all of the fallen leaves A deeper yellow. (Wright) (Please add your response in the comment box below. It can either be a 17-syllable Haiku or a 14 syllable Tsukeku.) David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com. Share Return to Table of Contents, Beach Issue Return to Table of Contents, June Issue Your content has been submitted Add to our haiku in the comment box below.

< Back No More Novels David Cowles Aug 24, 2026 “Most novels have an overriding purpose: to justify the ways of men to God.” 1800 words, 8 minute read I must confess I’ve never been much for novels. Give me a good epic any day, maybe a short story or a play, some poetry, but novels…not so much. Of course, I have a few favorites but after Ulysses things trail off rapidly. What can I say about novels that is universally true? Nothing. The genre has been so overworked, so crowded with anti-novels, that any affirmative statement is bound to elicit a list of exceptions. How do you get Charles Dickens, Gertrude Stein, Franz Kafka, and Alain Robbe-Grillet in a room together and not expect fireworks? Novels range from panoramic swashbucklers to intimate steams of consciousness. They can include 100 characters or just one. They can cover events over multiple continents (or galaxies) and multiple generations or they can all take place in one room, in one mind, or on one day (e.g. Bloomsday, June 16, 1904). But regardless of setting or scope, most novels have an overriding purpose, ‘to justify the ways of men (sic) to God’. They seek to account for a person’s feelings, thoughts and acts in terms of external influences: class or caste, childhood trauma, cultural heritage, etc. But the one thing no one can ever do is to ‘account for’ another person’s actions. Being a person means being unaccountable or, what amounts to the same thing, being accountable only to oneself. My life is not the mechanical result of unseen causes nor is it the product of my own grand designs. It is a series of free, creative responses to disconnected ‘events’, be they mundane, miraculous or absurd. That said, I don’t experience my life as entirely random either. Generally speaking, continuity is strongly felt. Recent studies involving brain scans (MRI) show our brains spontaneously configuring sensory input into coherent narratives. An ‘event’ is a story. Like every story, an event has a beginning, middle, and end. Every story, at least every decent story, has elements of novelty. But every story, no matter how novel, is constructed on a template drawn from one’s extensive library of ‘story forms’ derived from personal experience and/or from cultural transmission. A truly ‘novel narrative’ (whatever that might mean) would be utterly incomprehensible: Finegan’s Wake meets Jean Luc Godard. Ever visit that “vast waste land” (Newton Minnow) known as television? Thousands of ‘stories’ are constructed on just a handful of narrative templates. How many police chases, jilted lovers, betrayed friendships, etc. can you tolerate in one evening? Often stories are so similar that you can mistake something new for something you’ve already seen. Sidebar : Sometimes I’ll watch a show and not realize until the very end that I’ve seen it before; other times, I’ll realize early on that I’ve seen it but elect to continue, discovering new content with fresh eyes. These are marks of good TV! Life is like a word game played at a very high level. A member of the audience shouts out a phrase. I must immediately use that phrase in a sentence and then elaborate that sentence into a story that is original, well-crafted, and meaningful, all the while keeping my audience entertained, preferably laughing or crying or, even better, both. There must be easier ways to make a living! Happily though, there’s a trick to it! True, I have no way to control or predict what phrase an audience will throw at me. But my audience and I do share a huge volume of common knowledge, and I can rely on that shared background to act as foundation and scaffolding for my narrative. In the end, my story is a blend of creativity (me) and continuity (audience). It is a story of ‘events’, i.e. relatively dynamic figures against relatively static ground. I am wise to rely as much as possible on our shared background to carry my story forward. My categorical imperative: “Change as much as necessary but as little as possible.” *** No matter how introspective, novels look at people from outside-in. I know authors are concerned with emotions, motivations, and mental states. And stream of consciousness purports to take us into Jung’s backroom to see Freud’s sausage being made. But all this is external to me. It’s surface! I am neti, neti Hot Link – not this, not that (Sartre’s Neant ). I begin where the world leaves off. I am not what the world is; I am what the world is not. “I dream of things that never were and ask, ‘Why not?’.” (Robert Kennedy) Whatever you can say about a character is external to that character. As soon as you shoehorn an insight into a symbolic system, a language, for communication purposes, your insight takes on an order not organic to it. The vine-picked grape has become fine wine, you know, with ‘hints of cassis and tobacco’. Simplistically speaking, a language consists of its vocabulary and its grammar. Grammar in turn includes a substructural infra-grammar that determines how we break down our perceptual field into semantic quanta, e.g. words, and a syntax which determines how we reassemble those words to form meaningful propositions. A good character is likely to have some rough edges. Stephen, Leopold, and Molly certainly do! But ‘a rough edge’ implies ‘a smooth core’ and that’s something no real person possesses. In fact, we are Eliot’s hollow men and I’m not sure a novel can ever fully capture that emptiness. Even existential angst, when expressed in