< Back Genesis and Revelation David Cowles Aug 23, 2026 “Like all good bookends, they are symmetrical…Spacetime begins on the 7th day and ends with the 7th seal.” 1750 words, 8 minute read The canonical Christian Bible, finalized during the first centuries C.E., is beautifully constructed. Genesis and Revelation are its bookends and, like all good bookends, they are symmetrical. Like Peter Pan, Genesis takes us from void through the light and onto the created world while Revelation takes us from the created world through void onto Parousia . That said, do not expect the Apocalypse to look like a film of Creation run backwards. The processes are congruent but not mirror images. Check it out: Genesis : Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and wind sweeping over waters, and God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light ! God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day . Revelation : I watched as the Lamb opened the first seal of seven. Then I heard one of the four living creatures say in a voice like thunder, “Come!” I looked, and there before me was a white horse! Its rider held a bow, and he was given a crown, and he rode out as a conqueror bent on conquest. Aletheia : Light ↔ white. Light is vectored (bow); it stands at the head of the created world (crown) and it is the prerequisite of all that follows (conquest). *** Genesis : And God said, “Let there be a vault between the waters to separate water from water.” So God made the vault and separated the water under the vault from the water above it. And it was so. God called the vault “sky.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the second day . Revelation : When the Lamb opened the second seal , I heard the second living creature say, “Come!” Then another horse came out, a fiery red one. Its rider was given power to take peace from the earth and to make people kill each other. To him was given a large sword . Aletheia : Separation ↔ sword. The sword is agent of division, as instrument of death; appropriately, it’s color is fire engine red. *** Genesis : And God said, “Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear.” And it was so. God called the dry ground “land,” and the gathered waters he called “seas.” And God saw that it was good. Then God said, “Let the land produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants and trees on the land that bear fruit with seed in it, according to their various kinds.” And it was so. The land produced vegetation: plants bearing seed according to their kinds and trees bearing fruit with seed in it according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the third day . Revelation : When the Lamb opened the third seal , I heard the third living creature say, “Come!” I looked, and there before me was a black horse! Its rider was holding a pair of scales in his hand. Then I heard what sounded like a voice among the four living creatures, saying, “Two pounds[a] of wheat for a day’s wages, and six pounds of barley for a day’s wages, and do not damage the oil and the wine!” Aletheia : Gatherer economy ↔ distributive justice. Black ↔ (justice is) blind. *** Genesis : And God said, “Let there be lights in the vault of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark sacred times, and days and years, and let them be lights in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth.” And it was so. God made two great lights—the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars. God set them in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth, to govern the day and the night , and to separate light from darkness. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the fourth day . Revelation : When the Lamb opened the fourth seal , I heard the voice of the fourth living creature say, “Come!” I looked, and there before me was a pale horse! Its rider was named Death , and Hades was following close behind him. They were given power over a fourth of the earth to kill by sword, famine and plague, and by the wild beasts of the earth. Aletheia : Time ↔ death (entropy, mortality). Death (Hades) entails the loss of defining qualia, e.g. the ‘shades’ in Homer’s underworld ( Odyssey ); ergo, “pale.” *** Genesis : And God said, “Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the vault of the sky.” So God created the great creatures of the sea and every living thing with which the water teems and that moves about in it, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. God blessed them and said, “Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the water in the seas, and let the birds increase on the earth.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the fifth day . Revelation : When he opened the fifth seal , I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slain because of the word of God and the testimony they had maintained. They called out in a loud voice, “How long, Sovereign Lord, holy and true, until you judge the inhabitants of the earth and avenge our blood?” Then each of them was given a white robe, and they were told to wait a little longer, until the full number of their fellow servants, their brothers and sisters, were killed just as they had been. Aletheia : Hunting ↔ martyrdom. The evolution of animalia opens up the possibility of expanding the gatherer economy to include hunting. The perverse analogue of hunting is martyrdom (we are the hunted). Question : Is there a vegetarian/vegan message embedded here? I will leave that to the reader. *** Genesis : And God said, “Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: the livestock, the creatures that move along the ground, and the wild animals, each according to its kind.” And it was so. God made the wild animals according to their kinds, the livestock according to their kinds, and all the creatures that move along the ground according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good. Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.” Then God said, “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds in the sky and all the creatures that move along the ground—everything that has the breath of life in it—I give every green plant for food.” And it was so. God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the sixth day . Revelation : I watched as he opened the sixth seal . There was a great earthquake. The sun turned black like sackcloth made of goat hair, the whole moon turned blood red, and the stars in the sky fell to earth, as figs drop from a fig tree when shaken by a strong wind. The heavens receded like a scroll being rolled up, and every mountain and island was removed from its place. Then the kings of the earth, the princes, the generals, the rich, the mighty, and everyone else, both slave and free, hid in caves and among the rocks of the mountains. They called to the mountains and the rocks, “Fall on us and hide us from the face of him who sits on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb! For the great day of their wrath has come, and who can withstand it?” Aletheia : Mankind (sic) ↔ apocalypse. ‘Nuf sed! As Adam and Eve hid from God in Eden, so now we call upon Nature to conceal us from God’s scrutiny and to protect us from his wrath. *** Genesis : Thus the heavens and the earth were completed in all their vast array. By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work. Then God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested from all the work of creating that he had done. Revelation : When he opened the seventh seal , there was silence in heaven for about half an hour. Aletheia : Rest ↔ silence. God’s creative process ( Genesis ) and his redemptive process ( Revelation ) are separated from the created world by a Markov Blanket : rest/silence. Ordinary spacetime begins with the dawn of ‘the seventh day’ and ends with the opening of ‘the seventh seal’. The world was created in the image of God, but the image is not the figure, the map is not the territory. There is an ontological ‘gap’ between God and World that protects the integrity of God’s process and the independence of his product. Question : Did John of Patmos, titular author of Revelation , intentionally recapitulate Genesis or did the subject matter itself dictate its presentation? Again, I defer to you, dear reader. 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 Hard Problem Solved David Cowles Aug 22, 2026 “God’s unassuming manner gives us a model for human consciousness.” 