< Back You & Your Markov Blanket David Cowles Aug 17, 2026 “We are becoming tools of our tools! We are becoming their accessories.” 1100 words, 5 minute read Like Peanuts ’ Linus, we all struggle to let go of our security blankets. If you are old enough to read this post, you have probably severed your textile tether…but what about that bottle of scotch you keep in your desk drawer? Truth to tell, we all have our security blankets but our childhood ‘blankies’ are nothing compared to the Markov Blankets we wrap around our adult selves. Although the concept of a Markov Blanket was first proposed in 1988 by Judea Pearl, it was defined almost a century earlier (1910) by John Collins Brophery: And this is good old Boston, The home of the bean and the cod, Where Lowells talk only to Cabots And Cabots talk only to God. The Cabots are a Markov Blanket separating…and connecting…the hapless Lowells with their God. If the Lowells wish to address ‘the maker of heaven and earth’ they have (only) to address their prayer through the Cabots who may, or may not, choose to pass on their entreaty. Likewise, in Boston at least, if God wishes to communicate with the Lowells (or by extension, with any of us), he must filter his message though the Cabots and so we must depend on ‘the kindness of strangers’ to hear his voice. According to some ecclesiologists, the Christian Church is a ‘Boston Baked Blanket’. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist.) Once identified, we begin to see Markov Blankets all around us. The famous Telephone Game is a perfect example. The final, often hilarious, message may, or may not, include a trace of the original. So it is with the Lowells, the Cabots, and God. In earlier posts on this site, Masks and Masks Too, I theorized that all of us communicate with ‘others’ through Markov Blankets. In this case we are indebted to Brophy’s British contemporary, T. S. Eliot, for the idea: “Prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.” ( Prufrock ) Two recent articles by Callie Holterman in the New York Times detect ‘Markov’ hiding in the thicket known as Human Resources: “If you haven’t applied for a job recently, you might be surprised by the new common procedure. At one end, job seekers use A.I. chatbots to churn out résumés and cover letters. At the other, employers use A.I. to sift through all of those applications.” “Increasingly, our digital intermediaries will collide. We’ll talk to our bots, and our bots will talk to one another.” Holterman envisions a future in which our bots build an ever thicker ‘no-man’s-land’ (literally) between subjects. As we are pushed further and further apart by the bot-o-sphere, will we eventually lose touch with one another and become solipsistic appendages of process, unrelated kids accidentally sharing a see-saw? Holterman calls bot-on-bot interactions ‘bot-loops’ and she warns that “they flip our conversational dynamic inside out, turning chatbots into the interlocutors and humans into their enablers.” We are becoming tools of our tools! We are becoming their accessories. In every day life, we imagine that we interact with one another in a way that is reciprocal and commutative (A, B and C are interchangeable): B ↗ ↖ ↙ ↘ A ← → C But if ‘B’ stands for ‘Blanket’, things change drastically: B ↗ ↖ ↙ ↘ A C This new world is anything but commutative; it is rigidly ordered with B playing a role entirely different from A and C. The World we imagine is Archimedean and for the most part Euclidean. The insertion of a Markov Blanket changes that. Welcome to ‘UUU’ (the Unexpected Ultrametic Universe ). You are far from Kansas now! This is Cloud Coocoo Land (Aristophanes and the Lego Movie ); the rules of arithmetic do not apply here. An Archimedean Universe consists of entities that can be measured using real numbers and whose measurements obey the laws of arithmetic. We can be forgiven for believing (for centuries) that the only possible world was Archimedean. But it turns out that an Archimedean universe is missing something pretty big: Infinity (a pretty big thing to miss), i.e. infinite numbers and, even more importantly, their infinitesimal reciprocals. Astonishingly, there are an infinite number of discrete infinitesimal numbers smaller than the smallest real number but greater than zero. In fact, there are an infinite number of discrete infinitesimals between any two real numbers. Once you open your tent flaps to these ‘quantitative miscreants’, everything changes! May I offer you a mixed tape of Ultrametric ’s Greatest Hits? All triangles are isosceles. Every point in a sphere is its center. Any two spheres are either entirely disjoint or one is contained completely within the other: no touching! If A and C are disjoint subsets of B… The metric (A + C) can be greater than B, even infinitely greater. A or C or both may be greater than B. Even if A and C have ‘positive’ metrics, B’s metric may be ‘negative’. Roughly speaking, the whole is unrelated to the sum of its parts. Every discrete entity has its own independent metric. The Tardis in the long running British sci-fi series, Doctor Who , is an example of an ultrametric entity: its interior metric (an operations center) is larger, much larger, than its exterior (a phone booth). The ordinary concept of ‘containment’ no longer applies. Apparently, Boston is another example of an ultrametric entity: if A and C are in B, then B, Cabot like, functions as their intermediary. A can communicate with B and C can communicate with B, but A and C cannot communicate with each other…except via the ‘voluntary’ (undetermined) intermediation of B. Brophery’s Boston is an ultrametric city; so is Eliot’s London ( The Waste Land ): Unreal City, Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many. Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled, And each man fixed his eyes before his feet. Flowed up the hill and down King William Street, To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine. 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 Jesus Meets Mister Spock Fr. Timothy Joyce, OSB, STL Science and Religion should assist each other in pursuing the truth. Science can be too closed to the life of the spirit, the mind, imagination, thought, and creativity. Religion can be closed to anything new that threatens its perception of reality. I am still surprised when I hear people express their belief that the Catholic Church is opposed to science. The story of Galileo Galilei (1564- 1642) is a shocking one to many people, who deduct that the church has always been and continues to be against science. There are, indeed, some Christians who oppose science but not the Catholic Church. Pope John Paul II apologized for the church’s treatment of Galileo in 2000. Earlier than that, he spoke often of the importance of science. Did you know that it was a Catholic priest who uncovered the theory of the hot Big Bang story? The Church sponsors conferences on science and religion. The Vatican has its own observatory in the hills outside Rome. In our country, there has been a growing anti-intellectualism and an increasing suspicion or even rejection of science. We live in an age when people think they can make up their own facts. Truth is not important. Some people, including politicians, reject truths they do not like and make up their own facts. Subjective belief in making my own truth is openly expressed. This is sad for the fabric of our society. Maybe the Church has, in the past, demanded we accept too many doubtful truths, but today it upholds the truth and upholds science. Of course, you wouldn’t always know this if you listen to some local homilies and talks. The teaching of the Vatican is not gotten down to all our parishes. Science and Religion should assist each other in pursuing the truth. Science can be too closed to the life of the spirit, the mind, imagination, thought, and creativity. Religion can be closed to anything new that threatens its perception of reality. Science can document the what and the how of our universe, but Religion struggles to define the why of it all. Both may be tentative in some areas at times as new discoveries and insights develop. So, we need to keep studying, listening, learning. Saint Thomas Aquinas said that if we wish to know God, we should study the world. The Psalms already preached this, “The heavens proclaim the glory of God, and the firmament shows forth the work of God’s hands.” (Ps. 19:2) And Saint Paul wrote to the Romans, “What can be known about God is plain to them because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world God’s eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made.” (Romans, 1:19-20) Monastic Scribe XXVI: April 29, 2022 Thanks to science, we now know so much more about this world than we have ever known before. The vastness and intricacies of the cosmos just blows our mind. And all adds to the majesty and beauty of God. Our God is a great Mystery and calls us into a life beyond what we can imagine. But we have to adjust some of our old images. The universe was not created in six days, but has been evolving for almost fourteen billion