Explore Aletheia Today's Groundhog 2025 issue: where philosophy, theology, and culture intersect. From Mark’s Gospel to Parmenides, faith, and love—thought-provoking insights await! Inside Groundhog 2025 Philosophy From Marx to Mark “The Gospel of Mark is no biography…It’s a call to action, a manifesto, a How to manual for non-violent guerilla warriors everywhere, 1st century…or 21st.” After Parmenides... “Western philosophy is the history of our effort to understand the silence of Parmenides, or to break it.” Theology Apocalypse Now! “We are not midway through the Second Act of a Mystery Play called Salvation… Brunhilda has sung; we just need to applaud!” Christian Anarchism ”A heretical state is not a bad state…A heretical state is not a state at all. There are no bad states. There are only states and pseudo-states.” Culture & The Arts Be Proud...of Yourself! “I’m proud of you is code for I’m not proud of you at all.” We All Live in a Yellow Submarine “The occasional dragon notwithstanding, we hardly ever see monsters in Liverpool anymore.” Spirituality Ephesians 2:10 “In this one verse…St. Paul proposes a radically new model of what it means to be a human being.” Faith, Hope, Love “When we truly love, the Kingdom is already ‘come’ and God’s will is already ‘done.'" Readers React What's the buzz about? Our readers' reactions to Aletheia Today... Additional Reading Can't get enough of Aletheia Today's content? Check out the books that inspire our magazine.

“Eat or be eaten, kill or be killed. It’s a terrible way to live! But we’re living it…(but) it wasn’t always this way, and it doesn’t…have to be this way.” < Back Middle Voice David Cowles Mar 1, 2023 “Eat or be eaten, kill or be killed. It’s a terrible way to live! But we’re living it…(but) it wasn’t always this way, and it doesn’t…have to be this way.” According to Benjamin Whorf, language is a record of how we see the world, and conversely, language conditions us to see the world in a particular way: a paradigmatic, if somewhat diabolical, example of non-linear, auto-reinforcing process. Take English, for example. When we speak, most of our verbs are either active or passive . We call that the “voice” of the verb. In an active/passive voiced language, we are always doing something to someone (or something) or someone (or something) is doing something to us: eat or be eaten, kill or be killed. It’s a terrible way to live! But we’re living it. The Lex Talionis (‘eye for an eye’), literally the law of retaliation , is the paradigmatic expression of such an active/passive world view. Scotty broke the vase: active voice. Scotty is called the ‘subject’ and my poor Ming is called the ‘object’ of his action. This construction first separates Scotty from what he’s done. In fact, Scotty’s action itself assumes the status of an object; it is something Scotty possesses: “ his action”. Scotty acted, and the vase ‘reacted’ (by shattering). The flow is in one direction: it’s a vector. Alternatively, the vase was broken by Scotty: passive voice. It’s the same event but this time seen from the point of view of the victim, my precious artifact. The vase is now the subject, but the action is still unidirectional, still a vector. In one sense, the active and passive voices are opposites; but in another sense, they are really the same thing. (How often that is true in our world!) They both describe the same event, in the same way, but just from opposite viewpoints. So we can say that English is an ‘active/passive voiced language’. Syntax speaks volumes about how we understand events, and, therefore, how we understand the world. An action, according to our grammar, is a vectored relationship between two unequal participants, a terribly minor, in not null, subset of all that goes on in our world. The world consists solely of events. If our preferred way of defining an event is in terms of a unidirectional relationship between unequal participants, then for us the world will consist primarily of such actions. This will be the logos we impose upon the world, and our language will reflect that logos . Of course, it works both ways. To a large extent, we learn about the world through language. Our language teaches us to see our world in terms of unequal, unidirectional relationships. Our language creates our logos, thereby defining our world for us. Putting it another way, we create our world in the image and likeness of our language. Does this language serve our purposes ? You bet it does! It’s hard to imagine a Golden Gate Bridge without it. Our language essentially reduces Being to a schematic. But does such a language actually meet our needs ? Not so much! In the real world, action is rarely, maybe never , entirely one directional. “I hit the nail” is actually an abstract simplification of a much more complex process. When my hammer connects with the nail head, the nail moves (hopefully) and the hammer recoils (predictably) sending vibrations down my arm…and that’s assuming I didn’t also hit my thumb in the process. Syntax unravels the unity of being and displays it like a collection of butterflies pinned to the wall of a natural history museum. The fact is that every real action acts on the so-called subject as well as on the so-called object. In the example of Scotty and the vase, that reality is somewhat trivial and can probably be safely ignored…that is, unless I accept Scotty’s explanation that the vase jumped off the shelf and attacked him, possibly the act of a neighborhood genie. And why not, the very same thing happened at Billy’s house just last week. It’s a pattern you see. Better call Ghostbusters ! But did you notice the real ‘ghost’ in this story? It’s Scotty’s language. He translated what might have been an accident into the intentional action of a genie. But what if we’re trying to model a chemical reaction, or worse, a quantum mechanical process, or even worse, some sort of ecological phenomenon? How do we describe these events using just active and passive verbs? We can’t. At best, we can approximate clumsily in simple situations. “Two hydrogen atoms each lend an electron to one oxygen atom; or an oxygen atom borrows an electron from each of two hydrogen atoms.” (Hint: it’s water!) When we get into more complex interactions, language breaks down completely, and we have to resort to diagrams (e.g. Feynman diagrams) or equations or shoulder shrugs. Now imagine the difficulty of modeling complex human interactions using just active and passive voice verbs! No wonder we’re always at war with one another. And our politics? Of course, we see the world in terms of “us” and “them”; of course, we see social change in terms of class warfare. It’s the Golden Rule after all: she who has the gold, rules. Nonetheless, most of us are resigned to this state of affairs. It’s just the way things are. How could it be otherwise? Easily! And the fact is, it wasn’t always this way, and it doesn’t necessarily always have to be this way. Many ancient languages had another voice which linguists call the Middle Voice . The middle voice is ideally suited to model situations where relationships are between equals and where action is reciprocal. Linguists disagree about the place of the middle voice in the evolution of language, but it is at least possible that the middle voice preceded both the active and passive voices. Modern linguists struggle to understand the middle voice. Conditioned by their own active/passive logoi , they want to understand this verb form as somewhere in between the active and passive poles. Hence, the term “middle voice”. In fact, the middle voice has nothing to do with its active/passive cousins. It is a completely different way of viewing the world. The middle voice verb form describes an action that impacts both subject and object simultaneously; or it describes a reciprocal relationship between two co-subjects who are also co-objects. That’s what process is; that’s what an event is. Anything else is just an abstraction. Analogy : If the active voice is the voice of the future and the passive voice the voice of the past, then the middle voice is the voice of the Present. Imagine what our world would look like if we viewed it in terms of reciprocal relations and omnidirectional events! Would that change the way the world is? Or would it just enable us to see it as it really is? Both. We’d see the world through a different filter, and in turn, we’d most likely act quite differently in such a world. How do we talk about love using active and passive verbs? The best we can come up with is something lame like, “Mary and Paul are in love with one another.” This turns love into a static state rather than a raging fire. The middle voice, on the other hand, is ready-made to describe the relationship between Mary and Paul in a way that does it justice. The active and passive voices describe the same event in the same way; they merely reverse the point of view. The middle voice defines that same event in an entirely different way. The active/passive voice sees the world from the outside; the middle voice sees the world from the inside: objectivity vs. subjectivity. Thus, we have two opposing world views: an active/passive view and a middle voice view. One sees the world in terms of will, struggle, domination, and power; the other sees the world in terms of mutuality. One is the syntax of war, the other of peace. One is the syntax of cause and effect, the other of evolution. One is the syntax of past and future, the other of the present. Unfortunately, however, most Western languages have lost the middle voice. Where the middle voice has been retained (e.g. Icelandic), it has been forced to co-exist with its active/passive cousins, and it no longer conveys the strong sense of reciprocity it once did. The poverty of an active/passive voiced language and the lack of a strong middle voice alternative is not just a linguistic problem; it’s a philosophical problem and ultimately a theological problem. One way to understand ‘the Christian project’ is as an attempt to reintroduce middle-voice consciousness to the world. Of course, I am not suggesting that the New Testament authors, much less Jesus himself, were budding linguists. Yet, they understood that there was something fundamentally wrong with the way folks viewed the world and, with incredible insight, they sought to change that view. When you view events and the actions that constitute them in terms of unequal, unidirectional power relations, it becomes easy to abuse or exploit your neighbor...and impossible to love her as yourself. Even today, certain sub-cultures will brand you a sucker or a wimp or a ‘goodie two shoes’ if you do not take advantage of the weaker folks in your orbit. “It’s just business!” Active/passive-voiced languages conflict with values like justice and kindness. It is difficult to inculcate an ethic of justice, reciprocity and love in folks who view the world according to the active/passive paradigm. In this sense, ‘bad language’ could be seen as humanity’s ‘original sin’: the second commandment is just an extension of the first. Christianity, especially in its early stages, sought to replace the active/passive world view with the world view that we are calling ‘middle voice consciousness’. In the Lord’s Prayer, for example, we read, “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” 12 centuries later, Francis of Assisi built on this insight: “It is in pardoning that we are pardoned.” Whatever we do, we do to ourselves to the same degree and in the same way and at the same time as we do it to others. That goes for positive actions like forgiveness and negative actions like violence. “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Why? Because in middle voice consciousness, your neighbor is yourself! Beginning with Leo XIII (1878 – 1903), modern Popes have railed against economic injustice, but they have done so from the middle voice perspective of universal love ( agape ) rather than class consciousness. 