1100 words, 5 minute read It is customary these days to refer to consciousness as ‘the Hard Problem’. Ok, I’ll grant you, it’s tricky. How is it that I seem to be aware of myself acting apart from my awareness of my action itself. Spooky! Not that spooky. Turns out, the Hard Problem was solved more than 2500 years ago, or if not solved, at least defined and modeled: “Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God hovered over waters. And God said , “ Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning— the first day .” (Genesis 1: 1(b) – 3) But before that, we read: “ In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” (Genesis 1: 1(a)) Some creator! He observed, he spoke, he allowed, he evaluated, he separated/gathered, and he labeled. He was more lab assistant than Nobel scientist, more Lucy, doing QC on the candy line, than DaVinci, painting his Mona Lisa . But God’s unassuming manner gives us a model for human consciousness. Contrary to popular (and by ‘popular’ I mean universal) opinion, we are not conscious authors of our actions. Rather, we oversee, we permit, we judge, we aggregate and we differentiate. No wonder we read, “ So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them…” (Genesis 1: 27) We are chips off the ole block! And say what you will, Genesis doesn’t skimp! Just in case we’re dense, which of course we are, it retells the story. And just like Grandpa (that’s me) at family gatherings, it tells the same story over and over again: “And God said, ‘Let there be a vault between the waters to separate water from water’… and it was so. God called the vault ‘sky’… And God said, ‘Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear’. And it was so. God called the dry ground ‘land’, and the gathered waters he called ‘seas’. And God saw that it was good. “Then God said, ‘Let the land produce vegetation’… and it was so… And God saw that it was good… And God said, ‘Let there be lights in the vault of the sky to separate the day from the night’. And it was so… and God saw that it was good. “And God said, ‘Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the vault of the sky’… And God saw that it was good… And God said, “Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds… And it was so…and God saw that it was good. “Then God said, ‘Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness… So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them… God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.” Get the point? Apparently not! Why else would we continue to refer to God as ‘almighty’ ( omnipotentem ) rather than ‘all-might-be’ ( omnipotentia )? Like our template, God, we act and we are conscious of our actions; but we do not act consciously. We break continuous activity (Herclitus) into distinct events (called ‘days’ in Genesis ). We are conscious of our activity as a series of such events which we evaluate and imprint. We consciously review, and condone or condemn, our actions and we project each imprint, and our conscious evaluation of it, into the Actual World of future events. Our conscious evaluation of our actions is no more inert than God’s. Just as light and land and sea and sky became permanent features of the World, accompanied by God’s approbation, i.e. his positive prehension and favorable subjective form (Whitehead), so we tag our own actions with conscious judgment, and the objective future inherits both our physical actions and our conceptual valuations of those actions. In another post on this site, Consciousness & Free Will , we explored in more detail our idea that actions may be voluntary, free, and value driven even if not preceded by conscious intent. According to this model, consciousness is an emergent property of events, not their prerequisite. None of this is meant to compromise our responsibility, or our accountability, in any way. We are responsible for the actions we undertake voluntarily, even if unconsciously, and we are also responsible for the subjective form (valuation) we attach to those acts as we project them forward into future Actual Worlds. Imagine you are playing the role of Hamlet on Broadway. Lucky you! Wally Shawn directing? You act the part of the Danish prince from curtain to curtain. Then, instead of getting drunk with the rest of the cast, you head home to write a review of the play for the New York Times . You impact the future twice: once by the way you interpret and project Hamlet’s character on stage and then again by how you review your performance (and the rest of the production) for Times ’ readers. The future of this Hamlet is a function of the quality of your acting and the tone of your writing. Consciousness transforms action in the same way that quantum computing transforms data processing. Instead of a binary bit (+ or -), consciousness gives you qubits (+/+, +/-, -/+, or -/-): I act or I pass, I confirm or I condemn. Quantum computing power grows exponentially rather than arithmetically; consciousness gives a similar boost to the efficacy of my actions. Consciousness does not determine what I do; it amplifies (or dampens) it and ‘superjects’ the finished, evaluated product, ‘raw material’ for future events. Genesis gives us a model of consciousness that avoids the usual pitfalls of mechanism, determinism, and dualism. It eliminates the problem of agency. Rather than emerging from a network of single celled organisms called neurons, consciousness envelopes physical process, observing, rationalizing, judging and projecting. Consciousness action is reaction! 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.

Written by David Cowles, Thoughts While Shaving is the official blog of Aletheia Today magazine and explores short, profound thoughts and discoveries about theology, science, philosophy, literature, the arts, society, and prayer. Subscribe today for FREE! Enter your email address here: Subscribe now! Thanks for submitting! Aug 24, 2026 No More Novels “Most novels have an overriding purpose: to justify the ways of men to God.” Read More Aug 23, 2026 Genesis and Revelation “Like all good bookends, they are symmetrical…Spacetime begins on the 7th day and ends with the 7th seal.” Read More Aug 22, 2026 The Hard Problem Solved “God’s unassuming manner gives us a model for human consciousness.” Read More Aug 17, 2026 You & Your Markov Blanket “We are becoming tools of our tools! We are becoming their accessories.” Read More Aug 16, 2026 The Dark Universe “Science has executed a U-Turn and now embraces the heuristic power of mystery.” Read More Aug 15, 2026 So You Want to Live Forever? “Life is paradoxical. The longer we live, the shorter our lives seem.” Read More Aug 14, 2026 The Anarchist Archipelago “La Mojana society thrived for 10,000 years - 20th century dictators, eat your hearts out!” Read More Aug 12, 2026 Christians & Atheists Unite! “Universe came to be at a single moment in time and…will vanish without a trace, leaving no residual effect.” Read More Aug 11, 2026 The Pre-Socratic Consensus “Western philosophy has struggled with one persistent challenge: How to account for the twin phenomena of stability and flux!” Read More Aug 10, 2026 Masks Too “Society is a non-virtual video game and we anonymously manipulate our avatars with joy sticks.” Read More Aug 7, 2026 Applied Camus “I think Camus gets himself into some serious trouble here…he lets dreaded ‘objective values’ slip back into his system.” Read More Aug 4, 2026 Genesis Reconsidered “Whether you are an Idealist, a Materialist, an Empiricist, or a Vitalist, you are espousing a cosmology that was first outlined 2500 years ago...in Genesis.” Read More Thoughts While Shaving 43 Page 1

< Back No More Novels David Cowles Aug 24, 2026 “Most novels have an overriding purpose: to justify the ways of men to God.” 1800 words, 8 minute read I must confess I’ve never been much for novels. Give me a good epic any day, maybe a short story or a play, some poetry, but novels…not so much. Of course, I have a few favorites but after Ulysses things trail off rapidly. What can I say about novels that is universally true? Nothing. The genre has been so overworked, so crowded with anti-novels, that any affirmative statement is bound to elicit a list of exceptions. How do you get Charles Dickens, Gertrude Stein, Franz Kafka, and Alain Robbe-Grillet in a room together and not expect fireworks? Novels range from panoramic swashbucklers to intimate steams of consciousness. They can include 100 characters or just one. They can cover events over multiple continents (or galaxies) and multiple generations or they can all take place in one room, in one mind, or on one day (e.g. Bloomsday, June 16, 1904). But regardless of setting or scope, most novels have an overriding purpose, ‘to justify the ways of men (sic) to God’. They seek to account for a person’s feelings, thoughts and acts in terms of external influences: class or caste, childhood trauma, cultural heritage, etc. But the one thing no one can ever do is to ‘account for’ another person’s actions. Being a person means being unaccountable or, what amounts to the same thing, being accountable only to oneself. My life is not the mechanical result of unseen causes nor is it the product of my own grand designs. It is a series of free, creative responses to disconnected ‘events’, be they mundane, miraculous or absurd. That said, I don’t experience