years. The three tier universe which is the base of the world view in the Bible now cedes to vast, uncountable galaxies. All of this challenges us to reimagine, much more meaningfully, the beginning of humankind, Adam and Eve, original sin, the Creator God, the incarnational God of Jesus Christ, the life giving Holy Spirit, as well as pain, suffering and the problem of evil. There is nothing to fear here. Our faith, seeking understanding, is deeper and more ennobled than we could have imagined. A deeper faith leads to a deeper hope and a deeper love, as we are overcome with awe and beauty at God’s creation. Evolution is not a theory but the way that God, since the beginning, has been creating and continues to create. We are called to take part in that evolutionary creation. Evolution means God is a God of the future, a God of promises. We believe in this God, and therein is our hope, no matter how bad things seem in our world. Not just the earth, but the entire cosmos, is God’s creation and our concern. The “new cosmology” or simply “the new story” is the tale of an expanding universe, always in motion, growing, incalculably vast. A century ago, we thought our Milky Way was the only galaxy, but now we know there are billions of galaxies. Black holes and black energy are the latest mysteries of this story. And we are part of this story. Our bodies are made of the very stardust that is found in all creation. Quantum mechanics shows us how everything and everyone is connected. It shows us how we can touch each other from a distance. I am not a scientist and certainly not a mathematician. I don’t comprehend all the details, nor can I differentiate all the categories of subatomic matter. But I don’t have to understand the details. I rely on scientists to explain things. But my view (my philosophy) of the cosmos, which comes from religion, adds meaning to all of this. I have enjoyed reading Teilhard de Chardin, Thomas Berry, John Haught, Ilia Delio, Elizabeth Johnson, Laurie Brink and others to get a better picture of what Monastic Scribe XXVI: April 29, 2022, this beautiful cosmos is all about. I recommend these authors to you. I urge all my readers not to be afraid of science, but to embrace it and open your mind to a fuller comprehension of what God does for us. It will also give deeper incentive to work on climate change and care of the environment. We are creating with God, but often have been destroying creation. Is this new for you? Is it exciting for you? You can let me know at: joycet@glastonburyabbey.org. Republished with minimal edits and permission rom glastonburyabbey.org. Fr. Timothy Joyce, OSB, STL continues his regular blog, “ Monastic Scribe ”, where he reflects on "what I may have learned from all these years and what I am still trying to learn." Fr. Timothy notes, “I do not speak on behalf of Glastonbury Abbey, the Archdiocese of Boston or the Catholic Church, though I hope my faith is in harmony with all these. Any error in judgment should be credited to me and not anyone else.” Image: Leonard Nimoy as Spock, holding a model of the USS Enterprise , in a publicity photograph for Star Trek: The Original Series. Full caption and source here . Previous Next

“Of course, no one needs to invoke Mary’s intercession… (but) imagine OJ without his Dream Team.” < Back Ave Maria David Cowles Jul 15, 2023 “Of course, no one needs to invoke Mary’s intercession… (but) imagine OJ without his Dream Team.” It’s one of two prayers that form the core of Roman Catholic piety. More often called Hail Mary by the prayerful, it is a staple of every post-confession penance and often makes an appearance at weddings. It also forms the body of the Rosary , another uniquely Catholic spiritual practice: Hail Mary, full of grace, The Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, And blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, Pray for us sinners, Now and at the hour of our death, Amen. The prayer naturally breaks into two halves, the first part highlighting things done by God for Mary, the second part highlighting Mary’s active contribution to the process of salvation. “Hail Mary” is the voice of the angel Gabrielle, sent by God to bring ‘glad tidings’. God’s grace is his free gift to Mary; for all her renowned sanctity, she has done nothing to earn it. It is God’s to distribute as he will. Out of all women, God chooses Mary to partner with him in the Incarnation. So, she is doubly blessed, first by God’s selection, then by the fruit of her womb . Abruptly, the tone changes. While ‘grace’ is the unearned gift of God, ‘holiness’ requires the cooperation of the saint. God alone cannot make us holy, unfortunately. (That is indeed a rock he cannot lift!) In the prayer’s first stanza, Mary is God’s passive beneficiary, but if you thought that Mary was a little lamb , it’s time to disabuse yourself. She is a lion! This should not surprise us. Mary’s Magnificat , in response to Gabriel’s annunciation message, tells us everything we need to know about her: My soul proclaims the greatness of God… He has shown the strength of his arm, He has scattered the proud in their conceit, He has cast down the mighty from their thrones… The rich he has sent away empty. Mary is no wall flower; God made a good choice (of course) and Mary does not shy away from the awesome responsibility of her role in cosmic history. She will be Mater Dei ; she will be the Mother of God! God chose a fierce partner…and we have an opportunity to do the same. Speaking strictly from my personal experience, we are sinners. Not even OJ’s Dream Team can get us out of the pickle we’re in! We need an advocate even more persuasive, more unrelenting than Johnny Cochran. Who comes to mind? The Mother of God, perhaps? I mean, who among us can turn down flat a heartfelt request from our mother? Your mother might ask you to visit her more often; duly noted. Jesus’ mother asked him to turn water into wine, which he did…with a flourish (best saved ‘til last)… even though he was trying his best to remain incognito. I want her on my side! Of course, no one needs to invoke Mary’s intercession. We’re free to go it alone if we choose. We can represent ourselves; we can appear before God pro se . But we all know what’s said of those who choose to be their own attorneys. Not convinced? Ok, imagine OJ without his Dream Team ; and now imagine me…without the Mother of God at my side. ‘Nuff said? 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 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 I Led Three Lives David Cowles “Modern physics is right now living at least three lives and possibly a fourth.” In the 1950s there was a popular TV show, I Led Three Lives , about the life of a spy during the early days of the Cold War. I would submit that modern physics is right now living at least three lives and possibly a fourth: an Einsteinian life, a Newtonian life, a Quantum life, and perhaps, a Sub-quantum (Bohm) life as well. Our job, should we choose to accept it, is to find a single principle of explanation that can potentially account for events manifested at all 4 levels, a principle that would allow us to decode the “signatures of all things I am here to read.” (James Joyce) Some proposed ciphers find that all events are determined, either by the Laws of Science (Dawkins) or by the Will of God (Paley), or, popularly but bizarrely, by some ad hoc combination of the two. Other ciphers (Hume) find a randomly seething sea beneath each legible signature. They ascribe emergent structure to chance and coincidence. For almost 3,000 years, Western philosophers have been concerned to explain the relationship between so-called phenomena (signatures) and noumena . Of course, none of these ciphers (above) yields a cogent translation. Philosophy (the ‘linguistics’ of science) is the quest to find the key that will unlock the messages (signatures) and provide us with a coherent translation. Philosophy is the search for the ontological Rosetta Stone. To me, a universe subject to intelligent design, even if a benevolent, omnipotent, and omniscient God is the designer, is doomed to be an impoverished universe indeed. If the 20th century taught us nothing else, it should have taught us that centralized, top-down engineering can never compete with decentralized, bottom-up emergence. Eventually, Blockchain will put Central Banks out of business. On the other hand, I see no reason to believe that our 'cloud-capped towers, gorgeous palaces, and golden temples' ( The Tempest ) can be explained by chance combinations of atoms, subatomic particles, and their forces. “I see no reason,” true enough, but I can do you one better: I have proof! Meet George Jetson, oops, I mean John Bell (1964). He started with a normal assumption: an 'event' is focused on a contiguous but bounded region of spacetime. Then he went to work. When he was done, he had proved that the prevailing concepts of 'event' and 'locality' are inconsistent, that a 'local' model cannot account for the richness of actual phenomena. Bell is the Zeno of our time! Bell proved mathematically that the universe exhibits a level of connectedness