language, becomes superficial. The real life of a real person is chaotic. Nothing follows automatically from anything else. It is an archipelago of events spread across an inert medium. How do I differentiate an ‘event’ from that medium? To be ‘real’ an event must satisfy Bateson’s Criterion , i.e. it must be a difference that makes a difference. As such, an event is information : it must differentiate itself from its medium and it must deflect the course of events going forward. Paradigm : Hercules cleaning the Aegean Stables. The river’s flow is diverted and the stalls are properly mucked. Riddle : “My life is a matrix of nodes. Each node is a bifurcation point. Like GPS, I enter my destination based on the values I wish to instantiate and a program calculates all available routes.” Who am I? Answer : Robert Frost . One way or another, subtly or heavy handedly, the novelist attempts to account for my chosen values and my actions (route) in pursuit of those values. It’s a thankless ask. Personally, I’ll stick to Homer: ‘a god made me do it’…and I am that god, for me! *** Neuroscience is revealing how our brains are wired for narrative (Ingrid Wickelgren, Scientific American , September 2026): No story accurately replicates events. They deliberately streamline reality into versions that emphasize cause and effect relationships. People’s real-world experiences are similarly edited by the brain to make sense of them; these edited scripts form our memories. Culture shapes storytelling in ways that can subtly but profoundly affect our sense of ourselves. Family and society are co-authors, even of the stories we tell ourselves. In 1944 Austrian American psychologist Fritz Heider asked 114 subjects to watch a crude animated film in which a small triangle, a big triangle and a small circle ricochet off one another and scoot in and out of a rectangle with a doorlike flap. When asked to describe what they saw, hardly any of the participants reported the physical movement of shapes. To some, those ‘beings’ were in a love triangle; to others, they were embroiled in a family drama or an episode of bullying. The brain does automatically what a screenwriter does deliberately. “When you create narrative, you say, “‘Well, this caused this, or this would have caused this, but this other thing happened,’” says Pixar’s Jesse Andrews. The primary glue is cause and effect . In a 2022 study, when people watched or recalled scenes that were causally connected, activity spiked in certain parts of the brain and that higher activity was associated with greater recall of those scenes. Even when a film makes generous use of flashbacks and flashforwards, folks retelling the story restore the causal order, ignoring the director’s artistry. Confronted with a continuous flow of undifferentiated ‘experience’, the brain breaks the continuum into defined ‘events’ and then reassembles those events into a narrative. “The building block of the movie is the scene,” Andrews says. As far back as the 1970s, psychologists hypothesized that people store basic scripts derived from prior experiences and analyze future experiences in terms of those scripts. Your experience of your next trip to LAX will be informed by your experience of previous trips to the airport. Every trip to the airport is different but every trip has certain features in common: arriving, boarding, etc. Surprisingly, studies show that you better remember those experiences that are closest to the mean experience. Storytelling projects the neural patterns associated with one person’s experience onto another individual, expanding the latter’s inventory of experiences beyond their own. Stories that appeal to broad audiences are often rooted in shared cultural narratives which in turn reflect accepted ways of thinking. *** Narrative is the glue that creates solidarity. The stories we tell ourselves about our own lives enable us to maintain a sense of continuous personal identity. Somehow, I am the same person who sat, bored to distraction, gazing out the window of Sister Martha Mary’s 4 th grade classroom onto the inviting school yard below. The stories we tell each other enable us to share a sense of cultural identity. The Hebrew Torah, the Homeric epics, the Norse Edda and the Christian Gospels are examples of collections of shared stories that strongly reinforce the cultural identities of disparate social groups, across continents and millennia. But narrative has its limits. Admittedly, it edits raw experience to create sequences of events that highlight cause and effect relationships. Whether causality plays a similarly important role in the evolution of objective events is a moot question. First, my proposed ‘categorical imperative’ (change as much as necessary but as little as possible) ensures a world characterized by events that form sequences that often appear causal. But any conservative ontology would likely produce a similar result. Second, our neural structure apparently encourages us to break up the continuous flow of experience into stochastic events with causal links. Whether that corresponds to anything objective about the World is, again, moot. Third, and most importantly, no narrative can ‘account for’ the values we freely adopt or for the actions we take in pursuit of those values. Whatever else, this is a realm beyond the reach of narrative and so I beg, “No more novels” – please! Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! 