my life as entirely random either. Generally speaking, continuity is strongly felt. Recent studies involving brain scans (MRI) show our brains spontaneously configuring sensory input into coherent narratives. An ‘event’ is a story. Like every story, an event has a beginning, middle, and end. Every story, at least every decent story, has elements of novelty. But every story, no matter how novel, is constructed on a template drawn from one’s extensive library of ‘story forms’ derived from personal experience and/or from cultural transmission. A truly ‘novel narrative’ (whatever that might mean) would be utterly incomprehensible: Finegan’s Wake meets Jean Luc Godard. Ever visit that “vast waste land” (Newton Minnow) known as television? Thousands of ‘stories’ are constructed on just a handful of narrative templates. How many police chases, jilted lovers, betrayed friendships, etc. can you tolerate in one evening? Often stories are so similar that you can mistake something new for something you’ve already seen. Sidebar : Sometimes I’ll watch a show and not realize until the very end that I’ve seen it before; other times, I’ll realize early on that I’ve seen it but elect to continue, discovering new content with fresh eyes. These are marks of good TV! Life is like a word game played at a very high level. A member of the audience shouts out a phrase. I must immediately use that phrase in a sentence and then elaborate that sentence into a story that is original, well-crafted, and meaningful, all the while keeping my audience entertained, preferably laughing or crying or, even better, both. There must be easier ways to make a living! Happily though, there’s a trick to it! True, I have no way to control or predict what phrase an audience will throw at me. But my audience and I do share a huge volume of common knowledge, and I can rely on that shared background to act as foundation and scaffolding for my narrative. In the end, my story is a blend of creativity (me) and continuity (audience). It is a story of ‘events’, i.e. relatively dynamic figures against relatively static ground. I am wise to rely as much as possible on our shared background to carry my story forward. My categorical imperative: “Change as much as necessary but as little as possible.” *** No matter how introspective, novels look at people from outside-in. I know authors are concerned with emotions, motivations, and mental states. And stream of consciousness purports to take us into Jung’s backroom to see Freud’s sausage being made. But all this is external to me. It’s surface! I am neti, neti Hot Link – not this, not that (Sartre’s Neant ). I begin where the world leaves off. I am not what the world is; I am what the world is not. “I dream of things that never were and ask, ‘Why not?’.” (Robert Kennedy) Whatever you can say about a character is external to that character. As soon as you shoehorn an insight into a symbolic system, a language, for communication purposes, your insight takes on an order not organic to it. The vine-picked grape has become fine wine, you know, with ‘hints of cassis and tobacco’. Simplistically speaking, a language consists of its vocabulary and its grammar. Grammar in turn includes a substructural infra-grammar that determines how we break down our perceptual field into semantic quanta, e.g. words, and a syntax which determines how we reassemble those words to form meaningful propositions. A good character is likely to have some rough edges. Stephen, Leopold, and Molly certainly do! But ‘a rough edge’ implies ‘a smooth core’ and that’s something no real person possesses. In fact, we are Eliot’s hollow men and I’m not sure a novel can ever fully capture that emptiness. Even existential angst, when expressed in language, becomes superficial. The real life of a real person is chaotic. Nothing follows automatically from anything else. It is an archipelago of events spread across an inert medium. How do I differentiate an ‘event’ from that medium? To be ‘real’ an event must satisfy Bateson’s Criterion , i.e. it must be a difference that makes a difference. As such, an event is information : it must differentiate itself from its medium and it must deflect the course of events going forward. Paradigm : Hercules cleaning the Aegean Stables. The river’s flow is diverted and the stalls are properly mucked. Riddle : “My life is a matrix of nodes. Each node is a bifurcation point. Like GPS, I enter my destination based on the values I wish to instantiate and a program calculates all available routes.” Who am I? Answer : Robert Frost . One way or another, subtly or heavy handedly, the novelist attempts to account for my chosen values and my actions (route) in pursuit of those values. It’s a thankless ask. Personally, I’ll stick to Homer: ‘a god made me do it’…and I am that god, for me! *** Neuroscience is revealing how our brains are wired for narrative (Ingrid Wickelgren, Scientific American , September 2026): No story accurately replicates events. They deliberately streamline reality into versions that emphasize cause and effect relationships. People’s real-world experiences are similarly edited by the brain to make sense of them; these edited scripts form our memories. Culture shapes storytelling in ways that can subtly but profoundly affect our sense of ourselves. Family and society are co-authors, even of the stories we tell ourselves. In 1944 Austrian American psychologist Fritz Heider asked 114 subjects to watch a crude animated film in which a small triangle, a big triangle and a small circle ricochet off one another and scoot in and out of a rectangle with a doorlike flap. When asked to describe what they saw, hardly any of the participants reported the physical movement of shapes. To some, those ‘beings’ were in a love triangle; to others, they were embroiled in a family drama or an episode of bullying. The brain does automatically what a screenwriter does deliberately. “When you create narrative, you say, “‘Well, this caused this, or this would have caused this, but this other thing happened,’” says Pixar’s Jesse Andrews. The primary glue is cause and effect . In a 2022 study, when people watched or recalled scenes that were causally connected, activity spiked in certain parts of the brain and that higher activity was associated with greater recall of those scenes. Even when a film makes generous use of flashbacks and flashforwards, folks retelling the story restore the causal order, ignoring the director’s artistry. Confronted with a continuous flow of undifferentiated ‘experience’, the brain breaks the continuum into defined ‘events’ and then reassembles those events into a narrative. “The building block of the movie is the scene,” Andrews says. As far back as the 1970s, psychologists hypothesized that people store basic scripts derived from prior experiences and analyze future experiences in terms of those scripts. Your experience of your next trip to LAX will be informed by your experience of previous trips to the airport. Every trip to the airport is different but every trip has certain features in common: arriving, boarding, etc. Surprisingly, studies show that you better remember those experiences that are closest to the mean experience. Storytelling projects the neural patterns associated with one person’s experience onto another individual, expanding the latter’s inventory of experiences beyond their own. Stories that appeal to broad audiences are often rooted in shared cultural narratives which in turn reflect accepted ways of thinking. *** Narrative is the glue that creates solidarity. The stories we tell ourselves about our own lives enable us to maintain a sense of continuous personal identity. Somehow, I am the same person who sat, bored to distraction, gazing out the window of Sister Martha Mary’s 4 th grade classroom onto the inviting school yard below. The stories we tell each other enable us to share a sense of cultural identity. The Hebrew Torah, the Homeric epics, the Norse Edda and the Christian Gospels are examples of collections of shared stories that strongly reinforce the cultural identities of disparate social groups, across continents and millennia. But narrative has its limits. Admittedly, it edits raw experience to create sequences of events that highlight cause and effect relationships. Whether causality plays a similarly important role in the evolution of objective events is a moot question. First, my proposed ‘categorical imperative’ (change as much as necessary but as little as possible) ensures a world characterized by events that form sequences that often appear causal. But any conservative ontology would likely produce a similar result. Second, our neural structure apparently encourages us to break up the continuous flow of experience into stochastic events with causal links. Whether that corresponds to anything objective about the World is, again, moot. Third, and most importantly, no narrative can ‘account for’ the values we freely adopt or for the actions we take in pursuit of those values. Whatever else, this is a realm beyond the reach of narrative and so I beg, “No more novels” – please! Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! 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< Back Christians & Atheists Unite! David Cowles Aug 12, 2026 “Universe came to be at a single moment in time and…will vanish without a trace, leaving no residual effect.” 1850 words, 8 minute read Theology makes strange bedfellows. Fundamentalist Christians and Secular Atheists have more in common than you may imagine. For one thing, both believe something that would seem to challenge all rational credulity: “The material universe came to be at a single moment in time and, after a calculable number of such (Planck length) moments (c. 10^60), it will vanish without a trace, leaving no residual material effect.” Christians call it creatio ex nihilo , atheists prefer bootstrapping ; either way, it’s the same phenomenon: nothing → something → nothing. For over three millennia, philosophers have been finding fault with this model: “…What-is is ungenerated and imperishable… Nor was it once, nor will it be, since it is - now, together, one , continuous… Thus coming-to-be is extinguished and perishing not to be heard of… It is not to be said or thought That it is not … It must either be completely or not at all.” (Parmenides, Fragment 8) “It is impossible for there to be coming to be from what is not and that what is should be destroyed.” (Empedocles, Fragment 18) “There is no growth…(nor) destructive death…but only mixture and interchange… Growth is the name given to them by men.” (Empedocles, Fragment 21) “They have no constant life but in so far as they never cease from interchanging, they are forever unchanged…running through each other they become different at different times and (so) are perpetually alike.” (Empedocles, Fragment 25) “We step and we do not step into the same rivers, we are and we are not.” (Heraclitus, Fragment 49a) “As they, different, step into the same rivers, different waters flow over them.” (Heraclitus, Fragment 12) “We come together into one cosmos…from which all things that were, and are, and will be in the future have sprung…” (Empedocles, Fragment 25) “Out of all things, one thing, and out of one thing, all things.” (Heraclitus, Fragment 10) “All things are one thing.” (Heraclitus, Fragment 50) Fast forward 2500 years: Gregory Bateson gave us a criterion to judge any entity claiming any sort of ‘ontological authenticity’: “A difference that makes a difference.” Alfred North Whitehead implicitly incorporated Bateson’s criterion into his Philosophy of Organism when he wrote that every event begins by rejecting elements of its Actual World (difference) and ends by projecting a new synthesis (difference) into the Actual Worlds of other events. So that’s an event, a difference that makes a difference. But then Universe, as we understand it, cannot be an event! It rejects nothing (there’s nothing to reject) and, even more importantly, it projects nothing (there’s nowhere to project it): “(It) will vanish without a trace leaving no residual effect.” So universe can harbor events, but it cannot itself be an event; but if it’s not an event, What is it? Or more to the point, Is it? (According to Whitehead, only events are actual entities .) And so we find ourselves at an impasse - an occupational hazard for philosophers. We have eviscerated the Big Bang/Big Burp model of Universe (above), and now we have even called into question the existence of Universe per se . Well done! But our mutual congratulations are necessarily tempered by two inconvenient facts: Ø The ‘discredited’ Big Bang/Big Burp model fits barge loads of scientific evidence. What seemingly can’t be (philosophy) apparently is (science). Ø “…Ergo est!” Universe does exist; deal with it! Somehow, we must reconcile what must be with what can’t be. It’s a tall order…so everyone is invited to join in: Atheists, Christians, Sikhs, et al. In such a dilemma, it often proves useful to reexamine the core proposition in question: Is it well formed or does it embed a preconceived solution, disguise a bias, or harbor a contradiction? In that spirit, let’s deconstruct our original prop: “Universe came to be, without precedent cause, at a single moment in time, and after a measurable period of time, it will cease to be…without residual effect.” How can this be so? Atheists must look for an answer that is consistent with their assumption that the Universe is ‘all there is’. They must find Sufficient Reason within the Universe itself. This is admittedly a heavy lift but one which can be addressed with quasi-explanatory concepts like virtual particles and negative vacuum pressure or… with a simple shrug, “We know what we know and that’s all that we know (Popeye)…for now.” Their God is the Gaps! Christians have a superficially easier task. They have a ready-made explanation close at hand: “I am who am ( YHWH) … I will be all in all ( pan in panti )… I am the Alpha and the Omega , the first and the last, the beginning and the end… everything that comes to be comes to be through me ( sophia /wisdom, logos /plan).” Ok? Well, that depends on your point of view. For some, ‘God’ is a matter of first person experience, for some a conclusion drawn from observation and reasoning. For others, ‘God’ is evinced by testimony from trusted, reliable sources. For these folks, creatio ex nihilo and parousia (above) pose no difficulty. To the extent that they trust their own process, the problem is solved…for them. For others, however, God is more abstract, more remote, possibly unknowable, at least ineffable. But if God cannot be known or described, how can we attribute any specific act or function (e.g. creation, salvation)? Still others consider ‘God’ a false flag, e.g. “a concept by which we measure our pain.” (Lennon) Some cite Occam’s Razor, dismissing the ‘God Hypothesis’ as superfluous. Finally, there are those who believe that the very concept of God is logically incoherent and/or inconsistent with what we know and trust about the world. Sidebar : Christians are often thought to be gullible, basing their convictions on faith rather than on evidence. Atheists are credited with greater rationality. But the reverse is the case. Atheists place enormous, almost mystical, faith in the principle of Sufficient Reason, in WYSIWYG , and in the power of human inquiry to discover ultimate truth. Judeo-Christians are simply advancing a minimal hypothesis (God) to account for incontrovertible data. That doesn’t make it right, just simpler. Can we meaningfully differentiate between these two cosmologies? Ceasing to be without residual effect is logically equivalent to never having been: ‘42 – 42’ is the same as ‘0’, Mr. Adams. The math is the same for Christians and Atheists alike. If you are not now and there is no trace of you ever having been, what would it mean to say you were ? Aren’t we playing language games when we ascribe being to something that is not…or non-being to something that is? In what sense can we say that anything was when whatever was has vanished without a trace, leaving things exactly as they would have been if it had not occurred in the first place or if something entirely different had happened instead? In what sense can we say that anything is when whatever is will vanish without a trace, leaving no residual effect? The Universe ends the same way no matter what events it contains; all its trajectories converge… at the place labeled never having been . Therefore, Christian or Atheist, both Occam’s Razor and the Principle of Sufficient Reason require us to say that nothing is, was, or ever will be. Ergo Nihilism …unless there’s more to the story. The Book of Revelation contains the clearest statement of this doctrine from the Christian perspective. The fulcrum of the book is the successive opening of Seven Seals . Each seal reveals an aspect of Universe: . “When He (Christ/the Lamb) broke open the seventh seal, there was silence in Heaven for about a half an hour.” (8: 1) The material Universe ends the same for Christians as for Atheists: Nihil est , nothing is. “Nothing beside remains.” ( Ozymandias , Shelley) But Revelation does not end with the breaking of the 7 th seal. Over 15 additional chapters it presents a detailed, if highly symbolic account of the ‘transcendent’, supra-material, eternal process of Universe. Where does this leave us…besides confused? First, there is nothing wrong with the Big Bang/Big Burp model of Universe! There is abundant evidence to support it, mainly in the halls of science, but also in Judeo-Christian scripture. Again, the secular and the spiritual converge on this model; it would be foolish not to accept it, at least provisionally. The question is whether the model is coherent without the