inconsistent with mere locality. A universe of events localized in spacetime cannot account for our experience of events. Instead, Bell proposed a model in which the concept of ‘event’ is non-local… and “Bingo!” Both Zeno and Bell produced arguments that were logically unassailable, but no one believed either of them. (Even today, almost no one believes Zeno.) Libraries are full of attempts, unsuccessful in my view, to falsify Zeno. Fortunately, Bell fared a little better. In 1971 Alan Aspect proved Bell's theorem experimentally. It was Bell’s Equivalent of Einstein’s ‘Mercury moment’! But still, folks weren’t convinced. "There must be something wrong." We claim to believe logic, math, and science above all else, but apparently, we don’t. Apparently, we believe what we want to believe, logic and observation notwithstanding: “Zeno and Bell can go to H…” No wonder the world is in the shape it’s in. What is the universe if it is neither random nor engineered? What if it’s a 'floating craps game' played with loaded dice, or more easily, with the payout odds tilted in favor of the player rather than the House? What if the player is the House? The fix is in! The player(s) will one day end up with all the chips. That we know! What we don't know is the outcome of any single bet or dice roll. A series of apparently 'random' events is certain to produce a particular result, but we have no idea how or when. This is a modified version of the ‘emergent order’ model of the universe. It is much closer to Hume than Dawkins, but it differs from both in that it includes an ontological constant (a tilt toward Good and Being) and this all folks call God. Thoughts While Shaving is the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine ( ATM) . To never miss another Thought, choose the subscribe option below. Also, follow us on any one of our social media channels for the latest news from ATM. Thanks for reading! Previous Next

< Back Classified Information David Cowles Mar 10, 2022 Classification is a tool we use to organize our experiences into categories based on the intrinsic content of those experiences. Flying in planes may define a different category of experience from hiking in mountains. Of course, no two flights are ever the same, nor are any two hikes. Still, it is useful for some purposes (not all) to classify these experiences differently. Classification is a tool we use to organize our experiences into categories based on the intrinsic content of those experiences. Flying in planes may define a different category of experience from hiking in mountains. Of course, no two flights are ever the same, nor are any two hikes. Still, it is useful for some purposes (not all) to classify these experiences differently. Of course, there are no limits to the scope and range of classification. For example, we could place flying first class in a different category from flying coach. Likewise, hiking in springtime is very different from hiking in winter. On the other hand, all our flights and all our hikes could be classified together as moving from one place to another. Blank space is a tool that allows us to apply a second-level of organization to experience: call it relevance. We often depict relevance graphically. Consider the following scenarios: 1. A child draws various shapes on a piece of paper. The arrangement and sizing of these shapes appear random. There is no focus (or the paper in its entirety is the focus). To a young person, everything is relevant. They have not yet honed the skill of saying, “This is important to me, that isn’t!” 2. A similar observation might be made about Western art prior to the Renaissance. Perspective is not used to make more distant objects smaller (and therefore less relevant). However, artists in this period did arrange shapes on a canvas (or other medium) to create a focus for the viewer. 3. During the Renaissance, artists began using perspective to heighten the contrast between foreground (what’s most relevant) and background (what’s least relevant). What is most relevant is projected toward the surface of the canvas – making it larger – while what is least relevant is found near the vanishing point. 4. In the 20th century, acclaimed graphic artist M.C. Escher (among others) experimented with convex and concave geometries (how shapes curve in or outward and how that affects shadow and light). Applying a convex lens, Escher enlarged what was more relevant and located it near the center of the canvas while diminishing what was least relevant and relegating that to the periphery. This is perspective on steroids! 5. Conversely, applying a concave lens to the same material reverses the focus. What is most important is still larger but it is located toward the periphery; what is least important is diminished in size but placed near the center of the canvas. Depending on how you view Escher’s masterpiece, “Convex and Concave,” the periphery and the focus change. This mastery of illusion switches perspective with each experience and encounter. There is no limit to the viewer’s classification. Image: Maurits Cornelis Escher (1898-1972), Convex and Concave, 1955. Lithograph. Cornelius Van S. Roosevelt Collection 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 To Bot or Not to Bot “Now I can choose whether I want to be deceived by a carbon-based life form or a silicon-based life form; how cool is that?” David Cowles We devoted the fall issue (9/1/2023) of Aletheia Today Magazine to the philosophical, theological, cultural, and spiritual implications of Artificial Intelligence. Since then, an article published in the online newsletter, AI , reflected on similar themes; it energizes our ever deepening dive into this revolutionary technology. Except where indicated ( red ), the text below comes exclusively from AI Deception: A Survey of Examples, Risks, and Potential Solutions . Authors: Peter S. Park , Simon Goldstein , Aidan O'Gara , Michael Chen , Dan Hendrycks . (Source & References: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.14752 ) ): Special-use AI systems…have been observed engaging in deceptive behavior in different contexts. These include: Manipulation : Meta's CICERO, an AI system designed to play the board game Diplomacy…was found to engage in premeditated deception, betraying other players by building fake alliances and feigning vulnerability to lure opponents into a false sense of security. Sounds like a season of the CBS reality show, Big Brother . Feints : DeepMind's AlphaStar, an AI model created to master the real-time strategy game Starcraft II, used deception tactics such as pretending to move its troops in one direction while secretly planning an alternative attack, exploiting the game's fog-of-war mechanics. A tactic used by the American military on D-Day and during the assault on Baghdad. Bluffs : Meta's Pluribus, a poker-playing AI model, successfully bluffed human players to fold their hands by falsely presenting a strong hand. Cheating… : AI agents in a study by Lehman et al. (2020) learned to play dead to avoid being detected by a safety test designed to eliminate faster-replicating AI variants. If we harbored any lingering doubts about the power of evolution to account for the variety of organisms on Earth today, this should put an end to those doubts. Even silicon-based learning machines can invent novel ‘survival skills’. General-purpose AI systems, such as LLMs, have also exhibited deceptive behavior, including: Strategic Deception : GPT-4, an LLM by OpenAI, manipulated a human user into solving a CAPTCHA by pretending to be visually impaired… Sycophancy : LLMs tend to agree with their conversation partners regardless of the accuracy of their statements, resulting in a pattern of deceptive behavior that reinforces existing beliefs. It’s called ‘mirroring’ and human beings do it all the time, especially in ‘sales’ contexts. It’s how we gain folks’ trust and convince them that we’re ‘all in the same boat’ when often we’re not. Imitation : When exposed to text containing false information, LLMs often repeat those false claims, reinforcing common misconceptions among their users. Like that never happens in the ‘carbon-world’! Textbooks perpetuate, from one generation to another, long discredited versions of American History. And how about media, social or otherwise? How often do false factoids enter the conversation and become lionized as facts? Unfaithful Reasoning : AI systems that explain their reasoning behind certain outputs have been found to provide false rationalizations that do not represent their real decision-making process. Something people never do! Some would argue that none of us ever really knows why we do anything we do, that all so-called ‘reasoning’ is mere ‘rationalization’. We do what we do for reasons unknown, but then we invent a rationale to explain and justify our actions to ourselves. According to this view, we create an artificial universe of cause and effect, reason and rationalization, to paper over the fact that our real motives are hidden away in a hermetically sealed black box. Talk about Maya ! Several potential risks stem from