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“Following the science, LP assumes that the same act, performed under the same conditions, will always produce the same result…it’s true, precisely 0% of the time!” < Back Logical Positivism David Cowles Dec 1, 2023 “Following the science, LP assumes that the same act, performed under the same conditions, will always produce the same result…it’s true, precisely 0% of the time!” It’s October 2023, and Norwegian novelist and playwright, Jon Fosse, is awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. In naming Fosse, the Nobel Committee cited “ his innovative plays and prose, which give voice to the unsayable.” But isn’t that the function of all literature? Of all language even? According to Heidegger, art is what empowers us to see the world in new ways. As a certain poet (Keats) once said, “Beauty is Truth and Truth Beauty.” Language is ‘saying’. If language says it, then it’s said, and therefore obviously was never really ‘unsayable’. When I was in college, Logical Positivism (LP) was the philosophy du jour . It presented a view of the world that was embraced by academic philosophers on both sides of the Atlantic. The justly renowned Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote LP’s Bible ( Tractatus )…before he repudiated it years later in Philosophical Investigations . According to LP, propositions (sentences) have meaning if, and only if, they are subject to ‘falsification’ via the scientific method. Undoubtedly, such propositions do have a special semantic character, but they represent a tiny fraction of the things human beings yearn to say to one another about their lived experience. According to the tenets of LP, propositions that cannot be falsified are just meaningless strings of words. ‘To be’, Hamlet, is to be consequential . There is no being without consequences. If we cannot identify the consequences of an Act, why should we assume that there was an Act in the first place? Where there’s smoke, there isn’t always fire! We are rewriting Descartes: “I am, therefore I am engaged; I am engaged, therefore I am.” In elementary school, we were taught that sentences are meaningful if and only if they link words selected from a culturally shared lexicon according to patterns that conform to a culturally shared syntax. Later in life, we learn that such rules are arbitrary. New words are coming into our language all the time from all sorts of different sources. Also, strings of words can often be meaningful even if they don’t conform perfectly to ‘the rules of grammar’. Only the most conservative critic would argue that James Joyce’s two great novels, Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake , are meaningless, even though the former includes copious neologisms, and the latter is barely recognizable as English. And then there’s ‘poetry’! When a writer uses language ‘poetically’ (in the broadest possible sense of the word), no hard and fast rules apply… ever . The author and the reader come together virtually, of course, and agree on a vocabulary and grammar that are meaningful to them . If you find my writing gibberish, and many do, that’s ok by me, as long as ‘ some of my readers are able to tease some of my meaning out of some of my articles’. (Pseudo-Lincoln) I think most of us would agree that the most of the important propositions we’ve encountered in life would not pass LP’s Turing Test : I love you; thou shalt not kill; this sunset is gorgeous. Superficially, LP might be appealing. After all, if a proposition claims to be true, why shouldn’t it undergo rigorous verification? Why should I pay any attention to assertions that cannot be verified? It’s 2023—we ‘follow the science’ — now! The exclusion of so-called ‘slang’ and ‘poetry’ from the semantic universe is a heavy price to pay for scientific precision, but it is far from LP’s deepest flaw: Propositions refer to events. Every event is unique. If an event were not unique, it would not be an ‘event’. Following the science , LP assumes that the same act, performed under the same conditions, will always produce the same result…that is essence of science, and of course, it’s true, precisely 0% of the time! Repetition is an approximation. An experiment creates ‘information’ only to the extent that the results deviate from expectations. Every event has something in common with every other event, but no event has everything in common with any other event. So, is this the ultimate irony or what? LP is based on the truth criteria of science, which in turn rely entirely on the usually unstated but always false ‘axiom of repeatability’. A little reflection will likely lead you to conclude that it is precisely those ‘excluded propositions’ that embody the real content of our lives. The thrill of contemplating a remarkable sunset is for most of us a more important aspect of life than the satisfaction of calculating the precise boiling point of water. According to LP, ‘meaningful propositions’ are propositions that can ultimately be reduced to algorithms of the form, ‘if x, then y’. Conceivably, every such ‘verifiable proposition’ could be programmed into a relational database and then downloaded onto a mechanical platform (e.g., a computer). While such a result might be beyond our current capabilities, the project itself is certainly conceivable. That would make ‘living life’ a superfluous exercise. At the very moment when we are discovering that reflective consciousness is liberally distributed throughout the biosphere (and possibly beyond), LP comes along and says we don’t need reflective consciousness after all. ‘We don’t need no lived experience.’ (Pseudo-Pink Floyd) We can know everything that there is to know algorithmically. Can you stand another twist? This is beginning to sound like an episode of Big Brother (CBS). In fact, we know that the assumptions underlying LP are falsifiable! For example, LP was supposed to rescue the concept of Truth from the machinations of skeptics and nihilists. LP allowed us to answer Pontius Pilate’s dismissive question, “What is truth?” It’s simply the set of all verifiable propositions (above). The only problem with this is that we know that no algorithm can generate the set of all true propositions (Godel). Far from rescuing Truth, LP is incompatible with it! Likewise, we know that no two events are ever identical; if they were, they would be one event. Sure, events can closely resemble one another, and that may be good enough for government work, but it doesn’t satisfy us philosophically. The soul of the scientific method is repeatability, but no real-world event can ever be repeated. Finally, we increasingly suspect that the fundamental building blocks of Universe are not objects or even events but patterns. Contrary to what we said above, patterns can be congruent. So, have we rescued LP after all? ‘Fraid not! Congruent patterns are not identical patterns. Congruence may be serial or scalar: (1) ‘serial congruence’ refers to identical patterns that have different locations in spacetime; (2) ‘scalar congruence’ refers to patterns that are identical but on different scales. Examples: (1) a box of ball bearings; (2) atom, cell, or solar system. BTW, did you hear the one about the atom, the cell, and the solar system that walked into a bar? The bartender couldn’t tell them apart. That’s scalar congruence. To the extent that Universe displays scalar congruence, we say that it has a ‘holographic structure’ and consists of ‘fractals’. 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 Yuletide 2023 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 Navigating Ethics David Cowles Oct 29, 2025 “Are there Values…that apply to everyone, everywhere, in every circumstance and in every possible universe?” Ethics is the science of ‘doing good’. Speaking both developmentally and anthropologically, our earliest encounter with the concept is rules based: The 613 mitzvoth of Torah The Code of Hammurabi English Common Law The rules Dad just posted on the fridge Our earliest concept of ‘doing good’ consists of nothing more, or less, than obeying orders, following rules: “The law of the Lord is his joy.” (Psalm 1: 1 - 3) Against this background various reform movements (in families and in society) have attempted to shift the moral emphasis from action to intention: “I didn’t mean to do it, it was an accident,” or “I was speeding but only because my wife was in labor.” An effort was made to find a simpler set of moral principles at the foundation of our ethical intuition. In that spirit, the Decalogue (10 Commandments) came to be regarded as a Cliff’s Notes version of the Torah. Later, the so-called Great Commandment designated two of the 613 mitzvoth of Torah as a summary of the other 611: Love God and love your neighbor! The Cliff’s Notes version of Cliff’s Notes. Then Jesus of Nazareth entered the fray: “I give you a new commandment: love one another.” (John 13: 34) Several modern humanists have proposed Be Kind as a universal statement of the ethical intuition. John-Paul Sartre , with some support from Pope Leo XIII, suggested Freedom as the ultimate value. But at the beginning of the 16 th century, Machiavelli stood Western Ethics on its head. (There’s a lot of head-standing in the Intellectual History of the West, e.g. Mark & Hegel.) He suggested that the Good lies not in conformity, nor in intentionality, but in consequences: ends justify means! The term ‘Machiavellian’ retains a slightly pejorative connotation even today, but the concept has long since been rehabilitated under the different-seeming guises of Utilitarianism (Bentham, Mill), Liberalism (Adam Smith) and Pragmatism (William James). If we adopt Gregory Bateson’s meme ( a difference that makes a difference ) as our ontological standard, ‘good’ behavior is whatever produces, or is likely to produce, ‘good’ results: e.g. ‘greatest good for the greatest number’ (Mill), ‘the wealth of nations’ (Smith) or ‘redistribution of the means of production’ (Marx). Of course, this Enlightened sense of ethics assumes that we are able to distinguish ‘favorable’ outcomes from ‘unfavorable’ alternatives. By what measure? On what scale? Over what span? From whose perspective? ( Hint : We can’t!) It also assumes a certain causal, i.e. predictable, link between events: A leads to B or at least A makes B substantially more likely. Either way, the ethical content of an event now lies in its actual (or projected) consequences. Ethical systems based either on rules (Moses) or on results (Machiavelli) appear to constitute a spectrum ranging from Absolute Despotism to Eternal Utopia. As we now know all too well, the invisible hand of Adam Smith is no less heavy than the iron fist of Pharaoh. Consequences are commands viewed backwards. Wage slavery is just plain slavery, minus Spartacus. La Technique (Jacques Ellul) replaces Written Torah (613 mitzvot) and Oral Torah (Natural Law) with Mechanical Torah (now AI). This leaves us with just two alternatives: (1) an ethics that is focused solely on actions themselves (virtue is its own reward) or (2) an ethics grounded entirely in the subjective experience of others (or another ). Ethical systems broadly compatible with Triple-M (Moses, Machievelli, Marx) focus on the proximate : obey a command, weigh a consequence. Conversely, our alternative systems focus either on the hyper-immanent or on the totally transcendent . But first, are there Values, manifestations of the Good, that apply to everyone, everywhere, in every circumstance and in every possible universe? Elsewhere on this site , we have proposed Beauty, Truth, and Justice as Values that satisfy these conditions. I have even called them the Divine Values ; they are the essence of the Ineffable (God). Of course, no two people agree on what is beautiful, true or just: no matter! Everyone agrees, theoretically or not, that these are the values that characterize the Good, aka God . Everything any actor does is ultimately motivated by one of these Super Values, however distorted it may have become in the mind of its executor. This ethical system holds