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. 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< Back “If I only had a Brain” David Cowles Feb 22, 2026 So lamented the loveable Scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz.” Scarecrow can be forgiven! We have developed a fetish for the grey matter inside our skulls. We know that when we think, we utilize intercellular processes in our brains. It is easy to see why we (or Scarecrow) might think that those brains were an essential precondition of thought itself. But turns out, brains are overrated! Consciousness is opportunistic: it co-opts physical structures as it finds them and retrofits them for its purposes. The neural structure of the human brain seems ideally suited: “Oh, the things I could do with this !” The long held hypothesis of ‘human exceptionalism’ seems justified. There are, however, three potentially serious problems with an anthropocentric model like this. First, there are abundant signs of consciousness throughout the animal kingdom, and there are reasons to believe (see below) that consciousness may also occur in other ‘kingdoms’, e.g. among plants (forests), fungi (the Wood Wide Web), and, yes, even bacteria and other unicellular organisms (slime mold). Second, we need a model of consciousness that can account for the possibility of intelligent, extra-terrestrial life that may use an entirely different chemistry as its substratum. And third, we need to be able to account for signs of consciousness, now or in the future, as they arise in silicon based AI. In the February 2026 Issue of New Scientist , Conor Feehly quoted Tom Froese (Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology): “The origins of agency (consciousness) coincide with the origins of life (itself).” I am… therefore I think. Feehly also noted: “Theoretical biologist Michael Levin and his colleagues at Tufts University in Massachusetts recently applied cognitive tools to systems far simpler than even basic, single-celled organisms ...” In a previous post on this site we explored Michael Levin’s study of the cognitive abilities of Slime Mold . Unlike most unicellular organisms, a slime cell can be visible to the naked eye, growing to as much as a foot in diameter. But here Feehly went further: “Surprisingly, even simple networks of biomolecules appear to display some degree of a self… In 2022, complexity scientist Stuart Bartlett at the California Institute of Technology and David Louapre at Ubisoft Entertainment in Paris, France, found that simple ‘autocatalytic’ chemical systems, which react together to replicate themselves, could also learn by association. “In autocatalysis, one chemical is fed into the system as fuel, while another chemical is produced by consuming that fuel. The pair found that the reaction rate between these two chemicals is influenced by previous patterns in the concentration of available fuel – a behavior that Bartlett describes as a ‘primitive form of learning’.” In our previous post (above) we explored the cognitive abilities of Slime Mold. We compared the performance of slime with that of a supercomputer and the results surprised even me. Think Achilles and a certain tortoise! A recent article in Knowable Magazine (2/11/2026) spelled it out: “Some slime molds of the species Physarum Polycephalum consist of one giant, pulsating cell that keeps changing shape as it moves around and branches out to access food and avoid unpleasant things like salt or light. “But it took a 2010 experiment led by Japanese biologist Toshiyuki Nakagaki of Hokkaido University to reveal the depths of its sophistication. When Nakagaki placed the oat flakes that Physarum likes in a pattern mimicking the cities surrounding Tokyo, the slime mold’s branches almost exactly reproduced (in just a few hours) the efficient transport connections between them that humans had taken years to develop.” Nakagaki compared the achievements of Slime Mold with those of a supercomputer, based on the 25 nodes (stations) that constitute the Tokyo area railway system. Both were asked to optimize routes balancing several different variables simultaneously, understanding that there could be more than one ‘right answer’ (a ‘Pareto Frontier’). The supercomputer solved the problem in several hours with 100% accuracy. The Slime Mold solved the problem in the same (or less) time but achieved only 91% – 96% accuracy. However, because it was more fault tolerant, mold came up with attractive solutions (i.e. points near the Pareto Frontier) that the ‘perfect’ computer had to rule out. So a draw? Not bad for slime! But there’s more to the story: Suppose Tokyo decides to open a new station or close an existing one. Every time a change is made, even to just one node and even just temporarily, our supercomputer must solve the problem from scratch. Think GPS : Every time you make a wrong turn, it recalculates your entire route; sometimes the new route barely intersects the old one. Apply that to Tokyo Rail. Imagine if they closed one station only to have AI tell them that now they have to reconnect all the stations in the system. Talk about dysfunctional! Being Slime Mold, on the other hand, means ‘never having to say you’re sorry’, never having to start over. Why would it? Slime modifies its existing model incrementally the same way Tokyo modifies its transit network; there’s no such thing as rebuilding from scratch in the real (organic) world. Modern Rome rests on Caesar’s ruins. Note : I am a direct descendant of Planet Earth’s first DNA equipped cell. So are you, dear cousin; and so is your pet goldfish. Slime Mold is a form of distributed intelligence, like blockchain; it compulsively preserves the past and builds off it. A supercomputer, on the other hand, is the paradigmatic central planner, periodically ‘starting over’ with a new and improved economic plan for the People’s Republic. A computer starts fast and achieves impressive early results. But when it comes to long term utility, central intelligence is a bust. Just as the people of Eastern Europe. A slime cell looks like a central blob from which a network of vein-like ‘tubes’ emanates — first larger tubes, then smaller tubes that fan out in the direction of food and retract in the vicinity of poison (e.g. salt) or another danger (e.g. sunlight). Inside those tubes, cytoplasmic fluid is rhythmically flowing back and forth… “The…best-positioned tubes will grow larger and larger and receive more and more flow, while others will fade away — and hence, over time, a super-efficient network of links will form. “You could say that the shape of the network (and its underlying fluid flow dynamics) helps Physarum to remember. Appropriately sizing its branches in accordance with food sources it has encountered recently makes for a simple but effective way to recall where food can be found…contraction patterns may persist and store information similar to the way waves of activity in our brain can store information.” So brains do not create consciousness; consciousness configures brains…and other ‘mind friendly’ patterns in the material medium. Author L. Frank Baum (1900) makes the point that Scarecrow had always been conscious and intelligent. Sadly, he was taken-in by society’s brain fetish and made to feel inferior. In the words of Alfred North Whitehead, he fell prey to the Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness . Scarecrow, Lion, and Tin Man, and therefore Baum, are early existential heroes. They are defined by their choices and their actions, not by their physical substrata. None of us is controlled by our Past; we each configure the past so that it supports our own immediate choices. We create our own causal pathways, our own destinies, our own pathologies. Alcoholic Anonymous is famous for its memes. One of the best: “Nothing changes if nothing changes.” In our context, we can interpret this as follows: We make our own changes Nothing changes us When we change, everything changes We are more mold than machine, Thank God. *** Paul Klee’s “Botanical Theatre” (1924) imagines plants as if they were performers on a stage, each form carrying a sense of personality and intention. With its delicate lines and playful abstraction, the painting suggests that plant life has its own quiet intelligence, unfolding in rhythm and structure like a choreographed act. 