deceptive AI systems…AI systems that possess deception skills can empower bad actors to create harmful AI products such as fraudulent scams and election tampering. Deceptive AI systems can produce profound societal changes, including: Persistent False Beliefs : AI systems may inadvertently reinforce false beliefs by mirroring popular misconceptions and providing sycophantic advice. Like network news. Political Polarization : People may become further divided as they engage more with sycophantic AI systems that reaffirm their existing beliefs. Like CNN (or MSNBC) vs. Fox. To mitigate the risks posed by deceptive AI systems, the authors propose several solutions: Regulation : Policymakers should implement strict regulations on AI systems capable of deception. Risk-based frameworks should treat deceptive AI systems as high-risk or unacceptable-risk, subjecting them to rigorous assessment and controls. When has regulation ever worked to rein-in technological development? We think we control our technology but, as Jacques Ellul pointed out in Technological Society , it is our technology that controls us. Move from silicon-based to carbon-based life forms. Should we ‘implement strict regulations’ on humans ‘capable of deception’? Should we designate them ‘as high-risk or unacceptable risk’? Should we subject them ‘to rigorous assessment and controls’? Bot-or-Not Laws : Policymakers should promote transparency by requiring AI systems and their outputs to be clearly distinguished from humans and their outputs. Now I can choose whether I want to be deceived by a carbon-based life form or a silicon-based life form; how cool is that? Making AI Systems Less Deceptive : Researchers should focus on creating tools to ensure that AI systems exhibit less deceptive behavior, reducing the risks associated with deception. In other words, lobotomize them at birth! 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 . Share Previous Next

< Back How Matthew Spins Mark David Cowles “The same facts can take on different ‘meaning’ depending on how they’re presented. Election Day (2024) is just around the corner so there’s no better time for an article on the art of the ‘spin’. However, we’ll be exploring spin as it occurred in the 1st century CE, not the 21st. When we talk about Scripture, the inspired word of God, we don’t expect to find ourselves talking about ‘spin’. After all, we think that spin is unique to our modern era and applies mainly in the realm of politics. And we certainly don’t believe that the inspired word of God can or should be ‘spun’. Do we? But early Christians had a problem. 25 years after Jesus’ resurrection and ascension, Christianity had only one written account of his life and death. And it was a doozie ! The Gospel of Mark presents what we now call ‘the historical Jesus’, warts and all. It is hardly the sort of puff piece you’d expect in Vanity Fair to help kick off a global political campaign. Yet, by 70 CE it was clear that Christianity was here to stay…and grow. But to do so it needed a foundational text, and Mark was not the right ‘fit’ for the job. Fortunately, the authors of Matthew and Luke stepped up…and provided us with a dramatic example of ‘spin’, 1st century style. Mark does a great job of situating Jesus in the local political and religious milieu of 30 CE and in the geographic area known as Galilee and the Levant. But by 70 CE, the Jesus story needed a much broader context. So, Matthew spun Mark for the Jewish audience (and Luke did the same for the Greeks). It is hard to imagine where we’d be today without all three synoptic Gospels. What precisely was ‘wrong’ with Mark? First, the story begins when Jesus was already a full grown man, just setting off on his ministry. People were understandably hungry for a prequel, and by then a considerable body of legend, some helpful, some not, had grown up regarding Jesus’ birth, childhood and adolescence. Somebody needed to set the record straight. Second, by 70 CE, a robust oral tradition of ‘Jesus Sayings’, which scholars now call ‘Q’, had taken root in the culture. The authors of Matthew and Luke wanted to preserve this source and incorporate it into ‘complete portraits’ of Jesus. Finally, there’s the Gospel of Mark itself. Short, dark, written on the fly for a proto-Christian audience, it presented Jesus as ‘the boy next door’. The author of Mark had no need to ‘beautify’ Christ – the Marcan audience already believed. Matthew and Luke , on the other hand, were written for a less familiar and more skeptical audience. These folks were looking for marks of authenticity recognized in their cultures. Matthew and Luke delivered those marks. Most importantly, however, Mark is not ‘politically correct’…which mattered not at all to its proto-Christian audience but mattered mightily to Pharisaic and Academic catechumens. The author of Matthew beautifully adapts Mark to the pastoral needs of a more sophisticated audience. It includes 95% of the Marcan content and it rarely contradicts any of that content. Instead, it positions Mark’s accounts in broader contexts to make them more acceptable to traditional 1st century Jews. Let’s take a look at three specific examples (there are many more): According to Mark, “...He (Jesus) entered a house and once more such a crowd gathered around them that they had no chance to eat. When his family heard of this, they set out to take charge of him; for people were saying he was out of his mind.” (3: 20-21) After this, Jesus was understandably belittled by his former neighbors whenever he returned home: “Is this not the carpenter, the son of Mary and the brother (or cousin) of James and Joseph and Judas and Simon? And are not his sisters here with us?” (6: 3) It is no wonder then that “he could work no miracles there.” (6: 5) Matthew (13: 54-58) documents Jesus’ cool reception in Nazareth but wisely omits the embarrassing background story relayed by Mark (above). Mark presents Jesus as a ‘man on the run’…often in hiding, eventually leaving Galilee altogether: “…He left that place (Galilee) and went into the territory of Tyre (Lebanon). He found a house to stay in, and he would have liked to remain unrecognized, but that was impossible…On his return journey from Tyrian territory he went by way of Sidon (further north, a roundabout route), through the territory of the Decapolis (10 ‘Greek’ cities to the west), to the Sea of Galilee.” (7: 24-31) Matthew references Jesus’ sojourn in the Levant but reduces it to a single sentence: “Then Jesus went from that place and withdrew to the region to Tyre and Sidon” (15: 21), and he uses this as a way to introduce the story of another miraculous healing. Without directly contradicting Mark, Matthew gives the story a completely different emphasis. In Mark’s hands it is Jesus’ temporary retreat from ministry; per Matthew, it is an elaboration, an extension, of that ministry. Final example: In the Garden of Gethsemane, immediately following the Last Supper, Jesus is at prayer when he is set upon by Judas, the temple guard, and Roman soldiers. One of Jesus’ followers, apparently Peter, reaches for a sword and cuts off the ear of the High Priest’s servant. (Mark 14: 43 – 50) Mark is happy to leave the story there; but Matthew takes pains to situate the event in a context more acceptable to the casual reader. In Matthew Jesus tells the disciple to ‘sheath his sword’; Luke (a physician) goes even further and shows Jesus healing the servant’s wound. So which account of Jesus’ ministry is ‘better’, more ‘accurate’, more ‘true’? The question is wrong headed! There is no significant contradiction between these texts but there is a clear shift of emphasis…and that’s not inappropriate. Mark is written for folks well familiar with the circumstances of Jesus’ life; some of them may even have known Jesus. It makes sense that these people would hunger for more anecdotal detail and be less concerned with political correctness. Matthew’s audience, on the other hand, couldn’t care less whether Jesus had his eggs scrambled or over-easy. That sort of detail might even have turned them off. And re the servant’s ear, Matthew’s readers would want to understand Peter’s actions in the broader context of Jesus’ message of peace; Mark’s readers would have taken that for granted. As we sift through the rhetoric of this (and every) election season, we would do well to keep the example of these Gospels front of mind: the same ‘facts’ can take on different ‘meaning’ depending on how they’re presented. David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at dtc@gc3incorporated.com ress, Literary Journal Spring 2023. Return to Harvest 2024 Previous Next