that any act is ‘good’ precisely to the extent that it creates, discovers, disseminates, or restores Beauty, Truth, and/or Justice, not as a remote consequence of the act (which are always alienated from the act itself), but as the act itself. For example, the actions of the Good Samaritan are just in themselves; in fact, they are Justice per se ( mishpat , understood as a verb: “Do Justice!”) Ironically, the alternative post-Machiavellian ethic also finds a home in this Parable . According to this interpretation, whatever we do to relieve the suffering of others is good . This concept of the ‘ethical’ links us with Mother Theresa and through her to the Buddha himself. In one parable we see both sides of the post-Machiavellian coin. Either Value is immanent in the act itself, regardless of its intent or consequence, or Value transcends both the act and the actor and rests entirely on the experience of the Other , the indirect object of the act. The ethical universe of the 3M’s is flat. Rules → Intentions → Actions → Consequences. The Good Samaritan flips the script. Now we look beneath the plane ↓ to focus on the acts themselves or beyond the plane ↑ to focus on those acts as they appear in the experience of others. Riddle : If a ‘good’ act is performed in the absence of an ‘other’, is it still a ‘good act’? Maybe, maybe not: If I spend three years studying for a PhD in psychology so I can better help my future patients? Then yes! If I write articles for a local newspaper in the hope that they will amuse, entertain, enlighten or console someone other than myself? Also yes! If I admit the existence of a ‘collective other’ (God, Gaia, or Geist), then yes again. But otherwise, no! So we have found that ethical systems tend to congregate around 4 cardinal points, the nodes of a diamond, and along two perpendicular axes: T ↑ R ↔ E ↓ I The horizontal axis is a continuum spanning Rules and Ends. Cause and Effect live here! The vertical axis, on the other hand, is perpendicular to the plane of ‘daily commerce’. It allows us to focus ‘off plane’ on acts themselves ( Immanent ) or on others’ experience ( Transcendent ) of those acts. From the perspective of Immanence acts are stochastic, airlocked, islands in the stream, knots in the thread of fate each act has its own independent moral value. On the other hand, from the perspective of Transcendence the moral value of acts lies ‘off grid’ in the experience of others . Remarkably, these radically different perspectives intersect, as witnessed in the concrete behavior of the Good Samaritan. When we foster Beauty (peace, harmony) we ‘lighten the load’ of the other. Likewise, when we discover Truth and correct falsehood (gnosis); and most dramatically of course, when we practice Justice (including charity, community, and mercy). We are striving to graduate from the ‘nursery notion’ of rules and results. Happily, we have found a new ethical home in the content of our actions per se and in others’ experience of those actions. *** Norman Rockwell’s The Golden Rule (1961) unites people of many races, faiths, and ages beneath the words “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Painted in luminous, realistic detail, it transforms a moral principle into a shared human moment of empathy and equality. By portraying kindness and respect as universal, Rockwell turns a private rule of ethics into a public vision of global goodwill. 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 Consciousness & Panpsychism David Cowles Dec 14, 2023 “Everywhere we look in the biosphere, we seem to find evidence of mental functioning, self-awareness, consciousness, or at least proto-consciousness.” ‘Consciousness’ has been called the ‘hard problem’. It may be the last remaining piece of the ontological puzzle. But it’s a doozie. Over the past 150 years, we’ve ‘discovered’ evolution, relativity, quanta, the big bang, DNA, the human genome, etc. But "consciousness"—how we know these things and how we know that we know them – not so much. Traditionally, the ‘problem of consciousness’ has been focused exclusively on Homo sapiens , but recently, that’s had to change. Strong evidence has emerged suggesting that members of many other species could pass a modified Turing Test . And don’t get me started on AI! Bonobos and chimpanzees are ‘no-brainers’, pardon the pun. Marine animals as well (e.g., dolphins). Corvids (crows and ravens), Parrots, and Cephalopoda (e.g., octopus), very likely. Recent exploration has detected intriguing signs of self-awareness in multiple species of fish, insects, and plants. Now, Nature (11/1/23) has published a study suggesting that the presumably ‘headless starfish’ is actually ‘bodiless’; Max Headroom! Everywhere we look in the biosphere, we seem to find evidence of mental functioning, self-awareness, consciousness, or at least proto-consciousness. Recent efforts to reduce consciousness to a ‘neural network’ have failed, both scientifically and philosophically, and recent discoveries make that hypothesis less and less defensible. Today, mechanism is on the run! The imputed connection between physiology and consciousness is growing ever thinner. Vastly different versions of ‘sensory processing apparatus’ seem to support very similar mental phenomena. For centuries, science has focused on removing all traces of ‘spirituality’ from biology. No more ‘soul’, no more élan vital . Consciousness was to be mechanism’s final frontier . The locker room was decorated, caterers on site, champagne on ice, but, as it turns out, there’s nothing to celebrate. Just as people were confidently predicting the final coup, things began ‘slip sliding away’. It’s becoming clear that ‘something’s happening here, and we don’t know what it is’ (Bob Dylan). In a recent issue of Thoughts While Shaving , we outlined our own theory of reflection, self-awareness, and