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 Size Doesn't Matter David Cowles Aug 24, 2025 “In less than 500 years, we’ve gone from a privileged species on a privileged planet at the center of the Universe to a speck on a speck on a speck.” We are obsessed with size. Bigger is better. Supersize me! Consider the Universe: from Planck scale to Cosmos - 60 orders of magnitude! You and I, dear reader, are about 25 orders of magnitude short of a Cosmos (I’ve been called worse). But that means we’re 35 orders of magnitude larger than Planck. From the perspective of a subatomic particle, the human body is approximately the size of the Cosmos. From the perspective of the Cosmos, you are the size of a subatomic particle. Feeling a bit ‘lost in space’? That’s how an electron ‘feels’ inside your body. In less than 500 years, we’ve gone from a privileged species on a privileged planet at the center of the Universe to a speck on a speck on a speck. It would take your breath away…if it were not all BS . Our notion of size is a function of our 4 linear dimensions. But these dimensions are simply axes on which events are conveniently arranged, like ornaments on a 4D Christmas tree. Theoretically, events could be arranged in any order whatsoever, or in no order at all, but most folks hang their larger, heavier balls on the tree’s lower limbs. To do otherwise would require a great deal more energy (kinetic and potential)…and it would look like Hell . Is Beauty negentropic? You bet it is! Events happen! They are sui generis . They are a response by what is not to what is in pursuit of what might be . Events happen by alternately inheriting and rejecting various elements from their environment before synthesizing the ‘survivors’ into a single Actual Entity ; that process (called ‘prehension’ by Alfred North Whitehead) generates entropy (heat). The synthesis of elements itself (i.e. ‘concrescence’) is negentropic: it creates an island of relative order in a sea of chaos. It is relatively beautiful (heavy ornaments are at the bottom). Because it is a ‘cool’ energy trough relative to its ‘hot’ environment, it is stable; it would require a significant input of energy from an external source to dislodge it. But where would that ‘new’ energy come from? “Heavy ornaments on the bottom!” my mother always said. We instinctively minimize the inexorable increase in entropy. Against a backdrop of ever encroaching disorder, the Whole attempts to conserve and curate order (e.g. Beauty, Truth, and Justice) wherever and whenever possible. That is the origin of process . We are the Universe reacting to itself. We are that reaction per se . Therefore, we are Recursion; we are Consciousness, period. Note : We are not organisms who happen to be conscious; we the Consciousness itself. This is not necessarily what we mean by terms like ‘mind, spirit, soul’, etc. We are talking about pure recursion, pure process . “I seem to be a verb.” (Buckminster Fuller) The negentropic process of concrescence does not violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Looked at globally, entropy still increases. Local increases in order are more than offset by the global increase in entropy. The so-called order of events is the arrangement that corresponds to variations in global entropy. Spacetime orders events along the path of lower to higher entropy; we call that path, time . The concepts ‘big’ and ‘little’ have no fixed meaning. Their sense is entirely relational. The fundamental structure of the Universe is fractal; it is self-similar across all scales. Big and little have no fixed denotative meaning. A 4 year old is called a ‘big boy’ in certain contexts while his 8 year old brother may be referred to as a ‘little boy’ in others. Both characterizations are true . Each is true relative to its context. However, neither is true relative to the other. Think about it: calling a 4 year old ‘little’ and an 8 year old ‘big’ conveys zero information; plus it’s demeaning...to both. Sidebar : The relationship of a 4 year old and an 8 year old within a family (or other social unit) is an example of non-Archimedean geometry at work in everyday life. Each child must be measured on its own terms, with its own metric, in its own context. They cannot be compared, one to the other. There is no common metric, e.g. calendar age, to relate them. That metric exists but it applies only at the meta-level, i.e. only to the family unit. In the family’s terms the ‘big boy’ is only half as old as the ‘little boy’ but that is not relevant to either boy’s subjective experience of himself. Switching back to an Archimedean (Euclidean) framework, events can be represented by spacetime coordinates (i.e. a common metric). To the extent that those coordinates define a contiguous region, we refer to the measure of that region as the ‘size’ of the event (its domain, range, depth, duration, volume, etc.). The coordinates themselves encode information as pattern , and we can compare children based on their ‘size’ (above). From spatiotemporal coordinates we calculate size. But size has no absolute significance. Big is only ‘big’ relative to ‘little’. Our 4 year old is ‘big’ compared to a toddler but our 8 year old is ‘little’ compared to a tween. The 4 year old bestrides Nursery School like a colossus; the 8 year old cowers in the corner of his K-8 Primary School. Sidebar : IRL 4 year olds and 8 year olds are rarely compared; they’re perceived to have nothing much in common. Exception: when dad yells at the elder, “Stop acting like a 4 year old.” – a high compliment, but probably neither meant nor understood as such . Events create spacetime; they are not made of spacetime. Events are holistic. As Richard Feynman demonstrated, spacetime breaks down at the event’s horizon . In this sense, every event is like a black hole - minus the massive gravitational attraction. Patterns scale! Spacetime configurations are stackable. While every event is unique, patterns tend to repeat…like Russian nesting dolls. In 10 th grade geometry we called this ‘congruence’: the Bohr model of the atom is roughly congruent with the Copernican model of the solar system, etc. While scientists search for causal sequences , philosophers search for congruent patterns . Congruence (pattern) is just another way of encoding order. But what about those causal sequences ? We say that ‘A causes B’ to the extent that the transition from A to B is ‘the least dirty shirt’ (i.e. the event that would generate the least entropy). Causation minimizes information. It collapses the wave function at its apex (most probable value). Congruence , on the other hand, preserves the wave function (and all its potential values). Causation : Congruence :: Atari : Quantum Computing. In a fully determined world, events would convey zero information. In fact, there would be no discrete events at all. Subsequent states would simply be encoded in prior states. Pierre-Simon Laplace (c. 1800 CE) believed that everything is caused by something else; his contemporary, William Blake, maintained that everything is congruent with everything else: “To see a world in a grain of sand…and eternity in an hour.” Information is ‘difference’ and differences are the raw material of pattern. Sentences are patterns; music and art depend on patterns; software is a pattern; DNA forms a pattern. Even molecules are ‘patterns’ of elements. As spacetime is an ordering of events, the fractal structure is a way of conserving that order by stacking those events on top of one another based on ‘self-similarity’ ( aka pattern). It’s a bit like zipping up a computer file. Everything works toward one goal: the conservation of pattern encoded information. The Universe has a Prime Directive: Minimize incremental entropy by maximizing Beauty, Truth, and Justice. Spacetime, scale and pattern are tools we use to fulfill that mandate. Size, on the other hand, doesn’t matter! *** Kazimir Malevich, Black Square, 1915, oil on linen, State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. Malevich’s stark reduction of form to a single square reflects the essay’s claim that “size” has no absolute meaning, only relational context, and that true order emerges from pattern rather than scale. 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 What's It Like to Be a Bat David Cowles Nov 26, 2024 “What kid hasn’t thought about what it would be like to be a free flying eagle or a majestic oak?” The 20th century certainly had its share of philosophical tomes: Being and Nothingness , Being and Time , Process and Reality , and Philosophical Investigations to name a few. But it also had many somewhat less ambitious gems like Martin Buber’s I and Thou . What’s it like to be a Bat , a 1974 essay by Thomas Nagel, falls into this second category. By 1900, it had begun to occur to us that mental phenomena might be reduceable to chemical reactions and electrical pulses. From Freud to Ryle to Skinner to Dennett, the race was on to find ways to account for the phenomenon of consciousness solely in terms of physical processes. After all, we have more or less successfully reduced biology to chemistry, why shouldn’t we expect to reduce psychology to physiology? But Nagel objected to the analogy. Just as it seemed that we were on the brink of a materialist solution to the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness, Thomas Nagel fired an unwelcome shot across the bow. What Is It Like to Be a Bat? arrived at the ‘academy’ with all the fanfare of a 3 day dead fish. There was indeed a stench, but it turned out it was coming from the academy itself. Nagel threw open the windows and let in fresh air and the light of day. He exposed the bankruptcy of the reductionist agenda: “There is something that it is like to be a bat…what it is like for a bat to be a bat…because we know what it is like to be us.” Do we? Do we know what it’s like to be ourselves? Or is that what we’ve been trying to figure out for the past 3000 years? I am myself, of course, but that’s pretty much a tautology. It doesn’t tell what it’s like to be me. But I’m also aware of being myself…and that is what it’s like to be me – that non-thetic awareness of self qua self. I am aware of my awareness, no matter what I happen to be aware of. And so I say with some justification, “I am conscious.” When a hypothetical life form ‘responds’to environmental stimuli, biochemical pathways are activated and that may produce some sort of coordinated behavior on the part of the organism. But that does not necessarily mean that the organism is aware of itself qua organism or that it is aware of itself being aware of its environment or that the whole plays a part in determining how the parts of the organism (organelles) act in response to external stimuli. Response to stimulus does not necessarily imply consciousness. However, whether the Zombie organisms we’re proposing actually exist in nature is a hot topic of debate among biologists and philosophers today. 