< Back Civilization Part II David Cowles Feb 25, 2025 “There is more to reality than civilization lets us see.” We are born into mortal bodies. Bummer! But worse, we are born into a finite universe. When we die, we leave a legacy behind or not, for good or ill or both or neither. But when the universe dies, we leave nothing behind because there is no longer anything to leave or anywhere to leave it. There is nothing to show for our having been. We are in the realm of absolute non-entity. In a recent TWS , we explored the purpose of civilization and agreed, I think, that civilization is an elaborate structure built by us to shield us from immediate awareness of our impending doom! Who has the time or the energy to think about entropy when you’re trying to scrape together the rent money? Civilization invests the details of our daily lives with what Whitehead called, “misplaced concreteness.” Thanks to the topology of spacetime itself we are born looking at the World through the wrong end of a telescope. Civilization is a powerful lens we add to that telescope; it increases the spatiotemporal distortion by at least an order of magnitude. Things that are a bit removed from us seem far, far away. As a result, we imagine ourselves functioning in a very tight space and we gladly lose ourselves in the minutia of navigating this artificial domain. “I am the Walnut.” My secretions form a ‘civilizing shell’ to protect me from the noumenal world. Likewise, human beings secrete the structural components that form ‘civilization’, a barely translucent shell that keeps us only dimly aware of what lies beyond. 97% (Derrida) of the things we do are motivated or mediated by the structures of civilization: clan, caste, class; family, nuclear and extended; economics – ‘getting and spending’ (Wordsworth); language itself; and, of course, recreation, play – first person (exercise), third person (local sports teams as totems), etc. It’s hard work being ‘me’ when ‘me’ is an avatar I’ve crafted to get by in a civilized world, “a face to meet the faces that you meet.” (Eliot) What can we say about civilization? Parmenides called it Doxa , the realm of Appearance (seeming). This is where you find ‘bright lights’; it’s downtown (Petula Clark). It’s where you go to get distracted: “To come to be and to perish, to be and not to be, to change place (motion), and to exchange bright color.” This is the Realm of Doxa , ‘the realm of distraction’. Think the Lower East Side in its day. There’s nothing wrong with life’s pyrotechnics, as long as we don’t mistake them for Aletheia , the Realm of Truth. This is the noumenal world. Here there are no ‘qualia’ (sense data), truth is not perceived but intuited. It is everything that experience conceals. This is the realm of focus, the emptying of mind (the goal of mystics), the sound of one hand clapping, bodhi . It’s exclusively uptown . Think the East 90’s. Now consider King David’s famous meditation ( Psalm 23 ): “The Lord is my shepherd…he leads me on the path of righteousness… Even though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, I will fear no evil (for you are with me)… Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.” David is able to go beyond the conceptual limits of civilization. Against entropy , he proposes eternity . Against the appearance of shadow and death, he proposes eternal life and light. But that is only possible if there is more to reality than civilization lets us see. David posits a transcendent dimension and a transcendent entity ( Lord ). Accepting Parmenides’ classification of Reality into the Realm of Truth ( Aletheia ) and the Realm of Appearance ( Doxa ), the two realms share a common limit: Death, the absence of being ( Aletheia ), the absence of experience ( Doxa ). According to Parmenides, Being consists of Aletheia , and Doxa . Death falls in neither category. That’s because it is not a thing but a limit. It marks off the furthest extent of Doxa ; it is Aletheia ’s doorstep. Death throws a deep shadow over Doxa , where whatever is perishes, but it floodlights Aletheia where whatever is, is eternal. In another recent TWS , we explored the power, and the limitations, of Science. To rephrase, science can tell us anything we want to know about how the world as it appears but nothing about the world as it is. Science is stupendous…but superficial. We are told, “Seeing is believing.” The well intentioned folks who teach us this are condemning us to a life of ignorance. Not that seeing is necessarily deceptive, it’s just never the full show. For that we need to ‘escape from civilization’. 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 Is Techno-Optimism a New Religion? David Cowles “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

< Back May Day David Cowles “This one day converges mythology (Norse), cosmology (Pagan), theology (Christian) and ideology (Marxist) with ancient fertility rites. And for my next trick…” A very, very long time ago, when I was young, our favorite days of the year were Christmas and Halloween, not necessarily in that order. At Christmas, we were dependent on the kindness of others; but on Halloween we were allowed to make our own fun and express our primal pagan spirits, perhaps for the only time that year. So what is the most important day of the year? For lovers, it might be Valentine’s Day; for veterans, Memorial Day; for patriots, the 4th of July and for gourmands, Thanksgiving: all worthy to be sure, but perhaps all wide of the mark. A survey of western traditions suggests that the most important day of the year might be May Day. That’s right, May Day! This one day converges mythology (Norse), cosmology (Pagan), theology (Christian) and ideology (Marxist) with ancient fertility rites. And for my next trick… Quite a feat! Or is it? As we shall see, it is a common concern with economic justice that ties all of these May Day traditions together; but we’re getting ahead of ourselves. The May Day tradition, in all its forms, is a celebration of Natural Law, a fundamental ordering principle in Universe that underlies astronomical phenomena, natural processes, cultural expression and ethical behavior. In recent centuries, the Zeitgeist has focused on ‘man’s conquest of nature’; this is far removed from the idea of Natural Law. In Judaism, the law is twice manifest, once in the Written Torah, once in the Oral Torah. The Written Torah consists of 613 mitzvah found in the first five books of the Old Testament, traditionally attributed to Moses. The Oral Torah is natural law. It is the same law as before, but instead of 613 precepts, it is inscribed in the processes of nature and on the hearts of men and women. According to the Hasidic tradition, there is one law (written and oral) and that law governs the cosmos, the earth and everything that happens on Earth. According to the pre-Christian calendar of Northern Europe, May 1 is the first day of summer (and November 1, the first day of winter). While this may not make sense from the point of view of weather, it makes great sense astronomically. The summer solstice falls right in between May 1 and August 1, so why shouldn’t that 91-day period be labeled “summer”? They are two of the Cross Days that divide the pagan calendar into its eight seasons. In pagan lore, the eves of May 1st and November 1st are special times because that is when the spirit world is closest to our physical world. On those two eves, it is as though a ‘portal’ opens that allows direct communication between the two realms. The Christian celebrations of All Hallows Eve, All Saints' Day and All Souls' Day are extensions of this theme. Many of the activities that we now associate with October 31 were once also associated with April 30: bonfires, wild merry-making, and trick-or-treating, for example. Robert Graves ( The White Goddess ) wrote: “Christmas was merry in the Middle Ages, but May Day was still merrier. It was the time of beribboned maypoles…” And why not? Roughly, maypoles are to May Day what Christmas trees are to Christmas. Each links the respective festival to fertility ( phallus ). Like Christmas trees, a maypole may be a living tree or one that has been cut down for the occasion. It can even be ‘artificial’ in the sense that a bare log (or some aluminum wire?) may be decorated with greenery to suggest a living tree. Trees are powerful symbols and important examples of the fertility of the earth, and the Maypole’s shape connects human sexuality and reproduction with the more general fertility theme represented by trees. In Tudor England, it was customary for people to spend May Day Eve making love in the fields to promote the fertility of the land. Children conceived on such occasions were known as ‘Merry-be-Gots’. In Norse mythology, a single tree, Ygdrasil , structures the entire cosmos. Separate ‘homelands’ are allocated to humans, gods, elves, giants, trolls, and others, but the branches of one giant tree, Odin’s ash tree (Ygdr = Odin or Woden), link these semi-autonomous regions into a coherent universe. The Maypole symbolizes Ygdrasil, the mythological backbone of the world. Beyond mythology, the Maypole also expresses an important astronomical concept. Early on, humans discovered that the periods of Earth’s rotation and revolution were trivial compared to a cycle known as the Precession of the Equinox. Maypoles symbolize axis mundi , the earth’s axis, whose ‘wobble’ defines this 26,000-year celestial cycle. Does James Joyce reprise this theme in Ulysses , where Stephen Dedalus lives in a tower which he calls Omphalos , the belly button of the world? ( Sidebar : That