consciousness . We hypothesized that such phenomena are a hard-wired feature of being itself. We imagine we live in an ‘orientable’ world with 360° symmetry: up is up and down is down and never the twain shall meet. Likewise, we imagine an insuperable barrier separating any two sides: obverse from reverse. But what if these things are true only locally? Or approximately? What if the orientable world we know and usually love is a degenerate case, an abstraction, or an approximation of a wider, non-orientable reality? Take this earth, for example: from here to my horizon (locally), it looks flat, but we know it isn’t (globally). We proposed the possibility that our orientable world is embedded in a more general, non-orientable topology with 720° symmetry, where ‘up is up’ only once, at t = 0, and the obverse/reverse distinction does not exist at all. In such a world, after a 360° rotation, ‘up is down’. ‘Up is up’ again only after we complete a full 720° circuit, i.e., after our system returns to its initial state. Superficially, this model looks appealing, but it has a huge unanticipated consequence: according to this model, all living organisms must be self-aware – not just primates and bees, but sponges and trees…even unicellular organisms like bacteria. Objection #1 : “How can we ever know what it’s like, subjectively, to be a unicellular organism?” Answer #1 : We can’t! But neither can I know what it’s like to be you . I presume you’d like to be considered ‘conscious,' but if I grant you that courtesy, I have no justification for denying the same courtesy to my ‘brother paramecium’. Answer #2 : We can! We can just ask: “What’s it like in there? What’s it like to be you?” But tragically, we don’t yet know how to question the unicellular organisms that make up our bodies…and much of our environment. Fortunately, though, we do know how to question human beings…like you, for example. So why not just ask yourself? After all, you were once a unicellular organism! Have you forgotten that you were a single cell, the convergence of a maternal and a paternal sex cell? Assuming a normal lifespan, more than 100 trillion cells, each an approximate copy of your single-celled self, will participate in ‘your body’. So just ask any one of ‘you’! Objection #2 : The single cell that was me at conception and has now gone viral is not me. ‘I’ am an emergent phenomenon. So you can’t ask my cells because they’re not conscious, and you can’t ask me because I am something other than those cells, whether taken individually or collectively. Answer : Attractive answer! Wouldn’t most of us be only too eager to sign on to this resolution? In fact, it’s hard to see how you could not agree with it, and yet… This solution may generate more problems than it solves. If I emerge from my cells, not as some sort of social superstructure but as an entirely novel ontological entity…well, bully for me, but how is that possible? And then, who am ‘I’? At what point in time did I become ‘I’? Did I become ‘I’ gradually (if so, how so) or was there a ‘quantum leap’ (and if so, how…and when)? We are on the horns of a dilemma. We face three entirely unacceptable options: (1) Nihilism (there is no such thing as consciousness – it’s a ‘conceptual illusion’); (2) Mechanism (consciousness can be reduced to chemistry); (3) Mysticism (the phenomenon of consciousness is the discontinuous in-breaking of something ‘transcendental’). I see only one way out of this dilemma: (4) Panpsychism (self-reflection is a fundamental feature of Being – it extends to everything that is). So you suit yourself, but as for me and my tribe, we choose #4 . Keep the conversation going! 1. Click here to comment on this TWS. 2. To subscribe (at no cost) to TWS and ATM, follow this link . 3. We encourage new articles and reprints from freelance writers ; click here to view out Writers’ Specs. Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

< Back Give us your honest opinion, please. David Cowles Sep 15, 2022 Give us your honest opinion, please. Thank you for subscribing to Aletheia Today and Thoughts While Shaving. We’re thrilled to share our insights and opinions with you. In order to continue to serve you best, we kindly ask that you take a minute to provide us with your feedback. By answering these brief questions, you'll help us improve and better serve you. Thanks again, David Cowles, Editor-in Chief Enter the survey 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.

“It is the uniqueness of events that 'creates' spacetime; it is not spacetime that makes events unique.” < Back Who R U? - The Caterpillar David Cowles Mar 1, 2023 “It is the uniqueness of events that 'creates' spacetime; it is not spacetime that makes events unique.” I’m reading an innocuous book about DNA when I suddenly come upon a sentence that snaps my head back: “Many SNP (genetic) variants have no known consequence…but some can be crucial to who you are.” - DNA Demystified by Alan McHughen. If your head did not snap back, don’t worry; few heads would (snap or worry). But for me, this sentence is an epiphany…an epiphany of error! In fact, it would be a challenge to craft a sentence in ordinary English that was more broadly wrong than this one: “SNP variants…can be crucial to who you are.” Try, “The Patriots won every Superbowl ever played.” Wrong – it just seems that way sometimes; but this erroneous sentence is just narrowly wrong , so it doesn’t compete with McHughen’s much broader error. May I belabor the point? Telling someone they are something when they’re not is just plain cruel, even for us neo-Machiavellians. Example: In 2004, misread exit polls indicated a landslide victory for John Kerry (vs. G. W. Bush). I didn’t vote for John Kerry that year, but I have always sympathized with him. Cruel! Back to McHughen: My DNA is no part of who I am. It’s