100 years ago, human children were often thought to be Zombies, as well as members of aboriginal tribes, of ‘other’races, or even of ‘other’ nationalities. I am reminded that in the 1960’s folks actually asked whether Vietnamese people experienced loss with the same intensity as Euro-Americans. Disgusting as all this is, we can learn from it…and also take some solace in the fact that we’ve come a long way in a fairly short period of time. In the 2020’s folks are asking whether unicellular creatures might be conscious. What kid hasn’t thought about what it would be like to be a free flying eagle or even a majestic oak? But when you imagined it, you imagined that you, yourself , would be that oak or that bird. You imagined ‘being yourself being something else’; you didn’t even consider ‘becoming someone else and being something else’ – big difference! That would have been ridiculous…and meaningless. The sentence, “I became someone else” is oxymoronic. I can only and ever be I (whatever I is), and never other , because ‘other’ is defined as ‘not-I’. Kid, oak, or eagle, I’m still me. Having feathers in place of hair or bark in place of skin doesn’t make me any less me. This is not to dismiss Nagel’s ground breaking insight. There is something it’s like to be something, but which ‘something’ I’m being is of no matter to anyone but my transitory self. I could be ‘hare’ today and ‘goon’ tomorrow and still be me, the same me! A hawk is not a Hapsburg, but what it’s like ‘to be a hawk’ is the same as what it’s like ‘to be a Hapsburg’. I am, whatever I am, always me. I know who I am and I know that I can be whatever I choose to be…and still be me. Who I am never changes (Parmenides); what I am never stays the same (Heraclitus). If what I am never stays the same, then what I am (e.g. a bat) can never be who I am! ‘Who’ implies the conservation of identity across some region of spacetime (or other phase space). The Heraclitean flow vitiates even the concept of identity. I can step into the same river as many times as I wish; both I and the river have and retain our identities. But I can never step into the same water twice. Flowing water has no stable identity…by definition. I, on the other hand, from infancy to seniority, from paramecium to paralegal, am still myself. I am what it’s like not to be whatever I happen to be at the moment. “ Neti, neti” – not this, not that! " I know this because I am what’s left whenever I stop being what I am. I am that which keeps me from becoming what is. Sartre might say, “I am my freedom!” A well-meaning adult asks a bewildered child, “And what do you want to be when you grow up?” Absurdly, the question assumes that the child wants to be the only thing that the child can never be, and that is, some thing , a what ! So long as the child is a who, she can never be a what; sorry, Grandpa! Even so, there are a number of correct ways to answer Grandpa’s question: (1) defiantly, “I don’t want to be any thing ;” (2) confidently, “I just want to be me;” (3) heroically, “Nemo” (from the Odyssey , not the novel…or the movie); (4) mythologically, “Proteus” (the shape shifter); (5) existentially, “I want not to be whatever I am and to be whatever I am not;” (6) ghoulishly, “I want not to be the one thing I am certain to become…a corpse.” ‘Astronaut, firefighter, pro athlete and rock star’ are not on the list. I wonder how the important children in your life would answer Grandpa’s question. Something to think about. What it’s like to be me never changes. I am T he Ship of Theseus . No matter how much you swap out my physical or social infrastructure, I am still the same ship. Even if everything changes ( doxa ), nothing changes ( Aletheia ). To paraphrase a famous cliché: “The more things change, the more what stays the same stands out,” i.e. the ship ! Heidegger divided the phenomenon of existence into Dasein (that it is) and Wassein (what it is). ‘Being something’ is a quantum of experience ( Dasein ) regardless of ‘what’ that something is. ‘To be’ cannot be reduced to its predicate, i.e. to what it is. As Nagel astutely pointed out, there is something it’s like to be something; but what it’s like to be something is the same no matter who’s being it and no matter what that something is. Every day, when I wake from deep sleep, I rediscover what I am. In my dreams I am usually a youngish man in good health, living an active lifestyle; when I wake up, I discover that I am none of those things. Sometimes the disconnect can be quite disorienting, but I never question that I’m me . What I am may be in doubt for the moment, but who I am is not. If it was, then according to the cannons of 21st century psychology, I would be ‘a crazy person’. I have not yet had the experience of waking up as a member of another species…but I don’t rule it out a priori . I’ve read Ovid! I can conceive of myself being a sparrow. I cannot conceive of myself ‘being not-me’ . Discovering that my septuagenarian self is a sparrow is improbable; discovering that I am not-me – impossible! Not crazy. Met him pike horses (Joyce) is not something on my bucket list, but if it did happen, oak or eagle, sponge or spore, I do not doubt that I would still be ‘me’. Again, not crazy! Speaking of Ovid, according to his Metamorphosis , folks are shape shifting all the time. Yesterday’s fair maiden is tomorrow’s swan, but her sense of self remains unchanged. That’s the tragedy, that’s the punishment. Leyda, born human, must live an avian life. If Leyda were no longer Leyda, the story would lose all meaning. So, what’s it like to be a bat? Exactly what it’s like to be you! Because to be is ‘to be what you are regardless of what you are’. So be a bat if you want but it won’t stop you from being you. New job, same you; new family, still you; new home country, you. Different species? Sorry, still you. You can run but you cannot hide. So, “What’s it like to be …(anything)?” Well, what’s it like to be you ? That’s exactly what it’s like to be a bat…or anything else for that matter. Everything that is, is what it is, in the same way that you are what you are. Once you were a single celled zygote, then an embryo, a baby, child, teen, adult, senior. That initial cell will copy itself 100 trillion times during your lifetime. Right now, about 30 trillion of those copies are alive and working together as your body. Throughout all of this there is one you , only one you, and always the same you ; that never changes. It’s what Thomas Aquinas would have called a ‘simple substance’. It has no parts, no aspects, no qualities. It’s what Jean-Paul Sartre called neant , nothing. You are existence without essence. You are the sound of one hand clapping! Think back to your earliest memory. There you were! It was you, the same you that’s chatting with me now, many decades later. To suggest that 4 year old ‘you’ is not the same thing as 44 year old ‘you’ or 88 year old ‘you’ is nonsense. It’s you; you are you. You are not one you, then another you. That’s not what ‘you’ means. You are what does not and indeed cannot change amid the universe of changes; you are the river, not the water. “Wait,” you say. “I’m not the same now at 44 as I was at 4? Not even close.” Ok then, tell me what’s different? Ok, any anything else? Anything else? Ok, all of what you just described as being different…none of that is any part of you ! It’s all part of your external world. We have fallen prey to a fallacy: we’ve accepted the idea that my skin forms the boundary between me and not-me. Not true! My body, the contents of my mind, the patterns of my habitual behaviors… none of that is me. That’s all my world! The Serenity Prayer nails it: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change (the world), the courage to change the things I can (freedom), and the wisdom to know the difference (philosophy).” Keep the conversation going. 1. Click here to contact us on any matter. How did you like the post? How could we do better in the future? Suggestions welcome. 2. To subscribe (at no cost) to TWS and ATM, follow this link . 3. We encourage new articles and reprints from freelance writers ; click here to view out Writers’ Specs Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

< Back Pope Leo XIV Redux David Cowles Jan 19, 2026 “I’m now seeing ‘Leo’ as an extension of Francis’ pontificate, made more concretely relevant and imbued with new vigor.” 1750 words; 8 minute read Leo XIV from Chitown USA became Pope on May 8, 2025. However, 2025 was a Jubilee Year proclaimed by Leo’s processor, Pope Francis. Therefore, the theological ‘tone’ of 2025 remained ‘Franciscan’. To celebrate the end of the Jubilee Year and to begin to make his own mark on the Church, Leo convened a Consistory of Cardinals on January 7, 2026. Hoping for something new and refreshing from this pope, I was initially disappointed to learn that Leo directed the cardinals to reread Francis’ signature Encyclical, Evangelii Gaudium (EG, 11/24/2013) in preparation. Until I read it! Turns out, EG is full of exactly those ideas and perspectives that are vital to the Church’s future. I’m now seeing ‘Leo’ as an extension of Francis’ pontificate, made more concretely relevant and imbued with new vigor. Let’s browse: “The great danger in today’s world, pervaded as it is by consumerism, is the desolation and anguish born of a complacent yet covetous heart, the feverish pursuit of frivolous pleasures, and a blunted conscience.” Arguably, with slight adjustment, this sentence could be applied to any culture at any time in human history. It is a restatement of the human condition. However, this particular formulation calls special attention to the ‘wages’ of consumerism: i.e. desolation and anguish, complacency and greed, a blunted conscience. In other word…us, as we are today! “Getting and spending we lay waste our powers.” (Wordsworth) “Whenever our interior life becomes caught up in its own interests and concerns, there is no longer room for others…and the desire to do good fades…” Here Leo is reinforcing a fundamental connection between ‘ethics’ and ‘the other’. Jesus, quoting Leviticus (19: 18), said, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” And he added, on this ‘hang all of the Law and the Prophets’. We become aware of others as we become aware of our ethical obligations toward them. In an ideal world, we don’t abuse our pets. We don’t abuse them, not because it’s against the law, and not because we just read an article on animal consciousness. We take care of our pets because we love them and love is the source and manifestation of all ethics. We do good because we love others and we express that love by caring for them. Usually, we recognize ‘the other’ most clearly in human beings. But that is not always the case. Just as in AA, where ‘anything’ can be your ‘higher power’ (not just God), so in ethics ‘anything’ can be your other : a pet, a tree, a mountain, Nature ( Gaia ), Cosmos …even God. For that reason the Great Commandment (above) also says, “Love God with your whole heart, etc.” True solipsists, however, acknowledge no ethics; knowing no ‘other’, they are bound by nothing. They are Dostoevsky (“God is dead…everything is permitted”) on steroids. “Goodness always tends to spread. Every authentic experience of truth and goodness seeks by its very nature to grow within us, and any person who has experienced a profound liberation becomes more sensitive to the needs of others…If we wish to lead a dignified and fulfilling life, we have to reach out to others and seek their good.” Question : What Fortune 100 company just awarded its 2026 advertising contract to the firm of Augustine, Aquinas, and Leo (XIII)? Answer : UAL (United Airlines). Winning Slogan : “Good leads the way.” Sidebar : When theology is no longer mainstream, the mainstream becomes theological. Truth will be heard! Every undertaking of every intentional agent is motivated by that agent’s pursuit of Good as she understands it. Whatever we set out to do, no matter how distorted and perverse