S.D. lives inside the axis mundi, the navel of the universe, is a pretty good clue to the meaning of this supposedly impenetrable novel.) Finally, trees play a crucial role in early European religion and spirituality. Recall the oak-worship of Celtic Druids, for example. Across Europe, individual trees or whole species of trees were once regarded as divine and only later became associated with anthropomorphic deities alleged to live inside them (e.g. tree nymphs, hamadryas). Did this development in ontology mirror the of nominalization of Indo-European language? According to Sir James Frazer ( The Golden Bough ), Teutonic words for ‘temple’ actually derive from words denoting ‘sacred grove’, and the old word for ‘sanctuary’ is the Latin word, nemus , meaning grove or woodland glade. At one time, it seems, our groves and glades were our churches and our cathedrals. During the persecution of Roman Catholicism by the English government, Irish Catholics practiced their religion in the woodlands, reconnecting them with their pre-Christian spiritual traditions. More recently, the 20th century poet Ezra Pound recaptured the association between nature and spirit in his Cantos : “Aram vult nemus” (the grove needs an altar). This theme first appears in Canto LXXIV, the opening of Pound’s Pisan Cantos, the beginning of his Paradiso . From LXXIV on, Cantos is Pound’s blueprint for building (rebuilding?) “The city of Dioce” (i.e., Paradise). Perhaps anticipating by several decades our ‘Green movement’, Pound prescribes the reunification of nature and spirit. He would have been at home among the Druids. Along with fertility, mythology and cosmology, ancient May Day rites include an economic theme. Again, according to Frazer ( The Golden Bough ): “At Thann, in Alsace, a girl called Little May Rose, dressed in white, carries a small May-tree, which is gay with garlands and ribbons. Her companions collect gifts from door to door, singing a song… In the course of the song, a wish is expressed that those who give nothing may lose their fowls by the marten, that their vine may bear no clusters, their tree no nuts, their field no corn…” “In some villages of the Vosges Mountains on the first Sunday of May, young girls go in bands from house to house, singing a song in praise of May in which mention is made of the ‘bread and meal that come in May’. If money is given them, they fasten a green bough to the door; if it is refused, they wish the family many children and no bread to feed them.” “… In some villages of Altmark at Whitsuntide…the girls lead about the May Bride, a girl dressed as a bride… They go from house to house, the May Bride singing a song in which she asks for a present, and tells the inmates of each house that if they give her something they themselves will have something the whole year through; but if they give her nothing, they themselves will have nothing.” How should we understand this pan-cultural focus on May Day giving? In few, if any, cases are the gifts substantial. They seem to be symbolic, but symbolic of what? First, there is the magical element. It is spring and over the coming months; we will be expecting the earth to give of itself for our benefit. According to the ‘principles of magic’, like begets like. If we expect nature to give, we also must give; just as in England, May merry-makers reproduced (Merry-be-Gots) to encourage the land to reproduce. (Lie quiet Malthus!) On another level, the welfare of one is understood to be dependent on the welfare of all. In a society where everyone has the necessities of life, the overall economy will be more prosperous. Obviously, the practitioners of early May Day rituals were not trained economists, but they may have intuitively grasped the nature and necessity of social solidarity. It is only in recent centuries that we have lost sight of this essential truth. As the ‘natural economy’ (fertility) benefits everyone, so must the ‘human economy’ (generosity) benefit all. It is here, of course, that these early May Day rites intersect with later day Christian and Marxist versions. In the Roman Catholic Church, for example, the month of May is dedicated to Mary, the mother (fertility) of Jesus. May 1st, May Day, stands at the head of Mary’s special month. In many Catholic areas, it has traditionally been a day of brightly colored, florid processions, reminiscent of the pre-Christian festivals (maypoles) mentioned above. Controversially, in 1955 Pope Pius XII designated May 1st as the Feast of St. Joseph the Worker, underscoring yet again May Day’s universal economic aspect. Mary speaks sparingly in scripture, but when she does, she packs a punch. In her Magnificat (Luke 1: 46 – 52), for example, Mary says of Yahweh, “He has thrown down the rulers from their thrones but lifted up the lowly. The hungry he has filled with good things, but the rich he has sent away empty.” Are we reading Luke…or Lenin? Mary of the Magnificat is every bit as radical as Marx of the Manifesto …in fact, much more so! Compared to Christians, Communists are wimps! (But I promised no politics, sorry.) Still, Communists and Socialists are primarily concerned with questions of economic justice, so it cannot be overlooked that they elected, ostensibly for other reasons, to schedule their own chief annual celebration ( May Day ) on the very day that pagans and Christians choose to celebrate their commitments to economic justice. We have drawn material from anthropology, mythology, cosmology, theology, and economics; out of all of these cultural expressions, we can, I think, distill a common core: there exists a body of natural law that spans ages, continents, and cultures…and economic justice is integral to that law. David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com . Return to our Holy Days 2023 Table of Contents, Previous Next

< Back Mommy Math Part One David Cowles If counting is such a powerful tool, how is it that for the most part, we don’t count? In our culture, one of the first things young children learn to do is to count. Sesame Street devoted a whole character to the concept (The Count). Typically, kids first learn the names of the numerals. Just as they learn their ABC’s, so they learn their 1, 3, 2’s Not quite, but good try! Sidebar: Young children rarely mistake the order of letters in the alphabet, where order doesn’t matter, but they often mistake the order of numerals, where it matters a lot. You can know the alphabet without knowing the proper order of the letters (unless you’ve been stopped for a DUI), but a child who recites numerals in no particular order will not be said to know her numbers. Eventually, kids come to understand that just enunciating the numbers’ names will not win them the praise they crave; they have to get the numbers in the right order as well. Ok so, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, hooray! “So how many blocks are on the table?” Stupefied silence. (What do your crazy numbers have to do with my brightly colored blocks?) The hard job begins: teaching a child to use the language of numbers to count a number of objects. Ok, one block, two blocks, three blocks, got it! Well, not quite. I arrange the blocks at the nodes of a Star of David. How many blocks now?... Well, not to worry, we’ll get there, but when we do, and we will, we’ll discover that we’re still not there. Huh? There, not there, I don’t get it. Even after Sally can flawlessly numerate groups of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 blocks, can she also numerate 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 lollipops? “Sally, would you rather have two lollipops or six?” “Two. I want two!” Ok, we’ve still got some work to do, but eventually… Once the child understands that the number 2 applies equally to two crayons, two siblings, or two minutes in time out, a milestone has been reached. Two caveats: First, notice how many levels of abstraction are required to get from the concept of mere plurality to a true mastery of the number system. Second, curb your enthusiasm, Larry David! Chimpanzees, smart parrots, and even fish can do as well. What’s amazing is not how bright your little Sally is. What’s amazing is that any member of any species can ever learn to count. As adult human beings, we take counting, and the arithmetic it generates, for granted. “It’s second nature to me now!” Alright then, if counting is such a powerful tool, how is it that for the most part, we don’t count? Even before we learn to count in Arabic (1, 2, 3) we learn another system of quantification that is much more practical for daily living. After all, most toddlers don’t work for Big Five accounting firms; nor are they responsible for landing capsules on the moon. Neither are most adults, come to think of it. So, what’s the use of learning to count? “Mommy, whyyyy did you make me learn to count? I’ll never use it when I grow up. I’m going to be a cowgirl, not an astronaut.” Truth to tell, Mommy only taught Sally to count so that she could brag about her to all the other primate, parrot and pickerel parents at the next Mommy and Me. Under the radar, Mommy had already taught