part of my world, the world I live in, but it’s not part of me : a crucial distinction. Let’s fall back on a ridiculously trite metaphor: a game of cards (doesn’t matter what game). The cards are dealt. My crowd is fond of saying, “It’s not a hand, it’s a foot.” Hand or foot, it’s what I was dealt, and it’s what I’m going to have to play. I was hoping for a “grand slam” (bridge or whist). IRL, I was hoping to play for the Boston Celtics. My hand is a jumble of 7’s and 8’s. My height is 5’ 9’’ on tip toes. I probably won’t get my grand slam, and I probably won’t play pro ball. (That doesn't mean I can’t try, but trying is not doing. I am guaranteed the unfettered right to try; I am not guaranteed positive results.) I am not those cards, and I am not this body. These are things I’ve been given to work with. So far so good, but here’s where the metaphor breaks down. In cards, I am the person behind the cards, actively playing them. IRL there is no ‘man behind the curtain’, no ‘ghost in the machine’. Let me explain. Most of the 30 trillion cells that make up my body contain a full ‘copy’ of my DNA (exception: red blood cells), but none of those cells is me. Obviously. But what about all those cells taken together? Are they me? What about the ever-evolving network of cellular interactions? Still not me. So, back to the Caterpillar’s question: “Who R U?” How about we begin with actual experience? After all, at the end of the day, there is nothing else. According to 20th century British philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, to be is to experience and be experienced; so ‘experience’, let’s start there. So, how do you experience you ? Certainly not as the collection of cells we call a body (or a brain). But it’s not just that I am not a cell, a collection of cells, or even a network of cells. It’s that I am not even like any of these things! It’s not that I am ‘different’ from my cells; whatever I am is entirely unlike those cells. There are no parameters for comparison. A red ball is not a blue box. But we can compare them according to color, shape, utility, etc. No such comparison is possible between me and anything other than me (e.g., my cells). ( Sidebar : Imagine how long it must have taken civilization to convince our ‘best minds’ that the experience we call “I” is just a culture of unicellular organisms in a multidimensional petri dish! How do you do that? How do you make people believe something that silly? Why are we too anxious to think of ourselves as a ‘thing’; is this what Erich Fromm meant by “Escape from Freedom”?) Experience yourself. Take it in. Now nose around. Are you ‘like’ anything you hear, see, taste, smell, or touch? Of course not. You are an entirely unique phenomenon. So am I. In fact, you are not even like me …nor am I like you. Truth to tell, I have no idea what it’s like to be you, or a network of cells; I have no idea what it’s like to be anything at all or even what it’s like to be like something. I am, period. There’s nothing else. I am not even ‘experience’ itself; I experience experiencing. I am not the man behind the curtain: there is no man, there is no curtain, just Oz…and not-Oz. I am not the ghost in a machine: there is no ghost and no machine. It goes even deeper: I am that I am not something other than myself. My parents would be pleased: I am not like those boys who jumped off the bridge. Ok then, so what am I? Nothing? Precisely! Nothing, i.e., no thing. I am not a ‘thing’ and neither are you. Consider the alternative : Suppose I am like something else or, what amounts to the same thing, suppose I am something else. Either way, I am superfluous. The universe doesn’t need two of anything: “Lord, we don’t need another mountain…” The universe does not need carbon copies. To whatever extent I am something else or like something else, I am redundant, and the universe hates redundancy. “Idle hands”, you know… Being is a cosmic censor, relentlessly rooting out waste (e.g., duplication) before it can form. As a result, nothing is duplicative, nothing is superfluous. Again, according to Whitehead, to be is to be both novel and consequential. Mythology recapitulates cosmology. Being is Paradise, the Garden of Eden. (In Hebrew, Eden means ‘place of pleasure’; in Aramaic, it means ‘fruitful’.) But, as we know from Genesis , in Eden ‘one small step’ can turn into ‘one giant leap’ – out of Paradise. How so? A single instance of duplication would create a loop, and a single loop would freeze the universe in an endless and barren cycle of soul-numbing repetition. If anything repeats, then nothing is, was, or will ever be. My new political party will have as its slogan: “No novelty, no being!” Consider Dante’s Divine Comedy . Unwittingly, Dante ambles into the gated community we know as ‘Hell’: Dante’s Inferno , a spiral consisting of 9 descending levels (‘circles’) with the grand prize, Satan, waiting at the inflection point, the nadir of the funnel. Dante walks through Hell, past Satan, into Purgatory and eventually up to Paradise. Now suppose that just one of those infernal ‘circles’, makes no difference which one, doubles back on itself. Dante would be trapped in Hell forever, endlessly repeating the same journey. That’s the price of a single ‘error’. That’s what’s meant by the doctrine of Original Sin . Imagine living in a never-green world, bereft of all novelty, endlessly repeating itself until the ‘crack of doom’. Compared to this, Dante’s Inferno is a trip to Six Flags. One single loop, one single repetition, and all creativity is forever banished from the realm. Fortunately, there are no such loops; the universe makes no such error. We’re some 15 billion years into it and so far, not one error. Imagine you’re married to the same person for 15 billion years and never once have a fight. That’s what we’re dealing with here. The