the result, we are initially motivated by the universal thirst for Good. We can discover the ‘good’ via the ‘other’ but we can also discover the other via the good. Ethical awareness makes us sensitive to the existence and needs of others. Whenever we seek another’s ‘good’, especially when it is in preference to our own selfish interests, we manifest love, the essence of all ethics. We will not begin to treat bots with respect because we discover they are conscious; we will discover that bots are conscious when we begin to treat them with respect. Among other things, Christianity is a revival of the original boy band, Anaximander & the Pre-Socratics . According to the lead vocalist (6 th century BCE), Being is Relationship. I come to be as I facilitate the coming to be of another . I am able to realize my good only by enabling others to realize theirs. There is no ‘self’ in ‘selfish’: selfishness is an oxymoron! (No, Billy, that doesn’t mean it’s ok to call selfish people, ‘morons’.) “I am selfish” means “I am not. I do not exist!” There are no rocks, there are no islands, only fields and flows. EG brings together two absolutely core principles of Christianity: First, Good is the natural order of things; it spreads, it grows within us and it overflows into the lives of others. Second, we discover ourselves in others, specifically in the granting of reck . (Anaximander) As a Baby Boomer I was a card carrying member of the “Who am I?” movement, dedicated to “Finding myself.” Drove my father nuts; he knew who he was…or so he said. But he didn’t know enough to calm my restless mind. He didn’t know that to find myself, I merely needed to find ‘another’ and grant them reck . Sounds like Francis, and now Leo, nailed this! Positivists tend to dismiss Ethics as a ‘pseudo-science’ – hypotheses with no verifiable consequences. Not so! Christian ethics do have real world, behavioral implications. For example, Pope Francis (EG) quoted Thoman Aquinas: “…Mercy is the greatest of the virtues, since all the others revolve around it and, more than this, it makes up for their deficiencies.” What theologians call ‘mercy’, secular philosophers call ‘reck’ – the sublimation of apparent self-interest to the interests of the other. Love is the manifestation of Good and Mercy is the manifestation of Love. Just as ‘trespass’ (anti-reck) is the paradigm of sin (Lord’s Prayer) so ‘mercy’ is the paradigm of virtue (EG, also the Beatitudes: “Blessed are the merciful.”). While creedal documents play a critical role in the history of the Church, faith is not a collection of propositions. Faith is always interpersonal, it is always the fruit of an encounter with another (person, pet, or Prime Mover). “…Beyond the range of clear reasons and arguments… We need to remember that all religious teaching ultimately has to be reflected in the teacher’s way of life, which awakens the assent of the heart by its nearness, love and witness. “I invite all Christians, everywhere, at this very moment, to a renewed personal encounter with Jesus Christ, or at least an openness to letting him encounter them…” We do not ‘encounter others’. We let down our defenses so others can encounter us…and so we can reciprocate. Francis goes on to point out the primacy of faith over formula: “I dream of a ‘missionary option’, that is, a missionary impulse capable of transforming everything, so that the Church’s customs, ways of doing things, times and schedules, language and structures can be suitably channeled for the evangelization of today’s world rather than for her self-preservation. “The deposit of the faith is one thing... the way it is expressed is another…we hold fast to a formulation while failing to convey its substance. This is the greatest danger. Let us never forget that the expression of truth can take different forms. The renewal of these forms of expression becomes necessary for the sake of transmitting to the people of today the Gospel message in its unchanging meaning.” “At the same time, today’s vast and rapid cultural changes demand that we constantly seek ways of expressing unchanging truths in a language which brings out their abiding newness.” Here Francis appropriates an essential insight from modern linguistics: There is a fundamental displacement between word and object. A specific verbal formula, originally intended to denote a specific object or state-of-affairs, will gradually, over time, come to denote something entirely different. May I borrow an analogy from Cultural Astronomy … whatever that is. The earth’s axis wobbles 360° over a period of approximately 26,000 years. Today we are said to be in the Age of Pisces because the axis is in Pisces at the time of the vernal equinox. But according to Broadway ( Hair ), “This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.” Well, sort of. Actually, the Age of Aquarius begins c. 2150 when the axis will begin to denote the eponymously named constellation. At that point our verbal formula becomes neither word nor object but idol , a misplacement of concreteness (Whitehead). When we recite ‘rite words in rote order’ (Joyce) we practice idolatry. Therefore, if the Church is to remain true to its vocation, it must allow the unforced, organic evolution of new ways to express old truths. “Pastoral ministry in a missionary style is not obsessed with the disjointed transmission of a multitude of doctrines to be insistently imposed.” We see then that the task of evangelization operates within the limits of language and of circumstances. It constantly seeks to communicate more effectively the truth of the Gospel in a specific context. “Reading the Scriptures also makes it clear that the Gospel is not merely about our personal relationship with God. Nor should our loving response to God be seen simply as an accumulation of small personal gestures to individuals in need, a kind of ‘charity à la carte’, or a series of acts aimed solely at easing our conscience. The Gospel is about the kingdom of God (cf. Lk 4:43); it is about loving God who reigns in our world.” To the extent that God reigns, Satan doesn’t and Caesar governs within guard rails set by Divine Will . The Church’s mission is not the conversion of individuals, important as that may be, but the transformation of Society. We cannot expect to transform the whole merely by transforming its parts; we must transform both the parts and the whole. If Leo XIV can remain focused on just these points (the ubiquity of Good, the centrality of the Other, and the sovereignty of God), everything else will take care of itself, his pontificate will be a great success… and the ongoing process of rescuing the World from the Abyss of the so-called Enlightenment will continue apace. *** Image: Piero della Francesca, The Flagellation of Christ (c. 1455–1460), tempera on panel. A scene in which the central drama unfolds quietly, almost peripherally, while ordinary figures occupy the foreground, suggesting that what is most decisive often remains understated, sustained less by spectacle than by the unnoticed grammar of relationship, attention, and restraint. Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

< Back The Death of "God?" David Cowles Sep 27, 2022 “I had not known that God’s alleged demise had been elevated to the status of a fact.” As far as I know, Friedrich Nietzsche was the first responder to arrive on the scene. In any event, he was the first to pronounce: “God is Dead. TOD (time of death): 1882.” (The Gay Science) Nietzsche’s meme has echoed through Western philosophy, theology, and culture ever since 20th century positivists, logical or otherwise, and some existentialists (e.g., Sartre, Camus) joined his choir to sing his now famous Requiem for God in C major. In the 1960s, liberal theologians added their own postmortem notes (Death of God Theologies). A little later, John Lennon composed his own music for the divine requiem: he marginalized God (“God is a concept by which we measure our pain”) and then celebrated God’s absence with his generational anthem, Imagine . Then about a year ago, a work colleague of 20-plus years turned my world upside down. She offhandedly referred to ‘the past’ as “back when we used to believe in God…” Before that, I had not known that God’s alleged demise had been elevated to the status of a fact. Unfortunately, ‘God’ has become a four-letter word in academic circles and at my local bar. Nothing can tank a career faster than ‘God talk.’ Short of hungry lions, we might as well be back in Christianity’s first centuries. Secularism has become the new McCarthyism. I will continue to pray to ‘God’ in my private devotions, of course, but is it time to retire that moniker from the public forum? “No way,” you say? Ok, but what if we could do so without sacrificing a single one of our beliefs? “If your eye offends you, pluck it out!” Is it time for us to excise a part of our exoskeleton to facilitate our mission to evangelize? One thing is certain, as long as we cling to the form (‘God’) instead of proclaiming the substance (Faith, Hope and Love), we will continue to lose ground in the culture war. There is a long tradition supporting this point of view. As far back as the Exodus, Jews were forbidden to articulate the divine name (YHWH). St. Paul’s success is ‘selling’ Christianity to the Greek-speaking world was in large part due to his remarkable ability to put old wine in new skins. Paul never protected form (e.g., physical circumcision) to the detriment of substance (spiritual circumcision). Paul spoke to the Greeks in their own language. At Antioch, he proclaimed Christ to be their unknown god. Thus, he made dialog and, eventually, conversion possible. Most recently, 1960s radicals fondly chanted the names of their heroes in the streets: “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh”…until the Beatles (1968) warned us: “But if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao, you ain’t going to make it with anyone anyhow.” The Jews had good reason to keep the divine name under wraps. YHWH is an abbreviation for “I am who am.” The name itself embodies our most fundamental belief. Compare that with our word, God, a Germanic word (Gott) that entered Old English through the Dutch (God). Its Sanskrit root, ghue, means to invoke. This is not Yahweh, Elohim, el Shaddai, Adonai, or Emmanuel. ‘God’ is derived from a Sanskrit root that was originally applied to the deity, Indra. Are we willing to sacrifice the future of Christianity for a Hindu deity? The concept of God is, well, everything; but the Aryan name, ‘God,’ has no real significance. Words like this naturally come and go in the evolution of language. What if we could articulate a cosmology, completely consistent with orthodox Christology, that avoids such ‘flash point’ language? In Old Testament times, different theologies