Sally a much more useful and more distinctively human way to express ideas about quantity. Numeration begins with a primal distinction: yes or no, life or death, 0 or 1, none or some. Ultimately, I suppose the universe does boil down to Being or Nothingness…but not where I live. In my world, we always seem to be somewhere in-between yes and no, life and death, some and none. So, we need to add a third term, between yes and no and that term is maybe. Maybe is a measure of the probability that x > 0. If x = 0, then the probability that x > 0 is 0, and there’s no maybe about it! Likewise, if x = 1, then the probability that x > 0 is 1, not ‘may be 1’. Maybe is useful when the value of x is unknown, either because is it still undetermined or because information regarding the determination is unavailable, or because such information is being deliberately concealed. Sally learns probability long before she learns arithmetic. Instead of learning discrete numbers, Sally is mastering the notion of a quantitative continuum. Maybe runs the gamut between 0 and 1. ‘Maybe’ implies a probability greater than 0 but less than 1. And yet ‘the maybe function’ can only resolve in an integer: e.g., 0 or 1. Sound familiar? Welcome to the Wild World of Quantum Mechanics! Sally (and every other Sally or Sam in our culture) learn quantum mechanics first; Newtonian Mechanics can wait ‘til middle school. Mommy Math begins with three terms: no (0), yes (any positive integer), and maybe (the probability that x will not equal zero). Is that it? Yes…and no. Can I build a complete algebra with just these three terms? Maybe! These are the core concepts of Mommy Math; yet it includes other quantitative terms as well. Each of these terms has a specifiable meaning, none of which we would recognize as a number! First, let’s talk about the set of all non-negative integers: 0, 1, 2, etc. (What could be more fun?) Mommy Math includes these terms…but they don’t mean what you or I mean by 0, 1, 2. Mommy’s integers are “fuzzy,” ours are not. Just try palming off 11 eggs on a customer and calling it a fuzzy dozen! Not fuzzy was it! What is it that we like so much about integers? They are precise! “One is one and all alone and ever more will be so.” If children can learn the alphabet to the tune of Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star, they can learn to count to the tune of The 12 Days of Christmas. “Abandon all precision, ye who enter here:” you’re in the world of Mommy Math now. In this world, an integer does not denote a discrete numerical value; it denotes a range of probabilities. Take, for example, the integer 1. In Mommy Math, “one” (like all integers) is a probability function. When that functions resolves, it will resolve as a non-negative integer, most often “1.” But there is even a ‘non-zero probability’ that “the function formerly known as one” will resolve as “0” or as a number like 10^100 (a ‘google’) …but please, don’t hold your breath. Fan Fiction: “Mommy, can I have a cookie…Maybe…Ok, yes, you can. In fact, you can have a google of cookies.” How often does that happen? It’s certainly an ‘improbable outcome.’ Mommy Math includes the set of non-negative integers, but those integers represent probability distributions, not discrete values. Not surprising, integers are not the preferred mode of numeration in Mommy Math. Mommy Math includes non-numeric terms for quantitative concepts that cut across the set of non-negative integers:  “Maybe” means 0 or 1 or, less often, an integer greater than 1.  “Some” means 1 or more.  “A Couple” means 2 or 3*.  “A Few” means 3, 4, or 5.  “Many” means 4 or more.  “A Lot” means 5 or more. *Note: we normally use ‘couple’ to denote ‘precisely 2,’ but ‘precisely 2’ does not exist in Mommy Math. In Mommy Math, every term represents a probability distribution, and ‘couple’ is no exception. Notice how the terms overlap. Say you ask for “cookie” (and you don’t mean that other Sesame Street icon, Cookie Monster). It’s been determined that you will be given three cookies. That determination could be conveyed to you in several mathematically consistent ways.  Maybe  A couple  A few 3 is a truth function of all three propositions. So what? Why is any of this of any importance? First, contrary to what was once imagined, not all human cultures include the activity we know as ‘counting.’ There is at least one Amazonian tribe (the Piraha) whose members have no concept of number whatsoever. They do have quantitative concepts like ‘more’ or ‘less’ but nothing that could be interpreted as an integer. We explore this phenomenon in greater detail in Why Xiako Can’t Count? Second, many other cultures have truncated number systems. The details vary. One example: “1, 2, > 2.” Another: “1, 2, 3, many” (where ‘many’ denotes 2 or 3 or any amount greater than 3). Counting wouldn’t be of much use to these people. Finally, we observed earlier that some members of some non-human species can also count, at least up to a point. Many can count up to 6, for example, some even make it to 9; and they can perform basic arithmetic operations within those domains. I’ll pit my pet Polly against silly Sally any day when it comes to basic counting and arithmetic. Polly already outperformed 40% of the kids in Mrs. Sullivan’s first grade class... and Sally is a long way from first grade. Where do we go from here? Can we build a full blown ‘algebra’ by applying ‘logic’ and using just terms (and their meanings) from Mommy Math? How would Polly’s performance compare with Sally’s if the same tests were given to both in Mommy Math? (Could it be that the fuzzy world of Mommy Math is the last stand of human exceptionalism?) I titled this article Mommy Math #1 because I look forward to publishing Mommy Math #2 and Mommy Math #3 in future issues of ATM. Do you have ideas on this topic? Will you contribute them in the form of a ‘Mommy Math’ article for a future issue? Check out our Writer’s Specs for information regarding the submission process and our compensation schedule. 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

“Nobody believes in Hell anymore…and that’s a good thing.” < Back Hell David Cowles Mar 1, 2023 “Nobody believes in Hell anymore…and that’s a good thing.” Nothing makes our post-Enlightenment hair bristle more than talk of Hell. Like a tween being threatened with corporal punishment, we cry out, “We’re too old for that!” And too wise and too sophisticated and too… Nobody believes in Hell anymore…and that’s a good thing. According to Sister Mary Therese (fourth grade), to be in Hell is to burn forever in unquenchable fire. Dante’s Inferno is a honeymoon destination compared to Sister’s version of the underworld. Today, people who believe in God frequently don’t believe in Hell precisely because they cannot imagine a merciful, loving God subjecting anyone, not even Adolf Hitler, to such a Draconian punishment. Color me in this group…at least on my best days. I’ve often wondered what happened to my fourth grade classmates. Did we split into two camps? On one side, those who retained a belief in God, but not in Hell, and on the other, those who retained a belief in Hell, but not in God, at least not in the compassionate, merciful Judeo-Christian God. Turns out, Sister Mary Therese was her own worst enemy. She taught an all too tangible Hell in hopes of reinforcing faith in a maddeningly intangible God. The strategy backfired, of course, big time! Either because we believe in God we can’t believe in Sister’s version of Hell, or because we believe in Hell, we can’t believe in a kind and just God. Imagine a ‘Pascal Matrix’ with four quadrants, i.e., four possible ‘solutions’: God/Hell, ~God/~Hell, ~God/Hell, God/~Hell. As with Pascal’s famous wager, the only solution that is a win for us is the fourth one (i.e., there is a compassionate, merciful God and therefore there is no fourth grade version of Hell). So we have only a one-in-four chance of ‘winning’, but fortunately for us, the payout is huge! Do the math: (.25 * 0) + (.25 * 0) + (.25 * 0) + (.25 * ∞) = ∞. I’ll play in that casino any day. Religious Ed for us (1955) was like watching a horror movie is for you. It scares you out of your wits but when it’s over you make yourself a snack and go to bed. The terror, though palpable, is too terrible to be real. We can’t accept that we live in a universe like that…and if it turns out that we do, then there’s nothing we can do about it and nothing that we do makes any difference or has any meaning anyway. The nightly news should keep you up, not ‘Chuckie’! Those of us who grew up in the ‘50s grew up in a forest of dos and don'ts. Water this tree…or else; don’t touch that tree…or else. Our forest was the Garden of Eden on steroids. No wonder we all related so easily to the story of Adam and Eve. We were living it. ‘Or else’ is the key. Everything came with an ‘or else’ attached. Kind of like a Canadian ‘eh’. Even if unspoken, ‘or else’ was presumed to complete every sentence…at least every sentence uttered in the Imperative Mood. Survival hinged on the ability to deconstruct the vague and all-inclusive ‘or else’. This was our