added supposition of Transcendence (T), i.e. an aspect or dimension of Universe that exists/operates outside of spacetime. On this subject, Nietzsche was unusually adamant, even for him: “One is necessary, one is a piece of fate, one belongs to the whole, one is in the whole – there exists nothing which could judge, measure, compare, condemn our being, for that would be to judge, measure, compare, condemn the whole… But nothing exists apart from the whole!” ( Twilight of the Idols ) Take heart : acceptance of Transcendence need not lead to the dreaded Judeo-Christian God, at least not directly. ‘T’ could simply be a dimension of reality that does not have the characteristics of spacetime, i.e. that is neither extensive nor divisible. Still, some Christians argue that Transcendence necessarily leads to the concept of an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, personal and historical God; but not everyone agrees! On the other hand, some atheists argue that accepting T on any terms is equivalent to letting the nose of a very stinky camel into your tent. They are not wrong! Realism is a useful discipline. Having to find sufficient reason in the immanent, phenomenal world prevents us from considering seriously the idea that Earth might rest atop an infinite tower of turtles; or…it could blind us to the truth. We are in the habit of modeling Universe purely in terms of a finite number of spatiotemporal dimensions. Every event can be uniquely labeled using an ordered set of just 4 real numbers. Because these dimensions are extensive, continuous, and divisible, no two events share the same address. The resulting spacetime grid is a way to order events, a secular logos . But this model alone is incoherent. It is inconsistent with any actual world. Call it ‘God’ or something entirely unrelated to God, there must be a dimension, T, to Universe that is neither extensive nor divisible, i.e. that is unrelated to space or time, that is universal and eternal. On that, Christians and Atheists should be united! Dante Allegri described Transcendence in his Paradiso (and yes, he had in mind the Judeo-Christian God): “The glory of him who moves all things… the Love that moves the sun and the other stars… permeates the universe .” 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 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 The Dark Universe David Cowles Aug 16, 2026 “Science has executed a U-Turn and now embraces the heuristic power of mystery.” 1500 words, 7 minute read As my ‘frequent readers’ know, I am a parochial school survivor: 6 years…in the 1950s…before Vatican II humanized the Church: my first purple heart. (I also survived the late ‘60s for heart #2 ). That said, it’s intriguing to see that things I learned 75 years ago are making a comeback. In ‘sisters’ school’ everything was a ‘mystery’. (At least they had that right!) Creation, Incarnation, Eucharist, Resurrection, Ascension – all mysteries. Don’t think too much about them, just accept them as facts and move on. Hardly a promising start for a budding theologian! But later in my intellectual odyssey, I discovered that Sister Mary Martha was in league with some of the 20 th centuries leading thinkers: quantum mechanics like Bohr and logical positivists like early Wittgenstein. The Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, perhaps inspired by another leading intellect of the time, Frank Baum, asks us to accept experimental data on face value and avoid looking behind the ‘curtain’ in search of underlying causes or a coherent model. Sister would have approved. Phenomena only please! Were 5,000 people fed from a few loaves and fishes leaving 12 baskets of leftover scraps? So noted, now move on. As a child, how often was I told not to speak of things I did not fully understand? Sister would have been overjoyed to read, “ “Whereof one cannot speak (know), thereof one must be silent.” (Wittgenstein) The Global Cultural Revolution (from the Vatican to Paris and from China to Woodstock) taught us to eschew the transcendent and honor the immanent: “Be Here Now!” (Ram Das). Today we have bumper stickers reading, “Follow the Science.” But unbeknownst to everyone, Science has executed a U-Turn and now embraces the heuristic power of mystery . Truly, “it’s yesterday once more.” (Karen Carpenter) *** We have a problem. Since Thales (or before) we have been developing a detailed cosmology to account for the phenomena we know as Universe . An incredible tour de forc e, but one with a few rough edges. Specifically, the Universe seems to be expanding at an accelerating rate while structures within the universe (e.g. galaxies) seem not to be expanding at all. Gravity doesn’t cut it! It’s a mystery! But we learned how to deal with such unaccountable phenomena 70 years ago. We simply declare them ‘mysteries’ and then posit new entities, like Trinity and Transubstantiation, to account for what’s otherwise unaccountable. Eazy-Peezy. It began with Dark Matter - the name cosmologists gave to the mysterious force that seems to be holding galaxies together. Apparently, cosmologists felt a need to respond to the challenge young Woody Allen posed in Annie Hall : ‘Why should I bother to do homework if the universe is blowing up all around me?’ Then came Dark Energy : “For nearly thirty years, Dark Energy has been the cornerstone of modern cosmology. When astronomers discovered in the 1990s that the universe wasn't just expanding but accelerating…they needed an explanation. Dark Energy was it, an invisible pressure built into the fabric of space itself, pushing everything apart. Nobody has ever detected it directly, but the maths seemed to demand it, so into the equations it went.” - Mark Thompson, BBC, May 31, 2026 Dark Energy seemed to account for the fact that the universe seems to be expanding at an accelerating rate. Between the two, Dark Forces ( Oooo! ) are thought to account for 95% of the universe’s gravitational behavior (96% on October 31). It is so convenient when mysteries balance out like this. Perhaps it’s a mark of authenticity; perhaps not. And so a new definition of Scientific Method is emerging: Whenever you can’t explain some phenomenon, discover a new ‘force’ to account for it and then label that force ‘dark’ so no one can expect you to locate it or explain it. Neat trick…no wonder these guys (sic) got all A’s in high school; they really are that smart! Dark Forces are accepted by the astronomical community. The Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded in 2011 in recognition of the ‘discovery’ of Dark Matter. But now we have another problem! Well, several problems: A new set of measurements that seem to suggest that the expansion of the universe is not accelerating after all; in fact, it’s slowing down. Oops! So we have a beautiful theory , all dressed up with nowhere to go. Anyone who’s been stood up on prom night can empathize with our cosmological angst. But believe it or not, it gets even worse for ‘denizens of the dark’. Mark Thompson (above), science broadcaster and author, continued his remarks, turning his attention to a team of mathematicians who recently “…found that accelerating expansion falls naturally out of Einstein's original equations, without any need to bolt Dark Energy onto the side. The universe accelerates not because of some mysterious invisible force, but because of the inherent mathematics of how space and matter behave in the wake of the Big Bang.” So not only did your prom date ghost you, it turns out that the prom had already been cancelled and nobody bothered to let you know. *** Just a few years ago we thought we had everything figured out…well, at least one thing figured out: ‘We’re in the dark!’ (95% dark anyway). MIT Technology Review (5/19/2025): “We can put a good figure on how much we know about the universe: 5% . That’s how much of what’s floating about in the cosmos is ordinary matter—planets and stars and galaxies and the dust and gas between them. The other 95% is dark matter and dark energy, two mysterious entities aptly named for our inability to shed light on their true nature... Cosmologists have cast dark matter as the hidden glue binding galaxies together. Dark energy plays an opposite role, ripping the fabric of space apart.” Poor Isaac Newton must have been on mushrooms when he thought to explain gravity in terms of a perfectly visible , and regrettably tactile , apple (falling from a tree branch overhead). Dark ‘gravity/anti-gravity’ forces have been accepted in the academy, but the smug satisfaction that comes from intellectual certainty does not last long. Take in the 2026 view from the left coast (UC Davis): “…A new paper published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society produced mathematical proof that the standard model of cosmic expansion, the one built around dark energy, is fundamentally unstable.” So your prom date ghosted you, but the prom had been cancelled anyway, and OBTW, the brand new limo you hired to take you to the prom was just recalled - something about a tendency for the engine to explode? And I thought I was having a bad day! Scientists ‘invented’ the Dark to give a name to things they couldn’t explain. Based on what we know , the Universe shouldn’t work. There’s not nearly enough mass to hold galaxies together. In fact, however, galaxies do exist, 100’s of billions of them with more forming ‘every day’. So something’s wrong and the Dark hypothesis seems to solve the problem. Of course, it’s merely ‘solving’ one unknown in terms of another. So where do we go from here? Well, the headlines are already in the can: “ Dark hypotheses confirmed!” And they will be confirmed because any advance in our understanding of the universe will now be labeled dark . And why not? ‘Dark Universe’ has no denotative meaning, nothing that might subject it to the risk of falsification. It’s a universal place holder for whatever we don’t know now but may discover later. So ‘dark’ is apt after all. Once we learn something about the universe that we don’t already know, whatever that is, that will be what ‘dark’ is. It will define ‘dark’. Of course it will. We don’t know what Dark is so whatever turns out to solve the paradox will be quite correctly labeled Dark , and we will say, “Of course that’s what Dark Matter and Energy are, we knew it all along.” Except of course, we didn’t. Do you doubt me? It’s already happening. An article by Evan Gough in the February 09, 2026 issue of Universe Today suggests replacing the Black Hole hypothesis with…you guessed it, Dark Matter. According to Gough, it may be dark matter, not a black hole, that resides at the center of the Milky Way and holds the galaxy together. So the Dark Forces are living up to their name. They can explain virtually everything …no matter what anything is. Thanks for reading through to the end and now before you go, if you don’t mind, just one more favor, please: Can you remind me how rational science differs from spooky magic? 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 So You Want to Live Forever? David Cowles Aug 15, 2026 “Life is paradoxical. The longer we live, the shorter our lives seem.” 2000 words, 8 minute read If you’ve always craved immortality, your time has come at last…maybe! A group of individuals who call themselves Vitalists believe that death per se is humanity’s core problem. (And just like that, I’m back in middle school!) Influencer Bryan Johnson, for example, speaks of plans to create a new religion in which “the (human) body is God.” At last, God made in our image and likeness! “Who’s a thunk it?” ( Hairspray ) Recently, Johnson added psychedelics to his “God is us” tool kit. No, it’s not psylocibin or LSD; it’s venom from the Bufo Toad. And you don’t smoke it, snort it, or shoot it; you lick it! Right off of the back of your new favorite amphibian. How fun is that ! Caveat : The licked frog does not turn into a member of a royal family. Apparently, ‘a lick is not a kiss’. However, you may find yourself living in a palace (i.e. you may find that your current residence is in fact a palace…and always has been and you just didn’t notice). Molecule 5-MeO-DMT, the ‘active ingredient’ in the venom, does double duty: it reveals our spiritual divinity and it promotes our physical immortality. *** Vitalism is gaining ground worldwide! A popup city in Montenegro (Zuzalu, 2023) was created by people who wanted to establish a “longevity state” - a jurisdiction dedicated to lifespan extension, which would also facilitate access to unproven but potentially life-extending drugs. A similar effort in Próspera, Honduras, has created a permissive environment for biotech companies to perform unusual clinical trials. ZuVillage in Georgia (the country, not the state); and Zelar City in Berlin (Germany, not NH), offer their own spin on the original formula. And every May, ‘Vitalist Bay’ pops up somewhere in the SF area. Putting the dubious science of immortality to one side for now, does the more realistic goal of ‘life extension’ make sense? “Of course it does,” you say. “Who doesn’t want to live as long as possible?” Well, you do, apparently; but most people don’t – but that’s another subject for another day. Life is paradoxical. The longer we live, the shorter our lives seem. The problem? We don’t heed our own advice. We behave as though prior results do guarantee future performance. At 20 we cannot be convinced that we will not live forever. And who can blame us? The first twenty years went by so slowly that 80/20 → ∞. Subjectively, time seems inexhaustible. 20 years of adult living corrects our perspective: 80/40 = 2, but then 80/50 = 1 and 80/80 → 0. Believe it or not, this bizarre scenario can be expressed by a very simple mathematical function (where f(x) = subjective life span and x = the ratio of ‘average life span’ to ‘years lived’): *** Riddle me this : What do you and I have in common with every other human being who’s ever lived? Don’t say ‘death’ because death is not something we have ; in fact death is defined precisely as the absence of a we . I don’t have my own death, and I certainly don’t have yours …and you certainly don’t have mine (I hope). According to the local sage, Pop Wisdom, death is one stage in the process we call ‘life’. It isn’t! Death is the limit of life, not an aspect of it. Just as Achilles is forever infinitesimally short of the finish line, so you are always infinitesimally short of being dead. You cannot ‘be dead’ and be you ; therefore you cannot experience death. The sentence ‘I am dead’ (or even ‘I will die’) is oxymoronic. For Achilles to break the tape, or for you to be dead, it is necessary to employ a computational device called Calculus . Fortunately, the real world doesn’t obey the conventions of arithmetic. Less fortunately, when I explained this to Sister Mary Martha in 3 rd grade, I got something other than the Fields medal I was expecting . No, the correct answer is not death . Give up then? Ok, here goes: “Every human being who’s ever lived had, has, or will have a lifespan of one day…or less.” No, not all at the same time…at least I hope not. Someday it will happen that you will have a lifespan of one day or less (of course you almost certainly won’t know it at the time). Most of us believe we have lifespans of more than one day. But no one born alive fails to have a life span of ‘one day… or less’ . Of course, by now you’ve realized that there’s nothing sacrosanct about one day : it’s just a placeholder. It would be equally true to say that every human being has a life span of ‘one second or less’ …or ‘one millennium or less’ . Whatever, it’s always true! The key is ‘or less’. When it suits us, we think of periods of time as if they were beads on a string, one day following the next ad nauseum . But time is more like the Tower of Babel: each floor rests on the floor beneath it. Your top floor penthouse is essentially the sum of all the floors (and their occupants) below: Enjoy…and don’t worry about all the folks you had to climb over to get to the top. Although the circumstances of our births may differ, O Prince, the being born of it is the same for both of us…and for every other human being (every other living organism?) that ever lives. We diverge from a shared singularity into a solipsistic multiplicity , from undifferentiated potentiality into unique actuality. I am other than others. I am not not ! YHWH’s “I am what am” = “I am not what’s not.” (Exodus 3: 14) The circumstances of our deaths may differ. You may die, surrounded by loved ones with flights of angels singing you to your rest; I may bleed out in a ditch somewhere, waiting in vain for a good Samaritan to rescue me. Regardless, in the end we will once again be equal, identical, one. The becoming dead of it is the same for both of us. So ‘being born’ we diverge and live out our respective lifespans in perfect isolation only to remerge when ‘becoming dead’. Being born and becoming dead are limits and we all converge toward those limits. Shorter lifespans continually succeed longer ones; gradually, lifespan differentials (actually, all identifying differentials) collapse as we approach our common singularity. *** My life is defined by its limits: I am by I am not . What is ‘being’ other than ‘not-not-being’? Once upon a time I did not exist and someday I will exist no more. You too! In between our birth day and our death day we will each have what we call ‘a life’, and every such life is radically unique (i.e. no elements in common). But, as our respective lifespans shorten, our common fate begins to eclipse our unique experience. Two prayers are foundational in Roman Catholic spirituality: the Lord’s Prayer and the Hail Mary . There we pray to ‘Mary, Mother of God ’, asking her to ‘pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death’. In fact this is