co-existed. These early TOEs (Theories of Everything) underwent a process of natural selection: the fittest survived…and thrived. How does one apply the concept of ‘fitness’ to a cosmology? A cosmology is ‘fit’ to the extent that it accounts for the relevant experiences and satisfies the existential needs of its adherents. Today, many people worship Yahweh, Emmanuel, Allah; few worship Moloch…or even the great Jupiter. The Semitic deity has demonstrated remarkable fitness over continents, millennia, and a broad spectrum of human cultures. In the 21st century, we need to build on this success by demonstrating that Apostolic Christology is congruent with contemporary cosmology. We cannot be held back from this important task by a word with pagan roots and deeply disturbing modern connotations. God evokes the Crusades, the Inquisition, the religious wars, Sister Mary Martha’s rattan, and the recent church child abuse scandals; the word has, to a large extent, lost its positive connotations. We have the words of everlasting life (Psalm 19 et al.); who wouldn’t want to hear them? We don’t need to create barriers by focusing our energy on the defense of a single word, even if that word is 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 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 Transfiguration David Cowles Aug 29, 2024 “It’s hard to be a Christian today, but cheer up! It was much harder 125 years ago.” We live in an age when most people believe in the reality of the material world. In fact, most people believe that that’s all there is to the world. Blame the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, Science, and of course, Groucho’s 2nd cousin, Uncle Karl (Marx). But it was not always so. At one time, people thought of the material world as a gossamer web of illusion ( maya ) masking an immaterial (spiritual) reality. Blame the Vedas, the Buddha, Parmenides ( Aletheia & Doxa ) and British Empiricism (Hume & Berkley). Christianity (at least the Catholic version) stakes out a somewhat unique position in this debate: The material (physical) world is absolutely real. After all, Christians expect a resurrection of the physical body (albeit ‘glorified’) after death! But materiality is not the final world; it’s not substructural . Throughout the New Testament, the ‘relativity of materiality’ is clearly demonstrated. Even before his public ministry began, Jesus changed water into wine at the request of his mother. (I’ve prayed for the very same thing many times…but I guess Mary has more clout.) Later, Jesus satiated 5,000 pilgrims with 5 loaves of bread and 2 fish…and then gathered 12 baskets of scraps. (Today, we can barely feed 5 people on 2 paychecks.) Toward the end of his ministry, Jesus took Peter, James and John to the summit of Mt. Hermon where his material body was transfigured into light, revealing him in perpetual dialog with Moses and Elijah. At the Last Supper, Jesus transubstantiated ordinary bread and wine into his body and blood. And finally, after his crucifixion and burial, Jesus remained in the world via a resurrected body that was fully physical but no longer restricted by the ordinary laws of spacetime physics. Post-Resurrection, Jesus appeared to his disciples on multiple occasions but generally, he was not recognized, at least not immediately. His identity was revealed only through the things he said and did (interpreting scripture, breaking bread, etc.). It’s hard to be a Christian today; but cheer up! It was much harder 125 years ago when we were at the apex of philosophical materialism. We can date it: January 1, 1900. That was the last day on which it was reasonable to believe that everything is as it appears to be. It was the high water mark for materialism and realism. It’s been all downhill since... …And thank God for that! After Planck, Einstein, the Quantum Mechanics, and John Bell, we may state with conviction that almost nothing is as it seems to be. But this is not a new discovery; it is a reaffirmation of the basic insight that lies at the heart of Western philosophy…and Christian theology. The father of Western science, Parmenides (c. 475 BCE) defined the philosophical project for the millennia that followed. He based the West’s first extant work of systematic philosophy ( On Nature ) on the distinction between Truth ( Aletheia ) and Appearance ( Doxa ). Parmenides, his followers and his rivals took it for granted that there was more to reality than mere phenomena. Even Aristotle, 125 years later, wrote a Metaphysics . It would be 2,000 years before anyone seriously challenged the pre-Socratic paradigm. Between Parmenides and Machiavelli (c. 1500 CE) comes Jesus, the Christ. On one hand, Jesus’ ministry is very much in the here and now: dodging the law, healing the sick, feeding the hungry, forgiving the desperate. But on another level, Jesus was a poster boy for the struggle against naïve realism. I define realism simply as the belief that x = x. In other words, identity rules. Everything is what it is, exactly. Bread is bread and only bread; wine is wine; water water. “A rose is a rose is a rose.” (Gertrude Stein) When 5 loaves of bread are distributed among 5,000 people, each person receives exactly 0.1% of a loaf…and not a crumb more. What a miserably stingy world! Thank God that’s not the world we live in. Realism places reality in a straitjacket. Prior to the Renaissance, these violations of simple identity did not pose much of a problem for most people. Most everyone agreed that appearances were intrinsically detached from reality. The Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment challenged that assumption. We learned to ‘trust the science’. As we progressively ‘disenchanted’ the World, it became harder and harder to believe in Christianity’s model. We came to trust our senses and began to doubt that there was anything beyond them. Whole philosophies developed around the notion that only propositions subject to scientific verification could be meaningful. Reality was reduced to the repeatable and the phenomenal. Anything else was ‘nonsense’. It became more and more difficult to square Christianity’s focus on the novel and the noumenal with modern epistemology. As the cognitive dissonance intensified, Christian hegemony cracked. Many abandoned the faith, many more just stuck it in a desk drawer to be consulted once a week, or only ‘at the hour of our death’. Roman Catholic Christianity is rooted in the concept of Transfiguration, the relativity of materiality. Efforts to make Christian doctrine compatible with materialism, realism, and/or positivism (logical or otherwise) are doomed to failure. If 2,000 years of wisdom is to survive, believers must stop apologizing for their views and firmly declare, whenever confronted by materialist or realist dogma, that the Emperor has no clothes. 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 Horror Movies David Cowles Oct 15, 2025 “We are fascinated by a glimpse, however distorted, of the Infinite from our finite perspective. On the other hand, we are terrified.” What is it about Horror Movies that so fascinates us? In a world where the Nightly News (“What’s that?” - Gen Z) is often more horrible than anything Steven King could ever dream up, why do we feel we need more of a bad thing? Well, to be clear, we don’t all feel that need. I don’t, for example. I am anxious enough about life without manufacturing something else to scare me. But that’s me and clearly, I’m not ‘normal’. (I can hear you, readers! Stifle!) For years, my fascination with the fascination of horror has securely occupied shelf #76 in my hierarchy of existential concerns. However, a recent encounter with Paul Tillich ( Dynamics of Faith ) has forced me deep into the stacks. Without realizing it, Tillich gave me the interpretive key I’d been missing. Tillich’s concept of the Holy (shared in part with Rudoph Otto, Idea of the Holy ), emphasizes the dual nature of the Transcendent breaking into our lives. On the one hand, we are fascinated by a glimpse, however distorted, of the Infinite from our finite perspective. On the other hand, we are terrified. You have to go back 3,000 years to find the best expression of finitude confronting the infinite ( The Book of Job ). Job’s iconic expression of faith is timeless: “I know that my redeemer (infinite) lives and on the last day (finite) he will stand upon the earth and after my skin has been destroyed (finite), yet in my flesh I will see God (infinite).” (Job 19: 25 – 27) This is the fundamental existential crisis of human life. We explored it elsewhere on this site in The Human Predicament . We strongly suspect that there’s something beyond the curtain, not necessarily an ‘afterlife’ but an ontological context for this life: “This has been a fun visit but now, really, can you just tell us what’s really going on ‘cause this certainly isn’t it, or at least not all there is of it.” For 100,000 years human civilizations have pock marked Planet Earth. We are everywhere, but nowhere the same. Civilization is rapacious, adaptive, and resilient. Yet ours is the only civilization that has this as its identity defining motto: Freedom from Transcendence . Not that that matters. Consensus doesn’t constitute truth. But it does help to explain our obsession with this one conclusion (this ultimate concern - Tillich) and our eagerness to sift through ‘evidence’ to find just those nuggets that support that conclusion. We have Faith in the power of immanence; like Madonna, we’ve gone ‘all in’ on the material world. Of course in any civilization you will find ‘exceptional’ individuals and groups who deviate from the ideological norm. But as far as I know, we are the only civilization that has consciously reasoned from a pre-ordained, ideology-driven conclusion back to a logic, an epistemology, a cosmology, an ontology, and an ethics that support that conclusion. So we find ourselves in a bit of a pickle. We are firmly encased in our finitude but our gaze is naturally fixed on the infinite beyond. We think of ourselves as empiricists but “Don’t look up!” Head down, go to school, get a job, have a family, accumulate a nest egg, and, when it’s time to die, exit stage right sans fanfare. If you must look up, cover your eyes, or put on a pair of reflecting goggles. At all costs, keep your eyes off the Prize ( aka the Pearl of Great Price)! We live schizophrenic lives. On the one hand, we are viscerally aware of the Transcendent; on the other hand, we are required to deny it. We are left with existential dread and nothing to explain it, account for it, mitigate it or sublimate it. We are left with untethered terror ( aka free floating anxiety). We need an outlet for that feeling; we need something we can connect to the fear that accompanies us every day of our lives. We must find a way to project