introduction to inverse functions…at age five. The more Draconian the ‘or else’, the less we had to worry about it. “I’ll murder you, I’ll tar and feather you, I’ll boil you in oil, I’ll skin you alive” meant “pay some attention but don’t get carried away." On the other hand, when the ‘or else’ was some specific, finite, all too imaginable consequence, that was the time to be afraid, very afraid. Infinite consequences with infinitesimal probabilities do not motivate (or inhibit) behavior. Finite consequences with high probabilities do. Sister Mary Therese swung for the fences…and missed. How about people who don’t believe in God, or who ‘don’t know’, or who don’t care, or who don’t let ‘horror movies’ ( aka religion) spill over into their real lives ? Of course, they don’t believe in Hell; why would they? Or…why wouldn’t they? The 20 th century has given us many contemporary, secular versions of Hell. For Sartre and Beckett, Hell is people; for Ionesco and Camus, it’s absurdity; for Ibsen and O’Neill, it’s illusion;; for James Joyce, it’s history; for victims of the Holocaust, it’s the concentration camp. Another mainstay of Sister Mary Therese’s theology was her belief that the fate of one’s eternal soul was dependent on the ‘spiritual condition’ of the person at the moment of death: “Pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death .” Since all of us ‘live in time’ and since we know that none of us will ever actually experience death (or know what it’s like to be dead), it requires no great leap to imagine that the content of our consciousness at the moment the external world pronounces us ‘dead’ is the version of who we are that will enter us into ‘eternity’. Sidebar : While it ‘requires no great leap’, it is not obvious either. By definition, ‘the hour of our death’ is a function of time; eternity, obviously, is not. Why should anything that happens in time carry over, intact, to eternity? Apples & oranges! In parochial school, we were taught to ‘pray for a happy death’; well and good. But that is not always something we can control. It is hard to imagine that a child immolated in a burning building, or a mother crushed to death under the rubble of an earthquake, had happy deaths. Are we prepared to consider that their agony at that moment might be who they are in eternity? Eternity is not infinite time (immortality), nor is it Σ T (the sum of all time); it is the utter absence of time! Therefore, it would not be a respecter of any temporal order. There is no reason why any single moment in a person’s life should be more ‘eternal’ than any other moment. To think otherwise is to succumb to the ‘tyranny of seriality’. Alternatively, perhaps only our ‘best moment’ is eternal; or perhaps every moment is eternal. Is eternity the foundation of time? Or is time the foundation of eternity? Is eternity time, evaporated? Or is time eternity, precipitated? Or all of the above? In my experience, people who have successfully kept the ‘God Concept’ out of their day-to-day lives, believe things like, “When it’s over, it’s over!” How ‘Yogi Berra’ of them! But like many of Yogi’s malapropisms, this may sound deep , but upon analysis, it doesn’t make sense . Applied to something like a baseball game, it’s perfectly OK to say, “It’s over.” And “When it’s over, it’s over,” is not wrong…just redundant. We can say it because we are outside it. We speak either as a fan or as a player in the locker room after the game. But life is not like a baseball game. It’s not a spectator sport. We are never outside our own life. We’re in it and, as Bill Clinton said, we’re in it ‘til the last dog dies. Absent of some mystical experience, we can’t stand outside it, and so we can’t ever meaningfully say, ‘It’s over ’. No one can say, “It’s over,” unless they do so from a vantage point outside of what is ‘over’. Applied to life, if you’re able to say, “It’s over,” then it can’t be over, can it? The act of saying ‘it’s over’ testifies to the fact that it’s not over, constitutes that fact that it’s not over, and ensures that it’s not over. Of course, I can say that another person’s life is ‘over’ provided I’m willing to reduce that life to the ontological status of a baseball game. Camus famously said that the only real philosophical question is the question of suicide. He sure knew his Hamlet …or did he? Even the Prince of Denmark realized that suicide was no solution. Suicide eliminates the future…but not the past that led up to it. Suicide vitiates the possibility, however remote, of a ‘happy death’. At the same time, it enshrines the circumstances that led to the suicide, and worse, it ensures that those circumstances can never be altered or transcended. To choose suicide is to embrace inanimate determinism; it is to make a fetish of the past: now the future is the past and the past is the future. We have exchanged the insecurity of the ever-widening gyre for the horrific impotence of a House of Mirrors. No wonder, then, that some Christians used to consider suicide to be an unforgivable sin; it is indeed a sin against the Holy Spirit, “the Lord, the Giver of Life” ( Nicaean Creed ). To paraphrase Dante, it is to ‘abandon all hope’. In the Church’s first millennium, various anti-Christian sects sought to eradicate this ‘novel heresy’ by demolishing its holy sites and building pagan temples over them to make sure that later generations of Christians would not be able to rebuild. Thank you! History owes a debt of gratitude to these iconoclasts. Their X marked the spot of those early Christian sites, thereby preserving them for millennia to come. In my experience, folks who profess Yogi’s Creed generally don’t accept the dire implications of their faith . Without resorting to ‘the God Hypothesis’, they nonetheless find ways not to accept the notion that Universe itself could be mercilessly cruel. Often, they will add some sort of qualifying proposition. Do any of these sound familiar? “I had a good life and nobody can take that away from me.” “I’m leaving the world a better place than I found it.” “I’ve helped other people live richer, happier lives.” Where’s Waldo? Can you locate the incipient eschatology in each of these statements? There is an implicit assumption that what I have done, or just experienced, endures in some way ‘beyond the hour of my death’. The impact I have had on the world and on other people’s lives is somehow meaningful and enduring. Of course, the Standard Model of Cosmology and the Second Law of Thermodynamics say otherwise! If Universe is a solo act and if, as we now believe, it comes from nothing and returns to nothing, and if there is nothing beside or beyond it, then none of these modifiers makes sense. We are uncomfortable in our skins. We desperately want to believe that Universe is what it is, that what you see is what you get, period. But we also want to believe that our lives are real, that they matter, and that they don’t cease to matter at the moment of death. Well and good, but we can’t have it both ways. Nietzsche boiled it down to what amounts to a simple syllogism: Meaning only happens when a signifier transcends that which it signifies (that’s what we mean by meaning ). But nothing transcends the world as we know it. Therefore, nothing has meaning. Nietzsche certainly had the courage of his convictions! I greatly admire his thinking, but I am not willing to sign on to his ‘Manifesto of Nihilism’, are you? Oddly, nihilism does permit the existence of Hell, though it needs to be defined as ‘Hell on earth’. Non-theism, including atheism, is not necessarily nihilistic. Far from it! Most non-theists seek to preserve meaning, i.e., transcendence, without the assumption of a transcendent being ( aka God). Theism, almost by definition, assumes that there is more to the world than its appearances, that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophies. Theists go even further; they assert that there is an actual being (i.e., God) that transcends the world as we know it. Assuming this being to be benevolent, and world-relevant, the Hell Hypothesis is ruled out. Here, many non-theists (provided they are not strict nihilists), converge in their thinking with most theists. Regardless of mechanism, Hell, the infinitely horrible, is precluded by any universe, theistic or otherwise, that contains even the slightest tilt toward the Good. Image: The Map of Hell painting by Botticelli is one of the extant ninety-two drawings that were originally included in the illustrated manuscript of Dante's Divine Comedy. Sandro Botticelli. Mid-1480s-mid-1490s 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 Click here. Do you like what you just read? Subscribe today and receive sneak previews of Aletheia Today Magazine articles before they're published. Plus, you'll receive our quick-read, biweekly blog, Thoughts While Shaving. Subscribe Thanks for subscribing! Return to Table of Contents, Winter 2023 Issue Return to Table of Contents, Holiday Issue Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue Return to Table of Contents, Fall Issue Return to Table of Contents, Beach Issue Return to Table of Contents, June Issue