that hour! The hour of our death is always now and every now is that hour. There is but one birth and one death and every human being (certain mystical figures potentially excepted) approaches both as a limit. The end of all process ( doxa ) is identity ( Aletheia ) – Parmenides At the beginning and at the end we are not just equal, we are identical (but of course we are no longer we ); and if we are identical, then we are one , i.e. a single entity. The limit of every unique ‘I’ is a common ‘not-I’. There is but one ‘not-I’ but every ‘not-not-I’ is unique. You and I are entangled organisms (like Bell’s entangled particles). Birth is our Big Bang, death our Heat Death. Between these universal Bigs , each of us lives ‘my so-called life’. No two lives are the same. In fact, no two lives have even a single element (event) in common, but all lives diverge from and converge toward a common limit. Exception : God! By definition God stands outside the warp and woof of spacetime. If God is an element in any life, then God is an element in every life and constitutes our single, common point of contact with ‘the transcendent other’; that shared contact accounts for the Solidarity of the Universe ( aka the Mind of God). Intellectual History consists primarily of the search for analogies across lives…and of course analogies abound - they form the basis of language, art, society, and all culture - but there are no identities (other than being born and becoming dead ). We do not intersect, i.e. we share no experiences. From the moment of birth each of us lives out a totally unique, subjectively isolated life…right up to the moment of death; along the way we are comforted – and alienated - by our reflection as seen in the billions of surrounding mirrors we call ‘other people’. All of which makes the contemporary Vitalist movement especially perplexing. I mean, life extension to what end? Live an hour or less, live a century or more, ultimately you share a common (albeit infinitesimal) lifespan with every other human being who has ever lived. Does the long lived Sea Turtle experience life differently from the May Fly? (They experience different lives, but their experience of life is the same.) The arrow of mortality goes in one direction only. All our ‘lifespans’ continually shorten until they converge at non-entity; but what of our so-called lives? Do they count for nothing? Just so… unless you believe that experience somehow transcends death, i.e. entropy, spacetime. No matter how varied our lives may have been, dying is the ultimate leveler. Death is the Dictatorship of the Proletariat (which is not to say that the Dictatorship of the Proletariat is death, Comrade Lenin). Any experience, by definition, must differ from an alternative (real or imagined). That’s what experience is: differentiation. Those aspects of being that are common to all (e.g. birth and death) are not ‘experienced’; they simply constitute the human condition . *** “ We are such stuff as dreams are made on.” (Shakespeare, The Tempest ) Dreams can be complex experiences, crammed full of action and emotion and inter-personal relationships, yet within a second of waking up, all that has vanished without consequence and often without memory. If being is ‘difference that makes a difference’ (Bateson) then our dreams do not necessarily meet that criterion…neither do our lives! So life extension ? What’s to extend? Dream time? Unless events transcend spacetime, they are nothing but ‘ice cream castles in the air’. All dreams are the same at the moment we awaken; likewise all lives converge at the moment of death. If you were a precocious preschooler, some well-meaning buttinsky might have tried to comfort you following the death of a loved one (or pet) by analogizing: “Now we are caterpillars, but when we die, we become butterflies! ” Exactly so! Caterpillars (generally) do not ‘grow’ into butterflies; their genetic material totally reorganizes. They undergo the equivalent of a phase change. They both are, and are not, what they were (or what they will become). Nothing is added, nothing is taken away, but nothing is the same. But does the butterfly know that once upon a time it was a caterpillar? Does the caterpillar know that it is on its way to becoming a butterfly? When the butterfly emerges from the chrysalis, does it even know that anything has changed? Will we? 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 Pre-Socratic Consensus David Cowles Aug 11, 2026 “Western philosophy has struggled with one persistent challenge: How to account for the twin phenomena of stability and flux!” 1000 words, 5 minute read From the Alpha ( Parmenides ) to the Omega ( Whitehead ) and beyond (Quantum Mechanics), Western philosophy has struggled with one persistent challenge: How to account for the twin phenomena of stability and flux! The problem is summarized in popular memes as well as in academic tomes: Ø “The only constant is change.” Ø “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” Ø Wave-particle duality. Alfred North Whitehead, author of the last great work of systematic philosophy , Process and Reality (c. 1930), summed up the dilemma with a single verse from a popular Anglican hymn: Ø “Abide in me, fast falls the eventide.” 2400 hundred years earlier, in the oldest substantially extant work of Western philosophy, On Nature , Parmenides, the father of Western philosophy, struggled with the same paradox. His solution: Realm of Truth ( Aletheia ), meet the Realm of Appearance ( Doxa )! Re the former, he writes: Ø “…What-is is ungenerated and imperishable…whole, single-limbed, steadfast, and complete; nor was it once, nor will it be, since it is - now, all together, one, continuous… It is not lacking (anything) but if it were, it would lack everything… It must either be completely or not at all.” (Fragment 8) But, Ø “…Nevertheless you shall learn…how the things that (only) seem must have genuine existence, permeating all things completely… (Fragment 1) To come to be and to perish, to be and not be, and to shift place and to exchange bright colors.” (Fragment 8) Commentators are right to note the apparently irreconcilable contrast between events in the Realm of Aletheia (stability) and those in the realm of Doxa (flux). But they fail to note that Parmenides sees these, not as separate classes of events (one real, one imagined) but as two aspects, two poles of every event (“permeating all things completely”). In the language of Heidegger, Dasein (that it is) is ‘permeated’ by Wassein (what it is). Qualia alone do not constitute an event but there are no events without qualia . Commentators wrongly assume that Parmenides is lionizing one realm ( Aletheia ) at the expense of the other ( Doxa ). Rather, he anticipates a version of complementarity. As human beings, we love a good rivalry: Red Sox-Yankees, Ali-Frazier, Lions-Christians, and now, Parmenides-Heraclitus. As tradition has identified Parmenides as the ‘scion of stability’, so it has labeled Heraclitus the ‘father of flux’. The stage is set for a Melee in the Mediterranean …but unfortunately for the event promoters and the ticket scalpers, Heraclitus must account for the same paradoxical phenomena as Parmenides; so it is no surprise that he arrives at a strikingly similar resolution: Ø “It scatters and brings together again (or, rather, it brings together and lets go, neither again nor later but simultaneously); it forms and dissolves, it approaches and departs.” (Fragment 91) Ø “Whole and not whole, drawn together and drawn asunder, harmonious and discordant: the one is made up of all things, and all things issue from the one.” (Fragment 10) Ø “While changing, it rests.” (Fragment 84a) Ø “On those who enter the same rivers ever different waters flow.” (Fragment 12) There is a real difference between Parmenides and Heraclitus, but the difference is one of emphasis. Parmenides begins his account of ‘what is’ from the perspective of stability and then introduces flux: what is ‘whole, steadfast, and complete’ is also ‘to perish, to move and to change appearance’. Heraclitus begins with change and deduces permanence: ‘When I enter the same river, I am and I am not the same person; the river is the same but the water flowing though it is ever new.’ When the first Transcontinental Railroad line was built in the US (1869), it was intended to bring the West Coast east, or the East Coast west, depending on your point of view. Appropriately, construction began simultaneously from the two end points; miraculously, the two vectors met in the middle. The Golden Spike fused East and West forever via one track running in both directions. As Heraclitus himself wrote, “The road up and the road down are the same road.” (Fragment 60) Parmenides began with stability and incorporated flux while Heraclitus (“everything flows”) began with flux and incorporated stability. They met in the middle. Their Golden Spike? Empedocles! A generation younger than our two headliners, he likely had access to the complete (not fragmented) works of both and he was able to point out clearly what Plato and his successors (i.e. us) managed to miss, i.e. the natural compatibility of their ideas: “They (things) come to be and have no constant life but in so far as they never cease from interchanging, they are forever unchanged…running through each other they become different at different times and (so) are perpetually alike.” (Fragment 25) Nothing further is required. ‘Interchanging and running through each other, they become different at different times ( Doxa ) and (so) are perpetually alike ( Aletheia )’. Same river, different water! QED But Empedocles elaborates: “There is no growth…(nor) destructive death…but only mixture and interchange.” (Fragment 21) “We come together into one cosmos…from which all things that were, and are, and will be in the future have sprung…” (Fragment 25) There were many other philosophers of note during Greece’s Golden Century (5 th century BCE), Anaxagoras and Democritus to name just two, and they did not all agree about everything… not by a long shot. But they all confronted the paradox of permanence and change and, generally speaking, their thoughts converged on what I call the Pre-Socratic Consensus . 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 Anarchist Archipelago David Cowles Aug 14, 2026 “La Mojana society thrived for 10,000 years - 20th century dictators, eat your hearts out!” 1250 words, 5 minute read In an earlier post, we talked about the ‘advanced’ (Neolithic) Vinca civilization that thrived for a millennium along the Danube c. 5000 BCE. We talked about their extraordinary feats of social engineering achieved without resort to any form of central government: Ø Urban Planning . Residential areas are set apart from areas designated for community events, commerce, and manufacture. Within the residential quarter, buildings are arranged in symmetrical patterns, reflecting both pre-planning and a high level of cooperation. Ø Division of Labor . Hunting, agriculture, manufacturing and trade are functions performed by specified individuals but without any suggestion of coercion or class/caste differentiation. Ø Social Justice . A decentralized political structure, a relatively flat wealth distribution curve, and little evidence of gender inequality. Men and women have distinct roles but those roles do not appear linked to any social or economic disparities. Ø Gender Flexibility . Men and women were buried in different positions with different artifacts, but several recently opened graves contained skeletons of folks of both genders buried opposite to their birth physiology. Now archeologists have discovered another civilization, this time in pre-Hispanic Columbia, that appears to resemble the Vinca in several important ways. An article by Andrew Paul published Aug 11, 2026 in Popular Science presents the evidence: “The La Mojana field systems in Colombia’s wetlands are some of the largest examples of monumental ancient engineering in South America. Encompassing an area about as large as Grand Canyon National Park, the network of canals and raised farming ridges are so vast that they’re even visible from airplanes.” How so? “Instead of a centralized chiefdom commanding their citizens to build the field systems, an international research team now believes the hydraulic agricultural arrangement was designed, built, and maintained by local family cooperatives. What’s more, they likely achieved their goals much faster than expected… “Researchers at the Colombian Institute of Anthropology and History (ICANH) and Spain’s University of Santiago de Compostela then calculated the labor and social structures needed to construct such a system. Factors included how much earth was moved, local geological information, the era’s technology, population size, and indigenous working traditions. “ We are confident that one of these canal-ridge systems could have been built in less than two months’, said Jasmine Vieri, an archaeologist at the University of Cambridge and study co-author.” Sidebar #1 : Roman Catholic social theory has long emphasized the value of Subsidiarity – getting the job done as close to home as possible, at the lowest rung of social organization beginning with the nuclear and extended families. La Mojana culture seems to embrace this value, without any ‘cross contamination’ from European Christianity…yet. “These field systems are so impressive that people have assumed they were achieved by hierarchical chiefdoms. Our data tells a very different story’. Construction began during the first centuries BCE, and local pre-Hispanic communities continued to rely on these field networks until about the 11th century CE. “Our study is the first to show that these sustainable solutions can be organized locally and collectively’, said study author and ICANH archaeologist Fernando Montejo Gaitán.” Sidebar #2 : Many folks who are philosophically comfortable with the Anarchist ideal nevertheless concede that such a system might be too unwieldy and inefficient to be practical at scale and that the resulting social structure might be too fragile to survive the inevitable bumps. The La Mojana prove the faint of heart wrong…on both counts. Voluntarism is actually more efficient (“2 months” above)! And re fragility, the Vinca social structure survived 1,000 years; in all of European history, its longevity is rivaled only by Rome. La Mojana society thrived for 10,000 years - 20 th century dictators, eat your hearts out! La Mojana is the third oasis in our Anarchist Archipelago. Several millennia after the ultimate demise of Vinca civilization, a foundling led the Hebrew slaves out of Egypt, across the Sinai wilderness (40 years), into Canaan, ‘the land of milk and honey’. Under the guidance of Moses’ successor, Joshua, the Israelites chose Theocratic Anarchism as their form of social organization: “We will serve the Lord our God and obey (only) him.” (Joshua 24: 24) And so, for 250 years, Israel enjoyed ‘peace and prosperity’ without the burden of a bureaucracy, a police force, or a standing army. The social structure consisted of a council of elders (advisory) supporting a series of Judges, unelected, unappointed, unrelated leaders who emerged ad hoc to respond to periodic crises. Perhaps the most famous of these Lone Rangers was Judge Gideon . The Book of Judges details his unlikely and unwilling rise to power, his military successes, and his ‘abdication for the ages’. Following one such triumph, the Israelites proposed to make him King and make his family an hereditary dynasty; Gideon was horrified: “I will not rule over you, nor shall my son; the Lord will rule over you…(and so it was that) for 40 years the land was at peace.” (Judges 8: 23) Brief by the standards of the Vinca and La Mojana, but long by the standards of modern Europe, the period of Judges lasted more than two centuries. But unlike their Neolithic predecessors, the Judges left a ‘written transcript’ of their successes and failures, and, as far as I know, they are the only group mentioned in the Bible that had its own slogan, repeated verbatim 4 times in The Book of Judges : “In those days Israel had no king. Everyone did what was right in their own eyes.” (17:6, 18:1, 19:1, 21:25) Unfortunately, folks are fickle and finally, c. 1050 CE, they got their wish: Judge Samuel yielded to public pressure and anointed Saul Israel’s fist king, but not without a Herculean effort to persuade otherwise: “This is what the king who will reign over you will claim as his rights: He will take your sons and make them serve with his chariots and horses, and they will run in front of his chariots. Some he will assign to be commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and others to plow his ground and reap his harvest, and still others to make weapons of war and equipment for his chariots. “He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive groves and give them to his attendants. He will take a tenth of your grain and of your vintage and give it to his officials and attendants. Your male and female servants and the best of your cattle and donkeys he will take for his own use. He will take a tenth of your flocks, and you yourselves will become his slaves.” (1 Samuel 8: 11 – 17) As is often the case, both sides of this debate proved right. Saul was deposed by David who was succeeded by Solomon: unquestionably Israel’s Golden Age. And then the wheels came off. As Samuel had predicted, and as is inevitable, the monarchy became corrupt. The ‘Deep State’ became its own client constituency and half a millennium later, Israel’s leading citizens were living in exile, imprisoned in Babylon. Who can resist the temptation to say, “Told you so!” 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.

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