our subjective fears onto something objective, to ground our internal terror in an external source. Enter, Nosferatu ! Got kids? Ever try telling them, “Ghosts are not real” and “There’s no such thing as monsters?” How did that work out? Kids are terrified by the solidity and the fragility of their existence. Well they should be! But just like us, they cannot deal with it on face value. They have to find a way to project their feelings onto something concrete and immanent (if ultimately immaterial and absent). We stand on the edge of the infinite; we are terrified. No use pretending we’re not. We are all Kierkegaard! There’s not enough Jack Daniels or Baskin Robbins in the entire world to keep a lid on existential dread. We are well curated fruit of the Enlightenment vine. Our skins are bursting with the sugars of democracy, technology, and science. Who needs anything more? The answer, of course, is “We do!” No, I’m not invoking the “G-word” here. God forbid I do that ! I’m just talking about some sort of context that might enable us to make sense of it all. All bravado aside, there is no one among us so insensitive that they do not peer into the darkness and wonder. Of course, we can bail out. We can hide behind nihilism (solipsism, skepticism, relativism, etc.) or just declare the world, “Absurde!” (Artaud) and walk away. Good on you if that works. I’m not so lucky. Our fascination with ‘what lies beyond’ is not explicitly religious. What’s just over the next ridge, beyond the borders of the sea, at the end of the rainbow, outside the observable universe? Or after death? Our ‘hyper-materialistic, immanence-obsessed’ civilization is characteristic of just one corner of the World during one short period of time, the North Atlantic since 1700 CE. Our age is characterized by an insatiable urge to account for the phenomena of daily living without resorting to any ‘transcendental’ influences. According to Tillich (above), Faith is the foundational human experience. It is our act of ultimate concern . It is the reaction of who we are to what we’re not; it is the response of the finite (us) to the infinite (Transcendence). We all have a million little concerns in our lives, but they are all just refractions of the one and only ‘ultimate concern’, the infinite. All art, from cave paintings to Finegan’s Wake , can be understood as a chronicle of humanity’s confrontation with the ultimate. The Bible is one long meditation on that experience: Moses’ Burning Bush, Elijah’s ‘still small voice’, Jesus’ Transfiguration, Paul’s Conversion, John’s Seventh Seal, etc. It is in that context that we need to evaluate the horror film genre…and grant some ‘reck’ to those folks, even in our own families, who seem addicted. What we might experience listening to a Mozart Requiem, they might get from hanging out with Chuckie and Freddie over a long weekend. We all have more in common than we think. *** Image: The Triumph of Death (c. 1562) by Pieter Bruegel the Elder portrays a grim, chaotic world where skeletons wage war against humanity. The painting is densely packed with scenes of destruction, highlighting the universality of death across all social classes. Bruegel’s dark imagery reflects the fears of his time, shaped by war, famine, and plague. Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! 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< Back In the Year 2125… David Cowles Jan 2, 2025 “The future is indeed bright…if we can get there. Unfortunately…the closer we get to utopia, the greater the risk of a wrong turn.” “In the year 2525, if man is still alive, if woman can survive, they may find…” So begins Zager and Evans’ iconic ballad (1969). But we won’t need to wait 500 years (2525) to know the score; 100 years should suffice nicely: “Train A is traveling at X mph and Train B is traveling in the opposite direction at the same rate. They will collide at 10:45 AM EDT on 4/1/2125.” Prepare for it! I know, I know, you’ve heard it all before, countless times in fact, but this time it really, really, really is true. Things are changing! Things are changing at an accelerating rate. Consider how far we’ve come in just the last100 years (1925 – 2025); we’re a long way from Herbert Hoover’s campaign pledge, “A chicken in every pot.” The ubiquitous American auto: ‘A car in every garage’. Television: ‘A TV in every bedroom’. The PC: ‘A computer in every home’. Cell Phone: ‘A phone in every pocket’. Smart Phone: ‘A computer in every cell phone’. Then there’s… Mail → Fax → FedEx → Email → DM The World Wide Web E-commerce: “Amazon calling!” Atomic energy harnessed: Dr. Strangelove . Space exploration & travel: “…One giant leap…” DNA discovered; genome sequenced. The 20th century changed just about everything we thought we knew about the world. Why would we expect anything less from Century 21? The 20th Century may be remembered as the time where human beings finally asserted control over their environment (for better or worse). If so, Century 21 may be known as the time when we assert control over ourselves. For example… AGI (AI) will permeate every aspect of our lives, democratizing knowledge and marginalizing native human intelligence. We will not so much think as be thought. We will build new life forms (carbon, silicon, hybrid) from scratch. Personal aerial vehicles are routine, (Meet George Jetson!) DNA will routinely be modified in utero and in vitro . Parents will mix and match their children’s traits online. We will regrow damaged limbs and organs. We will extend the crash cart ‘life recovery period’ from a few minutes to hours. Organic and inorganic body parts will be routinely interchanged. Regular, authentic, monitorable telepathic communication will occur regularly. Regular, authentic, symbolic and/or telepathic communication will occur with various species of animals and plants. Most diseases (other than engineered pathogens) will be eradicated. Life expectancy will extend beyond age 100. Permanent, self-sustaining colonies will thrive at various locations in our Solar System. Mars will be terraformed into the Bread Basket of the Solar System. Increased productivity will allow for the virtual elimination of poverty and taxation and for the provision of a generous guaranteed annual income for all. Century 21 will be ‘remembered’ as the time we took on Death and Taxes…and won! Notice that none of my predictions requires a conceptual break with what we know today. Such breakthroughs cannot be predicted or described, except to say that they will undoubtedly occur. So the future is indeed bright…if we can get there. Unfortunately, there is a competing set of scenarios which are on the whole more probable and which will render all of the above meaningless. Ironically, the closer we get to utopia, the greater the risk of a wrong turn. Here are just a few of the mistakes we need to avoid: A Superbug. COVID-19 was a shot across our bow. Whether accidentally or deliberately, human manipulation of the genetic code has the potential to create and release a deadly pathogen that we cannot eradicate or control. Nuclear War. We spent the ‘50s crouched under our desks at school…and nothing happened. The world’s political leaders proved more responsible than we expected. But the geo-political climate is much more dangerous today than it was 65 years ago and WMDs are proliferating. Hal 1000 (from 2001- A Space Odyssey ). We are capable of creating an artificial life form with the power to make decisions that will lead to human extinction or enslavement. Devolution. AI stifles thinking, Social Media replaces community, media ratings replace electoral democracy, Artificial Selection reduces genetic resilience. The Borg Collective. Notice what’s not on the catastrophe list: Climate Change. I believe that technology already exists, or soon will, to solve our climate problem. We lack the political will to deploy it; but as we get closer to Armageddon, that will change (I hope). Extraterrestrials. I don’t know if they exist but if they do, I doubt we’ll make contact in the coming century. And who knows, perhaps they’ll come in peace. So buckle up! You’ve got a great ride ahead of you…I hope. 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 100 Years From Now David Cowles Feb 27, 2026 “There is a connection between the Future and the Past, but what is the nature of that connection?’ My grandfather was known for his memes; a favorite: “100 years from now, nobody will know the difference!” He was acknowledging the well-known but oft-forgotten human tendency to aggrandize what is Proximate (here, now, personal) at the expense of what is more remote, even Ultimate (eternal, universal). Our nation is the best, our high school is the best, our children are the best, etc. E Pluribus Unum . But not everything can be ‘best in class’. Case in point : Assemble 100 people in a room. Ask each person to mark an index card, anonymously of course. Question : Do you think you are more or less intelligent than the median person in this room? Write 0 for less, 1 for more. No other answers will be considered. You will find that 67% of your audience think they’re above median in intelligence. Of course, that can’t be true; somebody has an inflated image of himself! Now change the question: “More or less ethical? More or less creative? More or less empathetic?” The result will always be the same: 67% are above median! While I suspect that such myopia is broadly characteristic of homo sapiens , it is significantly stronger in some individuals, societies, cultures and eras, and proportionately weaker in others. I don’t claim to be an omni-math but I suspect that this bias is nowhere stronger than it was in the North Atlantic Community 1500 - 1900 CE. The proof is in the painting. The Renaissance’s ‘discovery’ of perspective allowed artists to make the proximate larger and the remote correspondingly smaller. That meant that things closest to us (i.e. the viewer) would automatically assume the greatest importance on the canvas. And just like that, the hook was set! Now we were locked in a loving relationship…with ourselves. Happy Birthday, Narcissus ! But prior to the 15th century, after the 19th century, or anytime away from the academy, the rules were more relaxed. Giotto (14th century), Juan Gris (20th century) and Grandma Moses all painted the World from God’s point of view. The size and positioning of ‘objects’ on the canvas are a function of aesthetics and semantics, not optics. The artist tries to see and convey the subject as God would see it, objectively and from a transcendent vantage point. *** Back to my grandfather! There are several critical philosophical concepts embedded in his simple meme: “100 years from now…” We are looking at a concave World through convex lenses (or is it a convex World through concave lenses?). Either