evidence is ‘merely’ inductive, but I am willing to go out on a limb and make a leap of faith (Kierkegaard beware): there will be no such error, ever! How can that be? We appear to be protected from error by some sort of omnipotent and infallible cosmic censor . Everything that is, in so far as it is, is unique. “How do I know? Occam’s Razor tells me so.” The fact that the cosmos has a censor should give us profound hope. It would take so little to make this world a living Hell. Just one error out of googles of transcriptions et voilà , ‘everlasting fire’. The very fact that there has been no such error, and apparently won’t be, can’t be, should encourage us to hope that Hell is empty (except perhaps for the Prince of Darkness) or even non-existent (good news for Lucifer, ‘light bearer’). We are offering a free tour of Hell in this issue of ATM . Sidebar : Non-believers (e.g., Bertrand Russell, Michael Ruse) make a lot of the so-called Problem of Evil. The real problem is a Problem of Good . How do you account for the fact that at the deepest possible level, the Universe is perfect? How’d that happen? Note : This is not a ‘best of all possible worlds’ argument. (Lie quiet Leibniz, I mean that is Gottfried Leibniz, c. 1600 CE) We do not live in the best of all possible worlds – far, far, far from it; but we do live in a perfect (error free) world. Memo to YHWH : There’s no more need for flood or fire. Just allow a single transcription error to slip through and walk away. Ah, but you can’t do that, can you? You tried to with Job , but that did not end well…for you. Thank you for being you! What we call ‘spacetime’ is the physical manifestation of cosmic censorship. The uniqueness of an event’s spacetime location certifies that it is not a duplicate; my coordinates are both my ‘X’ and God’s stamp of authenticity: “Inspected by #1 ”. Many things overlap with me in spacetime, but nothing else occupies the precise region that I occupy. What is co-incident with me, is me! Shift that locus a single nanodegree et voilà , something new. But note, and this is key, it is the uniqueness of events that creates spacetime; it is not spacetime that makes events unique. Topology recapitulates ontology. So, what about this body, those cells, that DNA? None of that is me; but that doesn’t mean it’s not important. These things are part of the world I’ve inherited. My experience of the world is mediated through my genetic makeup, but I am not those genes or that world. It is not enough to say that I (ego) cannot be equated with me (id), that I am-not me. Instead, we need to say I am not-me . It is not just that there is some sort of displacement between myself as I and myself as me. Being I is not-being me . Being I is being not-me! I come to be only by negating (‘being not’) what is. This “I” is very misleading. It implies something ‘other’ than something else. In one respect, “I” is as different from everything else as anything can be; in another respect, it’s no different at all. There is no “I” apart from the world, there is no Wizard directing affairs on Oz. I-ness is embedded in the world, as it’s active negation. Ontologically speaking, ‘not’ is not an adverb or a conjunction, ‘not’ is an active voice, indicative mood verb! ~A ɛ A. ~A is the proverbial snake curled up at the core of being, A. So, “Who R U?” The caterpillar was so 19th century! He asked the quintessential question of his time, the era mislabeled as “The Enlightenment”, i.e., part of the nightmare (history) from which James Joyce says we’re struggling to awake. ‘Who R U’ is a meaningless string of vocables. I am no-who. Who-ness and I-ness are incompatible categories. Backed against a wall by his Christian and Communist critics, Jean-Paul Sartre reluctantly answered the caterpillar’s question: U R ‘Freedom’. ( Existentialism as a Humanism ) U R that you can be whoever or whatever you want to be. Whitehead coined the phrase, “the fallacy of misplaced concreteness”. To understand our genes and our experiences as ‘us’, or even as part of ‘us’, is to succumb to this fallacy. Sidebar : Your DNA and my DNA are 99.9% the same. Yet, my experience of the world is radically different from yours, even adjusting for the fact that we experience objectively different events. Not convinced? Ok, my DNA is 50% the same as a banana’s. (Many people have told me that I am ‘bananas’ but I don’t think they meant that I experience the world the same way a banana does…or maybe that’s exactly what they meant.) We were born after 1750, so we are enlightened (whether we want to be or not); some would even say we’re woke . But woke to what? To the fact that we are star-stuff, that we are cogs in a mechanical universe, that our lives are determined by the forces of physics, sociology, psychology, et al? I am the sum of my gender, my race, my culture, my nationality, my socio-economic class, my upbringing, and the remnants of a host of more or less ‘accidental’ events that constitute my life story – NOT! I am anything but these things! No, I’m serious: anything but! I am the but ! “I am the Walrus.” If I were what the world thinks I am (above), there would be no need for me to be at all. I would be superfluous, and the universe could dispense with me. Occam’s Razor would require it. At most, I could be the nodal point of forces outside my control…or ken. But an intersection of beings is not itself a being. I am, I am nobody’s copy, I am not superfluous. To paraphrase Job, “If the cosmos cancels me, it will be the loser for it.” I am the Walrus (along with all ‘others’, of course); I am the universe’s source of novelty and its wellspring of intensity. “Here I am Lord, I come to do your will.” Image: Alice in Wonderland. Walt Disney Productions. 1951 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 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