way, we are focused on the Proximate (now) while the Universe is focused on the Ultimate (100 years). Example : Remember Jack and his sister Jill? They grew up ‘economically challenged’ ( skint ) and despite the boundless generosity of the modern Welfare State, they could only afford vision care for one. Ever chivalrous, Jack, who is farsighted, volunteered to wear eyeglasses prescribed for his nearsighted sister. Like Jack, we are trying to navigate life while looking through the wrong lenses. We stumble through the World as if it were an Outward Bound obstacle course. No wonder Jack fell down and broke his crown! “…No one will know the difference.” Sounds simple… but it isn’t! Why won’t anyone know the difference? How could they not know? There are several very different ways to account for this disconnect and each one comes with its own unique cosmology: Entropy : Order decays! Events interfere with one another, ultimately cancelling each other out, leaving no residual effects. As in Frost’s Road Not Taken , all roads lead to ‘Rome’ (the sacked version that is). It is exactly as if those events had never occurred. Big Bang → Heat Death. Overdetermination : Events in 2026 reinforce one another, leading to events in 2126. But no one event from 2026 causes any one event in 2126. Specific future events are not caused by specific prior events; future events emerge from a constellation of multiple events. Certain combinations of prior events are sufficient to cause specific future results; in most cases there are many ‘sufficient’ combinations but no single combination, let alone any one event, is ever necessary . There are always, or almost always, multiple pathways. The Butterfly Effect : What happens in 2126 (‘thunderstorm’) is in fact caused by events that happen in 2026 (‘butterfly’) via a linear pathway, but it is impossible in principle to connect any event (2126) to any other event (2026). Nothing is repeatable. Holism : There is a connection between the Past and the Future per se but there is no connection between any specific past event and any future event. The future is only impacted by the past as a whole, as a field, as illustrated below: E1 E3 ↘ ↗ P ↔ F ↗ ↘ E2 E4 Autogenesis : There is no causal pathway from the past to the future. Every event is sui generis and causa sui ; it is free to develop by itself, for itself. To the extent that there is ever any appearance of causality , it is generated by future events as they appropriate the past as their medium. Future events determine the significance, even the identity, of prior events. So my grandfather was on to something! He challenged the bedrock assumption of our Naïve Realism: Laplacian ‘Billiard Ball’ Causality. We imagine the Future as if it were the Present, superficially distorted by a Fun House mirror. It isn’t! There is a connection between the Future and the Past, but what is the nature of that connection? Is there any way to choose among my non-exhaustive litany of options (above)? Or should we regard at least some of these options as complementary (think Wave-Particle duality )? *** Wait! My grandfather did make a difference after all! But not the inscrutable difference made by his physical presence or by his DNA. This conversation we’re having right now is emblematic of that real difference. He could not have imagined the content or the setting of this conversation, but the outline, the spirit, of his ideas has clearly been conserved; and as soon as I hit “Publish” it will be conserved for the indefinite future (perhaps more than just 100 years). The differences that make a difference are the qualia , values, ideas. The Future may preserve nothing of the Present intact; but the Subjective Form of that Presence - the ideas, the emotions, the spirit - casts a long and possibly indelible shadow. So my grandfather in his wisdom was also wrong. 100 years on, something has made a difference, i.e. his meme: “100 years from now nobody will know the difference!” *** In The City of Paris , Delaunay moves beyond traditional representation to express the dynamic energy and fractured light of the burgeoning 20th-century metropolis. By intertwining the classical Three Graces with the modern Eiffel Tower, he suggests a thematic bridge between antiquity and the industrial future , unified by a singular, rhythmic vision. Ultimately, the painting's message is one of simultaneity , where time, space, and human form are no longer separate entities but are fused into a vibrant, crystalline whole. 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 Mental Health Crisis David Cowles Jun 6, 2023 “We all pretty much want the same things: a unique identity, a sense of belonging, and confidence that things we think and do make a difference.” We have a mental health emergency in America! Especially our tweens, teens, and young adults. It is fashionable to blame the pandemic, and the resulting reorganization of society, and there’s much truth in that assessment. But long before COVID-19, people had issues. In an earlier TWS , we identified four underlying causes of today’s malaise. I call them the four I’s: Identity, Isolation, Impotence, and Illness. By ‘Illness’ I mean a pre-existing psychological condition that makes an individual more vulnerable. We need not concern ourselves with this here. That leaves Identity (or lack therefore), Isolation, and Impotence as the unholy trinity underlying our present crisis. We are born with no sense of ourselves . We begin to develop such a sense as we interact with our environment and with other sentient (not necessarily human) beings. Our culture encourages us to think of ourselves as unique individuals with unique personalities and unique roles to play in the orchestra we call society . At the other end of the seesaw is Isolation, the absence of belonging. We want to be unique (Identity), but we don’t want to be alone (Isolation). We want to be unique in the context of belonging. I may be the only one playing the triangle (Identity), but I am playing it as part of an orchestra to which I belong . Finally, Impotence. I need to feel as though I make a difference to someone or something in this world. Nothing is more frustrating than repeating the same behavior over and over and never achieving an objective. I need to feel that my actions matter, that my opinions count. Driving around aimlessly makes us anxious. Driving from here to there, no matter where, gives me a sense of accomplishment. “Did it!” So, we all pretty much want the same things: a unique identity, a sense of belonging, and confidence that things we think and do make a difference. What’s wrong with that? Only everything! You cannot discover your identity…because you don’t have one! Of course, you are free to create an identity for yourself and most of us do, but that’s a prefabricated persona, not a core identity . We need to keep in mind that there’s nothing sacrosanct about the identities we create. We can change them on a whim…and you will. Identity is simply the role we choose to play. I am not a ‘triangle player’ (Identity); I am someone who plays the triangle (Choice). Such an identity certainly doesn’t answer the age-old question: “Who am I?” So, I’m no one. Bummer! Now more bad news: I don’t belong anywhere either. Society includes groups of people with whom I share, for a period of time and to a limited depth, certain experiences, values, interests, activities, etc. But I am always radically different from, and much more than, any group. I can pretend that there’s an ‘us’ but at 2:00 in the morning, there is only a ‘me.’ We’re just not the stuff of belonging! I could perhaps get past this lack of identity and belonging if I could be sure that I was making a difference, ‘leaving the world better than I found it’. Here, too, obstacles abound: The Second Law of Thermodynamics, for example. Great, so now even Nature is against me! After Big Bang, it’s all downhill. With every novel event, good or bad, order is destroyed. Q: What’s more certain than death or taxes? A: That I will leave the world a little ‘worse’ (i.e., more disordered) than I found it. Not good! But my problems are not all cosmic. We live in a Complex world near the center of a triangle with Determinism, Anarchy and Chaos as its nodes. Fun Fact : It doesn’t matter whether our world is determined, anarchic or chaotic – all three noumenal states result in the exact same phenomenal world, and fortunately, that ‘nightmare’ bears no resemblance to the ‘charmed’ world we live in. In the world as it is, actions have consequences, no doubt, but what consequences? Does a good intention guarantee a good result? Or even increase the chances of a good result? How many well-intentioned acts have done irreparable harm? How many dark plots have had unexpectedly positive consequences? In our world, there is a fundamental disconnect, philosophers call it alienation , between intention and result. And then there’s politics! Like any other ecosystem, our political organs have evolved with an eye to self-preservation. If you think, “I can’t fight city hall,” that’s because you can’t. If you think, “the more things change, the more they stay the same,” that’s because they do. So if you’re looking to solve your identity crisis by fixing the world, you might need to give that strategy a second thought. We all seek a fixed identity, a sense of belonging and an experience of potency. If we’re honest with ourselves, none of us will say that we have found even one of the three, and that’s because they don’t exist! It’s hard to find something that isn’t there in the first place. Could there be a more pessimistic prognosis? The country is suffering a crisis of Impotence, Isolation, and Identity diffusion. But not to worry! We have resources to help folks find their identities, develop their sense of belonging, and experience potency in their lives. Well, maybe worry just a little bit because there is no identity, belonging or potency to be found! So now what? We need a brand new therapeutic approach, one that says, “Identity, isolation and impotence are problematic; who needs them?” We need to help people learn to live meaningful lives in the face of the three I’s, and and we’ll do that…just as soon as we learn to do it ourselves. . Keep the conversation going! 1. Click here to comment on this TWS. 2. To subscribe (at no cost) to TWS and ATM, follow this link . 3. We encourage new articles and reprints from freelance writers ; click here to view out Writers’ Specs. 4. Aletheia Today Magazine (ATM) will be devoting its entire fall issue (released 9/1/23) to artificial intelligence (AI). What are the philosophical, theological, cultural and even spiritual implications of AI powered world? If you’d like to contribute to the AI Issue, click here . Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.